The New Aesthetic

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• Example playlist

According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call “fake artists” on Spotify.

These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform – artists with no discernible online footprint – whose music fills up many of Spotify’s own key mood and chillout playlists.

For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from “fake artists” – whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions – than streams of artists signed to major record companies.

In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 ‘fake artist’ names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.

This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly’s artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the “several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for”.

i.guim.co.uk

One of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers has said efforts to meet surging demand from the war in Ukraine have been stymied by a new TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory.

The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok’s new data centre using up electricity in the local area.

“We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos,” Morten Brandtzæg told the Financial Times.

A typical crochet pattern resembles coding in its own way, with abbreviations and punctuation marks denoting the creation process. “Ch” is used to denote “chain”, and “sc” is “single crochet”, for example. Meanwhile, an asterisk (*) implies an instruction should be repeated and brackets [] are used to separate repeatable steps in the instructions.

Woolner was impressed to find that ChatGPT returned comprehensive instructions that resembled a typical pattern. Following the pattern exactly, they created what was described as an “AI-generated narhwal crochet monstrosity”. Woolner said although the product was anatomically disturbing, it was impressive the language-learning tool created a pattern that actually yielded a sea creature.

“The consensus among people who have seen it is that it looks wrong and ugly, but also very cute,” they said. “It came out shockingly very accurate while still being very, very wrong. It’s a weird mix, kind of an uncanny valley.”

Drones raining from the sky in Zhengzhou 

 Word on the street is that a rival drone company that lost the bid interfered to overwhelm the drones nav system!

When we think of deepfakes, we tend to imagine AI-generated people. This might be lighthearted, like a deepfake Tom Cruise, or malicious, like nonconsensual pornography. What we don’t imagine is deepfake geography: AI-generated images of cityscapes and countryside. But that’s exactly what some researchers are worried about.

Specifically, geographers are concerned about the spread of fake, AI-generated satellite imagery. Such pictures could mislead in a variety of ways. They could be used to create hoaxes about wildfires or floods, or to discredit stories based on real satellite imagery. (Think about reports on China’s Uyghur detention camps that gained credence from satellite evidence. As geographic deepfakes become widespread, the Chinese government can claim those images are fake, too.) Deepfake geography might even be a national security issue, as geopolitical adversaries use fake satellite imagery to mislead foes.

In 2014, Facebook filed a patent application for a technique that employs smartphone data to figure out if two people might know each other. The author, an engineering manager at Facebook named Ben Chen, wrote that it was not merely possible to detect that two smartphones were in the same place at the same time, but that by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. That way, Facebook could suggest you friend the person you were talking to at a bar last night, and not all the other people there that you chose not to talk to.

Over the past few years, cops sure have become increasingly vocal about their disdain of average citizens exercising their constitutional right to record interactions with authorities. It's almost as if many of them feel they are above the law itself, but we digress. Now, some officers appear to be trying to evade videos of them circulating on social media through a crafty — if not exactly airtight — strategy: playing copyrighted music loudly and for long enough to be flagged by automatic censoring software on apps like Instagram.