Daily Tech News 27 June 2024

• A Russian propaganda network is promoting an AI-manipulated Biden video. (Wired) (archive site)

  Experts tell WIRED that Russian disinformation campaigns are using generative AI more and more.

  What would we do without experts?

  In recent weeks, as so-called cheapfake video clips

  Which is to say, live news footage.

  suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair.

  Note that the video is... A video. (Twitter)
  
  Wired is too scared to link to the video but it's not hard to find.
  
  It has human actors, in makeup and wigs, and it's edited, and put over a kind of bad song in a a thick Russian accent.

  An analysis by True Media, a nonprofit that was founded to tackle the spread of election-related deepfakes, found with 100% confidence that there was AI-generated audio used in the video. It also assessed with 78% confidence that some AI technology was used to manipulate the faces of the actors.

  There's only one voice in the entire video and it doesn't sound like anyone, so that claim is completely irrelevant.
  
  Is it used for the faces of Biden and Trump in the video? Eh. Maybe.
  
  But again, it's a parody video. Nobody thinks this is real. The reason Wired didn't link to it is because they want you to think people think it's real.

  Fink says the obvious nature of the deepfake technology on display here suggests that the video was created in a rush, using a small number of iterations of a generative adversarial network in order to create the characters of Biden and Trump.

  It's not a deepfake if it intentionally looks fake. But pretending it is a deepfake, is a deepfake.
  
  The article then wanders off to foam at the mouth about scary AI a bit more:

  The report details how the campaign, dubbed CopyCop, used the AI tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the content with a right-wing bias, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic Review that purport to be staffed by over a 1,000 journalists - all of whom are fake and have also been invented by AI.

  Just like CNN.

  The topics pushed by the campaign include errors made by Biden during speeches, Biden's age, poll results that show a lead for Trump, and claims that Trump's recent criminal conviction and trial was "impactless" and "a total mess."

  My apologies, not like CNN at all. It's actually reporting facts.
  
  No wonder Wired is upset.

• SpaceX has scored a $843 million NASA contract to blow up the moon. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or to deorbit the ISS sometime after 2030. One of those.
  
  
  
• If you are using Polyfill.io, STOP THAT RIGHT NOW. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The domain has been sold to a Chinese company which is using it to distribute malware.
  
  You're probably not unless (a) you're a web designer and (b) haven't updated your site in a long time.
  
  The developer of Polyfill warned about this in February. He has no connection with the polyfill.io website but people have been using it as an easy way to run the software, which was very useful to patch up browser incompatibilities years ago but is no longer needed by any modern browser.
  
  Google is notifying website owners where they can, and Cloudflare is offering a free alternative source.
  
  
  
• You're holding it wrong: An Australian bank is measuring how you hold your phone to stop scammers. (Pymnts)
  
  The article as it is written makes no sense, which may be because the bank is avoiding telling anyone exactly how it works, or may be because it doesn't work.
  
  But the article does make the same observation as the one about the rise of crime in Sweden: If you make payment frictionless, you also make theft frictionless.
  
  
  
• The Rabbit AI pin - which is rubbish but at least much cheaper than the Human AI pin - has been hacked. (404 Media)
  
  Or at least the API services behind it have been hacked.
  
  Briefly.
  
  Rabbit has apparently rotated the API keys - taking all the Rabbits offline briefly - and now the hack no longer works.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Strix Point laptops ship July 15. (Hot Hardware)
  
  This looks like a pretty good chip. Four Zen 5 cores, eight Zen 5c cores which are identical but run about 30% slower, and 16 RDNA3.5 graphics cores.
  
  That would make it twice as fast on the CPU side and nearly three times as fast on the graphics side as my new laptop.
  
  And Strix Point Halo, even faster, is still waiting in the wings.
  
  
  
• An AI-designed horse purse is tearing the horse purse community apart. (The Verge)
  
  You might well ask, is this a purse for AI-designed horses, or a horse purse for AI-designers, or a horse shaped like a purse designed by an AI, or... I don't know.
  
  In fact, it's a shopping bag.

  Collina Strada spokesperson Lindsey Solomon noted that only two of the prints used AI - others, like the "Sistine Tomato" print are done by "photograph[ing] every element of the print and compos[ing] them together, hand placing each rhinestone and tomato."

  It's a shopping bag with hand-placed rhinestones and tomatoes.

  The AI prints, meanwhile, are based on outputs generated by feeding Midjourney images of Collina Strada's past work, essentially remixing the brand's own designs. Is it still theft if your inputs are your own work?

  Is it theft if you eat the food you cooked for yourself?

  And what kind of freedom should artists have to experiment with these tools before it's seen as a moral failing?

  I cannot wait for you idiots to be replaced with ChatGPT.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:50 AM

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