Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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The European Union has charged Elon Musk’s X with violating new regulations for social media platforms. Musk faces hefty fines over delivering misinformation. -
A new lawsuit filed by record labels Universal, Sony and Warner says their catalogs have been ripped off by two AI music generators. But there’s a twist: It’s not clear the courts are on their side.
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Artificial intelligence tech companies are refusing to abide by internet protocol when it comes to scraping data. Their ravenous scavenging behavior is upending the basic rules of the internet.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday has put Florida and Texas social media laws on hold, sending both cases back to lower courts for more review. -
The U.S. Supreme Court returned challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that restrict the power of social media companies to moderate content, back to the lower courts. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that neither the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals nor the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals properly analyzed the First Amendment Challenges to the laws in both states.
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The controversial practice dates back to the 1990s when Apple introduced a service called Watson that critics say ripped off another company’s tool. Since then, small apps have said it has become a pattern. -
It’s been described as Apple’s “kiss of death.” When the tech giant reaches out to app developers, many fear that Apple is really looking to copy their product. At its annual developers’ conference this year, Apple was accused of just that.
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A round up of this week's developments and drama in artificial intelligence: Apple announced a slew of AI features for its new iPhone and Elon Musk dropped his lawsuit against the maker of ChatGPT.
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The image, with over 50 million shares, is considered the most viral ever AI-generated photo. Tracing the image’s history has revealed a rift over its true creator. -
Johansson says she was approached multiple times by OpenAI to be the voice of ChatGPT, and that she declined. Then the company released a voice assistant that sounded uncannily like her.
