THE VERGE Monday August 12, 2024
Wyoming’s Jackson Hole Travel & Tourism Board has created an open-source Instagram filter that will help visitors gauge if they’re at a safe distance from wildlife to take photos. To use the filter, visitors to the valley and wilderness recreation area need to open up the Selfie Control filter in the Instagram app, notes The Verge. After selecting the type of wildlife they’re looking at, tourists must align the animal’s outline to its icon. If the real-life animal’s bigger than the icon, then they’re too close and should back up.
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By
David Schonauer Monday August 12, 2024
In July, Google's parent company Alphabet reported a 29-percent rise in profits, driven by its search engine and cloud unit. The company also said its investments in artificial intelligence were
"driving new growth." But The Washington Post noted that while Google and other Big Tech companies say AI is on track to change whole swaths of modern life, in the same way the internet … Read the full Story >>
GOOGLE Friday August 9, 2024
As generative imagery technology has continued to improve in recent years, “there has been a concerning increase in generated images and videos that portray people in sexually explicit contexts, distributed on the web without their consent,” notes Google, which has announced new tactics in curbing such explicit deepfakes. Among them: new systems making it easier to remove non-consensual fake explicit imagery from Search and an “improved ranking system” designed to lower explicit fake content for many searches. See also: Mashable.
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The New York Times Friday August 9, 2024
Last year, one of Britain’s most famous trees, a sycamore that stood in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, was illegally cut down: Two men were charged in April in connection for the act of vandalism. Photographers who had flocked to photograph the so-called Sycamore Gap tree mourned its lost. But now sprouts have been spotted growing from its stump. “For people in Britain and tree lovers across the world, these fragile shoots are poetic justice,” notes The New York Times. “It’s nature’s response to what’s happened,” said Andrew Poad, the general manager at Hadrian’s Wall,
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