Month: July 2024

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of "Miss AI" award winner "Kenza Layli" (left) and an unidentified AI-generated woman beside her. (credit: Kenza.Layli / Instagram)

An influencer platform called Fanvue recently announced the results of its first "Miss AI" pageant, which sought to judge AI-generated social media influencers and also doubled as a convenient publicity stunt. The "winner" is a fictional Instagram influencer from Morocco named Kenza Layli with more than 200,000 followers, but the pageant is already attracting criticism from women in the AI space.

"Yet another stepping stone on the road to objectifying women with AI," Hugging Face AI researcher Dr. Sasha Luccioni told Ars Technica. "As a woman working in this field, I'm unsurprised but disappointed."

Instances of AI-generated Instagram influencers have reportedly been on the rise since freely available image synthesis tools like Stable Diffusion have made it easy to generate an unlimited quantity of provocative images of women on demand. And techniques like Dreambooth allow fine-tuning an AI model on a specific subject (including an AI-generated one) to place it in different settings.

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

After the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary released a report accusing the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) of colluding with companies to censor conservative voices online, Elon Musk chimed in. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote that X "has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators" behind an advertiser boycott on his platform.

"Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution," Musk wrote, leading several X users to suggest that Musk wants it to be illegal for brands to refuse to advertise on X.

Among other allegations, Congress' report claimed that GARM—which is part of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), whose members "represent roughly 90 percent of global advertising spend, or almost one trillion dollars annually"—directed advertisers to boycott Twitter shortly after Musk took over the platform.

Enlarge / Professional writers' names were attached to AI content they had nothing to do with. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Christina Warren)

In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we've seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge by mimicking the bylines of the websites' former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names.

The Verge reported on the fiasco in detail, including speaking to Christina Warren, a former writer for TUAW who now works at GitHub. Warren took to the social media platform Threads yesterday to point out that someone had re-launched TUAW at its original domain and populated it with fake content allegedly written by her and other past TUAW staff. Some of the content simply reworded articles that originally appeared on TUAW, while other articles tied real writers' names to new, AI-generated articles about current events.

(Disclosure: I worked with Warren at Mashable several years ago, and before that, I also worked at the original parent company of TUAW.)

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More than 1.5 million email servers are vulnerable to attacks that can deliver executable attachments to user accounts, security researchers said.

The servers run versions of the Exim mail transfer agent that are vulnerable to a critical vulnerability that came to light 10 days ago. Tracked as CVE-2024-39929 and carrying a severity rating of 9.1 out of 10, the vulnerability makes it trivial for threat actors to bypass protections that normally prevent the sending of attachments that install apps or execute code. Such protections are a first line of defense against malicious emails designed to install malware on end-user devices.

A serious security issue

“I can confirm this bug,” Exim project team member Heiko Schlittermann wrote on a bug-tracking site. “It looks like a serious security issue to me.”

Enlarge (credit: C. Marsicano)

Gaiasia jennyae, a newly discovered freshwater apex predator with a body length reaching 4.5 meters, lurked in the swamps and lakes around 280 million years ago. Its wide, flattened head had powerful jaws full of huge fangs, ready to capture any prey unlucky enough to swim past.

The problem is, to the best of our knowledge, it shouldn’t have been that large, should have been extinct tens of millions of years before the time it apparently lived, and shouldn’t have been found in northern Namibia. “Gaiasia is the first really good look we have at an entirely different ecosystem we didn’t expect to find,” says Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral fellow at Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Pardo is co-author of a study on the Gaiasia jennyae discovery recently published in Nature.

Common ancestry

“Tetrapods were the animals that crawled out of the water around 380 million years ago, maybe a little earlier,” Pardo explains. These ancient creatures, also known as stem tetrapods, were the common ancestors of modern reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and birds. “Those animals lived up to what we call the end of Carboniferous, about 370–300 million years ago. Few made it through, and they lasted longer, but they mostly went extinct around 370 million ago,” he adds.

Enlarge / A Redbox movie rental kiosk stands outside a CVS store. (credit: Getty)

Since 2004, red DVD rental kiosks posted near entrances of grocery stores and the like tempted shoppers with movie (and until 2019, video game) disc rentals. But the last 24,000 of Redbox's kiosks are going away, as Redbox's parent company moved to chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy this week. The end of Redbox marks another death knell for the DVD industry at a time when volatile streaming services are making physical media appealing again.

Redbox shutting down

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which owns Redbox, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 29. But on Wednesday, Judge Thomas M. Horan of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware approved a conversion to chapter 7, signaling the liquidation of business, per Deadline. Redbox's remaining 24,000 kiosks will close, and 1,000 workers will be laid off (severance and back pay eligibility are under review, and a bankruptcy trustee will investigate if trust funds intended for employees were misappropriated).

Chicken Soup bought Redbox for $375 million in 2022 and is $970 million in debt. It will also be shuttering its Redbox, Crackle, and Popcornflix streaming services.

Enlarge (credit: LEONELLO CALVETTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

One of the challenges of working with ancient DNA samples is that damage accumulates over time, breaking up the structure of the double helix into ever smaller fragments. In the samples we've worked with, these fragments scatter and mix with contaminants, making reconstructing a genome a large technical challenge.

But a dramatic paper released on Thursday shows that this isn't always true. Damage does create progressively smaller fragments of DNA over time. But, if they're trapped in the right sort of material, they'll stay right where they are, essentially preserving some key features of ancient chromosomes. Researchers have now used that to detail the chromosome structure of mammoths, with some implications for how these mammals regulated some key genes.

DNA meets Hi-C

The backbone of DNA's double helix consists of alternating sugars and phosphates, chemically linked together (the bases of DNA are chemically linked to these sugars). Damage from things like radiation can break these chemical linkages, with fragmentation increasing over time. When samples reach the age of something like a Neanderthal, very few fragments are longer than 100 base pairs. Since chromosomes are millions of base pairs long, it was thought that this would inevitably destroy their structure, as many of the fragments would simply diffuse away.