Category Archives: Mind Uploading

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27-year-old, Siva Rama Krishna Chennuboina was arrested on March 19, 2022, on the allegation of stealing confidential data of LCA Tejas programme belonging to the Aeronautic Development Agency (ALA)

The Karnataka High Court has said that stealing of sensitive data and uploading it on the dark web is a worrisome concern for all nations and such offences must be dealt with iron hands.

A single judge bench of Justice M Nagaprasanna dismissed a plea seeking to quash a criminal case lodged against an aerospace engineer, for allegedly stealing sensitive data on Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme and secretly selling the data on dark web.

"The petitioner has leaked into dark web, highly sensitive data which would have the effect of destabilising defence of the nation. Any person indulging in any crime that would destabilise nations defence of any kind, even to its triviality, cannot be countenanced," the bench said.

"Dark web is a sophisticated anonymous internet network used by both criminals and other individuals for manifold reasons, necessity to regulate the usage of dark web has become the need of the hour, as it provides anonymity, as the geo location is hidden. Such usage of dark web for defence secrets to be uploaded has devastating effect on national security," the bench said.

The court also noted that the occurrence of massive data theft and auction on the dark web has been a worrisome concern to all the nations, including to India.

"It is necessary to investigate the root of data thieving, and bring to book persons involved in acts of uploading sensitive data of defence of the nation on to the dark web, and deal with them with iron hands," the court further said.

In 2021, the Ministry of Defence lodged a complaint after finding foul play and leak of the data related to the ADA.

Deputy Solicitor General of India Shanthi Bhushan submitted the petitioner was an intern in the Indian Institute of Science where certain projects were sanctioned to be executed by the Aeronautical Development Agency, Ministry of Defence, Government of India. He was allowed to work as an intern in the preparation of code for the Light Combat Aircrafts used during war time.

"What the petitioner would do is get to know the entire source code and has published the same for sale on the Dark Web. Initially it was not known as to who was involved in the entire process. It took about 18 months for the Department to know thatthe petitioner is involved in all these activities," he said.

The law officer would contend that the petitioner has compromised the security of the nation. Investigation is still on to ascertain the involvement of any other person in such horrendous acts.

The petitioner said he was a bright student and there was a gross delay in registration of the FIR and arrest. He also contended investigation in the nature of case cannot be concluded overnight, as it involved several intricate facts to be gone into.

"If on the plea of the petitioner the present proceedings are quashed against him, it would amount to putting a premium on the activities of the petitioner who has acted in a manner that would compromise security of the nation, as he has leaked the data of the Light Combat Aircraft under the Tejas programme development by the Aeronautical Development Agency. The data that is leaked is of Aeronautical Technology which is used for Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, all of which form defence documents of the Ministry of Defence," the bench said.

The court, however, said the investigation in the case should be completed within four months.

"In such cases, the investigation is to be taken up on war footing and complete it in a time frame, so that illegality would not perpetuate. More than two years have passed by, the matter is still at the stage of investigation. Though in certain cases time to investigate on deeper issues would be necessary, but bearing that in mind as well, it should be the endeavour of the prosecution to conclude the investigation as expeditiously as possible and file their final report," the bench said.

Case Title: Sri Siva Rama Krishna Chennuboina Vs. Sarsi Narkis Babu V., Information security officer

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Usage of dark web for uploading sensitive defence information is a ... - LawBeat

There are a lot of things that go into account when you want to get a WiFi plan for yourself. For instance, you need to keep in mind the speed of the internet, the reliability, and a lot more. Most importantly, you need to see which company you will be getting your internet service from.

You should opt for the companies that are already popular throughout the country for their service, you should consider Xfinity Wi-Fi plans that are not just easy on your budget but provide brilliant speed as well. If you want, you can contact Xfinity customer service to get an idea about its plans and get one today.

With that, here are some other aspects you should keep in mind when you are picking out a WiFi plan for yourself:

Figure Out what Internet Speed you will Get

It is essential to know what internet speed you would be getting with the package since that is the most important factor while getting an internet connection. The internet speed depends entirely on your usage of the internet and how many people you have at home since that would bring the bandwidth into question. The usage of the internet depends on whether you are a student who needs to study online or even if you are an entrepreneur who runs most of your business on the internet. The internet that you get for yourself is measured in units of Megabits per second. The more megabits you get for yourself, the faster your internet is going to be.

Therefore, when getting an internet connection for yourself, make sure you check what internet speed you are provided with so that you can make the best out of your internet service.

The Bandwidth of Your Internet Connection

Not only is the speed of your internet important but the bandwidth that you get is just as important too. Bandwidth generally refers to the capacity that your internet connection can cater to. If more bandwidth is used, your internet might start performing poorly since too many people would be using your internet. It is important that you get an internet connection that offers you a high bandwidth so that more people would be able to connect and enjoy a fast internet connection.

Bandwidth also has a lot to do with the number of people in your house. If you live in a family with lots of people, you would certainly want an internet connection that has a high bandwidth so that everyone in your family could enjoy uninterrupted internet service. Having a higher bandwidth would mean everyone could enjoy streaming movies and shows, watching reels on Instagram, and even streaming music on Spotify at the highest quality.

Getting a Substantial Download Speed for yourself

The third most important factor while trying to figure out a wifi plan for yourself is to consider how much download speed you are getting with the plan. While using the internet, there is more downloading than there is uploading, therefore you need to make sure your internet has a great download speed.

Having a great download speed would allow you to download shows and movies in seconds. This way, you could keep up with all your favorite content just as soon as it is downloaded.

Making Sure your Upload Speed is Great as well

Not only do you need a great download speed in your internet plan but you also need a great upload speed as well. This comes in handy when you need to send a Snapstreak to your friends or if you have to upload a story to your Instagram. The upload speed is also important if you are a YouTuber or even an influencer. This is because you would have to upload videos very often or you would even have to make reels and TikToks to upload them.

Similarly, many cloud storage platforms such as Google One and Dropbox need a fast internet connection to make sure that your pictures and videos are backed up safely and on time. For that, your upload speed needs to be fast enough to upload your pictures and videos as fast as possible.

Keep your Data Cap in mind when you are getting a plan

Data caps are very important to keep in mind when you are getting an internet plan since they play a major part in how much internet you can use in a month. The data that you use has a certain limit that you cannot exceed since you pay for a certain limit. Before you buy a plan, make sure you see how much data cap that plan offers, the more the data cap is the more internet you can use in a month.

Wrapping Up

Getting an internet plan isnt really as easy as people take it to be. There are a lot of considerations you need to make before you get the perfect plan for yourself. For that, you have this list to keep in mind so you can get an internet plan for yourself as easily as possible!

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What Should You Look for in your WiFi Plan? - My Everyday Tech

Starting a blog has become much easier these days, and your biggest challenge won't be finding a place but choosing the right one. Traditional website builders often involve a lot of coding, but you can also make an appealing website without programming experience.

No-code websites are an excellent option for beginner bloggers, and theyre also useful if you have no interest in learning about coding. However, you will need to consider some of the associated drawbacks.

Today, youll find out about the advantages and disadvantages of using no-code websites as a blogger.

First, lets look at the top benefits of using no-code websites as a blogger.

When youre new to blogging, the most important thing is that you get started and build momentum. The biggest advantage of using no-code websites is that theyre pretty easy to set up.

If you pick a no-code website builder, youll usually choose a template then drag and drop boxes to build the site. Once youve done these, all you have to do is begin writing your content and uploading your media. Its also incredibly easy to create categories and customize your website menus.

For those of you who are ready to pick a website builder to launch your blog, consider checking out some of the easiest no-code website builders.

With so many blogs covering just about every niche these days, its essential that you find a way to stand out. Having informative content is one way to do that, but you can really increase your chances of people coming back for more by creating a website thats aesthetically pleasing.

Although some of the more traditional site builders are now simpler to use, having a no-code website builder makes it even easier to launch a beautiful blog. Many programs also have integration with stock image websites like Unsplash, meaning you dont even need to download and then upload photos to accompany your posts.

If you want to use stock images for your website, but the builder you choose doesnt have integrations, you can still choose from numerous sites for royalty-free images. Alternatively, you can take your own pictures. If you do that, check out some of the top photo editing apps for bloggers.

Having a hard-to-use content management system is one of the most annoying things that a blogger can experience. It can also hinder your desire to sit down and write, which will ultimately lead to you quitting before things get good.

When you use a no-code website, you typically shouldn't have any problems when it comes to writing posts and uploading photos. The only restriction you might encounter is limitations when uploading JPEG files.

Once youve finished writing and editing your piece, you can then schedule or publish your blog posts without too many issues. To ensure that you stick to a consistent schedule, you might want to consider building a simple and effective content calendar in Google Sheets.

Several factors will determine whether youre able to keep users coming back to your website, and one of those is how responsive your site is. If it takes a long time for pages to load, for example, users will look elsewhere for the information youre providing.

Many no-code website builders feature good responsiveness in whichever design you choose, meaning that you wont need to worry about that aspect of your blog. Instead, you can focus more of your energy on creating valuable content for your audience.

If youre concerned about the potential risks, you should take some time to read about the security of no-code and low-code development platforms.

As your blog grows, you might want to begin monetizing your audience more. This will often require separate platforms and integrations, such as eCommerce tools. Even at a base level, you may wish to use different integrations for easier social media access and more.

When you use a no-code website, you can get several useful integrations to help you take your business to the next level. For example, Squarespace integrates with Instagram, Apple Pay, Stripe, and several other useful solutions.

If you still wish to use alternatives like WordPress, you can consider these WordPress plugins that all beginners should install.

Now that you know some of the advantages of using no-code websites for your blog, lets identify the disadvantages that might hold you back.

When you use a no-code website builder, you have the option of picking from several templates. Within these, you can customize fonts, images, text, and more. However, you will still have fewer options than platforms that let you code.

When youre in your early days as a blogger, you might not find this such a big problem. But over time, you may want more customization options. So, its a good idea to keep this in mind. Because of the limited customization options compared to other platforms, it can be harder to scale in the long run.

This includes upgrading your plan to gain access to more features as your site grows bigger. However, it's worth noting that this isnt different from many website builders that let you code.

Even though no-code website builders limit much of the manual work as a blogger, some input is still necessary on your end. For example, youll need to choose the design and also rearrange the blocks in your text in a way that suits you.

When using no-code website builders, you still need to download all the integrations that you want to use with your blog. Moreover, you will need to manually add the metadata and other important SEO features for each page and article you write.

Speaking of SEO, becoming an SEO expert is crucial if you want to grow your blog organically. Weve got a full guide outlining how to become an SEO expert if you're ready to dig into the finer details.

No-code websites are an excellent way to get your blog underway without requiring significant effort to make your website look good. Considering that designs are often built to be responsive, you shouldnt have any issues with making your site easy for others to navigate.

But before you get started, its important to remember that no-code websites arent a one-and-done solution. Youll need to consider whether the lower customization options are a worthwhile trade-off, along with thinking about the manual work still required on your part.

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The Pros and Cons of Using No-Code Websites as a Blogger - MUO - MakeUseOf

Devices that allow computers to interface with the human brain are already here close to 200,000 people have cochlear implants in the U.S. alone. And a wide range of additional brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies are in development. As these technologies become more common, so do questions related to ethics and policy with agencies from the Federal Trade Commission to the FDA already facing regulatory decisions about BCI devices.

A new book, Policy, Identity, and Neurotechnology: The Neuroethics of Brain-Computer Interfaces, explores these issues and more. The book was co-edited by Veljko Dubljevi, an associate professor at NCState who leads the NeuroComputational Ethics Research Group; and by Allen Coin, a former graduate student at NCState.

To learn more about what BCI devices are on the horizon, and the questions those technologies raise, we spoke with Coin and Dubljevi.

The Abstract: Before we talk about the book itself, I have a threshold question: What exactly are BCIs? How common are they? Can you give me some examples?

Allen Coin: In short, BCIs are a class of technology that can read and translate brain activity into a format digestible by a computer. BCI devices use brain activity as input to provide some sort of output, or to pass information back to the user as feedback sometimes directly to the users brain. These devices have a lot of applications in medicine and are increasingly being adapted for widespread commercial use.

For instance, there are BCI devices in clinical trials that can warn a user when they are about to have a seizure. And you may know somebody with one type of BCI device that has been around for a long time: the cochlear implant. This technology is rapidly advancing, with a lot of investment from commercial ventures that aim to popularize this technology for everyday use perhaps BCIs will become as common as smartphones. Some private ventures have lofty goals for BCI commercialization, including Synchron which recently received FDA approval for human trials and Neuralink, a company that has a knack for making headlines and which has a stated goal for achieving human-AI symbiosis, among other very sci-fi applications.

Not every commercial application of BCI will require embedding a computer chip in your brain, however some private ventures seek to use non-invasive BCI technology, like a modified electroencephalogram (EEG) which can read brain activity via sensors you can wear like a hat. One such venture, Neurable, is working on a product that aims to put BCI sensors into a pair of headphones that can help the user optimize their own productivity. For example, it might let users know when to take breaks.

TA: The book is subtitled The Neuroethics of Brain-Computer Interfaces. What sort of ethical questions do BCIs raise?

Veljko Dubljevi: In our prior work, we mapped the landscape of ethical challenges arising from the introduction of BCI technologies. We characterized these challenges according to recurring themes of ethical concerns that were noted by ethicists: physical factors (relating to user safety and harm to humans or experimental animals), psychological factors (relating to autonomy and changes in humanity or personhood) and the most diverse social factors (relating to issues such as stigmatization of users; privacy; informed consent; responsibility; and fairness). There are also novel ethical issues which arise when BCIs are combined with computer-to-brain interfaces to allow direct communication between two or more brains, thus comprising brain-to-brain interfaces. Such new technological forms of communication may lead to information overload and radical psychological distress, at least for some people. Thus, serious consideration needs to be given to the vulnerability of individuals and groups and how they may benefit (or be harmed) by these technologies.

TA: What about policy challenges? Are there regulatory requirements in place governing BCI technologies? Should there be? And who would, or should, be doing the regulating?

Dubljevi: There are many policy challenges. For instance, the BCI technology is falling under inconsistent levels of oversight. On the permissive end of the scale, you have things like cases of wearable BCIs, where more or less the Federal Trade Commission has jurisdiction and will interfere only if producers start using too much hyperbole in their promotional materials. At the more stringent end of the scale you have cases of implantable BCIs, where the Food and Drug Administration needs to be satisfied that the BCIs are safe and effective. Another challenge is that current guidelines for research ethics usually dont apply to market research and yet this is exactly the area with the most exciting developments. Finally, there are unknowns about downstream effects of widespread implementation of BCI technology, which could be pertinent for regulation.

TA: Does your book focus solely on what we already know about ethics, policy and BCIs? Or are you also laying out recommendations for the path forward? If there are recommendations, what are they?

Coin: Our book doesnt just cover whats already known about BCI policy and ethics. The book also considers potential, realistic near-future applications of the technology, what ethical considerations those applications could have, and resulting policy implications. For instance, one developing area of research in BCI, which may seem like science fiction, is the use of BCI to enable direct brain-to-brain interfacing.

One of the key recommendations discussed at length in the book is the need for ethicists and policymakers to keep abreast of the rapid advancements in this technology that are taking place in the research, engineering, and commercialization spaces. Given that the stated goals of some private investment in the technology are to develop sci-fi applications like mind uploading or brain-AI symbiosis regardless of how feasible such applications may be this suggests a potential future path for this technology that could be rife with unique new challenges to our social norms and legal system. While we try to present a picture in this book of BCI that is cautiously optimistic, rather than alarmist, there is nevertheless a theme that it is important to keep in front of the rapid advancements in this technology from an ethics and policy perspective.

TA: Why write this book now?

Dubljevi: The field of BCI technology is now migrating from being almost entirely limited to academic research labs into a mainstream social phenomenon. With significant increases in computational power and sophistication of machine learning, BCIs are increasingly promising (or threatening) to become a fixture of the new human condition.

Coin: Building on that, another important reason for this book and for scholarship into the ethical, legal and social implications of BCI in general is something I alluded to in the previous question: it is possible that the commercialization and popularization of BCI technology could make BCIs as commonplace and ubiquitous in the future as the smartphone is today, and its important to consider the potential societal effects of such a scenario. Id pose a question of my own here: If a technology company were to ask you if youd like to have a computer chip implanted in your brain, what would be your response? And why? This book could help us, as a society, prepare to answer that question.

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The Future Is Now: Wrestling with Ethics, Policy and Brain-Computer ... - NC State News

Have you ever needed to share an image quickly and easily with someone online? Perhaps you needed to send a photo to a friend or share a screenshot with a colleague. Whatever the reason, sharing images online can often be a frustrating process. Email attachments can be slow and clunky, and many messaging apps compress images or limit their size.

Fortunately, theres a better way. Pasteboard is a free online tool that allows you to share images quickly and easily with anyone, anywhere in the world. With Pasteboard, you can upload an image, copy a link, and share it instantly.

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In this post, well take a closer look at how to use Pasteboard to share images online easily. Well cover everything from uploading images to sharing links, and well provide some tips and tricks along the way. So lets get started!

Related: What is Pastebin: Usecases, Getting Started, Tips and More

The first step in sharing images with Pasteboard is to upload your image to the platform. It has four ways of uploading the image; you can copy & paste, drag & drop, use a webcam, or with the upload button which I will use in this article. Heres how: No account is needed!

Step 1: Navigate to the Pasteboard website in your web browser.

Step 2: Click the Or Select Image button to select the image you want to upload from your computer.

Step 3: Choose your image.

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Step 4: Once youve selected your image, click the Upload button to upload it to Pasteboard.

Step 5: You can add option meta-data about the image; then hit the Save button.

Step 6: Copy the link to your clipboard by highlighting the text and pressing Ctrl+C (Windows) or Cmd+C (Mac).

Step 7: Paste the link into an email, messaging app, or other platform to share it with others.

Thats it! Your image will now be uploaded to the Pasteboard platform, and youll be able to access it from anywhere using a shareable link.

Related: How to Share Images and Files Between Your Android Phone and Chromebook

One thing to keep in mind when uploading images to Pasteboard is that there are some restrictions on image size and format. Currently, images must be under 10MB in size, and they must be in one of the following formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, APNG, TIFF, or BMP.

If your image is too large or in the wrong format, you may need to resize or convert it before uploading it to Pasteboard. There are many free online tools available for resizing and converting images, so this should be a relatively easy process.

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Thats all there is to it! When someone clicks on the link youve shared, theyll be taken directly to your image on the Pasteboard platform.

Another thing to keep in mind when sharing Pasteboard links is that they are public by default. This means that anyone with the link can view your image, so you should be careful about sharing sensitive or personal images in this way. If you need to share a private image, you can use the Pasteboard password protection feature to add an extra layer of security.

Related: Sharing Files in Windows using Windows Explorer

Now that you know how to upload images to Pasteboard and share them with others, lets take a look at some additional tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the platform:

Tip: Organize your images into folders for easy access. With a free Pasteboard account, you can create folders and albums to keep your images organized and easy to find.

Sharing images online doesnt have to be a frustrating process. With Pasteboard, you can upload, share, and organize your images quickly and easily, from anywhere in the world. By following the steps and tips outlined in this post, youll be able to use Pasteboard to share images with anyone, anywhere, in just a few clicks.

So why not give Pasteboard a try today? Its free, easy to use, and could save you a lot of time and hassle in the long run.

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How to Share Images Online Easily With Pasteboard - Dignited

ACID TEST The Acid Test, April 2023 By Miles Bowe May 02, 2023

Bandcamps outer limits continue to be a rewarding place for psychedelia, experimental club music, noise, vaporwave, and the wholly uncategorizable. In each edition of Acid Test, Miles Bowe explores its far reaches to dig up hidden gems and obscure oddities. This April, we look at a pair of albums using mind-bending samples to pay tribute to two very different songs, a digitally prepared piano, a psychedelic album that feels like wandering an arcade, and a musical titan opening a unique new chapter.

Most people know Yoshimi for her kinetic drumming in the legendary band Boredoms or her equally trippy project OOIOOnot to mention her iconic yelling on the Flaming Lips album named in her honor. That legacy only makes the experience of hearing To The Forest To Live A Truer Lifea debut collaboration with Izumi Kiyoshi credited under the mind-melting name YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduOall the more astonishing. Feeding vocals and expressive piano through her collaborators modular synth, Yoshimi creates a sound both laser-focused and overwhelmingly expansive. Some tracks, like opener YofuyO or YoY 7, flood your ears with bright, synth-processed flourishes, while rich piano patterns wind through others as acoustic fragments flicker and bend. Yoshimis piano playing is so entrancing that her vocals almost sneak up on you, appearing gradually on tracks like OmimiO before reaching incredible peaks in the second half on the immense mull and the hyper-processed 1.yoO. Instilled with spontaneity, wonder, and a life-giving fervor, To The Forest To Live A Truer Life crystallizes so many of Yoshimis strengths while also kicking off an incredible new chapter.

Since last summer Hausu Mountain off-shoot Blorpus Editions has pleasantly orbited the Chicago experimental label like a weird little moon, delivering everything from electroacoustic epics to a re-scoring of the 1999 movie Twister. Two recent highlights capture the labels adventurousness while taking differentbut equally extremeapproaches to sampling. I Am Sitting In A Cloud finds Doug Kaplan replicating the words of Alvin Luciers iconic electroacoustic piece I Am Sitting In A Room through deliriously spliced-together pop song samples. Once a funny highlight from the 2018 Pepper Mill Rondo release E.D.M., this now 20-minute piece is the result of Kaplan repeatedly uploading the recording to free audio-hosting sites, gradually reducing it to digital noise.

While that release fuses countless tiny samples to one end, sound artist Mike Sugarmanaka Exestinesuses his album Stang to blast a single songStings Desert Roseinto a whirlwind of electro-acoustic fragments. As tributes to their respective songs, these releases couldnt be more different; yet they end up complimenting each other wonderfully.

A sprawling 17-minute piece for four electric basses, Do Make Say Think is the latest release by Naemi, an alias of the producer Exael. Heady atmospheres, delicately plucked melodies, and sometimes thunderous pulses of feedback move gradually over each other like shifting clouds. It only grows knottier and more abstract as it evolves, and in its darker moments, that soft, plucked bass feels as large and ominous as suspension bridge wires. Both beautiful and unsettling, Do Make Slay Think is a continually absorbing listen.

Composer Marc Junker finds a smart frame for this collection of digitally dismantled piano pieces, presenting them as a computerized take on prepared piano. The skittering melodies of Beyond and ~(crashed)~ capture those percussive touches associated with the instrument, while Winds Theme seems to digitally craft the shuffle of footsteps. While Prepared Piano 1.0 doesnt resemble the prepared piano pieces of innovator John Cage, in both cases the preparation feels like a foundation rather than an end result. The frames are impressive, but what Junker composes within them is what makes Prepare Piano 1.0 stick with you.

The latest zone from NEW MEXICAN STARGAZERS opens with a minute of buzzing arcade machines and echoing crowds, and is appropriately named (enter). This brief blip sets the vibe for a bleary collection of synth jams that feel like wandering from one different game cabinet to the next. The chirpy 5D Entertainment brings to mind the hypnotic world of James Ferraros Marble Surf, while Mirror Maze ripples with synthesized guitar, matching the satisfying grind of an old Sega game. NEW MEXICAN STARGAZERS excel at conjuring vivid and surreal spacesmotels in the rain, highway rest-stops at night, the sound worlds of fantastical albums like Deserts Zenith and Aqua Temple. Return 2 White Sands Arcade feels like another welcome pitstop on the journey.

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The Acid Test, April 2023 - bandcamp.com

Generative AI applications and tools are solutions for generating original content based on training from massive AI models. The largest technology companies in the world and nascent AI startups alike are releasing new generative AI solutions. These new generative AI releases debut on what feels like a minute-by-minute basis, making it difficult to keep up with this emerging technology.

To provide a comprehensive look at the generative AI tooling landscape, weve compiled this product guide of the top generative AI applications and tools.

These generative AI tools were selected based on their current popularity and accessibility, their relevance and/or uniqueness to the market, and their potential for growth and AI innovation in the near future.

Read next: Generative AI Companies: Top 12 Leaders

Generative AI tools use AI models or the tools that are built upon these foundations to generate unique, original content in various forms, including text, audio, images, videos, and 3D models.

Generative AI tools are trained by natural language processing, neural networks, and/or deep learning AI algorithms to ingest, understand, and generate responses based on input data. Successful generative AI models are only possible with massive amounts of relevant, clean, ethical, and unbiased training data.

Learn more: What is Generative AI?

The best generative AI tools cover a wide range of functions and business use cases, though many of the most prominent tools today are large language models (LLMs) and/or content generation tools.

Take a closer look at the top generative AI tools in this category in our comparison chart below:

GPT-4 is OpenAIs latest iteration of its Large Language Model (LLM), developed following the success and widespread adoption of GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. Compared to previous iterations, GPT-4 is advertised as being more creative and accurate while also being safer and stabler.

Interested users can join the API waitlist for GPT-4, but even before they gain access to the API, they can reap the technologys benefits with public access to ChatGPT Plus. Many of the other top generative AI vendors on this list have built their products on a GPT-3 or GPT-4 foundation.

Also see: ChatGPT: Understanding the ChatGPT ChatBot

ChatGPT is OpenAIs most popular tool to date, giving the everyday user free access to basic AI content generation. For users who require more processing power, early access to new features (including GPT-4), and other benefits, ChatGPT launched its pilot paid plan, ChatGPT Plus, in March 2023.

Most recently, OpenAI has announced experimental support for ChatGPT AI plugins. These plugins are designed to expand the tools computation and coding capabilities while also giving the tool access to post-2021 information.

AlphaCode by DeepMind is one of the foremost problem-solving and coding solutions in the generative AI space. With 41.4 billion parameters, the transformer-based language model is larger than many other language models, including OpenAI Codex. AlphaCode has been trained in various programming languages, including C#, Ruby, Scala, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Go, and Rust, but its strongest capabilities are in Python and C++.

Through pre-training on GitHub code repositories, CodeContests fine-tuning, sample generation, and filtering and clustering, AlphaCode is able to solve complex problems similarly to a human programmer.

GitHub Copilot is the first of the Microsoft Copilot technologies to hit the market and has seen great success. The tool is designed to transform natural language prompts into code recommendations for all languages in public repositories. For languages like JavaScript that are widely used, GitHub Copilot is able to generate a wide range and quantity of coding suggestions.

Copilot can be used on an individual or a team basis and is priced accordingly. The tool is available as an extension for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs.

Bard, considered Googles response to ChatGPT, is a chatbot and content generation tool that runs on LaMDA, a transformer-based model that Google launched a couple of years ago. The tool is currently considered a Google Experiment and is only available to a limited number of users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Though some of its features are relatively limited compared to ChatGPT, the tool is quickly growing its capabilities. For example, in late April 2023, Bard was updated to support programming and development requirements like code debugging, generation, and explanation.

Also see:ChatGPT vs. Google Bard: Generative AI Comparison

Cohere Generate is a text generation solution from Cohere, a fast-growing AI startup with leadership members that previously wrote and worked on Googles now-famous Transformer paper. Many of the use cases advertised on Coheres site focus on product management and sales, digital marketing, and similar goals, but the tool can be used for software development tasks and other business requirements as well.

Though Cohere is perhaps lesser-known than OpenAI and the bigger tech companies on this list, it has grown quickly into a company thats estimated at around $6 billion in enterprise value. Cohere counts Spotify, HyperWrite, BambooHR, and Glean among its customers.

Claude is one of the latest AI chatbot assistants and content generators thats offered by Anthropic, an AI startup now worth approximately $5 billion. The tool is similar to ChatGPT, but it was specifically designed to be more focused on safety and a customizable, conversational tone. Many early users have praised Claudes abilities when it comes to comedy, creative content generation, and generally absorbing feedback about communication style.

Claudes early partners and testers include Quora, DuckDuckGo, Robin AI, and Juni Learning. Claude is also part of the foundation for Notion AI, the generative AI assistant that was recently added to the Notion project management platform.

For moreinformation, also see:Top AI Startups

Synthesia is an AI video creation platform that allows users to create videos based on their own scripted prompts. From there, the tool is able to use its library of AI avatars, voices, and video templates to create a realistic-looking and sounding video. As a bonus, users dont have to have any of their own video equipment or video editing skills in order to use this tool.

Synthesia is most commonly used to create product marketing, training, and how-to videos for both internal and external users. For customers who need additional resources to get started, Synthesia offers a library of example videos, a help center, and Synthesia Academy tutorials.

DALL-E 2 is OpenAIs latest iteration of its image and art generation AI tool. With DALL-E 2, users have the option to put in a prompt to generate a new image or add an existing image and prompt to edit the image in a certain way.

Compared to DALL-E, DALL-E 2 is said to be generating more photorealistic imagery that better matches user requests. An additional plus, DALL-E 2 appears to have received more training than its predecessor on how to decline inappropriate inputs and avoid creating inappropriate outputs.

On a related topic:Top Natural Language Processing Companies

Generative AI is such a new field, generating questions among both tech experts and laymen. These are some of the questions that most commonly get asked about generative AI tools today:

Though generative AI has most commonly been used for text generation and chatbot functionality, it has many other real-world applications and use cases. Other applications of generative AI technology include image generation, music and audio generation, synthetic data creation, code building, career coaching, drug discovery and predictive studies, and customer service. Learn about the top generative AI startups and the different ways theyre using this technology.

Many industries can benefit from generative AI tools. The more generic content generation and chatbot solutions support a wide variety of business use cases, while other, more specific solutions are being developed to serve healthcare, pharmaceutical, retail, sales, and other specific industries and sectors.

Learn more: Generative AI Examples for Key Industries

Whether your company should use generative AI tools is a question only your leadership, your tech team, and the rest of your employees can answer. If theres a specific use case or way in which a generative AI tool can improve your internal processes, its a great idea to invest in one of these tools while theyre still free or relatively low-cost.

However, keep in mind that it is important for your company to establish usage rules ahead of time, especially as it relates to data security and uploading proprietary information into any of these tools.

Generative AI applications and tools can fulfill a variety of project requirements and tasks for both professional and personal use cases. And with so many tools currently available with free trials and limited versions, now is the time to test out these applications and determine if they can optimize your business operations.

Regardless of the generative AI tool(s) you decide to invest in, the most important first step you can take is to communicate with your employees about the investment and what it means to the company. Generative AI currently cant and shouldnt be adopted to take over employee jobs; instead, its a great supplement for research, coaching, and creative content generation.

Teach your staff how to use this technology responsibly and effectively, and youll be surprised by how much generative AI is able to improve existing processes and work.

For more information, also see: Top AI Software

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Top 9 Generative AI Applications and Tools - eWeek

[Editors Note: Tubefilter Charts is a weekly rankings column from Tubefilter with data provided by GospelStats. Its exactly what it sounds like; a top number ranking of YouTube channels based on statistics collected within a given time frame. Check out all of our Tubefilter Chartswith new installments every week righthere.]

Scroll down for this weeks Tubefilter Chart.

This week, YouTube Shorts creators occupied the U.S. Top 50 like never before. The all-American ranking included 41 channels that rely on YouTubes short-form format.

Despite that dominance, a channel known for long-form videos continues to lead this edition of our weekly charts.

Chart Toppers

CoComelon Nursery Rhymes dropped all the way to third place in our Global Top 50. Despite that un-CoComelon-like malaise, the California-based channel continues to lead our American chart. As it has throughout the year, the kid-friendly hub finished #1 in the U.S. Top 50. Its546.6 million weekly viewskept it ahead of the field, and even though some global Shorts channels have been able to catch up with that traffic, no U.S.-based hubs are particularly close to CoComelon. Look for its U.S. win streak to continue into May.

The first of the 41 Shorts channels in the latest U.S. Top 50 belongs toAlan Chikin Chow. By collecting 405.2 million weekly views, the clever comedian retained the runner-up status he earned a week ago. Chow now has more than 24 billion lifetime views on YouTube, and thats not the extent of his online video prowess. On TikTok, his short-form yuks reach more than 13 million followers.

The next short-form channel in the chart is about 90 million views behind Alan Chikin Chow, but despite that gap,BigSchoolstill claimed the #3 spot in the U.S. Top 50. The animation channel uses characters from games likeMinecraftandPoppy Playtimeto tell school stories on Shorts. BigSchool rode a 27% week-over-week bump to move up seven spots after landing in tenth a week ago. Now that sounds like a passing grade to me.

MrBeasttook fourth place in the latest U.S. Top 50. The man bornJimmy Donaldsonrose to prominence by uploading extravagant stunts to his beastly YouTube channel, but his top 50 resurgence has been led by a combo of short-form and long-form content. That effective mix brought305.4 million viewsto the main MrBeast YouTube channel during the week that was. That channel is about to cross 150 million subscribers as well.

_vector_ made an inaugural appearance in the U.S. top five by taking fifth place in the ranking during the final week of April. The short-form channel added298.8 million weekly viewsto move up three spots.

Top Gainers

Some of the Shorts channels that have made it into the U.S. Top 50 are pretty easy to digest. For the stranger hubs that crack the ranking, theres nothing we can say other thanDaFuq!?Boom!

That profane statement is both the name of a channel in this weeks U.S. Top 50 and an accurate response to the weirdness of that channels videos. The ten most-watched videos in the DaFuq!?Boom! YouTube Shorts library all feature wide-eyed heads that pop out of toilets. You can try to flush them (as the POV characters in the videos often do) but the damage is already done.

If it boggles your mind that such simple potty humor can get45 million viewson a single video, just remember that 3D animation is one of the biggest categories on YouTube Shorts right now. Many DaFuq!?Boom! use the same background music as the animated memes created by the VRChat personality FSRiko, and the overall oddness of these Shorts is reminiscent of last weeks global Top Gainer, Banana D.

By joining 3D animation channels like BigSchool in the U.S. Top 50, DaFuq!?Boom! is showing just how far that category has come. Animators used to struggle with the demands of the YouTube algorithm; now its possible to get millions of views with a bunch of pixelated toilets. Over seven days, DaFuq!?Boom! secured144.8 million weekly viewsto make its first appearance in the U.S. Top 50. It finished in 33rd place, three spots above longtime chart-topper WWE.

To me, the success of this channel is as confusing as its title implies. But theres one thing you cant take away from DaFuq!?Boom! Its definitely the highest-ranking channel to feature an interrobang in its title.

Channel Distribution

This week, there are 41 YouTube Shorts channels in the U.S. Top 50.

Gospel Statsprovides transparent social media stats you can trust. For more information visit GospelStats.com.

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Top 50 Most Viewed U.S. YouTube Channels Week Of 04/30/2023 - Tubefilter

One of my favorite questions for new professional acquaintances is, Whats your favorite innovation from the past six months, and why?

I like this question for a few reasons:

Automation almost always comes up. PPC marketers are spoiled for choice on ways to automate their workflows, such as:

This article will not pass judgment on which automation options you might choose to opt into. Rather, it will outline the mechanics of each, as well as how to make them work.

Bidding arguably is one of the few things that should always be automated.

How advertisers automate is where theres room for different paths to profit:

If you opt for native bidding, its vital that you trust your conversion tracking. Ad networks use conversions as the main guiding light to know whether to invest or pull back.

While its true that Max Clicks and Target Impression Share dont need conversion tracking data to function, its still vital that youre feeding in the right data.

A common mistake people make is including too many conversion actions as primary. This usually results in double counting or including steps on the journey that arent worth feeding into the algorithm.

Another common mistake is setting a target that isnt attainable. If the target cost per acquisition (TCPA) or target return on ad spend (TROAS) dont match the budget and auction prices, youll likely underspend or flood your campaign with bad leads.

Rules and scripts are helpful when you have enough data to know what your bids should be. They typically need larger budgets to help compensate for being on manual bidding (and forfeiting the native bid signals).

The most common signals are:

While these do require healthy data, the biggest pitfall for rules/scripts is the human element.

If the input is incorrect, it might hurt the campaign.

This used to be my favorite way to automate bids: set a conservative manual bid and go aggressive on the bid adjustments.

Bid adjustments could be used to direct budget away from, or towards, desired prospects and give the user the most control.

However, with the improvements to native bid adjustments, its harder to justify using these. If you are planning on running a purely manual campaign, these are a must.

If you trust your conversion tracking, theres no reason not to use native bidding.

Native bidding pulls in signals advertisers arent able to access and usually outperforms human-governed automation.

Max Conversions with a TCPA goal and Max Conversion Value without a goal beat manual biddings 6.8% conversion rate.

However, if you arent able to put in accurate conversion value data or set realistic TCPA goals, going manual with rules, scripts, or bid adjustments will serve better.

When asked, many will say they prefer human creative over automatically created text, display, and video ads.

The human mind is supposed to be better at coming up with the right content for the right audience.

However, what may go unnoticed is that the lions share of auto-generated ads come from human creative. i.e., the text, tone, and images will be borrowed from the advertisers site, existing ads, or social channels.

Creative falls into these categories:

Responsive ads and PMax ads all fundamentally follow the same objective: Take the content the advertiser provides and find the best combination for those assets.

Marketers can choose whether to allow full learning or to help it along by pinning creative to desired locations.

It can be tempting to pin all assets to recreate Expanded Text Ads. However, as this Optmyzr study shows, youll get a higher conversion rate by allowing for some freedom in the learning.

Visual creative (static display images and videos) are a bit tougher.

Brand style guidelines can make auto-generated ads a no-go. Be sure all creatives work with the templates, and if they dont, consider uploading a fully contained ad.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are powerful; however, much of their utility has been absorbed into PMax. Part of their power is leveraging the well-SEOed nature of a site to help Google know which landing pages relate to a query.

Headlines are derived from the language on the landing page.

Currently, its not a question of when almost all creative has automation baked into it, to a certain extent.

The main choices to make are whether to fully delegate creative control or partner with the machine.

Assets (formerly known as extensions) should almost never be automated. This is because you want to use them to their fullest: highlighting high-value services, and amplifying ad messages.

Audiences are the beating heart of PPC campaigns and the main lever advertisers have at their disposal.

However, the privacy-first web has restricted which audiences we can use, and even saw the depreciation of some of them.

Marketers access audiences through the following:

Choosing to opt into any of the automated audiences (i.e., any that a human doesnt actively choose) depends entirely on how much you trust your conversion tracking.

Its also important that your creative matches the audience youre targeting. As a general rule of thumb, opting into automated audiences means manually excluding audiences you dont want (provided there are no restrictions).

Manually choosing audiences (particularly opting into audience signals for PMax) invites room for human error. This is why its important to use data to inform your choices.

Consider building custom search intent audiences based on your top converting search terms (as opposed to the keywords themselves).

Unless youre in a restricted industry, it almost always makes sense to have some manual influence on the audiences. This influence can be exclusions or outright targets.

However, as broad match, smart bidding, and PMax have evolved, its worth testing the baked-in audiences.

At best, they thrive, and youre able to benefit from leaning into the ad platforms toys.

At worst, you have data to harvest and can be proactive in future exclusions and ad creative choices.

This is one of the biggest areas for contention with marketers. Marketing channels are a strategic choice, and delegating this level of strategy can cause understandable uneasiness.

However, depending on how the human interacts with the automation, it can still be a net positive experience.

Automating ad channels boils down to the following:

Sometimes PMax can outperform campaigns with more controls in place. This is usually due to the following being true:

Many marketers default to search first, and not all prospects want to consume information that way.

Additionally, by the time the person is searching for the thing, they usually have a shortlist of brands theyre interested in.

PMax enables brands to access visual placements and top-of-funnel interactions without carving out a separate budget for it.

It is important to have account-wide negative keywords and placement exclusions for any automated channel campaigns.

Manual campaigns can be effective they just tend to require advertisers to pay a premium for each placement and are limited to the channels the advertiser opts into.

The biggest deciding factors will be budget and conversion data.

If you trust your conversions (and are able to include conversion values), automated marketing makes a ton of sense. The human marketer puts safeguards in place via negative keywords, audiences, and placements.

If you dont trust your conversion tracking and budgets are restricted, youll want to be specific about where marketing dollars are invested.

Its important to note that image extensions (available on both Google and Microsoft) are a valid answer to multi-channel campaigns that need more control.

If you are under strict brand standards and/or have to report on all channel ROI, that might be a more feasible solution for you.

Automation is ultimately a net positive for digital marketers.

How much folks engage with it depends on which tasks are core competencies and which are struggles.

The more a brand trusts its data, the easier it is to lean into automation.

More resources:

Featured Image: /Shutterstock

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PPC Automation: When & How To Use It - Search Engine Journal

Whether youre a blogger or write articles for an online magazine or newspaper, chances are youll find yourself asking whether your article needs an image or not. The answer is always Yes. Images bring an article to life and also contribute to your websites SEO. This post explains how to fully optimize an image forSEOand provides some pointers on using images for the best user experience.

Images, when used correctly, will help readers better understand your article. The old saying A picture is worth a thousand words probably doesnt apply to Google, but its certainly true when you need to spice up 1,000 dull words, illustrate what you mean in a chart or data flow diagram, or just make your social media posts more enticing.

Its a simple recommendation: add images to every article you write to make them more appealing. Whats more, since visual search is getting increasingly important as seen in Googles vision for the future of search it could turn out to provide you with a nice bit of traffic. And if you have visual content it makes sense to put image SEO a bit higher on your to-do list.

A while ago, Google Images got a brand-new interface with new filters, metadata, and even attribution. These cool new filters show that Google increasingly knows whats in an image and how that image fits into the larger context.

Its always better to use original images photos you have taken yourself than stock photos. Your team page needs pictures of your actual team, not this dude on the right or one of his stock photo friends. Off topic: also, this dude really needs a haircut.

Your article needs an image relevant to its subject. If youre adding a random photo just to get a green bullet in the Yoast SEO plugins content analysis, then youre doing it wrong. The image should reflect the topic of the post or have illustrative purposes within the article. Also, try to place the image near the relevant text. If you have a main image or an image that youre trying to rank, try to keep that near the top of the page, if thats possible without feeling forced.

There is a simple image SEO reason for all of this: an image with related text ranks better for the keyword it is optimized for. But well discuss image SEO later on in this article.

If you dont have any original images that you can use, there are other ways to find unique images and still avoid stock photos.Flickr.comis a nice image source for instance, as you can use Creative Commons images. Just remember to attribute the original photographer. We also like the images provided by sites like Unsplash.We have a blog post that gives you an awesome overview of where to get great images. Steer clear of theobvious stock photos, and if you are using stock photos, pick the ones that look (ok, just a bit)more genuine. But whatever you use, youll probably find that images with people in them always look like stock photos. Unless you took the photos yourself, which (in our opinion) is always the best idea.

Obvious alternatives for photos could be graphs or illustrations, which is what we at Yoast use. If youre interested, our resident illustrator Erwin wrote a fun article about the making of illustrations on our developers blog. Also, an honorable mention should go toanimated GIFs, as they are incredibly popular these days.

But even though animated GIFs are popular, dont go overboard. Itll make your post harder to read, as the movement of the image distracts your readers attention. They can also slow down your page.

Read more: Blog post images: why use them and where to find them

Once you have found the right image whether its a photo, illustration, or chart the next step is to optimize it for use on your website. So before you add your image, there are a number of things you need to think about:

Image SEO starts with the file name. You want Google to know what the image is about without even looking at it, so use your focus keyphrase in the image file name. Its simple: if youre writing an article on the Notre Dame and you use an image showing a sunrise in Paris over Notre Dame Cathedral, the file name shouldnt be DSC4536.jpg. A proper file name would be notre-dame-paris-sunrise.jpg, making sure the main subject of the photo (and your article) is at the beginning of the file name.

For images, the right format doesnt exist; it depends on the kind of image and how you want to use it. In short, we recommend to:

If you know a large part of your audience uses specific browsers or devices, make sure to check whether your preferred format is supported by those browsers on CanIuse.com.

When youve chosen the right name and format, its time to resize and optimize your image!

Loading times are important for UX and SEO. The faster the site, the easier it is for users and search engines to visit (and index) a page. Images can have a big impact on loading times, especially when you upload a huge image to display it really small for example, a 25001500 pixels image displayed at 250150 pixels size as the entire image still has to be loaded. So resize the image to how you want it displayed. WordPress helps you do this by automatically providing the image in multiple sizes after uploading it. Unfortunately, that doesnt mean the file size is optimized as well, thats just the image display size. So think about the size in which you upload your images!

This one is essential for SEO as well, and if youre using WordPress its done for you since it was addedby default from version 4.4. Images should have the srcset attribute, which makes it possible to serve a different image per screen width this is especially useful for mobile devices.

The next step in image SEO should be to make sure that your scaled image is compressed so its served in the smallest file size possible.

Of course, you could just export the image and experiment with quality percentages, but we prefer to use the highest possible quality images, especially given the popularity of retina and similar screens these days.

You can still reduce the file size of these images by removing theEXIF data, for example. We recommend using tools likeImageOptimor websites like Squoosh,JPEGmini, jpeg.io orKraken.io.

When youve optimized your images, you can test your page with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest.org or Pingdom.

While Google is getting better at recognizing whats in an image, you shouldnt totally rely on their abilities yet. It all comes down to you providing the context for that image so fill in as much as you can! Well discuss how below.

Your image is ready to use, but dont just throw it into your article anywhere. As mentioned earlier, adding it close to related textual content helps a lot. It makes sure the text is as relevant to the image as the image is to the text, something users and Google prefer.

The image caption is the text that accompanies the image on the page if you look at the images in this article, its the text in the gray box below each one. Why are captions important for image SEO? Because people use them when scanning an article. People tend to scan headings, images and captions as they scan a web page.Way back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen wrote:

Elements that enhance scanning include headings, large type, bold text, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, topic sentences, and tables of contents.

In 2012,KissMetrics went even further, statingthat:

Captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body copy itself, so not using them, or not using them correctly, means missing out on an opportunity to engage a huge number of potential readers.

Do you need to add captions to every image? No, because sometimes images serve other purposes. Decide whether you want to use yours for SEO as well or not. Bearing in mind the need to avoid over-optimization, wed say you should only add captions where it would make sense to the visitor for one to be there. Think about the visitor first, and dont add a caption just for image SEO purposes.

The alt text (or alt tag) is added to an image so there will be descriptive text in place if the image cant be displayed to the visitor for any reason. We cant put it any better thanWikipedia:

In situations where the image is not available to the reader, perhaps because they have turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment, the alternative text ensures that no information or functionality is lost.

The alt text is there to enhance your websites accessibility. So be sure to add alt text to images you use, and consider including the SEO keyphrase for that page if its appropriate to do so. Do not stuff the alt text of every images with keywords. Most importantly, describe whats in the image so both search engines and people can make sense of it. The more relevant information surrounding an image has, the more search engines deem this image important.

However, please note that not every images needs to have an alt text. Instead, you should think of alt text as a part of your content and add it where it makes sense. For instance, if you have an image purely for decorative reason, then that image doesnt need an alt text. In this case, having an alt text doesnt bring any value to your readers. On the other hand, if you use an image with a statistic, lets say the number of people who search for ice cream last month, then this should be reflected in the alt text. You can find guidance for alt text in this W3s article.

When hovering over an image, some browsers show the title text as a tooltip. Chrome shows the title textas was intended. Title text for images is similar and a lot of people who use titles simply copy the alt text, but more and more people leave them out altogether. Why is that? Heres Mozillas take:

title has a number of accessibility problems, mainly based around the fact that screen reader support is very unpredictable and most browsers wont show it unless you are hovering with a mouse (so e.g. no access to keyboard users).

It is better to include such supporting information in the main article text, rather than attached to the image.

Keep reading: Read more about alt tag and title tag optimization

Adding structured data to your pages can help search engines display your images as rich results. While Google says structured data doesnt help you rank better, it does help to achieve a more fleshed out listing in Image Search. Theres more, though. For instance, if you have recipes on your site and you add structured data to your images Google can also add a badge to your images showing that this image belongs to a recipe. Google Images supports structured data for the following types:

Google has a number of guidelines you need to follow if you want your images to appear rich in image search. For one, when specifying an image as a structured data property, make sure that the image actually belongs to the instance of that type. In addition, your image should have the image attribute and that your images should be crawlable and indexable. You can find them all Googles Structured Data General Guidelines.

Yoast SEO automatically adds the correct structured data a number of images on your site, like your logo or the ones you add to your how-to articles built in our blocks. The plugin always finds at least one relevant image on any page to add to the structured data graph. This way, Yoast SEO can describe your page properly to search engines. Want to learn more about structured data? Enroll in our free Structured data training course if you want to learn how to add structured data to your pages!

Earlier on, we mentioned using images for social sharing. If you add the following image tag to the section in your page HTML like this:

That will make sure the image is included in your share on Facebook (and OpenGraph is also used for Pinterest, for instance).

Our Yoast SEO pluginhas aSocial sectionwhere you can set and in the Premium version evenpreview your Facebook and Twitter posts. Premium users can also use the Zapier integration to automate posting to social media platforms. Make sure to use a high-quality image, like the original image you used in the post, as the social platforms use higher quality/larger images more often than not. If you have set this up correctly, and its not showing the right image, try to flush Facebooks cache in theURL Debugger. Twitter Cardsdo the same for Twitter and are also generated by our plugin.

If you are a web developer, you might wonder about XML image sitemaps. Id prefer to describe this asimages in XML sitemaps. Google is clear about this:

Additionally, you can use Google image extensions for sitemaps to give Google more information about the images available on your pages. Image sitemap information helps Google discover images that we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code), and allows you to indicate images on your site that you want Google to crawl and index.

Every now and then, people ask us about XML image sitemaps. We dont generate these in our plugin, but follow Googles advice and include them in the page or post sitemaps. Just scroll down in ourpost sitemapand youll see we have added images to all our latest posts (there is a column just for that). Adding images to your XML sitemaps helps Google index your images, so be sure to do so for better image SEO.

We all know CDNs as one of the most popular site speed optimizations. Some of the companies that provide CDNs also have a specific CDN for images. The image CDNs are built around basic tasks: to optimize your images and get them to your visitor as fast as possible. Running an image CDN can speed up the delivery of your images many, many times.

An image CDN lets you handle the transformation, optimization and delivery of images. You can determine what loads when and how that should work. For instance, you can say that all your PNG images should be converted to webp on-the-fly because these load fastest and give the best image quality. An image CDN has loads of options to fine-tune the process, but theres often a default setting thats probably best for the majority of sites.

There are loads of image CDNs to choose from, like Sirv, Cloudinary and Imagekit. Also, platforms like Cloudflare let you determine how to resize, reformat and serve images.

Image SEO is the sum of a number of elements. With Google getting better at recognizing elements in images every day, it makes sense to make sure the image and all its elements contribute to a good user experience as well as SEO. It would be foolish to try to kid Google.

Keep these 12 things in mind when adding an image to an article:

Besides contributing to SEO and user experience, images can also play an important role in conversion. So dont underestimate the importance of image SEO on your site!

Read on: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands leading web design magazine.

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Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines Yoast