The energy transition is nothing if not a balancing act: Growing EV adoption will place more demand on the energy grid, but it could also result in more batteries that utilities can draw power from during peak times.

For EV fleet owners, like the all-electric ridesharing company Revel, this presents an opportunity: They could sell surplus energy from EV batteries back to utilities during downtime to help save on charging costs and even potentially generate revenue.

• But to truly incentivize discharging, utilities will need to make the financial opportunity clearer, Paul Suhey, co-founder and COO of Revel, told Emerging Tech Brew.

Despite the ambiguity, in August, EV ridesharing company Revel created the first program to export energy from EVs to the grid in NYC, using three bidirectional chargers located at Revel’s warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Big picture: Interest in vehicle-to-everything capabilities is growing as vehicles like the bidirectional Ford F-150 Lightning come to market and regulators work out how to manage EV batteries as grid assets. But it’s still early days when it comes to real-world applications of this tech.

“This is the first time that a company is actually exporting energy into New York City’s power grid, not just a [vehicle-to-building] application,” Suhey said. “One thing that we’re trying to accomplish is sending a general signal to the market that there’s demand for this technology on the vehicle side, on the charger side.”

Keep reading about why Revel is investing in V2G in New York.—GD

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Your social feeds may be awash with DALL-E generated memes, but not everyone is embracing the recent wave of AI-generated imagery as readily. Earlier this week, Getty Images banned AI-generated content from its platform, The Verge reported.

Why it matters: Getty is one of the largest image-database companies in the world, with ~843,000 paying customers and nearly 500 million assets across its platforms. Its decision to ban the content will not only limit the ability to monetize AI-generated content but also points to a deeper potential problem with its commercial use: copyright.

Getty’s CEO, Craig Peters, told The Verge that he is concerned about potential copyright claims from artists whose work underpins the training data for tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

• The company declined to say if it has “received legal challenges over its sale of AI-generated content,” but Peters said it was “being proactive to the benefit of our customers.”
• Several smaller image databases have also banned the content.

For its part, the CEO of Getty’s main competitor, Shutterstock, wrote in a blog Thursday that the company is “taking steps to look at the impact AI-generated art has on our consumers and contributors,” and that it views “synthetic media as a new tool with which we can drive greater creativity.”

• A group of artists also recently released a tool that enables individuals to check if their art has been hoovered up into one of the datasets that underpins these tools.

Looking ahead…It’s possible that AI-generated imagery could fall under fair use, as The Verge pointed out, but given the newness of the field, there hasn’t yet been a court case that explicitly addresses the question.

Click here to read on-site.—DM

Former CISA chief Chris Krebs caused a stir in August when he proposed the department’s role be elevated into an independent “US digital agency”—or perhaps more realistically, liberate it from its status as an operational component under the Department of Homeland Security.

“I think it’s time to rethink the way government interacts with technology,” Krebs told attendees at the Black Hat conference, according to the Record. “We’re not where we need to be and we’re falling behind and Americans are suffering as a result.”

As an alternative to the creation of a new agency, Krebs suggested CISA could be spun out of DHS to make cybersecurity “apolitical, non-political, bipartisan, and nonpartisan.”

• Either way, he added, instead of organizations going to “five or six different agencies” for their security issues, there should be “a front door that is clearly visible. And as I see it, that’s CISA.”

Bottom line: Former US cybersecurity officials and other experts who spoke with Cyberscoop were broadly skeptical of the idea, arguing that CISA benefits from DHS’s political pull and resources.

Those who talked with IT Brew raised similar concerns, saying that centralizing cybersecurity functions currently spread out across the US government could be difficult—and in some cases, counterproductive.

Read the full story from IT Brew here.—TM

Stat: Amazon is aiming to power its entire global business with 100% renewable energy by 2025. The company expects to have a total of 379 renewable energy projects that could add up to 50,000 GWh of energy—enough to power 4.6 million US homes each year, per Reuters.

Quote: “Markets are won or lost based upon what you do in a downturn.”—Shane Wall, venture partner at Fusion Fund, at a Wall Street Journal event this week

Read: The future of manufacturing is…printers?

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• The NTSB wants new vehicles to come with alcohol-detection tech for drivers.
• Meta is reportedly considering a pivot away from AR/VR after internal strife and hardware missteps.
• Facebook has decided to simply let users take a stab at moderating speech.
• Morgan Stanley hard drives containing sensitive customer data were accidentally auctioned off by a third party.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• As John Deere digitizes, some experts worry about cyber risks
• Google, Amazon face new protests over contract with Israeli government and military
• Why Apple is spending $450 million on satellites for its new iPhone