Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Content owners are wising up to their work being freely used by Big Tech to build new AI tools. Bots like Common Crawl are scraping and storing billions of pages of content for AI training. With less incentive to share online freely, the web could become a series of paywalled gardens. AI is undermining the…
A new Forrester report forecasts the end of digital and display advertising as we know it as consumers move away from experiences in which they can be interrupted. That’s in part because consumers are putting more trust in digital assistants to make decisions on their behalf, but, naturally, it’s also because US marketers wasted roughly…
“When you hear someone playing a piano, would you ever ask if the piano is the artist?” asks Mario Klingemann, an AI artist whose work Memories of Passerby I recently sold at auction for £40,000. Though his answer is ‘no,’ it may not actually be so simple, since instead of an inanimate machine, his medium…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible. The SIGGRAPH 2018 computer graphics and design conference…
Illustration: Gizmodo What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And guess what: it’s…
Then I gave up and wrote it my damn self. Illustration: Jeremy Sorese for Bloomberg Businessweek ByMay 17, 2018, 4:00 AM EDT What a time for artificial intelligence! Google announced a new AI-powered set of products and services at its I/O conference for developers, including one called Duplex that makes phone calls for you…
close story-meta Photo Thousands of Google employees have signed a letter to Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, protesting Google’s role in a program that could be used to improve drone strike targeting. Credit Michael Short/Bloomberg WASHINGTON — Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement…
close story-meta Credit Cari Vander Yacht MTV’s “TRL” recently welcomed Poppy, a rising star with hologram-perfect skin, an avant-garde Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe and a voice like Betty Boop’s on benzos. For much of the show, she perched silently on the couch and methodically stacked candies on a glass table. A longhaired handler called Titanic Sinclair…
AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked Someone used an algorithm to paste the face of ‘Wonder Woman’ star Gal Gadot onto a porn video, and the implications are terrifying. Image: Screenshot from SendVids There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body,…
“Alexa, I’m depressed.” “Alexa, I’m being abused.” “Alexa, I’m considering suicide.” When Amazon introduced Alexa in 2014, it quickly discovered that users wanted more than traffic reports and Taylor Swift songs. According to the company, more than 50% of interactions with Alexa are “nonutilitarian and entertainment related,” a category that includes professions of love for…