KC DEBRIEF WEEK 8, FRIDAY 24/02/23
DIGITAL TITANS
_ PlayStation to axe 900 jobs and close London studio.
_ What is the 'card declines at therapy' trend on social media, and why are people sharing trauma on TikTok? The phrase “when your card declines at therapy” has opened up conversations about trauma among TikTok users. In a new trend on the app, users describe the hypothetical situation of their payment method getting declined at therapy – prompting their therapist to “give back” the trauma they’ve shared in the session. A less literal interpretation, though similar in sentiment, is the idea of falling back into trauma and undoing progress as a result of no longer being able to afford therapy.
_Samsung has just revealed it has a cool new gadget waiting for release: the Samsung Galaxy Ring. You can guess a little about it from the name (like, it’s round and fits on your finger), but not much more is known.
_ Apple Revolutionized the Auto Industry Without Selling a Single Car - The Atlantic
_ In the last few days, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) tool Gemini has had what is best described as an absolute kicking online.
_Google. Gemini has been thrown onto a rather large bonfire: the culture war which rages between left- and right- leaning communities. Gemini is essentially Google's version of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. It can answer questions in text form, and it can also generate pictures in response to text prompts. Initially, a viral post showed this recently launched AI image generator create an image of the US Founding Fathers which inaccurately included a black man. Gemini also generated German soldiers from World War Two, incorrectly featuring a black man and Asian woman.Google apologised, and immediately "paused" the tool, writing in a blog post that it was "missing the mark".
PEOPLE, MEDIA, CULTURE
_Everyone Knows That: how the internet became obsessed with lostwave. On Reddit, internet sleuths are desperately searching for the artist behind a mysterious 80s-sounding track, ‘Everyone Knows That’ – the latest in a long line of ‘lostwave’ recordings. It’s late at night and you’re searching. For what exactly, you’re not sure, but perhaps something ASMR-infused – a video equal parts soothing and strange that’ll lull you gently to sleep, while reminding you of the vast expanse of the internet. As you navigate YouTube’s complex warrens of ‘dark’ and ‘unsettling’ video essays, you see a familiar thumbnail crop up, sandwiched between playlists of unsolved true crime cases and Tumblr lore icebergs. An image of a hot pink boombox, set against furry cushions of the same colour, that wouldn’t look out of place on a Depop Y2K listing. You click on one of these videos, and then you hear it for the first time: a low-quality recording of an upbeat, 80s pop song performed by a singer with an accent you can’t quite place. The most mysterious 17 seconds on the internet.
_Lenovo’s Project Crystal is the world’s first laptop with a transparent microLED display. Sadly it's just a concept device, so it won't be hitting store shelves anytime soon.It’s not often you encounter a device that looks like it came straight out of a movie set. But Lenovo’s Project Crystal, supposedly the world’s first laptop with a transparent microLED display, is an example of sci-fi come to life.Currently there are no plans to turn Project Crystal into a retail product. Instead Lenovo’s latest concept device was commissioned by its ThinkPad division to explore the potential of transparent microLED panels and AI integration. The most obvious use case would be sharing info somewhere, like a doctor’s office or a hotel desk. Instead of needing to flip a screen around, you could simply reverse the display via software, allowing anyone on the other side to see it while getting an in-depth explanation.
_ First, the Internet made Daddy. He was strapping and benevolent, and he looked out on his kingdom from the eyes of Pedro Pascal, Oscar Isaac, and Idris Elba. Then it made Mother — a taciturn goddess in human form, inclined to take the shapes of Cate Blanchett and Greta Lee — and rather than standing by Daddy’s side, she soon upstaged him. (She couldn’t help it: She was born to slay.) When Babygirl came in the shapes of Paul Mescal and Cillian Murphy, they proved happy to follow in their parents’ footsteps, with a youthful gait slowed by melancholy. And finally, the 30-Year-Old Teenage Girl arrived, little bows already fastened to her hair. She kept her distance from the others, awestruck and unbearably horny for them. Thus, the Internet’s nuclear family was reborn: a storybook unit, reshaped by the furthest, most chaotic reaches of the hive mind.
Ai Ai La la land
// More AI fun! THE FUTURE OF AI VIDEO
// OpenAI and Microsoft are facing a fresh round of lawsuits from news publishers over allegations that their generative artificial intelligence products violated copyright laws and illegally trained by using journalists’ work. Three progressive US outlets – the Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet – filed suits in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, demanding compensation from the tech companies. The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement | Technology | The Guardian
//Celebrities including Piers Morgan, Nigella Lawson and Oprah Winfrey have criticised the use of AI deepfake online adverts that gave the false impression they had endorsed a US influencer's controversial self-help course. The adverts promoted the so-called "Genie Script", the centrepiece of a "manifestation" course sold for $37 (£29) a time by Wesley "Billion Dollar" Virgin. He describes himself as a motivational coach who has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and claims to be worth $40m. The videos, used to lure buyers to purchase the product, claim the Genie Script is a "missing" Hebrew Bible scripture of just 20 words that could - supposedly - change your life.