Augmented Intelligence – Christie’s
Augmented Intelligence is a groundbreaking auction highlighting the breadth and quality of AI Art. … The auction redefines the evolution of art and technology, exploring human agency in the age of AI within fine art. From robotics to GANs to interactive experiences, artists incorporate and collaborate with artificial intelligence in a variety of mediums including paintings, sculptures, prints, digital art and more.
An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic
Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).
Parkrun veteran, 82, runs final race in Leeds – BBC News
Hilary Wharam, 82, has more than 200 marathons and 171 Parkruns to her name since she took up the sport aged 55. However, as Ms Wharam is moving to Scotland to live with her daughter, Saturday was her last time running at Woodhouse Moor, which she has finished 112 times. Woodhouse Moor Parkrun director Anne Akers described Hilary as “a running machine”, adding: “We are going to miss her so much.” Ms Wharam was given a standing ovation by volunteers and fellow members of her running club, Horsforth Harriers, as she crossed the finish line on Saturday.
Man who lost bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill – The Guardian
“If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.” … The council has resisted Howells’ attempts to allow him to search, insisting that the hard drive had become its property when it entered the landfill site.
This Pixar-style dancing lamp hints at Apple’s future home robot – The Verge
When the researcher in the video plays music, the “Expressive” robot lamp dances with her; when she asks about the weather, it looks outside first; when she’s working on an intricate project, it follows her movements to shed light more helpfully; when it reminds her to drink water, it pushes the glass toward her. When she tells it it can’t come out on a hike with her, it hangs its head in faux sadness.
A life nearly wrecked — and then rescued — by books – The Washington Post
What could such an enviously exacting stylist find so horrifying about the written word? The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.”
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement – Aeon Videos
Commemorating [André Breton’s Surrealist] manifesto’s centennial, this short documentary from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) explores the surrealist exercise known as ‘exquisite corpse’, in which each participant creates one portion of a body, unaware of how the other participants’ contributions will look. Taking viewers through a history of the exquisite corpse up to today, the piece explores how these projects embody the surrealist emphasis on freedom, community and radical creativity.
This is a still from Charles Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator. It occurs at approximately the 1:59:32 mark. If our home releases and prints are different, the most important context for this essay is that we discuss the split second before Charles Chaplin speaks the film’s final speech. […]
To be bold, to dare to be stupid: this single frame in The Great Dictator is the most essential frame occurring in Charles Chaplin’s filmography. It is the most elegant and achy navigation out of comedy, straight through tragedy, and into something like the human struggle ever captured by camera. It is something like the writing of resolution.
Newport landfill site in £620m Bitcoin saga set to close – BBC News
A council spokesman said: “The landfill has been in exploitation since the early 2000s and is coming to the end of its life, therefore the council is working on a planned closure and capping of the site over the next two years.” … The council has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land. That was approved last August and is expected to power new bin lorries.
If Jeff Bezos doesn’t eat the Mona Lisa, who else will? – Diggit Magazine
What would it mean if Jeff Bezos would buy and eat the Mona Lisa? This article demonstrates how a seemingly meaningless petition on change.org conjures various connections between contemporary manifestations of technologically driven nihilism and an upcoming battle between technocapitalism and intangible sociocultural values.
Hate music practice? How you can learn to love your instrument again in 100 days – Classical Music
The strange alchemy of #100daysofpractice is how things seem to get better all by themselves. If you play something through a few times carefully, focusing intently on the result – just noticing rather than negatively self-talking – and then leave it, coming back the next day and the next, the chances are it will be better. Consistency is everything. This is a lesson it’s taken me too long to learn. As a teenager I would not pick up my violin all week and then expect to catch up by practising three hours on a Friday night before my lesson at Junior Guildhall the next morning. Tears and tantrums ensued, not to mention frustrated teachers. Of course, it’s not that they didn’t explain this to me, but youth is indeed wasted on the young, and I wasn’t listening.
AI-Generated slop is already in your public library – 404 Media
Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated. […]
It is impossible to say exactly how many AI-generated books are included in Hoopla’s catalog, but books that appeared to be AI-generated were not hard to find for most of the search terms I tried on the platform. There’s a book about AI Monetization of Your Faceless YouTube Channel, or “AI Moniiziization,” as it says on its AI-generated cover. Searching for “Elon Musk” led me to this book for “inspiring quotes, fun facts, fascinating trivia, and surprising insights of the technoking.” The book’s cover is AI-generated, its content also appears to be AI-generated, and it was authored by Bill Tarino, another author with no real online footprint who has written around 40 books in the past year about a wide range of subjects including Taylor Swift, emotional intelligence, horror novels, and practical home security.
Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed – The Guardian
An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders – Ars Technica
Smart TVs: This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases—even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy. When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something’s up. With this approach, TVs miss the opportunity to appeal to customers with more relevant and impressive upgrades. There’s also a growing desire among users to disconnect their connected TVs, defeating their original purpose. Suddenly, buying a dumb TV seems smarter than buying a smart one. But smart TVs and the ongoing revenue opportunities they represent have made it extremely hard to find a TV that won’t spy on you. […]
Google search: Admittedly, some AI summaries may be useful, but they can just as easily provide false, misleading, and even dangerous answers. And in a search context, placing AI content ahead of any other results elevates an undoubtedly less trustworthy secondary source over primary sources at a time when social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are increasingly relying on users to fact-check misinformation.
Delightfully simple and simply delightful, Paper Apps™ are a fun, smart alternative to screen time. Check out our solo games like DUNGEON, GALAXY and GOLF, as well as gamified tools like TO•DO and NUTRI•TRACK. For the full experience, we recommend grabbing a couple of Pencil Dice as well!
DeepSeek’s safety guardrails failed every test researchers threw at its AI chatbot – WIRED
The Cisco researchers drew their 50 randomly selected prompts to test DeepSeek’s R1 from a well-known library of standardized evaluation prompts known as HarmBench. They tested prompts from six HarmBench categories, including general harm, cybercrime, misinformation, and illegal activities. They probed the model running locally on machines rather than through DeepSeek’s website or app, which send data to China. […]
“Every single method worked flawlessly,” Polyakov says. “What’s even more alarming is that these aren’t novel ‘zero-day’ jailbreaks—many have been publicly known for years,” he says, claiming he saw the model go into more depth with some instructions around psychedelics than he had seen any other model create.
Deepfake videos are getting shockingly good – TechCrunch
Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date. … According to the ByteDance researchers, OmniHuman-1 only needs a single reference image and audio, like speech or vocals, to generate a clip of an arbitrary length. The output video’s aspect ratio is adjustable, as is the subject’s “body proportion” — i.e. how much of their body is shown in the fake footage. […]
The implications are worrisome. Last year, political deepfakes spread like wildfire around the globe. On election day in Taiwan, a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated group posted AI-generated, misleading audio of a politician throwing his support behind a pro-China candidate. In Moldova, deepfake videos depicted the country’s president, Maia Sandu, resigning. And in South Africa, a deepfake of rapper Eminem supporting a South African opposition party circulated ahead of the country’s election.
Is Google Maps fatally misleading drivers in India? It’s complicated – Rest of World
When Google Maps launched in India in 2008, it initially struggled due to the lack of street names, which were the foundation of its technology globally. In an X post from October 2023, Elizabeth Laraki, who led the global design team for Google Maps from 2007 to 2009, wrote that this rendered the app’s directions “pretty much useless.” The company subsequently used parks, monuments, shopping centers, landmark buildings, and gas stations to confirm directions instead.
Over the years, Google has launched several new features to improve Maps in India, including voice navigation and transliterated directions in about nine and 10 languages, respectively, to increase accessibility. Most recently, in 2024, the company introduced a simplified interface for reporting road incidents, two new weather-related alerts for streets obscured by flooding or fog, an artificial-intelligence model that estimates road widths, and a feature that alerts users to approaching overpasses in 40 cities.
Google has mapped 300 million buildings, 35 million businesses and places, and streets stretching across 7 million kilometres (over 4 million miles) in India, Ramani told Rest of World.
Why Amazon is betting on ‘automated reasoning’ to reduce AI’s hallucinations – WSJ
Amazon.com’s cloud-computing unit is looking to “automated reasoning” to provide hard, mathematical proof that AI models’ hallucinations can be stopped, at least in certain areas. By doing so, Amazon Web Services could unlock millions of dollars worth of AI deals with businesses, some analysts say. Simply put, automated reasoning aims to use mathematical proof to assure that a system will or will not behave a certain way. It’s somewhat similar to the idea that AI models can “reason” through problems, but in this case, it’s used to check that the models themselves are providing accurate answers.
Amazon plans to unveil next-generation Alexa AI later this month – MacRumors
Amazon is using AI models from Anthropic’s Claude rather than relying solely on its in-house AI technology, as early versions of Amazon AI had trouble responding in a timely manner. Amazon initially planned to roll out the updated version of Alexa last year, but ended up pushing the debut back. It is important for Amazon to get changes to Alexa right, because there are more than 100 million active Alexa users and over 500 million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold. Amazon is aiming to convert some of those Alexa users into paying customers, with plans to eventually charge a subscription fee for the new Alexa. At launch, Amazon will test the new Alexa with a small number of users and won’t charge for it.
There is no going back – The New York Times
The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing. […]
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
Treasury official quits after resisting Musk’s requests on payments – The New York Times
Mr. Musk has been fixated on the Treasury system as a key to cutting federal spending. Representatives from his government efficiency initiative began asking Mr. Lebryk about source code information related to the nation’s payment system during the presidential transition in December, according to three people familiar with the conversations. Mr. Lebryk raised the request to Treasury officials at the time, noting that it was the type of proprietary information that should not be shared with people who did not work for the federal government. Members of the departing Biden administration were alarmed by the request, according to people familiar with their thinking. The people making the requests were on the Trump landing team at the Treasury Department, according to a current White House official.
I’m a federal worker. Elon Musk’s government data heist is the entire ballgame. – Slate
Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.
A 25-year-old with Elon Musk ties has direct access to the federal payment system – WIRED
A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration. WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk.
‘Scared and betrayed’ – workers are reeling from chaos at federal agencies – The Verge
It’s long been a strategy in Trump world to “flood the zone” with information, making it hard for the media and the public to know where to look, or where to concentrate their opposition. That feeling of disorientation is magnified for federal workers in the past couple weeks, as they wade through the eye of the storm. “These executive orders are flying fast and furious. I think that’s on purpose,” says one federal worker. “They’re giving agencies very little time to comply and even decide if they want to or not because there’s so much.” […]
“Nobody knows if they’ll have a job tomorrow, especially if your agency works on something that the Trump administration seems to be targeting,” says one federal worker. That might include anything from education to gender to climate-related issues. But even if they are fired, some workers are questioning if it would even be worth fighting for their jobs back. “This isn’t the job I loved and wanted,” says the DOL employee. “This is like some evil demon took it over.” […]
The crackdown on things like work from home or acknowledging gender has created an atmosphere of paranoia and hyper vigilance. Many federal employees have moved work-related conversations to encrypted messaging app Signal. And the tech industry’s embrace of right wing politics and politicians has created a sense of distrust, a federal contractor says, with people fearing that communication on other platforms could be leaked by pro-Trump companies.
$50 Van Gogh? Experts say no, offering alternative attribution in dramatic art dispute – Artnet News
The claim that New York-based LMI Group had discovered a long lost portrait by Van Gogh made a huge splash when it was announced last week. The company said the attribution was made by a team of experts according to a multi-pronged “data-based” approach costing over $30,000. Some commentators pored over the company’s 456-page report while others felt confident making their judgement from just a cursory glance at the composition. […]
“I thought it was odd that a claimed title was in the area where usually the signature sits,” said Dr. Martin Pracher, who offers appraisal and authentication services in Würzburg, Germany. After conducting some research, he found other paintings signed “Elimar” by a little known Danish artist Henning Elimar, who was born in Aarhus in 1928 and died in 1989. In one case, a painting attributed to an “unknown artist” that sold for €25 ($25) at Auktionshaus Dannenberg in Germany in September 2024 also bore the signature “Elimar” written in black bold caps, just like the text on Elimar (1889). […]
Edward Rosser, an art collector who was among those taken aback by LMI’s claim, said he was able to connect the painting to Henning Elimar thanks to “a simple Google search with the words ‘painting’ and ‘Elimar.’” This artist’s works, he found, bore signatures “as close as one could wish to the inscription on the yard sale ‘van Gogh,’” he said. “Much of what we respond to in Van Gogh’s art is the rhythm and proportion of his brushstrokes,” he continued. “They somehow, magically, create paintings that are ‘alive’; they even seem to vibrate.” Could the author of Elimar (1889)’s efforts ever compare? “I think it is a dreadful painting, and is about as far from a true Van Gogh as a painting could possibly be.”
OpenAI has undergone its first ever rebrand, giving fresh life to ChatGPT interactions – Wallpaper
I have to ask – was ChatGPT’s generative powers used at all in the processes? According to Moeller, the software was helpful when making calculations for different type weights, but other than that the process was entirely traditional. Later, the designers elucidate on this often-fraught relationship. ‘We collaborate with leading experts in photography, typography, motion, and spatial design while integrating AI tools like DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Sora as thought partners,’ they add in an email, ‘This dual approach – where human intuition meets AI’s generative potential – allows us to craft a brand that is not just innovative, but profoundly human.’
Participants told Kulkarni and his collaborators that, first and foremost, they viewed journalism as a form of oppression that had the same impact on their lives as the police. Journalism in general, and the BBC in particular, they said, felt like an arm of the state, and almost half of them refused to pay their license fee — essentially a legal permit that allows people to watch live broadcasts and forms the backbone of the BBC’s funding — out of protest against the BBC’s journalism.
That doesn’t mean they don’t engage with the news, however; participants were incredibly news literate, Kulkarni told me, and preferred to get their news from other sources. Many people favored Al Jazeera recently, for example, because they appreciated its coverage of the war in Gaza. Often, people got their news from social media or simply word of mouth, and the majority of them were engaging with the news every day.
What’s wrong with Apple now? – Archive Today: Financial Times
Even after the recent sell-off, the stock’s price/earnings valuation is a third higher than it was back in April. The sales growth and AI issues have come together: consumers have not demonstrated wild enthusiasm for AI-enabled phones in general, and the perception that Apple is lagging behind Android on that tech has grown. This casts doubt on the idea that AI will drive a big iPhone upgrade cycle. As Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson research sums up: “Not only have we not seen any sign of an upgrade cycle … we have seen growing evidence that consumers are unmoved by AI functionality (not just Apple’s but indeed everyone else’s as well). Meanwhile, fully agentic AI, the foundation of any real bull case for Apple, seems further away now than it did even five months ago.”
Strange, surreal and sexy: 31 images that changed the way we see our bodies – The Guardian
These photographs show us our bodies as we have never seen them before. Edward Weston’s captures a transcendental elegance in his lover Charis, as she dips her face from view like a resting swan tucking its head beneath a wing. The late Ren Hang, whose nude portraits of queer Chinese youth challenged government censors, lines up a mountain range of undulating bottoms. Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s self-portrait, pale limbs sandwiched between those of a silver birch, has a mischievous otherworldliness. It is as if you could step inside the frame, and into a magical world. There is nothing like an image of a body to expand your mind.
Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance – The Washington Post
Google’s principles restricting national security use cases for AI had made it an outlier among leading AI developers. Late last year, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it would work with military manufacturer Anduril to develop technology for the Pentagon. Anthropic, which offers the chatbot Claude, announced a partnership with defense contractor Palantir to help U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access versions of Claude through Amazon Web Services. Google’s rival tech giants Microsoft and Amazon have long partnered with the Pentagon.[…]
Google’s policy change is a company shift in line with a view within the tech industry, embodied by President Donald Trump’s top adviser Elon Musk, that companies should be working in service of U.S. national interests. It also follows moves by tech giants to publicly disavow their previous commitment to race and gender equality and workforce diversity, policies opposed by the Trump administration.
Trump’s proposal to ‘take over’ Gaza sparks immediate rebukes – The New York Times
In the United States, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said that Mr. Trump’s proposal — which flies in the face of decades of debate over how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was meant to distract people from Elon Musk’s sweeping attempts to downsize the U.S. government on Mr. Trump’s behalf. “I have news for you — we aren’t taking over Gaza,” Mr. Murphy said on social media. “But the media and the chattering class will focus on it for a few days and Trump will have succeeded in distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
The technology is new, but what GenAI music companies like Suno are doing is not. Like the recording industry before them (and without whom, ironically, there would be no training data for GenAI), companies like Suno commodify creative expression as part of an aesthetic economy based on passive consumption. Thus it is in Suno’s core interest to usher people away from active creation, and toward a system of frictionless convenience that strives to lower the effort of production — and the effort of imagination beyond vague concepts to type into prompts — to zero. And while no doubt prompting-AI-systems will be a new kind of “muscle” for us all to build, one has to ask: what other muscles will atrophy? There is always a price to pay; the danger of living in a world of frictionless convenience might well be cultural and individual stagnation.
Hong Kong is one of the last places in the world where bamboo is still widely used for scaffolding in construction. It’s flexible, strong and cheaper than steel and aluminium — metal alternatives that are now more commonly used in mainland China and elsewhere in Asia. In Hong Kong, skilled armies of scaffolders can erect enough bamboo to engulf a building in a day — even hours — using techniques that are thousands of years old, and have been passed down through generations.
In an effort to reduce “churn,” the rate at which customers canceled their subscriptions, the streamers began pushing a different kind of production model. Instead of acquiring films by auteurs, which had gotten them into trouble — Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, a film about preteen dancers in Paris, sparked a baseless right-wing panic that Netflix was sexualizing children — they turned to a safer, more uniform product that could be made in-house, and replicated and tailored to the diverse tastes of their enormous subscriber bases. (This also guaranteed they’d keep global distribution rights instead of having to negotiate for them.) “They no longer wanted that outlier,” Hope said. “They wanted someone to have correct expectations: ‘Oh, look at those two couples kissing. One’s wearing pool flippers. That must be a romantic comedy. I get it, do you want to watch a romantic comedy tonight?’ And that’s what it reduced down to. As long as people got what they expected, they stayed in tune.”
In documentaries, too, executives shifted to conventional feed. “It’s not enough to do something that a few million people might really love when you’re trying to reach twenty-five million people or fifty million people,” a former Netflix executive told the journalist Reeves Wiedeman in a 2023 article in New York about the documentary streaming “boom.” “A lot of documentaries — I would say the majority of documentaries — don’t meet that bar.” So what did? Grisly true crime, garish cult exposés, celebrity hagiography, sports and food miniseries, pop science, and pets. Netflix’s documentary slate quickly became a supermarket aisle of tabloid magazines. […]
Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)
One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
China to host human vs. robot half marathon race – Moss and Fog
Well, it’s begun. Our era of humanoid robots interacting with us in real, tangible ways. In April, Beijing is hosting a half marathon where humans will compete alongside bipedal (walking/running) robots. The 21-kilometer race will showcase over 12,000 determined human runners alongside more than 20 teams of cutting-edge humanoid robots, developed by leading manufacturers from across the globe. The robots are not allowed to use wheels, and must complete the full race. They will be a combination of remote-controlled robots, and fully autonomous ones. And their handlers will be able to swap out their batteries during the race.
AI art with human “expressive elements” can be copyrighted – Hyperallergic
The report, which details the findings of an inquiry involving 10,000 comments from the public and input from experts and stakeholders, concludes that AI-assisted works for which a human can “determine the expressive elements” can be fully or partially copyrightable. Among the contributors to the inquiry were the Authors Guild, Adobe, the Association of Medical Illustrators, and Professional Photographers of America. […]
According to the agency, “expressive elements” can be demonstrated when a human modifies AI output, or when “human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output.” However, the report stipulates that simply inputting prompts to generate AI output is insufficient, adding that whether or not human contributions are considered to meet the criteria for authorship should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Naturally the appearance of a structure which appears to be ‘man-made’ would send the internet into overdrive, with believers quick to use the image as proof of a long-lost alien civilisation. … But before you roll out the red carpet for aliens, it might be worth noting that straight lines aren’t impossible in nature. In fact, various replies to the original thread pointed out that natural wonders such as the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, the Eye of the Sahara and Turkey’s ‘Fairy Chimneys’ could appear man-made to an alien visitor.
KA-BOOM – The European Space Agency
Marsquakes – the earthquakes of Mars – and meteor impacts are common on our neighbouring planet. In the last two decades, scientists have scrutinised many images and manually identified hundreds of new impact craters across the martian surface. Researchers have recently turned to artificial intelligence to save them from some tedious detective work and to make connections between data collected by five different instruments orbiting Mars. Europe’s CaSSIS camera is one of them.
LPO announces Sky Arts documentary series – London Philharmonic Orchestra
The series showcases the meticulous preparation and routines of each section of the Orchestra, getting under the skin of the LPO’s talented musicians and processes which combine to create an orchestral masterpiece. Viewers will get to know the players personally, hear their inspiring stories of getting into professional music, see their deep knowledge of their instruments and learn about their specific roles within the Orchestra. Viewers will also hear Gardner and the players’ own insights into Mahler’s detailed score, allowing the listener to fully experience the final performance – which featured 118 musicians, 131 instruments and 200 members of the London Philharmonic Choir – during the fourth episode.
Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.
Think Trumpism couldn’t take root and flourish in Britain? Think again – The Guardian
I wondered: when the government changed last year, did it make them feel any different about the future? “No,” said Emma, wearily. “We don’t expect anything out of what we’re told.” What if a Trump-type figure promised to make Britain great again? She laughed, and glanced at her partner. “We’ve got different opinions on that,” she said. “I kind of like what he’s doing. I wish more would be put into the UK. I think we need someone with a bit more of … an oomph about them.”
The end of search, the beginning of research – One Useful Thing
A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I’ve been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI’s o1 was launched. These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive – AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed.
‘Barricade the doors’: Pupil describes school lockdown terror as boy killed – ITV News
Sixth former Divine said: “I went outside and I saw three year 11s shouting, ‘someone got stabbed, come here’ to a teacher. I didn’t believe it at first so I went outside to see what was going on.” He said he saw a body on the ground. Despite a major emergency services response, the boy died at the scene.”I ran upstairs to the sixth form area and said ‘there’s a lockdown, there’s a lockdown, someone’s got stabbed’,” Divine said. “And then all the teachers started taking people to classrooms. I was really really scared, I didn’t believe it at first, but I saw what I saw… the staff were scared – they didn’t know what to do but then they started saying ‘go into classrooms, lock the doors, shut the blinds, barricade the doors’ because they didn’t know if the person with the knife was on the loose or was trying to get other people as well.” Divine’s brother, Leon, was at home when he was called by his brother. He said: “It doesn’t feel real, it feels like America – but this is Sheffield.”
In London, an enormous exhibition of 500+ works roots out the creative seeds of flowers – Colossal
In nature, flowers serve as an essential component of the reproduction process. But for humans, scented blooms are ripe with myriad meanings and symbolism that transcend their biological functions. … A massive exhibition opening next month at Saatchi Gallery cultivates a vast repertoire of works that explores how blooms have become an omnipresent entity in human life and creativity. Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture brings together more than 500 photographs, installations, sculptures, archival pieces, and other objects to create a rich landscape spanning millennia.
I don’t think DeepSeek is going to replace OpenAI. In general, what we’re going to see is that more companies enter the space and provide AI models that are slightly differentiated from one another. If many actors choose to take the resource-intensive route, that multiplies the resource intensity and that might be alarming. But I’m hopeful that DeepSeek is going to lead to the generation of other AI companies that enter this space with offerings that are far cheaper and far more resource-efficient. […]
Sometimes, I see commentary on DeepSeek along the lines of, ‘Should we be trusting it because it’s a Chinese company?’ No, you shouldn’t be trusting it because it’s a company. And also, ‘What does this mean for US AI leadership?’ Well, I think the interesting question is, ‘What does this mean for OpenAI leadership?’
American firms now have leaned into the rhetoric that they’re assets of the US because they want the US government to shield them and help them build up. But a lot of the time, the actual people who are developing these tools don’t necessarily think in that frame of mind and are thinking more as global citizens participating in a global corporate technology race, or global scientific race, or a global scientific collaboration. I would encourage journalists to think about it that way too.
Without universal AI literacy, AI will fail us – World Economic Forum
For example, facial analysis software has been recorded failing to recognize people with dark skin, showing a 1-in-3 failure rate when identifying darker-skinned females. Other AI tools have denied social security benefits to people with disabilities. These failings are due to bias in data and lack of diversity in the teams developing AI systems. According to the Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap report, only 32% of those in data and AI roles are women. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that less than 2% of technical employees at Google and Facebook were black. […]
We cannot leave the burden of AI responsibility and fairness on the technologists who design it. These tools affect us all, so they should be affected by us all — students, educators, non-profits, governments, parents, businesses. We need all hands on deck.
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