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Daily Archives: March 28, 2023

A.I. Is Sucking the Entire Internet In. What If You Could Yank Some Back Out?

Slate: “Over the coming years, A.I. companies will release even more advanced models that will remind us that this is just the beginning. At least one of these tools will be different in an important way: It will be prohibited from seeing 80 million of the images that helped teach its predecessors to draw and paint. If you think of A.I. image training sets as lesson plans and word-to-image tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion as college students, it’s kind of like saying that incoming freshmen are prohibited from taking one of the outgoing seniors’ core requirement classes. Why? Because two Berlin-based musicians persuaded the head of a multibillion-dollar company to give artists more power. Many illustrators, designers, and photographers are furious that their work had been scraped from the internet to train an A.I. Last September, Mathew Dryhust, an artist and academic, and the experimental electronic artist Holly Herndon, created HaveIBeenTrained, a tool that enables you to see if your images have been used and then request that future A.I. models avoid them. It recently became clear that this was more than a subversive art project when the CEO of the company behind Stable Diffusion, one of the most widely used A.I. image generators, gave people a March 3 deadline to opt out using Herndon and Dryhurst’s tool. Millions of requests poured in, Dryhurst told me. As of this week, around 40,000 artists and many companies, including Shutterstock, a major image distributor, have opted out.

Alexander Skarsgård Explains the Answer to Everything

The New York Times – (It Involves Doing Some Math – Opinion / Video) “Partha Dasgupta is a Cambridge University economist who in 2021 prepared a more than 600-page report for the British government about the financial value of nature. Not your average bedtime reading. But believe us when we say his report, the culmination… Continue Reading

The Four Quadrants of American Politics

The Atlantic: “Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds. That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in… Continue Reading

LocalView

LocalView is a database co-created by Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko to advance the study of local government in the United States. “We introduce LocalView: a comprehensive dataset of over 100,000 real-time U.S. local government public meeting videos from 1,000+ localities (and counting). If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that attention,… Continue Reading

WHO recommends COVID-19 boosters for high-risk adults 6-12 months after last dose

CBC: “The World Health Organization has tailored its COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for a new phase of the pandemic, suggesting that healthy children and adolescents may not necessarily need a shot but older, high-risk groups should get a booster between six-to-12 months after their last vaccine. The UN agency said the aim was to focus efforts on… Continue Reading