Reuters Thursday March 6, 2025
In a move likely to increase its uptake and intensify competition in AI, Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba has announced that its video- and image-generating artificial intelligence model Wan 2.1 is now publicly available for free. Alibaba's announcement follows a similar move from startup DeepSeek, whose ostensibly low-cost open-source models generated surprise earlier this year among technology investors in the capital-intensive sector with performance akin to those of more established rivals such as OpenAI, notes Reuters.
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Courier Express Thursday March 6, 2025
Jennifer Hoover, a photographer in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, wants to capture memories that everyone can afford. “You want the holidays, you want the birthdays, you want the little in-between and you can’t afford that all the time. And I feel like it’s important to have that,” Hoover tells WTAJ. Her Say Cheeze Photography Studio in downtown Clearfield is a pay-as-you-can operation, adds the Courier Express: “The packages are all the same, but there’s different pay levels. Whatever you’re comfortable with and I’m not going to ask any questions. You just pick what you want and there we go,” Hoover says.
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By
David Schonauer Thursday March 6, 2025
New photographic technologies are changing what many people expect from cosmetic surgery. "People used to come in with pictures of themselves when they were younger or a movie star's [face]," New York
City-based plastic surgeon Melissa Doft recently told Allure magazine. Now, says Doft, they're bringing in photos that have clearly been Facetuned, filtered, or otherwise edited. "But you can never
really match that. … Read the full Story >>
CBS News Wednesday March 5, 2025
The world only knew him as “Caesar”—a photographer whose harrowing images, smuggled out of Syria at great risk, offered an unfiltered glimpse into torture and mass killing inside former President Bashar al-Assad's prisons. Caesar remained a faceless witness for over a decade, but the dictator's collapse in December allowed him to step forward, notes CBS News. In a televised interview with Al Jazeera in February, he revealed himself as Farid al-Madhhan, the (former) head of the forensic evidence department at the military police in Damascus.
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