THE VERGE Wednesday December 27, 2023
This was the year Elon Musk killed Twitter—literally, changing its name to X. But he killed it in many other ways, too, notes The Verge in a special report: firing most of its employees, destabilizing it as a technology and a business, and leaving the platform virtually unusable for those users who remained. “But in death,” adds TV, “there is understanding—now that it’s over, we can reckon with what Twitter really was: a news cycle accelerator, a tool of mass harassment, an idealistic money-losing workplace, and an infinite joke machine.”
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AnOther Wednesday December 27, 2023
Hong Kong-based photographer Lean Lui’s new book Aseptic Field is a sensuous reimagining of feminine-coded motifs, such as bows, pearls, petals and school girl-affiliated white socks. “I loved Barbie when I was younger and was raised in a girly environment. I still enjoy it, embracing that girly style,” the photographer tells AnOther. Liu began using a camera in as a girl, when she took pictures of her younger sister reenacting scenes they’d watched play out on America’s Top Model and other American TV shows.
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404 Media Wednesday December 27, 2023
The LAION-5B machine learning dataset used by Stable Diffusion and other major AI products has been removed by the organization that created it after a Stanford study found that it contained 3,226 suspected instances of child sexual abuse material. LAION told 404 Media on that out of “an abundance of caution,” it was taking down its datasets, including LAION-5B and another called LAION-400M temporarily “to ensure they are safe before republishing them.” The findings of the study “highlights the danger of largely indiscriminate scraping of the internet for the purposes of generative artificial intelligence,” notes 404 Media.
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The Guardian Wednesday December 27, 2023
Every year, The Guardian’s picture editors choose their favorite images from the millions of images the newspaper receives from the international photo agencies. This year’s edition highlights the work of a group of photographers equally, rather than selecting an overall winner. Among them: Jerusalem-based Ronen Zvulun (Reuters); Gaza-based photojournalist Fatima Shbair (Associated Press); Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem (Reuters); and Reuters photographer Evelyn Hockstein, who covered the issue of abortion in the US in 2023.
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