wired.com
When Texas-based copywriter Dustin Ballard released a cover of Aqua’s 1997 Europop hit “Barbie Girl” this summer using an AI-generated version of Johnny Cash’s voice, he was surprised by its reception. “I actually expected more of a backlash,” he says. Earlier this fall, when he followed up with AI Johnny Cash singing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” the feedback was unexpectedly positive once again. “This is hauntingly beautiful,” the top comment reads. Media coverage skewed glowing. “It absolutel…
3 months ago
wired.com
The vulturous routines of the celebrity death news complex are, at this point, predictable. Tabloids compete for 911 call recordings, statements from famous friends, autopsy reports, even glimpses of remains; the cause of death, if unclear, is fervently debated. It is a tough business, brazen and disrespectful, but one that looks wholly quaint next to a newer post-death ritual that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the past few years, anti-vaccine activists have latched onto tragedies by…
3 months ago
wired.com
As the generative artificial intelligence gold rush intensifies, concerns about the data used to train machine learning tools have grown. Artists and writers are fighting for a say in how AI companies use their work, filing lawsuits and publicly agitating against the way these models scrape the internet and incorporate their art without consent.
Some companies have responded to this pushback with “opt-out” programs that give people a choice to remove their work from future models. OpenAI, for ex…
3 months ago
wired.com
Another Body, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, opens with Klein seeing that she has been deepfaked into pornography; someone has used editing software to put her face on the bodies of porn actors and now these clips are all over the internet. The film follows Klein as she tries to figure out who did this to her and what she can do to stop them. Out today, it’s an all-too-timely documentary. As WIRED reported earlier this week, nonconsensual deepfake porn has skyrocketed in recent ye…
3 months ago
wired.com
A tepid attempt at horror about a narcissistic blogger as he’s menaced by a ghost with an oddly wholesome anti-cyberbullying agenda, Dear David is not a good movie. But it is the most epic bacon amazeballs doggo i can haz cheeseburger [tips fedora] you sir have won the internet film of all time, an ironic mustache-finger tattoo of a motion picture, so committed to bringing the giddy spirit of BuzzFeed to our screens that there is nothing left to do but gaze upon it in awe.
For those unfamiliar w…
3 months ago
wired.com
The models were trained on billions of images without anyone asking the humans behind them for permission. “They have sucked the creative juices of millions of artists,” says Eva Toorenent, an illustrator who serves as the Netherlands adviser for the European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation. “It is absolutely horrifying.”
As AI company valuations soared, the people whose work provided the bedrock for their products saw no compensation. Many artists ardently oppose how AI image gener…
3 months ago
wired.com
This never took place, of course. (Perhaps in some other universe, Buzz Bissinger’s My Crazy-Ass Summer With OJ is a blockbuster.) But something similar—the financial-world version of the above events, basically—has happened to Michael Lewis. His new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, is a behind-the-scenes look at how disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried made and lost a fortune through his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX and wound up on trial (right no…
4 months ago
Search by beat, location, outlet & position to find the right journalists for your story.
Sign up for freewired.com
For one of the two types of AI watermarking he tested for a new study—“low perturbation” watermarks, which are invisible to the naked eye—he’s even more direct: “There’s no hope.”
Feizi and his coauthors looked at how easy it is for bad actors to evade watermarking attempts. (He calls it “washing out” the watermark.) In addition to demonstrating how attackers might remove watermarks, the study shows how it’s possible to add watermarks to human-generated images, triggering false positives. Releas…
4 months ago
wired.com
It’s unclear exactly how many AI-generated books are currently for sale on the platform, which is both the largest bookseller in the world and the purveyor of the most popular self-publishing system in Kindle Direct Publishing. Certain genres, like travel guides and foraging handbooks, have been hit noticeably hard with a glut of low-quality titles. So have the bestseller lists for teen and young adult romance novels, which author Caitlyn Lynch referred to as “AI nonsense” on X (FKA Twitter) ear…
4 months ago
wired.com
Imagine a retirement portfolio stocked with Rihanna hits, or a college fund fueled by Taylor Swift’s 1989. In a post-GameStop, post-NFT-mania world, it sounds plausible enough. Wholesome, even.
A new music royalties marketplace, Jkbx (pronounced “jukebox”), launched this month and plans to officially open for trading later this year. It has filed an application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and is waiting for notice that the SEC has qualified its offerings. As long as that goes…
4 months ago
wired.com
This gripping documentary captures the reality of the opioid crisis by focusing on grassroots harm reduction.
11 months ago
