James' World 2

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Melissa Schriek for The New York Times

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Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested “Kelly McKernan” as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create “Lord of the Rings”-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, “Star Wars.” On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. The resulting images—of owls, cyborgs, gothic funeral scenes, and alien motorcycles—were distinctly reminiscent of McKernan’s works. “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told me. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.”

Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen, and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against Midjourney and two other A.I. imagery generators, Stable Diffusion, and DreamUp. (Other tools, such as DALL-E, run on the same principles.) All three models make use of LAION-5B, a nonprofit, publicly available database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet, including the work of many artists. The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the LAION database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work. When producing an image, these generators “present something to you as if it’s copyright free,” Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

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Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; ; Source photographs from Getty

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The subject in the striking image above looks like the centerpiece prop in a high-end sci-fi flick, but it is anything but. What you are looking at is the Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere (AIRS) guidance system that was designed to be used as the navigational heart of the highly-accurate LGM-118A Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), also known as the MX (Missile Experimental). Peacekeeper represented the pinnacle of Cold War-era American ICBM technology, but it came at a very high price and with a less-than-favorable developmental timeline. Even though it dwarfed its Minuteman III stablemate, and it was advanced in many ways, AIRS was by far the most exquisite piece of technology associated with the MX/Peacemaker program. In fact, the system’s existence was a major factor in the Peacekeeper’s reason for being. 

The masterful image was taken by photographer and author Martin Miller who had taken up the task of capturing Cold War weaponry in dramatic fashion. The photo seen in its entirety below was featured in Miller’s book Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Specters Of The Nuclear Age. 

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While many Americans were nursing hangovers on New Year’s Day, 22-year-old Edward Tian was working feverishly on a new app to combat misuse of a powerful, new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT.

Given the buzz it’s created, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about ChatGPT. It’s an interactive chatbot powered by machine learning. The technology has basically devoured the entire Internet, reading the collective works of humanity and learning patterns in language that it can recreate. All you have to do is give it a prompt, and ChatGPT can do an endless array of things: write a story in a particular style, answer a question, explain a concept, compose an email — write a college essay — and it will spit out coherent, seemingly human-written text in seconds.

The technology is both awesome — and terrifying.

“I think we’re absolutely at an inflection point,” Tian says. “This technology is incredible. I do believe it’s the future. But, at the same time, it’s like we’re opening Pandora’s Box. And we need safeguards to adopt it responsibly.”

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Edward Tian

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“I used [my Amazon Alexa] to turn on the lights or set a timer, and as a speaker for books and podcasts,” says the 43-year-old Londoner. “She turned my fan on and off during the heatwave and played me Christmas music in the winter.”

Ms. Barnes would ask her device to set alarms, tell her the time, or for the weather forecast.

“I kept my first Alexa in the kitchen and, a few months later, I got a second Alexa and set it up in my bedroom.”

However, Ms. Barnes fell out of love with her voice assistants when they began giving her frequent delivery notifications, asking her to review purchases, or prompting her to reorder items.

“It started giving me random updates or asking me to rate a product I’d bought last month,” she says, “which I found really irritating.”

She became concerned about conversation data “being stored in a cloud somewhere”. Then she found the voice commands became unreliable.

“I stopped asking her to turn off the lights when I went to bed, as I’d ask a number of times and then manually turn them off anyway.”

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Abigail Barnes found her voice assistant became more and more annoying

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OnlyFans is an online content-sharing platform that has become increasingly popular during the coronavirus lockdown. While OnlyFans creators can upload any kind of content, like photography, creative writing, or recipes, for example, the platform is particularly popular with sex workers.

During the lockdown, OnlyFans has become so popular that sex workers have found that the market is saturated, as reported by Newsweek.

Some OnlyFans creators report earning more money during the lockdown, while others report earning less money due to their fans facing financial struggles and the saturation of the market.

OnlyFans has been around since 2016 but has entered the mainstream recently, with Beyonce namedropping the site in her verse on Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage Remix.”

However, many people may not understand how the social media platform works, who uses it, and why it is so popular.

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A woman tries out a Microsoft-driven Nokia smartphone next to a symbol of a cloud on March 5, 2012, in Hanover, Germany. OnlyFans is a social media platform where content creators can charge fans for exclusive access to their content. Getty/Sean Gallup

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Just two months after creating her OnlyFans account, Elaina St James quit her day job and became a full-time content creator.

And less than two years later, the 55-year-old mom has already earned around $630,000 in less than two years through the subscription website. Insider has viewed documentation verifying her earnings.

St James says she’s happier since ditching her day job and can give her son a better life. (Elaina St James is a stage name she uses. Insider agreed to use this name to protect her privacy.)

In her 30s, St James worked in consumer goods sales. After having a baby at the age of 42, she decided to step away from her career, instead working in car sales and then in an office job.

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Elaina St James made her OnlyFans account in spring 2021. Courtesy of Elaina St James

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Over the last few decades, an idea called the critical brain hypothesis has been helping neuroscientists understand how the human brain operates as an information-processing powerhouse. It posits that the brain is always teetering between two phases, or modes, of activity: a random phase, where it is mostly inactive, and an ordered phase, where it is overactive and on the verge of a seizure. The hypothesis predicts that between these phases, at a sweet spot known as the critical point, the brain has a perfect balance of variety and structure and can produce the most complex and information-rich activity patterns. This state allows the brain to optimize multiple information processing tasks, from carrying out computations to transmitting and storing information, all at the same time.

To illustrate how phases of activity in the brain — or, more precisely, activity in a neural network such as the brain — might affect information transmission through it, we can play a simple guessing game. Imagine that we have a network with 10 layers and 40 neurons in each layer. Neurons in the first layer will only activate neurons in the second layer, and those in the second layer will only activate those in the third layer, and so on. Now, I will activate some number of neurons in the first layer, but you will only be able to observe the number of neurons active in the last layer. Let’s see how well you can guess the number of neurons I activated under three different strengths of network connections.

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Video: The phenomenon of criticality can explain the sudden emergence of new properties in a wide range of complex systems, from avalanches to flocks of birds to stock market crashes. Neuroscientists are now seeking evidence that criticality is at work in the brain’s networks of neurons. Taylor Hess, Noah Hutton, Emily Buder, Rui Braz, and Myriam Wares for Quanta Magazine

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