Picture a lonely polar bear stranded on an ice floe—bet you’ve seen it a dozen times. The impact of even the most evocative photos can be dulled with overuse. Maybe a group of penguins walking along a city boulevard could serve as a more original climate visual, Getty Images Chief Product Officer Grant Farhall suggested.

That’s an example of how he sees Getty Images’s newly released AI image generator being used when the photo bank’s existing massive library of content falls short.

“Unless you have access to a bunch of penguins and can convince downtown New York to shut off a block so you can march them down and take some photos, that’s really hard to produce,” Farhall told Tech Brew. “But that’s where the AI generator can create really compelling visuals to explore that type of concept.”

Getty Images teamed up with Nvidia to train a model exclusively on some of the 477 million assets the company has in its catalog. It claims to have done so in a way that is safe for clients to use without fear of copyright infringement. That part is especially important to Getty, which previously banned AI art from contributors on the platform and sued image AI giant Stability over the unauthorized use of its intellectual property.

“[Our customers] don’t want to be lying awake at night, worrying about what may be coming downstream because they used a visual in their marketing or creative,” Farhall said. “What we were looking to do was provide them something that they could apply across that creative process from ideation right through to production, but in a way that gave them that peace of mind and that commercial safety.”

Keep reading here.—PK

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What do Jane Austen, Tom Brady, and MrBeast have in common?

They’re all among the celebrities and historical figures that Meta is turning into AI characters as part of a quirky new push to add automated lifelike personalities to its messaging apps. It’s just one of the many ways the social media giant plans to weave generative AI into its platforms, it announced this week at Meta Connect.

Whereas many of its big tech rivals are focused on molding AI into unifying all-purpose digital assistants, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta takes a more-the-merrier approach when it comes to bots.

“We don’t think that there’s going to be like one singular superintelligence that everyone interacts with,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote. “But our view is that people are going to want to interact with a bunch of different AIs for the different things that you want to do.”

Keep reading here.—PK

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states delivered a sweeping lawsuit against Amazon this week, accusing the trillion-dollar e-commerce company of being an illegal monopoly.

It’s the fourth lawsuit levied by the FTC against Amazon this year and easily the one with the most profound consequences for US antitrust legislation—and for your ability to procure an inflatable cow in 24 hours.

What’s in the suit? The FTC and state attorneys general allege that Amazon abused its power by punishing sellers if they offered lower prices on other platforms, a practice that led to higher prices for consumers. Sellers on the marketplace were also allegedly coerced to use Amazon’s logistics and advertising services or face penalties like reduced visibility.

What does the FTC want? While the FTC is looking to break up Google and Facebook, it’s unclear if that’s the goal here. It’s asked for a permanent injunction to stop the alleged misconduct. An Amazon spokesperson riposted, claiming prices will increase and delivery speeds will slow if the FTC gets its way.

Zoom out: FTC Chair Lina Khan first gained prominence in 2017 as a law student for writing a paper about the inadequacy of the US’ antitrust framework to rein in Amazon’s monopolistic practices. Since her appointment by President Biden, Khan has led the agency in an attempt to take down Big Tech’s concentration of power—which some consider a “techlash.”—CC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

For real?: It’s probably not news to anyone here that the internet is…not great of late. You gotta thumb through two screens of “sponsored” posts every time you Google something. A similar problem exists when you search for something on Amazon—is that really the best blate for your bolognese-season needs? How do you separate the legit from the subpar?

And then there’s social media. It’s riddled with ads for things you definitely don’t need, and an algorithm controls whether you see a picture of your BFF’s darling puppy. So instead of just axing the ads and restoring a chronological timeline, the powers that be have—you guessed it—jammed in a bunch of AI tools.

And it’ll be fun for a minute! Picture yourself astride a unicorn, trotting over a rainbow—you can do it with AI! Post that “selfie” with poreless skin and flyaway-free hair and long eyelashes and plump lips. Solve a crime with an AI detective based on the likeness of Paris Hilton (really).

But it’s perhaps worth keeping in mind what it might cost.