As of Wednesday, NBC News was reporting that the death toll from fires in Los Angeles had climbed to 24, while CNN was noting that more than 6 million in L.A. remained under critical fire threat as high winds threatened more devastation. Meanwhile New York magazine's Vulture blog was focusing on how paparazzi were braving flames to get pictures of celebrities evacuating their homes. … Read the full Story >>
Famed Sports Illustrated photographer Heinz Kluetmeier was once asked to name the most memorable Olympic photo he shot. He didn’t hesitate: “I would have to say the Olympic hockey photo from Lake Placid,” he said. “That’s the only cover we ever ran without cover language. It didn’t need it.” That photo, on SI's March 3, 1980, cover, marked a definitive sporting moment for Americans of the 20th century — the U.S. hockey team’s improbable victory over the Soviet Union, notes The Athletic, which reports that Kluetmeier died on Jan. 14 at age 82. “He was technically years ahead of his peers but he also understood that it was the emotions of the subjects he captured that really made his photography stand out,” noted his SI colleague Robert Beck. Read the full Story >>
Several years ago, photographer Ashley Suszczynski saw photographs of a masquerade in the north of Spain called La Vijanera. “There was everything from anthropomorphic fur-covered creatures to masked tree nymphs and spirits of the woodlands. I flew to Spain for a week to attend, and just like that, an obsession was born,” she tells My Modern Met. Suszczynski began researching other European masking rituals and rites, eager to learn about their history, characters, and symbolism. The result is her series “Masked Traditions.” Read the full Story >>
Elon Musk agrees with other AI experts that there’s little real-world data left on which to train AI models. “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge … in AI training,” Musk said recently during a livestreamed conversation with Mark Penn, chairman of global marketing group Stagwell. Indeed, Musk suggested that synthetic data — data generated by AI models themselves — is the path forward, notes Tech Crunch. Companies including tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are already using synthetic data to train flagship AI models. Read the full Story >>
