When an AI image-generation tool—like the ones made by Midjourney, Stability AI, or Adobe—is prompted to create a picture of a person, that person is likely to be better-looking than those of us who actually walk the planet Earth. - The Atlantic
Unlike El Greco or Van Gogh, very few artists are household names these days. Fame in the art world is about having currency in the right circles. As those chosen to be on show at the art fair Frieze testify to, some artists achieve ultra-recognition ultra-young. Surprisingly, this can be a disaster. - The Conversation
A recent set of studies in the journal Psychological Science suggests that a more personal factor – specifically, how much a piece of art seems to relate, in one way or another, to you – can contribute greatly to its aesthetic power. - Psyche
Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. - MIT Technology Review
"These platforms effectively position themselves between business customers and end users. They extract rent from the business customers who then raise prices on the end users. In doing so, they also manipulate and exploit the end users, all in the service of business customers and the bottom line." - Jacobin
So, stop worrying about whether your attention span is too short, and start understanding distractedness as "a radical alternative to an internalised puritan work ethic." - The Guardian (UK)
A five-year full-on "test" to figure out which theory is right didn't figure it out - but that doesn't mean we didn't learn anything about our brains. - Wired
"Spotify laid off hundreds and effectively killed its in-house podcast production units, Gimlet and Parcast. It seemed like every entity, from public radio to news publishers, made cuts to their podcast units. Companies folded, and left their creators hanging." - The Verge
In 1956, Australia held an international competition "to design a national performance venue on Bennelong Point that would put Sydney on the map" - an idea that certainly worked. - BBC
Jennifer Richeson analyzed questionnaires completed by 400 One Small Step participants before and after their conversations. Her analysis showed that both liberals and conservatives felt more empathetic towards their partners following their conversations. - Current
The culture wars that take place over controversial moral questions are, in part, battles over which ethically loaded concepts should win out within a society. - Aeon
We’re in a spiritual revolution. Access to astrology and other spiritual practices has proliferated across witchy corners of the internet, with many tools fully embracing artificial intelligence as part of the supernatural process. - Wired
