The Download: the secrets of vitamin D, and an AI party in Africa

“At some point you’ve got to wonder whether the bug is a feature.”

—Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, ponders xAI and Grok’s proclivity for surfacing Elon Musk-friendly and/or far-right sources, the Washington Post reports.

One more thing

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical chairs made of avocados.

But artists saw this technological wonder as a new kind of theft. They felt the models were effectively stealing and replacing their work.

Ben Zhao, a computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, was listening. He and his colleagues have built arguably the most prominent weapons in an artist’s arsenal against nonconsensual AI scraping: two tools called Glaze and Nightshade that add barely perceptible perturbations to an image’s pixels so that machine-learning models cannot read them properly.

But Zhao sees the tools as part of a battle to slowly tilt the balance of power from large corporations back to individual creators. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.)

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