The Download: unnerving AI avatars, and Trump’s climate gift to China

—Rhiannon Williams

Earlier this summer, I visited the AI company Synthesia to give it what it needed to create a hyperrealistic AI-generated avatar of me. The company’s avatars are a decent barometer of just how dizzying progress has been in AI over the past few years, so I was curious just how accurately its latest AI model, introduced last month, could replicate me.

I found my avatar as unnerving as it is technically impressive. It’s slick enough to pass as a high-definition recording of a chirpy corporate speech, and if you didn’t know me, you’d probably think that’s exactly what it was.

My avatar shows how it’s becoming ever-harder to distinguish the artificial from the real. And before long, these avatars will even be able to talk back to us. But how much better can they get? And what might interacting with AI clones do to us? Read the full story.

How Trump is helping China extend its massive lead in clean energy

On a spring day in 1954, Bell Labs researchers showed off the first practical solar panels at a press conference in New Jersey, using sunlight to spin a toy Ferris wheel before a stunned crowd.

The solar future looked bright. But in the race to commercialize the technology it invented, the US would lose resoundingly. Last year, China exported $40 billion worth of solar panels and modules, while America shipped just $69 million, according to the New York Times. It was a stunning forfeit of a huge technological lead.

Now, thanks to its policies propping up aging fossil-fuel industries, the US seems determined to repeat the mistake. Read the full story.