One of the most persistent Windows 11 bugs ever keeps telling users they’ve changed their location, when they haven’t – but it’s getting fixed

Windows 11 has a new bug (that’s also in Windows 10) whereby the operating system keeps telling users that their time zone has changed, when it hasn’t – and repeatedly doing this, driving some users to the point of distraction by all accounts.

Windows Latest flagged up multiple complaints about this bug, which has been acknowledged by Microsoft, and the company is now working on a fix.

Indeed, the tech site notes that it has experienced the glitch itself, whereby a dialog box pops up, warning that “due to a location change a new time zone has been detected.”

Then the user has the choice of clicking ‘Ignore’ to dismiss the prompt, or ‘Accept’ to be taken to the Date & Time settings where there’s actually nothing amiss (the time zone and location aren’t changed, just to clarify).

Essentially, the prompt is appearing by accident, but the real problem is that affected users don’t just see this once. It’s occurring repeatedly and in some cases multiple times per day, or even hour, which is going to get seriously tiresome.

A user hit by the problem complained in Microsoft’s Feedback Hub: “This is the 2nd system where this pop-up about me changing time zones has occurred. After I set the date and time (Central time zone), why does Windows think that I have moved 455 miles to the East? Fix your darn OS Microsoft.”


Analysis: A rare bug apparently – but a seriously annoying glitch

This is a bit of an odd one, to say the least, and while it’s a relatively benign bug – an errant pop-up that doesn’t actually throw anything of a spanner in the works (unlike some of the showstoppers we’ve seen in the past) – if it’s happening regularly, then it’s going to be a headache.

The good news is that Microsoft says the bug is rare, and so presumably the set of Windows 11 and 10 users who are subject to it happening particularly regularly is even rarer. That said, it needs to be fixed, and the problem has been around for a few weeks now.

According to Windows Latest, the fix is already in the pipeline and should (most likely) be applied as a server-side solution, meaning that it’ll happen on Microsoft’s end, and you won’t need to wait for an update to contain the cure if you’re affected by this issue. Fingers crossed that this resolution arrives swiftly, then.

Meantime, if you’re getting these head-scratching time zone notifications, there’s nothing you can do but keep dismissing them.

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Midjourney just changed the generative image game and showed me how comics, film, and TV might never be the same

Midjourney, the Generative AI platform that you can currently use on Discord just introduced the concept of reusable characters and I am blown away.

It's a simple idea: Instead of using prompts to create countless generative image variations, you create and reuse a central character to illustrate all your themes, live out your wildest fantasies, and maybe tell a story.

Up until recently, Midjourney, which is trained on a diffusion model (add noise to an original image and have the model de-noise it so it can learn about the image) could create some beautiful and astonishingly realistic images based on prompts you put in the Discord channel (“/imagine: [prompt]”) but unless you were asking it to alter one of its generated images, every image set and character would look different.

Now, Midjourney has cooked up a simple way to reuse your Midjourney AI characters. I tried it out and, for the most part, it works.

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Midjourney AI character creation

I guess I don’t know how to describe myself. (Image credit: Future)
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Midjourney AI character creation

(Image credit: Future)
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Midjourney AI character creation

Things are getting weird (Image credit: Future)

In one prompt, I described someone who looked a little like me, chose my favorite of Midjourney's four generated image options, upscaled it for more definition, and then, using a new “– cref” prompt and the URL for my generated image (with the character I liked), I forced Midjounrey to generate new images but with the same AI character in them.

Later, I described a character with Charles Schulz's Peanuts character qualities and, once I had one I liked, reused him in a different prompt scenario where he had his kite stuck in a tree (Midjourney couldn't or wouldn't put the kite in the tree branches).

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Midjourney AI character creation

An homage to Charles Schulz (Image credit: Future)
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Midjourney AI character creation

(Image credit: Future)

It's far from perfect. Midjourney still tends to over-adjust the art but I contend the characters in the new images are the same ones I created in my initial images. The more descriptive you make your initial character-creation prompts, the better result you'll get in subsequent images.

Perhaps the most startling thing about Midjourney's update is the utter simplicity of the creative process. Writing natural language prompts has always been easy but training the system to make your character do something might typically take some programming or even AI model expertise. Here it's just a simple prompt, one code, and an image reference.

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Midjourney AI character creation

Got a lot closer with my photo as a reference (Image credit: Future)
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Midjourney AI character creation

(Image credit: Future)

While it's easier to take one of Midjourney's own creations and use that as your foundational character, I decided to see what Midjourney would do if I turned myself into a character using the same “cref” prompt. I found an online photo of myself and entered this prompt: “imagine: making a pizza – cref [link to a photo of me]”.

Midjourney quickly spit out an interpretation of me making a pizza. At best, it's the essence of me. I selected the least objectionable one and then crafted a new prompt using the URL from my favorite me.

Midjourney AI character creation

Oh, hey, Not Tim Cook (Image credit: Future)

Unfortunately, when I entered this prompt: “interviewing Tim Cook at Apple headquarters”, I got a grizzled-looking Apple CEO eating pizza and another image where he's holding an iPad that looks like it has pizza for a screen.

When I removed “Tim Cook” from the prompt, Midjourney was able to drop my character into four images. In each, Midjourney Me looks slightly different. There was one, though, where it looked like my favorite me enjoying a pizza with a “CEO” who also looked like me.

Midjourney AI character creation

Midjourney me enjoying pizza with my doppelgänger CEO (Image credit: Future)

Midjourney's AI will improve and soon it will be easy to create countless images featuring your favorite character. It could be for comic strips, books, graphic novels, photo series, animations, and, eventually, generative videos.

Such a tool could speed storyboarding but also make character animators very nervous.

If it's any consolation, I'm not sure Midjourney understands the difference between me and a pizza and pizza and an iPad – at least not yet.

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Google changed its privacy policy to reflect Bard AI’s data collecting, and we’re spooked

Google just changed the wording of its privacy policy, and it’s quite an eye-opening adjustment that has been applied to encompass the AI tech the firm is working with.

As TechSpot reports, there’s a section of the privacy policy where Google discusses how it collects information (about you) from publicly accessible sources, and clarifying that, there’s a note that reads: “For example, we may collect information that’s publicly available online or from other public sources to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features, like Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI capabilities.”

Preivously, that paragraph read that the publicly available info would be used to train “language models” and only mentioned Google Translate.

So, this section has been expanded to make it clear that training is happening with AI models and Bard.

It’s a telling change, and basically points out that anything you post online publicly  may be picked up and used by Google's Bard AI.


Analysis: So what about privacy, plagiarism, and other concerns?

We already knew that Google’s Bard, and indeed Microsoft’s Bing AI for that matter, are essentially giant data hoovers, extracting and crunching online content from all over the web to refine conclusions on every topic under the sun that they might be questioned on.

This change to Google’s privacy policy makes it crystal clear that its AI is operating in this manner, and seeing it in cold, hard, text on the screen, may make some folks step back and question this a bit more.

After all, Google has had Bard out for a while now, so has been working in this manner for some time, and has only just decided to update its policy? That in itself seems pretty sly.

Don’t want stuff you’ve posted online where other people can see it to be used to train Google’s big AI machinery? Well, tough. If it’s out there, it’s fair game, and if you want to argue with Google, good luck with that. Despite the obvious concerns around not just basic privacy issues, but plagiarism (if an AI reply uses content written by others, picked up by Bard’s training) – where do any boundaries lie with the latter? Of course, it’d be impractical (or indeed impossible) to police that anyway.

There are broader issues around accuracy and misinformation when data is scraped from the web in a major-scale fashion, too, of course.

On top of this, there are worries recently expressed by platforms like Reddit and Twitter, with Elon Musk apparently taking a stand against “scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models” with those frustrating limitations that have just been brought in (which could be big win for Zuckerberg and Threads, ultimately).

All of this is a huge minefield, really, but the big tech outfits making big strides with their LLM (large language model) data-scraping AIs are simply forging ahead, all eyes on their rivals and the race to establish themselves at the forefront, seemingly with barely a thought about how some of the practical side of this equation will play out.

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