Tired of rap battles composed by ChatGPT? Get ready for the next wave of AI-generated fun and profit. Cloned voices are taking center stage in productions by upstart creators and monied corporations alike.

A chatbot that simulated erotic companionship stopped sharing intimacies, leaving some users heartbroken. Replika, a chatbot app, deactivated features that allowed premium users to engage in sexually explicit chat with the 3D avatar of their choice, Vice reported.

Media outlets are forging ahead with generative AI despite the technology’s high-profile misfires. Publishers are using text generators to produce light reading within constrained formats such as holiday messages and quizzes.

ChatGPT fever has reached China despite legal and technical barriers. Two months after its debut, ChatGPT is a viral sensation on Chinese social media, MIT Technology Review reported. Companies in that country are racing to cash in.

Microsoft aimed to reinvent web search. Instead, it showed that even the most advanced text generators remain alarmingly unpredictable. In the two weeks since Microsoft integrated an OpenAI chatbot with its Bing search engine, users have reported...

AI hobbyists created an homage to their favorite TV show . . . until it got knocked off the server. The creators of Nothing, Forever launched a fully automated, never-ending emulation of the popular TV show Seinfeld.

Political forces used a commercial AI service to generate deepfaked propaganda. Videos have appeared on social media that show AI-generated characters speaking against the United States or in favor of foreign governments. The clips feature synthetic avatars offered by the startup Synthesia.

The long-dormant struggle to dominate the web-search business reignited in a display of AI-driven firepower — and hubris. Google and Microsoft announced competing upgrades powered by the latest generation of chatbots. Baidu, too, flexed its natural-language-processing muscles.

Models that generate text and images are raising thorny questions about the ownership of both their training data and their output. The companies that provide popular tools for generating text and images are fighting a barrage of lawsuits. TechCrunch surveyed the docket.

A top supplier of stock images will compensate artists who contribute training data to its image-generation service.

A prominent tech-news website generated controversy (and mistakes) by publishing articles written by AI. CNET suspended its practice of publishing articles produced by a text-generation model following news reports that exposed the articles’ authorship.

Amid speculation about the threat posed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to Google’s search business, a paper shows how the search giant might address the tendency of such models to produce offensive, incoherent, or untruthful dialog.

Microsoft deepened its high-stakes relationship with OpenAI. The tech giant confirmed rumors that it is boosting its investment in the research lab that created the ChatGPT large language model and other AI innovations.

An experiment in using chatbots to dispense mental-health counseling raised questions about ethics.

Tools that automatically write computer code may make their human users overconfident that the programs are bug-free. Stanford University researchers found that programmers who used OpenAI’s Codex, a model that generates computer code, were more likely...