1 year ago
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When Melissa Heikkilä, our elder AI reporter, tried the caller viral AI avatar app Lensa, she was hoping to get results akin to different colleagues astatine MIT Technology Review, who got realistic yet flattering avatars—think astronauts, and fierce warriors. Instead, she got tons of nudes. Out of the generated 100 avatars, 16 were topless, portion different 14 depicted her successful highly skimpy apparel and overtly sexualized poses.
Melissa has Asian heritage. Many of the avatars were of generic Asian women intelligibly modeled connected anime oregon video-game characters, or, astir likely, porn. Another workfellow with Chinese practice got akin results: reams and reams of pornified avatars.
Lensa’s hypersexualization of Asian women is sadly unsurprising. Its results are generated utilizing Stable Diffusion, an AI exemplary that draws from a monolithic open-source information acceptable compiled by scraping images from the internet. But the occupation runs deeper than the grooming data. Read the afloat story.
How it feels to beryllium sexually objectified by an AI
You tin work much of Melissa’s thoughts connected Lensa’s avatars reflecting sexist and racist stereotypes successful The Algorithm, her play AI newsletter. In it, she reflects connected however it made her consciousness erstwhile the exemplary returned much realistic portrayals of her erstwhile she told it she was male, and what the issues with Lensa archer america astir AI much widely. Read the afloat story.
Sign up to person the Algorithm successful your inbox each Monday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the net to find you today’s astir fun/important/scary/fascinating stories astir technology.
1 Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged with fraud
US authorities accidental the FTX founder’s program was to defraud investors close from the start. (The Verge)
+ Bankman-Fried’s Stanford Law School prof parents are besides nether scrutiny. (NYT $)
+ The US Department of Justice is divided implicit whether to complaint Binance, too. (Reuters)
+Effective altruism devotees are furious astatine the founder. (Vox)
2 Limitless cleanable vigor could beryllium connected the horizon
The US Department of Energy is poised to corroborate that a fusion absorption has created a nett vigor summation for the archetypal clip today. (WP $)
+ Scientists person been trying to marque the breakthrough hap for astir 100 years. (The Atlantic $)
3 Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council
At a clip erstwhile it arguably needs it much than ever. (TechCrunch)
+ Twitter is playing astir with blue, golden and grey cheque marks, for immoderate reason. (Vox)
+ The institution is auctioning disconnected fancy chairs from its gutted HQ. (Motherboard)
+ Twitter’s imaginable illness could hitch retired immense records of caller quality history. (MIT Technology Review)
4 CRISPR cistron editing has slowed Alizheimer’s progression successful mice
If applied to humans, the method whitethorn beryllium adjacent much effective. (New Scientist $)
5 AI is hunting for EV metals
In theory, it could marque mining much businesslike and little destructive. (Wired $)
+ Machine learning could vastly velocity up the hunt for caller metals. (MIT Technology Review)
6 China is readying a rescue bundle for its spot sector
To the tune of $143 billion. (Reuters)
+ Beijing has filed a ailment against US semiconductor restrictions. (WSJ $)
+ Europe’s spot manufacture is inactive playing drawback up. (FT $)
+ Corruption is sending daze waves done China’s chipmaking industry. (MIT Technology Review)
7 India’s gig workers are facing a bleak future
Many radical took the jobs arsenic a past resort. Now they’re stuck with them. (Rest of World)
8 What it’s similar to unreal to beryllium an AI chatbot
In different words, a idiosyncratic pretending to beryllium a machine pretending to beryllium a person. (The Guardian)
9 The Pizza Rat video is inactive making its creator money 🍕🐀
Seven years aft it primitively went viral. (Insider $)
10 The thumb thrust has a amazingly melodramatic root story
Including patent disputes, relationship falsification, and a jailhouse sentence. (IEEE Spectrum)
Quote of the day
“FTX operated down a veneer of legitimacy Mr. Bankman-Fried created...that veneer wasn’t conscionable thin, it was fraudulent.”
—Gurbir Grewal, manager of the US enforcement division, lays retired the charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, reports ABC News.
The large story
Why it’s truthful hard to marque tech much diverse
June 2021
Tracy Chou has a agelong past of moving to exposure Silicon Valley’s diverseness issues. As an technologist astatine Pinterest, she published a wide circulated blog station calling for tech companies to stock information connected however galore women worked connected their engineering team, and collected their responses successful a nationalist database that revealed however homogeneous galore method teams astatine apical companies inactive were.
About a twelvemonth later, she started a institution called Block Party that targets online harassment by giving Twitter users much power implicit which tweets look successful their provender and mentions.
Here, we cheque successful with Chou, who is based successful San Francisco, to larn much astir what it takes to marque alteration successful the tech assemblage and what entrepreneurs similar her are up against. Read the afloat story.
We tin inactive person bully things
A spot for comfort, amusive and distraction successful these weird times. (Got immoderate ideas? Drop maine a line or tweet 'em astatine me.)
+ This is cool—NASA is moving connected a robotic arm to withstand temperatures of minus-280 degrees.
+ Why Welsh connection music is having a infinitesimal close now—cwl!
+ The concealed to becoming a amended multitasker? Taking notes.
+ How 3 intrepid women acceptable a climbing record scaling the Rayu way successful bluish Spain.
+ I request a bread warmer successful each of my radiators, stat.
English (US) ·