The New Aesthetic

via Joseph A. Howley on Twitter: “Dystopia is here, and increasingly more evenly distributed”

Asking Alexa how you look is a bit like asking it who’s winning an argument, or to rate your self worth. It’s a subjective question that depends on context and is laden with nuance.

Checking back with an algorithm that gives you a percentage, like a school assignment, assumes it’s possible or desirable to look 100%, and that everyone has a score. That we’re rateable by Robots, and can be gazed upon and judged by them in unremarkable, everyday ways.

Women, Plandids, Power – Rachel Coldicutt – Medium

newdarkage:

Andy Coravos on Twitter: “@instagram strategically *withholds* “likes” from users that they believe might disengage hoping they’ll be disappointed and recheck the app“

Washington Post: Hawaii missile alert: How one employee ‘pushed the wrong button’ and caused a wave of panic

zzkt:

“Focusing only on defending against small perturbations is insufficient, as large, local perturbations can also break classifiers.”

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/02/these-psychedelic-stickers-blow-ai-minds/

How an A.I. ‘Cat-and-Mouse Game’ Generates Believable Fake Photos - The New York Times

With so much attention on fake media these days, we could soon face an even wider range of fabricated images than we do today.

“The concern is that these techniques will rise to the point where it becomes very difficult to discern truth from falsity,” said Tim Hwang, who previously oversaw A.I. policy at Google and is now director of the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, an effort to fund ethical A.I. research. “You might believe that accelerates problems we already have.”

AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked - Motherboard

There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.

The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.

It’s not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn’t track correctly and there’s an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable.