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Adobe’s new photo editor looks even more powerful than Google’s Magic Editor
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Adobe MAX 2023 is less than a week away, and to promote the event, the company recently published a video teasing its new “object-aware editing engine” called Project Stardust.

According to the trailer, the feature has the ability to identify individual objects in a photograph and instantly separate them into their own layers. Those same objects can then be moved around on-screen or deleted. Selecting can be done either manually or automatically via the Remove Distractions tool. The software appears to understand the difference between the main subjects in an image and the people in the background that you want to get rid of.

What’s interesting is moving or deleting something doesn’t leave behind a hole. The empty space is filled in most likely by a generative AI model. Plus, you can clean up any left-behind evidence of a deleted item. In its sample image, Adobe erases a suitcase held by a female model and then proceeds to edit her hand so that she’s holding a bouquet of flowers instead.  

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Project Stardust editing

(Image credit: Adobe)
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Project Stardust generative AI

(Image credit: Adobe)

The same tech can also be used to change articles of clothing in pictures. A yellow down jacket can be turned into a black leather jacket or a pair of khakis into black jeans. To do this, users will have to highlight the piece of clothing and then enter what they want to see into a text prompt. 

Stardust replacement tool

(Image credit: Adobe)

AI editor

Functionally, Project Stardust operates similarly to Google’s Magic Editor which is a generative AI tool present on the Pixel 8 series. The tool lets users highlight objects in a photograph and reposition them in whatever manner they please. It, too, can fill gaps in images by creating new pixels. However, Stardust feels much more capable. The Pixel 8 Pro’s Magic Eraser can fill in gaps, but neither it nor Magic Editor can’t generate content. Additionally, Google’s version requires manual input whereas Adobe’s software doesn’t need it.

Seeing these two side-by-side, we can’t but wonder if Stardust is actually powered by Google’s AI tech. Very recently, the two companies announced they were entering a partnership “and offering a free three-month trial for Photoshop on the web for people who buy a Chromebook Plus device. Perhaps this “partnership” runs a lot deeper than free Photoshop considering how similar Stardust is to Magic Editor.

Impending reveal

We should mention that Stardust isn't perfect. If you look at the trailer, you'll notice some errors like random holes in the leather jacket and strange warping around the flower model's hands. But maybe what we see is Stardust in an early stage. 

There is still a lot we don’t know like whether it's a standalone app or will it be housed in, say, Photoshop? Is Stardust releasing in beta first or are we getting the final version? All will presumably be answered on October 10 when Adobe MAX 2023 kicks off. What’s more, the company will be showing other “AI features” coming to “Firefly, Creative Cloud, Express, and more.”

Be sure to check out TechRadar’s list of the best Photoshop courses online for 2023 if you’re thinking of learning the software, but don’t know where to start. 

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Taiwan highlights powerful AI and cloud products with the Taiwan Excellence Awards
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In the internet age, reliable connectivity and networks are paramount. There’s a great deal that goes into keeping the back-end of a network running, and then more on top of that necessary to provide quality services to thousands or millions of users connecting to it every day. Recently, AI and cloud applications have been on the rise to meet these needs. And in the past year, a few particular products stood out from the pack as offering more innovation and life-changing impacts than the rest, earning them the Taiwan Excellence Award for 2023. 

Over the last 30 years, Taiwan has highlighted its domestic products with the Taiwan Excellence Awards, which go to products offering technical innovation and real, life-changing impact. It is this focus on innovative value that the International Trade Administration (TITA) and Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) seek to highlight across the world. 

Each year, Taiwan Excellence Awards selects only a handful of innovative products that have met rigorous criteria for R&D, design, quality, and marketing. The selected products receive the Taiwan Excellence Award mark, which serves as a distinction and testament to their high standards. 

These products, designed and made in Taiwan embody a combination of innovation and excellence reflecting the following aspects:

  • Innovative: Products that prioritize customer satisfaction through advanced and thoughtful design.
  • Excellence: Companies that are passionate about common goals, foster team spirit, enthusiasm, and knowledge-sharing.
  • Value: Practical products that truly enhance everyday life
  • Dependable: Reliable products with quality and performance you can count on.

The highlights in AI and cloud computing in this year’s Taiwan Excellence Awards are the PCIe 4.0 Enterprise SSD Controller IC from Phison Electronics, the LoRa AIoT Network Solution from Planet Technology, and SysTalk.Chat from TPIsoftware.

Phison’s PCIe 4.0 Enterprise SSD Controller IC — PS5020-E20 (X1 Solution) 

Phison’s X1 PCIe 4.0 Enterprise SSD Controller IC

(Image credit: Phison Electronics Corp)

Phison PS5020-E20 is a next-generation high-performance enterprise class SSD controller and solution that will help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) in enterprise use case scenarios with increased storage density, low power consumption, and high performance. The advanced solution enables smarter storage infrastructure in wide-ranging enterprise storage applications such as hyperscale data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI). 

With our cutting-edge ASIC designs and engineering know-hows combined with strong synergy with our partners, Phison looks to answer to demanding enterprise SSD market needs while working toward leading positions with state-of-the-art enterprise-grade NAND flash memory controller IC solutions. PS5020-E20-powered NAND storage solutions are fine-tuned for specific workloads and applications like AI, cloud storage, and 5G edge computing to give enterprise customers the biggest bang for their buck.

Planet Technology’s LoRa AIoT Network Solution

Planet Technology’s LoRa AIoT Network Solution

(Image credit: PLANET Technology Corporation)

PLANET LoRa AIoT Network Solution is specially designed for the efficient management of long-range IoT network infrastructure. It is flexible to be used in a variety of vertical applications such as factories, smart cities, energy facilities, and transportation. It is a cost-effective and reliable method for ISPs and enterprises to integrate the existing AIoT network deployment with new network devices and multiple communication protocols. 

The system can integrate using LoRa LPWAN, Wi-Fi 6 and optical fiber connections, making it exceedingly versatile, and it’s compatible with industrial-grade VPNs (IPSec/PPTP/L2TP over IPSec) and cybersecurity functions. The units offer a rugged industrial design, support MQTT and Modbus TCP, and come pre-configured for EU868/US915/AS923 MHz Sub 1G frequency bands. Serving as a comprehensive solution for networks, it offers an intelligent central management platform with a user-friendly web UI, a secure communication transmission gateway, and data conversion equipment. 

SysTalk.Chat

SysTalk.Chat

(Image credit: TPIsoftware Corporation)

TPIsoftware's SysTalk.Chat is the most powerful conversational AI service delivering smart customer service. It has been awarded Taiwan Excellence Awards 2023, CX Asia Excellence Awards 2021 in Singapore and many more. TPIsoftware has also been selected as a Cool Vendor in Conversational AI in APAC 2018 by Gartner. With a high market penetration, SysTalk.Chat has freed up employees’ time for higher-value work, saved 40% of labor cost for enterprises, helped enterprises expand omnichannel strategy, and increased customer satisfaction.

SysTalk.Chat has been widely adopted across industries, serving millions of monthly users in Taiwan with a robust customer experience. Built with the exclusive dual brain NLU + FAQ and voice recognition, SysTalk.Chat can provide human-like dialogue and activate voice recognition with minimal corpus data. What’s more, SysTalk.Chat is also a visual chatbot that stands out for its visual recognition capability that can interpret all kinds of documents with built-in AI-OCR technology. 

SysTalk.Chat can further integrate with TPIsoftware's DigiFusion, an iPaaS middle platform featuring API management to connect other existing services, which allows services such as bank transactions to be done simply through chatbot conversations, making customer service and the conversational service blueprint more comprehensive.  

Made in Taiwan: An environment that fosters innovation

The companies showcased here have forged everyday excellence into the DNA of their products. The Taiwan Excellence Awards showcase Taiwan's belief that innovative, cutting-edge technology can lead the way to a better future. The winners of the 2023 Taiwan Excellence Awards also demonstrate how Taiwan's work to build an innovative economic landscape is bearing fruit.

For more information, visit Taiwan Excellence and see the best made in Taiwan. 

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YouTube reveals powerful new AI tools for content creators – and we’re scared, frankly
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YouTube has announced a whole bunch of AI-powered tools (on top of its existing bits and pieces) that are designed to make life easier for content creators on the platform.

As The Verge spotted, at the ‘Made on YouTube’ event which just took place, one of the big AI revelations made was something called ‘Dream Screen’, an image and video generation facility for YouTube Shorts.

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This lets a video creator just type in something that they’d like for a background. Such as, for example, a panda drinking a cup of coffee – given that request, the AI will take the reins and produce such a video background for the clip (or image).

This is how the process will be implemented to begin with – you prompt the AI, and it makes something for you – but eventually, creators will be able to remix content to produce something new, we’re told.

YouTube Studio is also getting an infusion of AI tools that will suggest content that could be made by individual creators, generating topic ideas for videos that might suit them, based on what’s trending with viewers interested in the kind of content that creator normally deals in.

A system of AI-powered music recommendations will also come into play to furnish audio for any given video.

Analysis: Grab the shovel?

Is it us, or does this sound rather scary? Okay, so content creators may find it useful and convenient to be able to drop in AI generated video or image backgrounds really quickly, and have some music layered on top, and so on.

But isn’t this going to just ensure a whole heap of bland – and perhaps homogenous – content flooding onto YouTube? That seems the obvious danger, and maybe one compounded by the broader idea of suggested content that people want to see (according to the great YouTube algorithm) being provided to creators on YouTube.

Is YouTube set to become a video platform groaning under the collective weight of content that gets quickly put together, thanks to AI tools, and shoveled out by the half-ton?

While YouTube seems highly excited about all these new AI utilities and tools, we can’t help but think it’s the beginning of the end for the video site – at least when it comes to meaningful, not generic, content.

We hope we’re wrong, but this whole brave new direction fills us with trepidation more than anything else. A tidal wave of AI-generated this, that, and the other, eclipsing everything else is clearly a prospect that should be heavily guarded against.

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Google Bard update reveals a more powerful AI – but it might scare privacy purists
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Google has built a new model for Bard which it is calling the most capable iteration of the AI yet.

Google provided an update on the new version of Bard which it calls “more intuitive, imaginative and responsive than ever before,” offering greater levels of quality and accuracy in the chatbot’s responses.

A whole bunch of new features have been brought into the mix for Bard, and that starts with support for 40+ languages, and some tight integration with existing Google products elsewhere.

That includes giving Bard the ability to get its hooks into your emails in Gmail, and data in Google Drive and Docs, meaning you can get the AI to find info across your various files, or indeed summarize a piece of content if needed.

Bard will also be able to pull data in real-time as needed from Google Maps, Google’s travel features (hotels and flights), and YouTube, all of which will be extensions that are enabled by default (you can disable them if you wish, but they’re switched on by default in the new Bard).

Another big move here is the ability to check Bard’s answers. Not too sure about any given response from the AI? A ‘Google It’ button can be clicked to bring up additional info around any query, which is drawn from Google search (where supported), so you can check for yourself to see if there’s any doubt, or difference of opinion, elsewhere online compared to what Bard is telling you.

A further fresh introduction gives Bard users the ability to share a conversation via a public link, allowing others to continue that conversation with Google’s AI themselves, should they wish.

Analysis: The distant but distinct sound of alarm bells

This is indeed a major update for Bard, and there are some useful elements in here for sure. Better quality and accuracy, and the ability to check Bard’s responses, are obviously welcome features.

Some other stuff will set some alarm bells ringing for folks, particularly the more privacy-conscious out there. Do you really want Bard’s tendrils snaking into every corner of your Google Drive, Docs, and Gmail? Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a scenario of a nightmarish overreach from the AI?

Well, Google is pretty careful here to clarify that your personal data absolutely isn’t being hoovered up to train Bard in any way. As the company puts it: “Your Google Workspace data won’t be used to train Bard’s public model and you can disable access to it at any time.”

So, the only use of the data will be to furnish you with convenient replies to queries, and that could be pretty handy. Know you’ve got a document somewhere on a certain topic, but can’t remember where it is in your Google account, or what it’s called? You should be able to prompt Bard to find it for you.

Don’t like the idea of Bard accessing your stuff in any way, shape, or form? Then you don’t have to use these abilities, they can be switched off (and the mentioned extensions don’t have to be enabled). Indeed, whatever assurances Google makes about Bard not snuffling around in your data for its own purposes, there will be folks immediately reaching for the ‘off’ switch in these cases, you can absolutely bank on it.

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Apple makes Safari more private on the iPhone with iOS 17’s powerful new feature
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Apple is striking another blow in the name of privacy by adding Link Tracking Protection to select iOS 17 apps, which will make it easier for users to keep their data private while browsing the web on their iPhone.

Link tracking identifiers are a collection of numbers and letters typically appended towards the end of a link as a way for websites to keep track of users as they move around the web. It’s most often used for ad tracking, as well as a substitute for third-party cookies. When Apple’s iOS 17 rolls out, Link Tracking Protection will prevent advertisers from bypassing privacy features simply because they are typically targeted toward cookies. It'll be enabled on Mail, Messages, and Safari's Private Browsing mode.

It is worth noting that you can still remove link-tracking identifiers by yourself by selecting and deleting the offending characters. However, with the identifiers often being quite long, many users simply wouldn’t bother, and Apple is just streamlining the otherwise tedious process.

“Privacy is designed into every new Apple product and feature from the beginning,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, said in a press release announcing the feature. “We are focused on keeping our users in the driver’s seat when it comes to their data by continuing to provide industry-leading privacy features and the best data security in the world.

“This approach is evident in a number of features on our platforms, like the major updates to Safari Private Browsing, as well as the expansion of Lockdown Mode.”

A more private iOS

Compared to rival operating system Android, iOS has always been the more privacy and security-focused option, and iOS 17 furthers that. Apple put a stop to AirDrop flashing with Communication Safety, preemptively halted explicit contact posters, and beefed up Safari’s Private Browsing with an additional level of authentication. These are all subtle yet meaningful improvements – something that could be said for the iOS 17 update as a whole.

Apple is currently testing iOS 17 for developers, with a public preview slated for July. A full release of iOS 17 is expected to start rolling out to the best iPhones around September, to coincide with the launch of the iPhone 15.

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Amazon says even AI isn’t powerful enough to stop fake reviews
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Amazon has renewed its war on fake reviews by developing new AI-powered tools to help tackle the problem, but the retail giant admits they aren't enough to solve the issue on their own.

In a new blog post, Dharmesh Mehta, who's Amazon's VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, writes “we must work together to stop the fake review brokers that are the source of most fake reviews”, calling on “private sector, consumer groups, and governments” to work together to stop the brokers.

What are these so-called 'fake review brokers'? Amazon says the brokers have become an industry in recent years, and have “evolved in an attempt to evade detection”. They work by approaching average consumers though websites, social media or encrypted messaging services and getting to them write fake reviews “in exchange for money, free products, or other incentives”.

Amazon says it's using increasingly sophisticated AI tools and machine learning to stem the tide. These fraud-detection programs apparently analyze thousands of data points, including sign-in activity and review history, to help spot fake reviews. The figures involved are pretty staggering; Amazon says that last year it blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2022, and sued over 10,000 Facebook group administrators. 

But Amazon's financial might and its increasingly sophisticated AI tools seemingly aren't enough to stop fake reviews. The retail giant says that because much of the misconduct happens outside of Amazon’s store “it can be more challenging to detect, prevent, and enforce these bad actors if we are acting alone”.

A hand holding an iPhone showing Amazon reviews

(Image credit: Amazon)

So Amazon has made a three-point plan to get some extra help. Firstly, it wants there to be more cross-industry sharing about fake review brokers and their various tactics and techniques. Secondly, it wants governments and regulators to use their authority more to take action against bad actors. 

And lastly, in a veiled nudge at Meta and other social media giants, it's asked that “all sites that could be used to facilitate this illicit activity should have robust notice and takedown processes”. Amazon wants to work with “these companies” (read Facebook, WhatsApp, Signal and more) to help improve their detection methods.

Whether or not these three steps are realistic remains to be seen, but the message from Amazon is clear – it doesn't think it can stem the tide of fake reviews on its own, and that's a problem for all of us. Until that improves, it's more important than ever to follow advice on how to spot fake Amazon reviews during Prime Day and other big shopping events.

How to spot fake Amazon reviews

A laptop screen on an orange background showing an Amazon review in the website ReviewMeta

Sites like ReviewMeta (above) can help you weed out suspicious reviews from an Amazon product’s rating (Image credit: Future)

We've been highlighting the problem of fake Amazon reviews for over a decade, and it's clear that the issue has become a game of whack-a-mole – while Amazon's tools have improved, the retail giant admits that the “tactics of fake review brokers have also evolved in an attempt to try to evade detection”.

This is a big problem for the average online shopper – in the UK, the consumer group Which? says that around one in seven reviews are fake. And that means you can be misled into buying poor-quality products.

Mehta's blog post is a reminder than even the world's biggest tech giants, and the latest AI technology, aren't powerful enough to stop fake reviews. And that means we all need to be increasingly savvy when shopping online.

As our in-depth guide to spotting fake Amazon reviews highlights, there are some simple red flags to look out for in product reviewers, including “overly promotional language, repeated reviews, and reviews for an entirely different product”. 

But there are also handy third-party tools like ReviewMeta and FakeSpot (which was recently bought by the Firefox owner Mozilla) that can help you use AI to detect fake reviews and scams. These allow you paste in Amazon product URLs to get an analysis of the reviews or use Chrome extensions for a quick check.

While Amazon's three-point call-out for outside help is understandable, recent history suggests that progress is going to be slow – which means we'll all need to remain on guard when doing our online shopping, particularly during big events like Amazon Prime Day 2023.

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