If I had to pinpoint the moment when AI slop broke into the popular consciousness, I’d choose the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral last summer. For many savvy internet users, including myself, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up delivering a wave of nearly identically generated clips.
My first reaction was that this was all basically worthless. That has become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is messy now: the internet is ‘ruined’, with AI taking much of the blame. At first I mostly agreed. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were convincingly weird or funny. Some even had an ounce of brilliance.
I had to admit that I didn’t fully understand what I was rejecting, what I found so objectionable. To try to get to the bottom of how I was feeling (and why), I spoke to the people who made the videos, a company that makes custom tools for creators, and experts who study how new media becomes culture. What I discovered convinced me that generative AI might not ruin everything after all. Read the full story.
A new CRISPR startup is betting that regulators will relax gene editing
Hereby MIT Technology Review We’ve been writing about the gene editing technology CRISPR since 2013, calling it the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Yet only one gene-editing drug has been approved so far, and it has been used commercially in only about 40 patients, all with sickle cell disease.
It is becoming clear that the impact of CRISPR is not as great as we all hoped. In fact, there is a sense of discouragement across the field – with some journalists saying the gene editing revolution has ‘lost its mojo’.
So what will it take for CRISPR to help more people? A new startup says the answer could be an “umbrella approach” to testing and commercializing treatments that could avoid expensive new trials or approvals for each new version. Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
America’s new dietary guidelines ignore decades of scientific research
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