Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff (thebookseller.com)

This is great to see, but I’m not sure it does much to prevent AI companies from training on newly published books. I can’t imagine they’re scanning printed books for or buying ebooks to plug into model training. Maybe they’re scraping copies available on rogue sites, which would already be a copyright infringement.

It certainly feels good, though.

The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries (mit.edu)

Drinking water from brackish ground water, with only renewable energy input and no battery storage. Pretty cool.

“Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge. And we’ve done it.”