Today's Hallucination HQFake Tears, Real Grift: AI-Generated Black Creators Are Flogging Shein Tat on TikTokSomeone, somewhere, decided the best use of generative AI was creating fake Black personas — complete with emotional breakdowns — to sell cheap metal buckles to unsuspecting TikTok shoppers. These synthetic influencers cry on cue, beg for views, and pocket nothing, because they don't exist. The humans running the accounts, however, do. It's digital blackface in service of dropshipping. Technically impressive. Morally, a complete disaster. Source: The Verge
GitHub Copilot Moves to Token Billing, Developers React With Expected Levels of CalmThe golden age of GitHub Copilot's flat-rate pricing has ended, quietly, the way all beloved things end — replaced by something more confusing and almost certainly more expensive. Microsoft is switching to token-based billing, meaning developers now pay per unit of AI thinking, which sounds reasonable until you realise no one knows how many tokens anything actually costs. Developers have described the change as "a joke." GitHub has described it as progress. Both cannot be right. Source: TechCrunch
Director Walks Off Amazon's Animated Series After Studio Leans on AIJorge R. Gutierrez, director of The Book of Life, has departed Amazon Prime Video's upcoming animated series Punky Duck over the production's use of AI — which is, by any measure, a significant thing to lose over a cost-cutting decision. Amazon, a company whose annual revenue exceeds the GDP of several nations, apparently needed the assist. Gutierrez's exit follows mounting industry pressure over AI in animation. The duck, presumably, had no comment. Source: Dark Horizons
People Are Getting Surgery to Look Like Their AI Selfies, Which Is a Sentence That Now ExistsPlastic surgeons are reporting a new phenomenon: patients arriving with AI-generated portraits of themselves — smoother, sharper, suspiciously symmetrical — and requesting the real thing. The AI images aren't photos. They're algorithmic fantasies trained on an internet's worth of heavily filtered faces. Chasing them with a scalpel is, to put it gently, optimistic. Doctors have a name for this: AI dysmorphia. The rest of us are still processing that we got here at all. Source: Livemint
Turns Out Children Were Doing Machine Learning Before It Was Called ThatA new study in Nature finds that children across different cultures spontaneously use something called "algorithm induction" — detecting patterns in data, building mental rules, generalising them, all without being taught. This is, broadly speaking, what AI systems spend enormous compute budgets attempting to do. Kids, apparently, arrive pre-loaded. Researchers find this remarkable. Parents who've watched a four-year-old figure out a locked iPad in eleven minutes will find it entirely plausible. Source: Nature
Stay curious. The machines are — they're just billing you for it now.
**
|
