The Download: deepfake porn’s stolen bodies and AI sharing private numbers

The Download: deepfake porn’s stolen bodies and AI sharing private numbers Plus: the US has approved Nvidia chip sales to 10 Chinese firms. This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see whether it would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than a decade earlier. It did, but it also surfaced something she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, now featuring someone else’s face on her body. Conversations about sexualized deepfakes usually focus on the people whose faces are inserted into explicit content without consent. But another group often gets ignored: the people whose bodies those faces are attached to. Adult content creators say AI systems are training on their work, cloning their likenesses, and generating explicit content they never agreed to make, all with little legal protection or control. Read the full story on the threat to their rights, livelihoods, and ownership of their own bodies. —Jessica Klein This story is part of our The Big Story series, the home for MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. You can read the rest here. AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers Generative AI is exposing people’s personal contact information—and there’s no easy way to stop it. A software developer started receiving WhatsApp messages asking for help after Gemini surfaced his number. A university researcher got the chatbot to reveal a colleague’s private cell number. A Reddit user says Gemini sent a stream of callers looking for lawyers to his phone. Experts believe these privacy lapses stem from personally identifiable information in AI training data. Chatbots may now be making that information dramatically easier to find. Find out why these breaches are growing—and why there’s little that victims can do to stop them. —Eileen Guo The Tesla Semi could be a big deal for electric trucking Nearly a decade after Elon Musk first unveiled the Tesla Semi, the electric truck is finally rolling off the production line. It could be a breakout moment for battery-powered freight. Semitrucks produce an outsized share of road transport pollution, while electric alternatives have struggled with high prices, limited range, and charging challenges. Tesla is betting the Semi can overcome those problems. The truck reportedly travels up to 480 miles on a single charge and costs far less than many competing electric models. Here’s how the Tesla Semi could give electric trucking a vital boost. —Casey Crownhart This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US has approved Nvidia chip sales to 10 Chinese firms Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance…