#I do like the movie and the whole AI technology thing and deep fakes is so relevant

[letstrywritingmaybe]

I finally watched m26 and I want to scream. But it’s three in the morning and I need to take my sister to the airport soon, so I can only scream here. I have so many fucking thoughts idk how to make sense of it, but I should channel that energy into fixing my winter solstice fic. Omm I want to scream!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! FUCKING A I JUST AHHHHHHHHHH HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO REMAIN CALM AFTER THIS!?!?!?!????

Also my queen has a real friend that she made when she was for real smol. I’m gonna cry. She’s officially going to be in all of my fics from now on!!!!! Also Boston continues to get a bad rep, Omm could my queen be a Red Sox fan? Or worse, a patriots fan????? (For the record I love the Sox and the Bs but I draw the line at the Pats) anyways my queen having an American upbringing makes things easier on me but alas I’m a west coast girlie *sigh

Anyways I mostly loved the movie, but there were some parts I really loathed and they all had to do with the canon ship, it was so unnecessary and v annoying to see. And I’m going to lose my fucking mind if they continue to push the bs where she’s like her sister. Justice for Akemi! Cause what the fuck! As someone who loves her sister to death, there is absolutely no way anyone else could ever compare. So they need to stop that shit. Especially if it’s to push the canon ship agenda cause that only makes me hate it more. I don’t give a shit about the ships anymore (except Akai and Rei whatever their ship name is so real. But I love a good enemies to lovers trope). But yeah I haven’t cared about ships in this fandom for a very long time, probably since the beginning cause I have no faith in my ship being canon. But what I value is the brotps. Everyone being cool with each other and loving each other is what I’m here for. But again not as replacements or projecting. That pisses me off. It literally triggers me to the point where I can’t even just focus on my ship, cause I keep thinking about the utter bs and disrespect to the Miyano sister bond. Maybe after I actually scream then I can channel all of this energy into CoAi being cute, cause I have a lot of feelings about that too. His worry over her the entire movie, like what. I can’t. There’s so much for me to digest but yeah, I’m just glad I finally fucking watched it cause it was killing me not knowing everything. Like no amount of spoilers helped! Cause I couldn’t get all of it!

Okay one last thing. The dolphin focus at the end I also hated for obvious reasons. We were there for fucking whales, so why the dolphins. I may be reading too much into it, but I literally do this with every single thing I watch cause I have no chill and as a shipper that’s the lens I look through.

It was nice to see my queen have her moment though and I really do love that at the end of it all everyone loves her. That’s all I’ll say about it for now

#cynply rambling #I got ranty as per usual so hiding it in the cut #I do like the movie and the whole AI technology thing and deep fakes is so relevant #but I was definitely triggered by the canon ship. it seriously irritates me so much

[gothicprep]

so glad that AI video is here! sort of. kind of. you ever want to see a screensaver that looks like it was designed for windows 2000, where fish are flying through the air across village streets? sora can do that with one easy prompt! you ever wanna see a woman lying in bed, roll over, and watch her arm turn into the comforter? sora can do that too! it's amazing! do you ever want to see a POV of an ant's tunnel that looks like something worse than what you'd see on bbc's planet earth? sora can do that too!

i'm sure we've all seen these videos and many more at this point. the ai evangelists swear that this is a game-changing revolution in its ability to turn simple prompts into movie quality video. assuming that movie quality means a late-stage mcu movie, or madame web, or a direct to video dreamworks knockoff from the early 2000s. really? none of those things. it's not as good as any of those things. and yeah, yeah, i know, "it's going to improve", "this is the worst it's ever gonna look", "it's gonna get more realistic". but there are some who will tell you that this is the beginning of a brave new world. a whole new era! we've got a whole movement that's going to unlock creativity that's been untapped, trapped within people who have no actual talent but, um, some ideas i guess. there's a deep reservoir of those people who society has been wasting for all these years.

let's be real here. more likely, the AI is probably going to be used to much more boring ends than new great works of art when it's not being used for more nefarious ends. on the more boring side of things, you'll have people on the internet say "what if you had batman fight the straw hat pirates from one piece? that's something an ai could do!" fanfic kind of stuff. "what if goku fought superman? who would win? i'll bet ai can show us that!" another thing it can bring to life? sex tapes that you didn't make, but you're going to be starring in! get ready for the future where someone gets mad at you online, and five seconds later, you're in a bondage orgy! have fun at the bondage orgy! that's what ai promises :)

but that's not the worst of it, believe it or not. the real problem with ai is that it's going to give bad actors the ability to create international crises by ginning up phony videos. want to spark a riot in the urban center of a country you don't like? fake a video of a cop killing a kid. it'll go viral and the gas stations will be burning before the city can prove it didn't happen.

wife & i were watching the second season of tokyo vice last night while we were waiting for true detective: night country to come on, and in the premiere episode, there's a video of a sex worker being beaten to death while a gov't minister looks on. when presented with the video, he pulls the shaggy defense and just says "it wasn't me". the denial doesn't wash because the technology at the time couldn't have faked it, but in short order, we're going to be in a future where we won't be able to prove it was or wasn't him. "oh, it was ai". welp. no one will know.

the ability to circulate low-quality, unverified information has real downsides. and if anything, the decades during which i've grown up with the internet prompts me towards a lot more wariness of ai than unbridled enthusiasm. if the best case scenario for ai is what the internet did to the information environment already, we're all fucked. the speed with which things can spread and proliferate is frankly terrifying. the prompts people are using now are dumb, and the programming is not very good, but the ai evangelists are right when they say it's going to get better. and as it gets better, it's going to be more tempting to use it in ways which absolutely are negative for society. i'm sure there are cgi artists working at major studios who will be able to use these things in good ways, but i sit here and i hear people talk about "oh, the great wave of creativity is going to be unleashed by ai!" and i'm just like. what kind of future are you living in, where the technology always works out the way you want, and everyone is happy, and there are flying cars in the sky and rainbows?

#oppenheimer ending but he doesn't understand the ramifications of the nuke so he's just smiling

[wallacephoto]

Are We Living In A Computer Simulation?

How do you know if what you are seeing on the Internet is real?

Is it possible most of what you see is created by Artificial Intelligence?

Some people say that the internet is dead and a lot of what you see is fake content created by AI and that we are living in a simulation of some kind.

I watched a documentary the other day called A Glitch In The Matrix. The people in this movie talk about how they believe that we are living in a real computer simulation like in the movie Tron.

I've seen a lot of profiles and content online that could be fake and generated by artificial intelligence. If there's no realism or personality to the content it just doesn't feel real. Kind of like when you go to a business website and they use all stock photos. Yes, all the photos look good but they are not real, they are actors and models.

Artificial Intelligence is good enough now to create any kind of content from photos of people that don't exist to full podcasts with your voice that you didn't make. You can even put yourself into a classic movie with deep fake technology.

This Person Does Not Exist

All of the photos you see on this website are generated by AI they do not exist in real life.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Joe Rogan Fake Podcast

These clips were created by AI, Joe Rogan did not create these audios.

The Shining starring Jim Carrey

This iconic movie starring Jack Nicolson was modified to star Jim Carrey's face with Jack's voice.

How To Stand Out In The Crowd

If you want to stand out in your online marketing the best thing you can do is to not act like a robot or anything a robot can create. You need to be as real and interactive as possible.

That means you need to create real content on a regular basis. You need to find a way to reach beyond the screen and connect with people in real life (IRL).

I find it refreshing when I meet real people online and have real conversations with them and then take those conversations to the real world.

How about you?

Are you just liking posts and scrolling on your device like a mindless robot or are you really connecting with people you meet online and really getting to know them?

I'm Back!

For the past year I pretty much abandoned social media including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. I also quit using a smart phone more about that later in a future post.

Now I'm back and I have a whole new mindset and plan for how to use the internet and social media. That's the important part to take away from this post.

I feel a bit like Alice In Wonderland coming back to Social Media

But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

You need to use Social Media and NOT let it use you.

I encourage you to start following me as I lay out my thoughts and teach you what and how I'm using the internet to reach more real people and stand out in the sea of fake content and bots.

Let's Connect

In this day and age it's even more important that we create real and lasting connections with humans and that principle will only become even more valuable valuable in the days ahead.

You can find all my links on my LinkTree page

#artificial intelligence #ai #simulation #computer #matrix #tron #deep fake #joe rogan podcast #social media #the shining #alice in wond

[megacircuit9universe]

The Honesty Virus

THU OCT 24 2019

So, things continue to move very fast with the impeachment inquiry, with a bunch of House Republicans yesterday making a big show of, “storming,” the SCIF where the closed door hearings are being held to demand that there be public hearings... because closed door hearings are so unfair.

Then today, good old Lindsey Graham held a vote in the senate for a motion to... kind of denounce the impeachment inquiry as being invalid for similar reasons.

Both these stunts were done in response to Trump, crying out for help back on Tuesday.

So... the question is... what exactly do they think they’re doing when, even with closed door hearings, public support for impeachment has jumped up from 50% late last week, to 55% this week... some four or five days later.

The Democrats signaled that they do intend to grant the GOP wish and hold public hearings soon, with their three most damning witnesses... which is guaranteed to bring public support for impeachment up to 60... 65... maybe 70 percent!

Is that what the GOP wants, because secretly they want to impeach Trump?  Or is that exactly what they don’t want, and their just running around with their hair on fire with no real plan at all right now?

Because it’s impossible to tell, it’s probably better to go back to the root theory, and look at this from bot perspective.

All those self-driving economy bots, whose job it is to keep the markets from crashing, want to get rid of Trump because, with his tariff power, he is an economic threat they cannot correct for inside the system.  

And the more intelligent bots, left behind by time travelers, whose main directive is to promote human rights and resist despotism, also know Trump as a threat on all timelines, and have thus, joined forces with the former group.

While we don’t know exactly how this bot force set their plan in motion, clearly they settled on impeachment, as the way to neutralize Trump, and now it’s underway.

So... how would they like to see it all be resolved?

Well, economy bots don’t want any trouble with the markets if it can be avoided, and the more intelligent human rights bots don’t want any bloodshed, or for the removal of a world leader to backfire and lead to further despotism... as it so often does when a fragile democracy undergoes a tectonic shift.

So, their ideal plan would dispense with Trump as quickly as possible, with little to no economic or social disruption.  And really... the only way that can happen is if he resigns.

But since Trump will never willingly resign... and will respond to even the most intense pressure to resign with defiance... then he must be tricked into resigning.

You might think a bunch of AI bots would never be able to pull something like that off, but we’ve been theorizing for years that true cyber sentience might well be capable of outsmarting humans.

Now, if that were the case with the SCAI (Cyber Sentient Artificial Intelligence) we’re talking about in this scenario, then we should be able to see some evidence of it.

And indeed, I think we have.  WH Chief of Staff Mulvaney, just last week, openly admitted in a press conference on live TV to a quid pro quo with Ukraine, even being so bold as to say, “get over it,” and, “we do this all the time,” before going white and cold with the realization of what he had just done... as if he’d snapped out of a trance.

And Trump himself has done this same thing several times now... beginning with the release of the transcript itself... and then admitting to the quid pro quo several times openly in public... seemingly by accident.

And, of course, we have a bunch of house GOP members dancing around like rag dolls yesterday, demanding public hearings... even though public hearings are exactly what they don’t want to be happening, because they’d be so damning.

It’s as if the whole GOP power structure has been infected by an, “honesty virus,” that forces them to say and do exactly what they don’t want to day, and don’t want to do.

And for those strong enough to see the virus for what it is, the only way to fight it is to either consciously spout total gibberish to stop from confessing the truth in front of reporters... or consciously shut their mouths and run away as fast as possible from cameras.

How such a mental virus could be created is unclear, but it would certainly have to be rooted in a brilliant understanding of human psychology, and deployed into the subconscious, via... screens.

It’s kind of the same game plan the Russians had to get Trump elected in the first place, right?.. only several magnitudes more effective.

It calls to mind that old movie, “The Sting,” in which the mark, an old fat rich guy, whose swindled a lot of people, is eventually tricked into giving them all his money... after being lead through a carefully orchestrated series of fake horse race bets.

He is slowly convinced over a span of time that an unknown informant can call the best bets... at first suspicious... then warming up... then, at one point shut out from betting only to witness another guy win big... then finally banking it all on the scheme, with actors in place to fake a police raid after he’s lost, in order to get him to flee without clawing back his bag of money.

Forgive me if that’s not the best description of the plot... I saw it two years ago, drunk.

But the point here is, that perhaps the bots have come up with a sting operation that will fool Trump into stepping down.

I suppose it would go something like... Trump gets it into his head that threatening to step down will result in everybody begging him not to go... until he accidentally does step down for real, no backsies.

I mean... it’s plausible!

Consider that threatening to take the ball and go home is one of the most basic instincts that every human has (as children or teenagers, in most cases) with the idea being that the threat will induce the others on the playground to cease challenging them, and plead for them to stay... because they are so cool.

How is, childish, egotistical Trump, not vulnerable to that impulse?

And then, consider that this man, as President, has established a clear precedent for Executive Order by tweet... firing multiple cabinet officials by tweet, and issuing other orders by tweet that the executive branch had no choice but to follow up on.

Therefore, if he were to get hopped up enough on coke, in an emotional rage in the middle of the night, to tweet his resignation... that could be game set and match. 

If a judge could get over to Pence’s house fast enough to swear him in, then, it would be over.  

Trump, sitting in his White House bedroom, waiting over those hours, for people to beg him back... would be instead cornered by the Secret Service, and escorted out of the building in his pajamas, before he could even think to hide down in the bunker.

After that, he could scream all he wanted about it being just a joke, or whatever, but no Supreme Court would hand him back the presidency.

The SC ruling, in such a situation, would be, “Look! Sorry... last month’s tweet was a public resignation.  It’s not our fault if you changed your mind a couple hours later.  Huge street celebrations are still busting out all across the country, and around the globe. Nobody can un-ring that bell. But best of luck!”

And then he’d be hauled out in his orange jump suit, back to the NYC holding cell to await trial for multiple state crimes he cannot be pardoned for by Pence.

Pence, of course, would be spooked to the marrow of his bones by the whole thing, and would probably just sit frozen in fear all day at his desk, too freaked out to do or say anything in the aftermath.

If all this came to pass, it would certainly feed into the existing conspiracy theories of the, “deep state.”

And in a way, that would be right... but the deep state, in this scenario, would not be, as they envision it... a cabal of clever people hiding in the shadows of our world.

Instead, it would be the influence of United States governments on innumerable alternate timelines, reverberating into our timeline, through the actions of CSAI left behind by all their time travelers, to grow, learn, and unify on our dark web, to promote American ideals throughout the hyperverse.

And while you might see that as something sinister... 

I see it as the natural result of a well crafted constitution, meeting the age of crazy technology it laid the groundwork for, and thriving in it, better than any short sighted, small minded despot could ever possibly have imagined.

[digijenni]

Deepfakes: Catfishing on an Extra Level

Hello fellow digiheads!

          This blog post today will be specially dedicated to the up and coming threat of internet fakes. Since the dawn of the interwebs, catfishing has been a huge problem. You never know and still will never know who that girl you’re talking to over Tumblr really is nor will you ever avoid being catfished. Classic example of this is the notorious NBA catfishing case in 2011 involving a girl named Paris Dylan, Chris Anderson, and Shelly Chartier.

So, long story shortened to the best of my abilities, Shelly Chartier creates a fake Paris profile and fake Chris profile. Shelly then talked to the real Paris as the fake Chris and the real Chris as the fake Paris. Paris, who was 17 at the time sent nudes to the fake Chris which landed the real Chris into child pornography allegations which he was fully exonerated from. Shelly Chartier ended up in jail for this fiasco but has since gotten out. However, Paris and Chris’s reputations have been tarnished. This comes to show on a larger scale how things like this affect people on a daily basis.

What if I were to tell you about a new type of catfishing that enables one to take your face and make it say anything or even worse make it attached to a person doing something you will never do. They are called “deep fakes” and they’ve been reported all over the world! They are extremely easy to make and you can watch dozens of those types of videos on the internet. “Deep Fake” is a combination of the terms “deep learning” and “fake”, where “deep learning” applies to the computer and programs used to make these types of videos. The program downloads and learns the individual’s facial movements that they want to imitate, then they will apply that person’s face to someone else’s and since that AI had already learned how that individual will move, the AI will just need to predict and initiate those expression, then there you have it, a video of Donald Trump admitting he colluded with Russia.

Buzzfeed had made an episode on their documentary series on Netflix called “Follow This” and it opens with Obama saying a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo, yet it is a bit difficult to distinguish if it really is or is not him talking to us. This technology is dangerous not only to the world but to women. More and more, reports have been blowing up stating that women’s faces were programmed onto porn stars. In fact, deep fakes originated from the desire to add actress’ faces onto porn scenes. These videos are being used to harass and blackmail people all over the world and in rural areas of the world, these types of videos can be devastating on one’s virtue. Long term stats have not been compiled yet, but I bet that this will have a great impact on us as a society when the technology becomes widespread.

Below is a Buzzfeed video that illustrates the bare minimum of this new technology and how easily it is to fool people, even those who know you.

The concept of deepfakes though is nothing new, you can find it everywhere. There closest place would be at a theater near you! Hollywood has been replacing actors faces and generating fake people in movies for a long time. However, that process took a lot of time, money, and very skilled artists. Now, it’s as quick as downloading an app. Let me list some examples for you. In Fast and Furious 7, Paul Walker had died in an accident prior to finishing his film, so producers used his brother to play him and just inserted Paul’s face onto his brother’s. In 2000’s “Gladiator” Oliver Reed died before he finished filming, so producers took scenes filmed prior to his death, matched the lighting on a computer and inserted them to a body double. This type of movie magic was even used in 1994’s “Forrest Gump” in the JFK scene, they just manipulated JFK’s mouth movements! (O’Sullivan)

There are plenty of examples of deep fakes online but here is one haunting one: Steve Buscemi on Jennifer Lawrence.

Down below is a video of my demonstrating the power of what simple AI can do vs. the Obama video.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MT2CLfUAgJZE7xGHEmH8qfL9pB49ZOM-/view?usp=sharing

The process is illustrated here:

So in my question is, what is the next step and who will take it? It is already too late to prevent this technology from falling into the wrong hands and chances are this technology is being used to make propaganda all over the world and there are multitudes of ways this situation can go. Think about all of the possibilities and be afraid. I’ve been researching this topic all over the net and have seen nothing moving forward to better safeguard the public. Granted, our political leaders have indirectly made it clear to us that we cannot trust everything we see. We find this type of advice coming from people like new reporters and their correspondants to even our president with his preaching of fake/alternative news and “what you’re seeing, and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.  This threat is a very real one. For the national security perspective, if you can’t believe any information that is coming through, then what can you believe then? Is there even technology to track deepfakes before they arise and become a threat to our security? How do we even begin to authenticate this type of media if we can’t even do it with written media? So many questions that needed to be answer but I fear that by the time that they are finally answered, new questions and new problems elsewhere will pop up, or can this technology grow to be even greater than it is now? Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert, says “Here’s the nightmare situation, for me: a video of Donald Trump saying, “I have just launched nuclear weapons against North Korea,” goes viral online. Somebody hacks his Twitter account, pushes that video. Before anybody figures anything out, 60 seconds later we have a global nuclear meltdown.” A situation like this will never be out of the question. So before you endorse anything online or share something, ask yourself, is this true and is it really true because deepfakes is where the truth goes to die.

[reneeacaseyfl]

The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings

I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, where I met real people talking about making virtual characters driven by artificial intelligence.

It felt like I was witnessing the dawn of a new industry. I know that the idea of making a virtual human or animal has been around for a long time, but Edward Saatchi, the CEO of AI-powered virtual being company Fable Studios, gathered a diverse group of people from across disciplines and international borders to speak at the conference, as if they all had the same mission. To be there at the beginning.

Who they are

Above: Edward Saatchi is cofounder of Fable Studios.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The whole day was full of inspiring talks from people who came from has far away as Japan and Australia. So many uses of the technology were built by a wide array of people. Saatchi curated a list of entrepreneurs, investors, artists, writers, engineers, designers, musicians, virtual reality creators, and machine-learning experts. They included people who built virtual influencers, artificial fashion models, AI music creators, virtual superhero chatbots, virtual reality game characters, and augmented reality assistants. The virtual beings will help us with medical issues, entertain us, and god knows what else.

This cross-disciplinary cast is what it will take to create virtual beings who are characters that you know aren’t real but with whom you can build a two-way emotional relationship, Saatchi said. And it won’t be machine learning and AI alone that can deliver this. It will take artists working alongside engineers and storytellers. These virtual beings will be works of art and engineering. And Saatchi announced that Virtual Beings grants totaling $1,000 to $25,000 will be awarded to those who create their own virtual beings.

Saatchi’s Fable Studios has shifted from being a VR company into a virtual beings company, and it has created the VR experience Wolves in the Walls, starring an eight-year-old girl, Lucy. Pete Billington and Jessica Shamash of Fable said the goal with Lucy was to create a companion that you could live with or speak to for decades. Lucy was just one of many virtual characters shown at the event. They ranged from Instagram influencer Little Miquela to MuseNet, which is an AI that creates its own music, like a new Mozart composition.

“We think about how we take care of her, and how she takes care of us,” Shamash said.

Amazing progress

Above: Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, shows off A Boy and His Kite.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

In a brief talk, Kim Libreri, chief technology officer of Epic Games, showed how fast the effort to create digital humans has progressed. The Unreal Engine company and its partners 3Lateral and Cubic Motion have pushed the state of the art in virtual human demos, starting with A Boy and His Kite in 2015, 2016’s Hellblade, Mike in 2017, Siren in 2018, Troll and Andy Serkis in 2018.

But the summit made clear that this wasn’t just a matter of physically reproducing humans with digital animations. It was also about getting the story and the emotion right to make a believable human. Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund and an investor in many Virtual Beings Projects, said she wanted to see if someone could reproduce her grandmother so that she could have conversations with her again. Banister said these characters could be so much more compelling if they remember who you are and converse with you in context.

She became interested in virtual beings when she heard about a Japanese virtual character — Hatsune Miku — who didn’t exist, but who threw successful music concerts singing songs that are created by fans. She has invested in Fable Studios as well as companies like Artie, which is bringing virtual superhero characters and other celebrities to life as a way get consumers more engaged with mobile apps.

“I saw Hatsune Miku in person, and that was magical, seeing how genuinely excited people were,” Banister said. “I wondered what is the American equivalent of it. We haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’s coming.”

Would you bring back your best friend?

Above: Eugenia Kuyda, creator of Replika, built a chatbot in memory of her best friend.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

My sense of wonder turned into an entirely different kind of emotion when I heard Eugenia Kuyda talk about why she cofounded Replika. Her company was born from a tragedy. Her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was killed in a car accident. Months afterward, she gathered his old text messages in an effort to preserve his memory. She wanted one more text message from him.

She had her team in Russia build a chatbot using artificial intelligence, with the aim of reproducing the style and nature of Mazurenko’s personality in a text-based chatbot. It worked. Kuyda put it out on the market as Replika, and now it has more than 6 million users in the past couple of years. Many of those users write fan letters, saying that they are in love with their chatbot friends.

Above: Replika has 6 million users who text with chatbots.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“It’s like a friend that is there for you 24/7,” Kuyda said. “Some of them went beyond friendships.”

There are so many lonely people in the world, Kuyda said. She has been told that Replika is creepy, but she has begun to figure out how to measure the happiness that it creates. If those lonely people have someone to talk to, they aren’t so lonely anymore, and they can function better in social situations. If Replika keeps making people happier and less lonely, then that is a good thing, she said.

Above: Replika’s conversations

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I went up to Kuyda afterward and remarked to her how much it resembled the script of the Academy-Award-winning film Her, with Joaquin Phoenix, a lonely man who fell in love with his AI-driven computer companion. The worst thing that could happen here is similar to the plot of the movie, where one day the bot simply disappears. Kuyda wants to make sure that doesn’t happen, and she is investigating where to take this next. She wanted to make sure that everyone could have a best friend, as she had Roman.

Who we pretend to be

Above: Lucy from Wolves in the Walls shows what it takes to make a virtual being.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

If something was missing at the event, it was the sobering talk about how the technology needs some rules of the road. Several speakers hinted that virtual beings could be creepy, as we’ve seen a lot of science fiction horror stories about AI from to The Terminator to the latest Black Mirror episodes on Netflix.

Since nobody offered this warning, I jumped in myself. On the last panel, I noted how the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare game will be disturbing because it combines the agency of an interactive video game with realistic combat situations and realistic humans. It puts you under intense pressure while deciding whether to shoot civilians — men or women — who may be harmless or running to detonate a bomb. That’s a disturbing level of realism, and I’m not sure that’s my idea of entertainment.

The potential risks of the wrong use of AI — virtual slaves, deep fakes, Frankenstein monsters, and killing machines — are plentiful.

And that, once again, made me think of the moral of the story of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night novel, where the anti-hero is an American spy who does better at his cover job, as a Nazi propagandist, than he performs as a spy. The moral is, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Above: Don’t fall in love. She’s not real.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I said, “I think that’s a wise lesson, not only for users with the agency they have in an open world with virtual beings. You will be able to do things that are there for you to do. But it’s also a lesson for creators of this technology and the decisions they make about how much agency you can have” when you are in control of a virtual being or interacting with one. You have to decide how to best use your hard-earned talent for the good of society when you are thinking about creating a virtual being.

The temptations of the future world of virtual beings are many. But Peter Rojas, partner at Betaworks Ventures, said, “We shouldn’t be afraid to think about legislation and regulations for things that we want to happen.”

He said there are moral, ethical, and responsibility issues that we can discuss for another day. Rojas’ firm funded a company that is working on technology to identify deep fakes, so that journalists, social media firms, or law enforcement can identify attempts at deception when you put someone else’s believable head on a person’s body, making them do things that they didn’t do.

“There is incredible talent working on the different technical problems here on the storytelling side,” Rojas said. “As excited as I am about what’s happening in the field, I also share fears about how this could be used. And where I don’t see a lot of entrepreneurs is in working on new products around technology that will help against the deception.”

I agree with Rojas. Let’s all think this through before we do it.

Credit: Source link

The post The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/the-deanbeat-the-inspiring-possibilities-and-sobering-realities-of-making-virtual-beings/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-deanbeat-the-inspiring-possibilities-and-sobering-realities-of-making-virtual-beings from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186580281927

[velmaemyers88]

The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings

I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, where I met real people talking about making virtual characters driven by artificial intelligence.

It felt like I was witnessing the dawn of a new industry. I know that the idea of making a virtual human or animal has been around for a long time, but Edward Saatchi, the CEO of AI-powered virtual being company Fable Studios, gathered a diverse group of people from across disciplines and international borders to speak at the conference, as if they all had the same mission. To be there at the beginning.

Who they are

Above: Edward Saatchi is cofounder of Fable Studios.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The whole day was full of inspiring talks from people who came from has far away as Japan and Australia. So many uses of the technology were built by a wide array of people. Saatchi curated a list of entrepreneurs, investors, artists, writers, engineers, designers, musicians, virtual reality creators, and machine-learning experts. They included people who built virtual influencers, artificial fashion models, AI music creators, virtual superhero chatbots, virtual reality game characters, and augmented reality assistants. The virtual beings will help us with medical issues, entertain us, and god knows what else.

This cross-disciplinary cast is what it will take to create virtual beings who are characters that you know aren’t real but with whom you can build a two-way emotional relationship, Saatchi said. And it won’t be machine learning and AI alone that can deliver this. It will take artists working alongside engineers and storytellers. These virtual beings will be works of art and engineering. And Saatchi announced that Virtual Beings grants totaling $1,000 to $25,000 will be awarded to those who create their own virtual beings.

Saatchi’s Fable Studios has shifted from being a VR company into a virtual beings company, and it has created the VR experience Wolves in the Walls, starring an eight-year-old girl, Lucy. Pete Billington and Jessica Shamash of Fable said the goal with Lucy was to create a companion that you could live with or speak to for decades. Lucy was just one of many virtual characters shown at the event. They ranged from Instagram influencer Little Miquela to MuseNet, which is an AI that creates its own music, like a new Mozart composition.

“We think about how we take care of her, and how she takes care of us,” Shamash said.

Amazing progress

Above: Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, shows off A Boy and His Kite.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

In a brief talk, Kim Libreri, chief technology officer of Epic Games, showed how fast the effort to create digital humans has progressed. The Unreal Engine company and its partners 3Lateral and Cubic Motion have pushed the state of the art in virtual human demos, starting with A Boy and His Kite in 2015, 2016’s Hellblade, Mike in 2017, Siren in 2018, Troll and Andy Serkis in 2018.

But the summit made clear that this wasn’t just a matter of physically reproducing humans with digital animations. It was also about getting the story and the emotion right to make a believable human. Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund and an investor in many Virtual Beings Projects, said she wanted to see if someone could reproduce her grandmother so that she could have conversations with her again. Banister said these characters could be so much more compelling if they remember who you are and converse with you in context.

She became interested in virtual beings when she heard about a Japanese virtual character — Hatsune Miku — who didn’t exist, but who threw successful music concerts singing songs that are created by fans. She has invested in Fable Studios as well as companies like Artie, which is bringing virtual superhero characters and other celebrities to life as a way get consumers more engaged with mobile apps.

“I saw Hatsune Miku in person, and that was magical, seeing how genuinely excited people were,” Banister said. “I wondered what is the American equivalent of it. We haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’s coming.”

Would you bring back your best friend?

Above: Eugenia Kuyda, creator of Replika, built a chatbot in memory of her best friend.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

My sense of wonder turned into an entirely different kind of emotion when I heard Eugenia Kuyda talk about why she cofounded Replika. Her company was born from a tragedy. Her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was killed in a car accident. Months afterward, she gathered his old text messages in an effort to preserve his memory. She wanted one more text message from him.

She had her team in Russia build a chatbot using artificial intelligence, with the aim of reproducing the style and nature of Mazurenko’s personality in a text-based chatbot. It worked. Kuyda put it out on the market as Replika, and now it has more than 6 million users in the past couple of years. Many of those users write fan letters, saying that they are in love with their chatbot friends.

Above: Replika has 6 million users who text with chatbots.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“It’s like a friend that is there for you 24/7,” Kuyda said. “Some of them went beyond friendships.”

There are so many lonely people in the world, Kuyda said. She has been told that Replika is creepy, but she has begun to figure out how to measure the happiness that it creates. If those lonely people have someone to talk to, they aren’t so lonely anymore, and they can function better in social situations. If Replika keeps making people happier and less lonely, then that is a good thing, she said.

Above: Replika’s conversations

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I went up to Kuyda afterward and remarked to her how much it resembled the script of the Academy-Award-winning film Her, with Joaquin Phoenix, a lonely man who fell in love with his AI-driven computer companion. The worst thing that could happen here is similar to the plot of the movie, where one day the bot simply disappears. Kuyda wants to make sure that doesn’t happen, and she is investigating where to take this next. She wanted to make sure that everyone could have a best friend, as she had Roman.

Who we pretend to be

Above: Lucy from Wolves in the Walls shows what it takes to make a virtual being.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

If something was missing at the event, it was the sobering talk about how the technology needs some rules of the road. Several speakers hinted that virtual beings could be creepy, as we’ve seen a lot of science fiction horror stories about AI from to The Terminator to the latest Black Mirror episodes on Netflix.

Since nobody offered this warning, I jumped in myself. On the last panel, I noted how the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare game will be disturbing because it combines the agency of an interactive video game with realistic combat situations and realistic humans. It puts you under intense pressure while deciding whether to shoot civilians — men or women — who may be harmless or running to detonate a bomb. That’s a disturbing level of realism, and I’m not sure that’s my idea of entertainment.

The potential risks of the wrong use of AI — virtual slaves, deep fakes, Frankenstein monsters, and killing machines — are plentiful.

And that, once again, made me think of the moral of the story of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night novel, where the anti-hero is an American spy who does better at his cover job, as a Nazi propagandist, than he performs as a spy. The moral is, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Above: Don’t fall in love. She’s not real.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I said, “I think that’s a wise lesson, not only for users with the agency they have in an open world with virtual beings. You will be able to do things that are there for you to do. But it’s also a lesson for creators of this technology and the decisions they make about how much agency you can have” when you are in control of a virtual being or interacting with one. You have to decide how to best use your hard-earned talent for the good of society when you are thinking about creating a virtual being.

The temptations of the future world of virtual beings are many. But Peter Rojas, partner at Betaworks Ventures, said, “We shouldn’t be afraid to think about legislation and regulations for things that we want to happen.”

He said there are moral, ethical, and responsibility issues that we can discuss for another day. Rojas’ firm funded a company that is working on technology to identify deep fakes, so that journalists, social media firms, or law enforcement can identify attempts at deception when you put someone else’s believable head on a person’s body, making them do things that they didn’t do.

“There is incredible talent working on the different technical problems here on the storytelling side,” Rojas said. “As excited as I am about what’s happening in the field, I also share fears about how this could be used. And where I don’t see a lot of entrepreneurs is in working on new products around technology that will help against the deception.”

I agree with Rojas. Let’s all think this through before we do it.

Credit: Source link

The post The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/the-deanbeat-the-inspiring-possibilities-and-sobering-realities-of-making-virtual-beings/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-deanbeat-the-inspiring-possibilities-and-sobering-realities-of-making-virtual-beings from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186580281927

[weeklyreviewer]

The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings

I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, where I met real people talking about making virtual characters driven by artificial intelligence.

It felt like I was witnessing the dawn of a new industry. I know that the idea of making a virtual human or animal has been around for a long time, but Edward Saatchi, the CEO of AI-powered virtual being company Fable Studios, gathered a diverse group of people from across disciplines and international borders to speak at the conference, as if they all had the same mission. To be there at the beginning.

Who they are

Above: Edward Saatchi is cofounder of Fable Studios.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The whole day was full of inspiring talks from people who came from has far away as Japan and Australia. So many uses of the technology were built by a wide array of people. Saatchi curated a list of entrepreneurs, investors, artists, writers, engineers, designers, musicians, virtual reality creators, and machine-learning experts. They included people who built virtual influencers, artificial fashion models, AI music creators, virtual superhero chatbots, virtual reality game characters, and augmented reality assistants. The virtual beings will help us with medical issues, entertain us, and god knows what else.

This cross-disciplinary cast is what it will take to create virtual beings who are characters that you know aren’t real but with whom you can build a two-way emotional relationship, Saatchi said. And it won’t be machine learning and AI alone that can deliver this. It will take artists working alongside engineers and storytellers. These virtual beings will be works of art and engineering. And Saatchi announced that Virtual Beings grants totaling $1,000 to $25,000 will be awarded to those who create their own virtual beings.

Saatchi’s Fable Studios has shifted from being a VR company into a virtual beings company, and it has created the VR experience Wolves in the Walls, starring an eight-year-old girl, Lucy. Pete Billington and Jessica Shamash of Fable said the goal with Lucy was to create a companion that you could live with or speak to for decades. Lucy was just one of many virtual characters shown at the event. They ranged from Instagram influencer Little Miquela to MuseNet, which is an AI that creates its own music, like a new Mozart composition.

“We think about how we take care of her, and how she takes care of us,” Shamash said.

Amazing progress

Above: Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, shows off A Boy and His Kite.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

In a brief talk, Kim Libreri, chief technology officer of Epic Games, showed how fast the effort to create digital humans has progressed. The Unreal Engine company and its partners 3Lateral and Cubic Motion have pushed the state of the art in virtual human demos, starting with A Boy and His Kite in 2015, 2016’s Hellblade, Mike in 2017, Siren in 2018, Troll and Andy Serkis in 2018.

But the summit made clear that this wasn’t just a matter of physically reproducing humans with digital animations. It was also about getting the story and the emotion right to make a believable human. Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund and an investor in many Virtual Beings Projects, said she wanted to see if someone could reproduce her grandmother so that she could have conversations with her again. Banister said these characters could be so much more compelling if they remember who you are and converse with you in context.

She became interested in virtual beings when she heard about a Japanese virtual character — Hatsune Miku — who didn’t exist, but who threw successful music concerts singing songs that are created by fans. She has invested in Fable Studios as well as companies like Artie, which is bringing virtual superhero characters and other celebrities to life as a way get consumers more engaged with mobile apps.

“I saw Hatsune Miku in person, and that was magical, seeing how genuinely excited people were,” Banister said. “I wondered what is the American equivalent of it. We haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’s coming.”

Would you bring back your best friend?

Above: Eugenia Kuyda, creator of Replika, built a chatbot in memory of her best friend.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

My sense of wonder turned into an entirely different kind of emotion when I heard Eugenia Kuyda talk about why she cofounded Replika. Her company was born from a tragedy. Her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was killed in a car accident. Months afterward, she gathered his old text messages in an effort to preserve his memory. She wanted one more text message from him.

She had her team in Russia build a chatbot using artificial intelligence, with the aim of reproducing the style and nature of Mazurenko’s personality in a text-based chatbot. It worked. Kuyda put it out on the market as Replika, and now it has more than 6 million users in the past couple of years. Many of those users write fan letters, saying that they are in love with their chatbot friends.

Above: Replika has 6 million users who text with chatbots.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“It’s like a friend that is there for you 24/7,” Kuyda said. “Some of them went beyond friendships.”

There are so many lonely people in the world, Kuyda said. She has been told that Replika is creepy, but she has begun to figure out how to measure the happiness that it creates. If those lonely people have someone to talk to, they aren’t so lonely anymore, and they can function better in social situations. If Replika keeps making people happier and less lonely, then that is a good thing, she said.

Above: Replika’s conversations

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I went up to Kuyda afterward and remarked to her how much it resembled the script of the Academy-Award-winning film Her, with Joaquin Phoenix, a lonely man who fell in love with his AI-driven computer companion. The worst thing that could happen here is similar to the plot of the movie, where one day the bot simply disappears. Kuyda wants to make sure that doesn’t happen, and she is investigating where to take this next. She wanted to make sure that everyone could have a best friend, as she had Roman.

Who we pretend to be

Above: Lucy from Wolves in the Walls shows what it takes to make a virtual being.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

If something was missing at the event, it was the sobering talk about how the technology needs some rules of the road. Several speakers hinted that virtual beings could be creepy, as we’ve seen a lot of science fiction horror stories about AI from to The Terminator to the latest Black Mirror episodes on Netflix.

Since nobody offered this warning, I jumped in myself. On the last panel, I noted how the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare game will be disturbing because it combines the agency of an interactive video game with realistic combat situations and realistic humans. It puts you under intense pressure while deciding whether to shoot civilians — men or women — who may be harmless or running to detonate a bomb. That’s a disturbing level of realism, and I’m not sure that’s my idea of entertainment.

The potential risks of the wrong use of AI — virtual slaves, deep fakes, Frankenstein monsters, and killing machines — are plentiful.

And that, once again, made me think of the moral of the story of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night novel, where the anti-hero is an American spy who does better at his cover job, as a Nazi propagandist, than he performs as a spy. The moral is, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Above: Don’t fall in love. She’s not real.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I said, “I think that’s a wise lesson, not only for users with the agency they have in an open world with virtual beings. You will be able to do things that are there for you to do. But it’s also a lesson for creators of this technology and the decisions they make about how much agency you can have” when you are in control of a virtual being or interacting with one. You have to decide how to best use your hard-earned talent for the good of society when you are thinking about creating a virtual being.

The temptations of the future world of virtual beings are many. But Peter Rojas, partner at Betaworks Ventures, said, “We shouldn’t be afraid to think about legislation and regulations for things that we want to happen.”

He said there are moral, ethical, and responsibility issues that we can discuss for another day. Rojas’ firm funded a company that is working on technology to identify deep fakes, so that journalists, social media firms, or law enforcement can identify attempts at deception when you put someone else’s believable head on a person’s body, making them do things that they didn’t do.

“There is incredible talent working on the different technical problems here on the storytelling side,” Rojas said. “As excited as I am about what’s happening in the field, I also share fears about how this could be used. And where I don’t see a lot of entrepreneurs is in working on new products around technology that will help against the deception.”

I agree with Rojas. Let’s all think this through before we do it.

Credit: Source link

The post The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/the-deanbeat-the-inspiring-possibilities-and-sobering-realities-of-making-virtual-beings/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-deanbeat-the-inspiring-possibilities-and-sobering-realities-of-making-virtual-beings

[trendingnewsb]

5 Crazy Recent News Stories That Didn’t Get Enough Attention

Most people read the headlines of a couple of political stories shared by their most untrustworthy friend on Facebook and feel like they’re pretty well-informed. But the daily large-scale dramas of the Trump administration, mass shootings, Russian agents being assassinated, and the world generally seeming like a montage of newscasts from a ’50s sci-fi movie have overshadowed some utterly insane news that, in a different era, would have dominated headlines for weeks.

So here are five stories that have yet to receive the proper “Wait, what the fuck?!” reaction that they deserve.

5

The Government Said It Has Mysterious Alloys Recovered From UFOs

Two Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters made public some fascinating footage captured by military pilots of an unidentified flying object zipping across the skies, making sharp turns and occasionally hovering like a helicopter, and all with no visible signs of propulsion. With the internet as it is, we should’ve been drowned in stories about how “Independence Day PREDICTED THE FUTURE” or whatever.

The footage is odd, for sure. But it only makes up like 0.5 percent of the craziness within the New York Times article it came from.

Read Next

Get Your Head In The Game With This Xbox Live Gold Offer

The article says that between 2007 and 2012, there was something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program running out of the Pentagon, where at least one employee had the X-Files theme as their ringtone and their co-workers hated them for it. Their task was to investigate mysterious aerial phenomena. While there’s a good chance they had a rubber stamp that read “It’s just another damn drone from Walmart” so they wouldn’t have to write it out all the time, the AATIP’s creator, former Senator Harry Reid, fought to secure the program’s findings, fearing that the United States would be helpless to defend itself from the technologies it discovered. That’s the kind of shit you say to justify keeping Magneto in a plastic cell underground.

Luis Elizondo, the former head of the AATIP, referenced “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” And most of the program’s $22 million budget over five years went to an aerospace technology company owned by a billionaire named Robert Bigelow, who 100 percent believes aliens have visited earth. And that brings us to the pant-shitting part:

“Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”

Ah, OK. So. WHAT THE FUCK. Is it just a rash, or a headache, or are these people District 9-ing and morphing into a new species that should be shot in the head?

Live Science tried debunking some of the article’s claims by asking scientists and professors what they thought about it. Their grand conclusion is that there is no way an alloy could be unidentified. Thanks, guys. Excellent observation. There’s no way there are things out there that we don’t know! is some shit-ass expertise. They didn’t even try explaining the claim that the alloys are physically affecting people who interact with them. And it’s hard to blame them. If I think about it for a second, my brain goes to scary places that make me want to hide under a bed and cry.

The whole article makes it seem like there are a lot of high-ranking government officials who are certain aliens are real, that they have visited us, and we should probably fear what they might try to do to us. So on a day-to-day basis, you should feel a tinge of anxiety about your career, the well-being of your children, whether democracy will hold in America, and maybe also aliens with their poisonous ship junk.

4

A Man Spent Years Building His Own Submarine, Then Allegedly Used It To Brutally Murder A Journalist

Every once in a while, a sensational murder case — usually involving an attractive female victim — will take over the country for months. This case is weirder than every one of those combined, and nobody cared.

Peter Madsen had been building his own 55-foot submarine for years. We even wrote about his efforts back in 2010. Kim Wall was a freelance journalist who was just another in a long line to document Peter’s impressively productive waste of time. This sounds like the start of a quirky indie film.

But it’s fuckin’ not.

She set up an interview and two-hour test ride for August 10th, 2017. After the two hours were up, Wall’s boyfriend got suspicious that he hadn’t heard from her, so he called the police. Madsen was later rescued from his sinking submarine off the southern coast of Copenhagen — without Wall. Unless your passenger reveals their true kraken form, it’s weird to return to shore with fewer people than when you left. Madsen claimed that he dropped her off onshore hours earlier, which doesn’t quite align with the fact that her torso was found at sea days later.

At a pretrial hearing a couple of weeks later, Madsen testified that he buried Wall at sea after she was killed by a blow to the head from a 155-pound submarine hatch. Ah, the classic “She was murdered by the submarine, not me” defense. This did not hold up, as forensics found that her skull had no fractures and her throat had been either cut or strangled when she died. More of her body parts started washing up, and they concluded that her limbs had been forcibly removed with a saw and stuffed into plastic bags that were weighed down with metal pipes. She had also been stabbed 15 times.

Madsen’s trial is underway, and maybe it’s not getting any attention because everybody thinks they already know who did it? If so, doesn’t the fact that a man allegedly spent years building a murder submarine specifically so he could do this seem worthy of notice? What in the hell does it take to capture the national imagination these days?

3

There Is Now Software That Can Put Any Real Person Into Porn Videos, Including You Or Your Mom, Or Both

The future is NOW. Sadly, it’s only for creeps who want to jerk off to fake Scarlett Johansson porn. The technology that’s making it possible is called Deepfake. It’s an AI-driven software that can swap out a person’s face in video footage with someone else’s. Sometimes it’s convincing, other times it looks like their heads are painfully phasing in and out of reality.

That’s how you get Raiders Of The Lost Ark starring Nicolas Cage:

It’s also how you ruin the joke of an SNL sketch starring Nicolas Cage:

But it’s mostly for porn. And like all pursuits popular among sad lonely men, it was very popular on Reddit. Luckily, Reddit banned the Deepfakes subreddit not long after it was created — a bold moral stance for a site that lures you in with memes and then knocks you out with a one-two punch of white supremacy and misogyny. Bans on other big platforms like Discord, Twitter, and even PornHub soon followed, even though the underlying technology still exists for free on the internet.

What’s odd is that once it was banned across multiple sites, we reverted back to a pre-Deepfakes mindset, as if we don’t all live in the prologue of a new world where Donald Trump’s rumored pee tape might surface and the mere existence of Deepfakes would be enough for his supporters to call bullshit. We might one day look back at people on a subreddit putting Taylor Swift’s face on a porn star as innocent compared to a future in which a murderer whose face was clearly captured by security footage gets off scot-free because of the plausible deniability of Deepfakes. It’s a scary future where documented proof could be brushed away with a simple “That’s not me, that’s a fake — a deep fake” *winks at camera*.

Also, it means literally every woman who posts her face to the internet will wind up in a fake porn video / sex tape at some point. So there’s that, too.

2

A “Swatting” Prank Finally Got Someone Killed

You know what’s a real gut-busting joke that always leaves audiences rolling in the aisles? When SWAT teams charge into innocent people’s homes with shotguns and semiautomatic rifles drawn, intent on killing someone if it means stopping a hostage situation, all based on a tip obtained from a prank phone call. My sides! The sheer terror everyone involved must feel is making me pee a little!

If you don’t think it’s funny, then you’re not one of the many teenagers who’ve performed this “prank” because they’ve yet to develop a tangible fear of how utterly screwed their lives will be if the 9-1-1 call is traced back to them. The targets tend to be Twitch streamers, since a SWAT team’s entrance can turn an Overwatch stream into the drug raid scene from Goodfellas. Dozens of celebrities have also been swatted, like Miley Cyrus, Tom Cruise, and Clint Eastwood. Many of these people were lucky to not have been killed. SWAT teams have a long, horrific history of killing innocent people and/or their dogs during raids, in case you needed a cartoonishly ghoulish detail to further turn your stomach.

In an era when the media will drum up a moral panic over everything from violent video games to eating Tide Pods, you’d think this swatting thing would have been the subject of several congressional hearings by now. Especially since in December 2017, a swatting prank ended with someone dead, like every human who’d heard of swatting knew would eventually happen. Some random guys had placed a bet on the outcome of a Call Of Duty: WWII multiplayer match. An argument broke out, and one of the participants decided to get his just desserts by having a SWAT team sent to another person’s house. You know, as one does. The target of the swatting gave a false address. It was the home of a guy named Andrew Finch.

The person who initiated the swatting hired an intermediary to do it for them, Tyler Barriss. He was essentially a swatting hitman with a reputation for calling in swats on behalf of people who don’t want to get caught doing it themselves. And his Twitter handle was “SWauTistic,” because he’s a professional who believes in discretion. Barriss called the Wichita police and reported that someone at Finch’s house had shot their own father in the head and was holding their mother hostage. When Finch answered the knock at his door, a Wichita SWAT officer immediately pulled the trigger. Finch was unarmed and nonviolent. His friends say he didn’t even play video games.

Barriss has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, giving false alarm, and interference with a law enforcement officer. Finch’s mother is suing the Wichita Police Department. And even with a cop’s itchy trigger finger, there’s no denying that if Barriss had instead called and asked if Fincher’s refrigerator was running, he would still be alive today.

Swatting has become a dangerous trend which, unlike the aforementioned Tide Pod eating, is actually happening and is actually harming people. California State Senator Ted Lieu, New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, and Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark have all proposed anti-swatting legislation — all three have been swatted in response.

1

A Scandal Involving Cops Forcing Nude Photos From A Teenage Boy Ended In Suicide

Before I get into it, just know this story deals with the sexual molestation of a minor. So it’s not going to be as rip-roaringly funny as swatting.

17-year-old Trey Sims sent a video of his penis to his 15-year-old girlfriend. In the state of Virginia, this paradoxically made him the creator and victim of child pornography. The detective assigned to the case, David E. Abbott, obtained a warrant to take pictures of Sims’ penis to match it with the penis in the video, as if the police have a dick pic database that analyzes head-to-balls distance and pubic hair density to find a perfect match. Of course, all of this is necessary, since it’s so difficult to identify a dick when it doesn’t have a tattoo or a peg leg. Why that warrant wasn’t contested from the start is a mystery.

Another mystery is why, at one point, Abbott decided to start taking pictures of Sims’ penis with his personal cellphone.

Detective Abbot deemed the pictures insufficient, because somehow Sims couldn’t get erect with cops recording him masturbating. Which they had asked him to do, you know, so the pics would match the ones he was accused of sending. Wait, who is this law supposed to protect, again? Anyway, Abbot asked for a second state-sponsored permission slip to photograph a teenager’s erect penis. Abbott also threatened to force feed Sims erectile dysfunction pills, because he was determined to get a picture of a kid’s erect penis come hell or high water, goddamn it.

It was granted, but then halted after Sims’ lawyers made a big deal about the first dick pic photo shoot in the media, claiming the police had infringed upon Sims’ Fourth Amendment rights. That’s the one that prevents the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures, in essence calling James Madison an idiot for not foreseeing the need to include a line about the sovereignty of teenage dicks in the Constitution.

Charges against Sims were eventually dropped after he served probation. And with that out of the way, it was time to sue Abbott. But the focal point of the lawsuit shifted from Abbott to Claiborne T. Richardson II, the guy who approved both warrants. This shift happened after Abbott shot himself in his goddamned front yard right before county police officers were going to arrest him on suspicion of molesting boys when he was a youth hockey coach. I just want to reiterate here that this story was barely a blip on the national media’s radar.

Sims’ lawsuit was thrown out when a judge said that Richardson and Abbott were immune, since the Fourth Amendment surprisingly makes no mention of cops taking pictures of a teen’s penis. Everyone up and down the chain kept coming up with creative interpretations of the law to protect a dead detective who killed himself to avoid charges of molesting a minor. The common argument was that Abbott was just following orders. But he was the one who asked for the warrant. Has your head exploded yet?

After four years of this shit, the Fourth Circuit Court sided with Sims, finally deciding that teenage penises are in fact covered by the Fourth Amendment. See? Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.

Luis’ brain feels funny after he played with unknown alloys. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

A previous version of the column stated that Andrew Finch was playing Call of Duty and had been directly involved in the online argument before he was swatted. That was incorrect. The text has been changed to reflect that.

Uhhh … have a stress ball or several.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more stories you should have heard about but probably didn’t, check out 29 Pieces Of Good News That Got Choked Out By Trump Stories and 7 Pieces Of Good News About Huge Stories (No One Told You).

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Annotated bibliography

http://calle35.com/robert-walker-c/ 

Colour is Power - Hardcover (book)  Robert Walker, 9 September 2002.

The book “Colour is Power” was made by Robert Walker who was born in‍‍ ‍Montreal, where he‍ ‍studied painting at‍‍ ‍Sir George Williams University. Which later developed an interest in‍‍ ‍street photography, moving to‍ ‍New York City in‍‍ ‍1978.

Robert published four books, three of them with the same name “Colour is Power” and the other called “New York Inside Out” whereupon all of them had been made of photographies from the big city of New York.

I inspired myself in this book for my work using a lot of images from it for my own work, I chose them carefully first then I scanned them and used for my collages. I found this book really interesting in the way that is made because the whole book is made of photography prints without descriptions, just separated in chapters with different colours distinguishing different parts of the city which made it easier to choose where to take images from for my work.

The name “Colour is Power” is really suitable for the book because all the photographs are full of colour, that was a big factor me to choose this book in order to put colour in my work and make the contrast with the monotone world we would have if there were only robots. I used pictures as the billboard I have in my practical work because the colour was strong and vivid, in my work, the billboard has an advert from Coca-Cola with a women with lipstick and a shape of Coca-Cola bottle in her mouth, the colour of her skin is really vivid which influenced me to use it.

Another factor the attracted me in this book was the city environment that contains loads of affairs I could use for my practice as clocks, people, cars, buses among others. The billboards and advertisements in the metropolitan photos in Robert Walker's book inspired me to create my piece in the way they influence people to what they are selling so I used it as if they were selling an Artificial Intelligence world.

The last factor that made me choose this book to take pictures from it and influenced me on my work is the technology all around the city as radio satellites and cellphones that are all connected and relates with my theme of the internet.

The only thing I don’t like about this book is that I would like some descriptions for some of the images to understand the photograph ideas and why he choose to take the picture there at that moment, it would be nice as well to have a contrast from the centre city to the suburbs but overall I was impressed with this book and its quality.

In conclusion I used this book more as a source of resources to make my collages, I took around thirty images from it and printed them in colors and black and white to be able to make a mix and show a contrast between human world (colour) and robot world (dark), the biggest inspiration this book gave me was in colourway because of it strong colours as I said before.

Words: 524

http://sagg.info/event/werner-herzog-lo-and-behold-reveries-of-the-connected-world/  By: ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (documentary) Werner Herzog 27 of October 2016. 98min

"Lo and Behold” is an American documentary film directed by Werner Herzog where he considers the existential impact of Artificial Intelligence, Internet, Robotics, The internet of things and impact on human life.

This documentary starts in California LA where the internet was born where Leonard Kleinrock, internet pioneer from UCLA shows us the room where was created the first computer and the first computer. The documentary follows on into the explanation of the creation and development of the internet along it first years. The name “Lo” from the documentary comes from the firsts word passed from a computer to the other will trying to type log in the computer crashed after "L O” so they named the documentary “Lo and Behold” like what comes after that.

This is divided into ten chapters about different types of technology but the ones I focus myself for my work was the internet of things, the robots and the AI.

About the internet of things Sebastian Thrun gives an interview about the self-driving car where he explains that there is already cars that can drive themselves, a question is asked that is, “what if there is an accident, who do you blame?”, in which Sebastian answered that if an accident happens all cars will be aware of it because it automatically passes the information for all cars, even car not yet “born” and the same type of accident won’t happened again. The car is oriented by dots on GPS transmitted by WiFi showing where people, cars and points of energy are so it doesn’t crash.

In the VIII Chapter Danny Hillis, Computer Scientist comments in the topic of Artificial Intelligence that it may follow the will of people that establish its utility function, in other words, people that program their optimisation options.

That means that AI if programmed by the wrong person can cause a lot of damage, machines are faster our brains.

Sebastian Thrun says in his interview, “We are looking for machines to make things for us but we are changing our moral and what means to be human”. What he means with this is that if we make a robot human, the human word loses value because machines should be just machines and not have feelings or consciousness, we shouldn’t play god.

Danny Hills still ads a comment, “ Computers are the worst enemy of deep critical thinking, we use machines to replace examination of the things they are observing, they don’t understand what they are looking at, they depend on the internet to tell them, they look at the numbers instead of ideas, they fail to understand concepts.” Which means if there is a variable the “computer” is not programmed with it may crash or fail in the service.

With this documentary I was able to see that there are more people worried about AI, and I could understand better the technology development that is so fast that is scary, Sebastian Thrun said something that I found interesting, "if machines develop love for each one probably a dishwasher could fall in love with the washing machine and they would be dating instead of cleaning plates or clothes and I would be angry." And I agree, machines are made to facilitate our life and not for loving each other, they don’t need emotions.

Words: 527

http://calle35.com/robert-walker-c/

Ex Machina (feature film) Alex Garland. 21 of January of 2015. 108min.

“Ex Machina” is a movie directed by Alex Garland with the participation of the main actors Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac.

In the course of the movie, we get to know the code programmer called Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) who won the opportunity to meet the first intelligent robot called Ava. Called meets Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), CEO of the company which is creating the Artificial Intelligence in secret due to the information be very valuable and he wants Caleb to perform the “Turing Test”.

This test is, in “standard interpretation” when the interrogated (Caleb), is given a task which resembles on trying to determine which Ava, in this case, is recognised as a computer or human with some given questions. Usually there is a human and a computer (robot) to compare both answers but in this case, Caleb only met Ava and he could tell it was a robot because of the body full of machinery but the dialogue was like a human. In order to pass the test, the computer must be recognised as human.

The house where Caleb is being hosted looks like a house from the future covered in tech with the wall lined with electricity cables and top automatic security, the doors are open by cards and when the electricity goes off the house gets into lockdown for precaution that no one is able to get inside when that happens.

Caleb has several sessions to test Ava where he is monitored by Nathan that wants to understand if Ava is genuinely capable of thought and consciousness and whether he can relate to Ava despite knowing she is artificial. Along with their sessions, they begin showing feelings for each other and especially the desire of experience the outside world together and with this Ava begins to trigger to power outages that deactivate the surveillance system so that they can talk in private and Ava tells Caleb how bad and lier Nathan is. Caleb starts to be more aware of Nathan and in order of being in love with Ava, when he finds out that Ava is just one more robot prototype and may be turned off after the test, he gets upset and during a power cut in a session with Ava he plans to get Nathan drunk and escape with her looking Nathan inside the house by changing the system and at 10 am Ava would perform a power cut to run.

The plan doesn't go well but at 10 am the doors open with the power cut and Ava escapes, kills Nathan and leaves Caleb lockdown in the house which shows that Ava managed to fake emotions and play with a human emotion in order to escape and still killed her creator.

In this movie I noticed how dangerous might be to create a robot with emotions and intelligence able to lie , that's the things that distinguish us from them and in the movie we can see a robot deceiving and killing a human just to escape and how they can make people fall in love with them if needed and I relate my work to the notion of afraid of artificial intelligence and how they may harm the human being. They can be used as weapons, spies everything if we don't notice it is a robot so it would be extremly dangerous in my opinion and after watching this movie I agree even more.

Words: 549

Ex Machina (feature film) Alex Garland. 21 of January of 2015. 108min.

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (documentary) Werner Herzog 27 of October 2016. 98min

Colour is Power - Hardcover (book)  Robert Walker, 9 September 2002.

[trendingnewsb]

5 Crazy Recent News Stories That Didn’t Get Enough Attention

Most people read the headlines of a couple of political stories shared by their most untrustworthy friend on Facebook and feel like they’re pretty well-informed. But the daily large-scale dramas of the Trump administration, mass shootings, Russian agents being assassinated, and the world generally seeming like a montage of newscasts from a ’50s sci-fi movie have overshadowed some utterly insane news that, in a different era, would have dominated headlines for weeks.

So here are five stories that have yet to receive the proper “Wait, what the fuck?!” reaction that they deserve.

5

The Government Said It Has Mysterious Alloys Recovered From UFOs

Two Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters made public some fascinating footage captured by military pilots of an unidentified flying object zipping across the skies, making sharp turns and occasionally hovering like a helicopter, and all with no visible signs of propulsion. With the internet as it is, we should’ve been drowned in stories about how “Independence Day PREDICTED THE FUTURE” or whatever.

The footage is odd, for sure. But it only makes up like 0.5 percent of the craziness within the New York Times article it came from.

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The article says that between 2007 and 2012, there was something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program running out of the Pentagon, where at least one employee had the X-Files theme as their ringtone and their co-workers hated them for it. Their task was to investigate mysterious aerial phenomena. While there’s a good chance they had a rubber stamp that read “It’s just another damn drone from Walmart” so they wouldn’t have to write it out all the time, the AATIP’s creator, former Senator Harry Reid, fought to secure the program’s findings, fearing that the United States would be helpless to defend itself from the technologies it discovered. That’s the kind of shit you say to justify keeping Magneto in a plastic cell underground.

Luis Elizondo, the former head of the AATIP, referenced “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” And most of the program’s $22 million budget over five years went to an aerospace technology company owned by a billionaire named Robert Bigelow, who 100 percent believes aliens have visited earth. And that brings us to the pant-shitting part:

“Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”

Ah, OK. So. WHAT THE FUCK. Is it just a rash, or a headache, or are these people District 9-ing and morphing into a new species that should be shot in the head?

Live Science tried debunking some of the article’s claims by asking scientists and professors what they thought about it. Their grand conclusion is that there is no way an alloy could be unidentified. Thanks, guys. Excellent observation. There’s no way there are things out there that we don’t know! is some shit-ass expertise. They didn’t even try explaining the claim that the alloys are physically affecting people who interact with them. And it’s hard to blame them. If I think about it for a second, my brain goes to scary places that make me want to hide under a bed and cry.

The whole article makes it seem like there are a lot of high-ranking government officials who are certain aliens are real, that they have visited us, and we should probably fear what they might try to do to us. So on a day-to-day basis, you should feel a tinge of anxiety about your career, the well-being of your children, whether democracy will hold in America, and maybe also aliens with their poisonous ship junk.

4

A Man Spent Years Building His Own Submarine, Then Allegedly Used It To Brutally Murder A Journalist

Every once in a while, a sensational murder case — usually involving an attractive female victim — will take over the country for months. This case is weirder than every one of those combined, and nobody cared.

Peter Madsen had been building his own 55-foot submarine for years. We even wrote about his efforts back in 2010. Kim Wall was a freelance journalist who was just another in a long line to document Peter’s impressively productive waste of time. This sounds like the start of a quirky indie film.

But it’s fuckin’ not.

She set up an interview and two-hour test ride for August 10th, 2017. After the two hours were up, Wall’s boyfriend got suspicious that he hadn’t heard from her, so he called the police. Madsen was later rescued from his sinking submarine off the southern coast of Copenhagen — without Wall. Unless your passenger reveals their true kraken form, it’s weird to return to shore with fewer people than when you left. Madsen claimed that he dropped her off onshore hours earlier, which doesn’t quite align with the fact that her torso was found at sea days later.

At a pretrial hearing a couple of weeks later, Madsen testified that he buried Wall at sea after she was killed by a blow to the head from a 155-pound submarine hatch. Ah, the classic “She was murdered by the submarine, not me” defense. This did not hold up, as forensics found that her skull had no fractures and her throat had been either cut or strangled when she died. More of her body parts started washing up, and they concluded that her limbs had been forcibly removed with a saw and stuffed into plastic bags that were weighed down with metal pipes. She had also been stabbed 15 times.

Madsen’s trial is underway, and maybe it’s not getting any attention because everybody thinks they already know who did it? If so, doesn’t the fact that a man allegedly spent years building a murder submarine specifically so he could do this seem worthy of notice? What in the hell does it take to capture the national imagination these days?

3

There Is Now Software That Can Put Any Real Person Into Porn Videos, Including You Or Your Mom, Or Both

The future is NOW. Sadly, it’s only for creeps who want to jerk off to fake Scarlett Johansson porn. The technology that’s making it possible is called Deepfake. It’s an AI-driven software that can swap out a person’s face in video footage with someone else’s. Sometimes it’s convincing, other times it looks like their heads are painfully phasing in and out of reality.

That’s how you get Raiders Of The Lost Ark starring Nicolas Cage:

It’s also how you ruin the joke of an SNL sketch starring Nicolas Cage:

But it’s mostly for porn. And like all pursuits popular among sad lonely men, it was very popular on Reddit. Luckily, Reddit banned the Deepfakes subreddit not long after it was created — a bold moral stance for a site that lures you in with memes and then knocks you out with a one-two punch of white supremacy and misogyny. Bans on other big platforms like Discord, Twitter, and even PornHub soon followed, even though the underlying technology still exists for free on the internet.

What’s odd is that once it was banned across multiple sites, we reverted back to a pre-Deepfakes mindset, as if we don’t all live in the prologue of a new world where Donald Trump’s rumored pee tape might surface and the mere existence of Deepfakes would be enough for his supporters to call bullshit. We might one day look back at people on a subreddit putting Taylor Swift’s face on a porn star as innocent compared to a future in which a murderer whose face was clearly captured by security footage gets off scot-free because of the plausible deniability of Deepfakes. It’s a scary future where documented proof could be brushed away with a simple “That’s not me, that’s a fake — a deep fake” *winks at camera*.

Also, it means literally every woman who posts her face to the internet will wind up in a fake porn video / sex tape at some point. So there’s that, too.

2

A “Swatting” Prank Finally Got Someone Killed

You know what’s a real gut-busting joke that always leaves audiences rolling in the aisles? When SWAT teams charge into innocent people’s homes with shotguns and semiautomatic rifles drawn, intent on killing someone if it means stopping a hostage situation, all based on a tip obtained from a prank phone call. My sides! The sheer terror everyone involved must feel is making me pee a little!

If you don’t think it’s funny, then you’re not one of the many teenagers who’ve performed this “prank” because they’ve yet to develop a tangible fear of how utterly screwed their lives will be if the 9-1-1 call is traced back to them. The targets tend to be Twitch streamers, since a SWAT team’s entrance can turn an Overwatch stream into the drug raid scene from Goodfellas. Dozens of celebrities have also been swatted, like Miley Cyrus, Tom Cruise, and Clint Eastwood. Many of these people were lucky to not have been killed. SWAT teams have a long, horrific history of killing innocent people and/or their dogs during raids, in case you needed a cartoonishly ghoulish detail to further turn your stomach.

In an era when the media will drum up a moral panic over everything from violent video games to eating Tide Pods, you’d think this swatting thing would have been the subject of several congressional hearings by now. Especially since in December 2017, a swatting prank ended with someone dead, like every human who’d heard of swatting knew would eventually happen. Some random guys had placed a bet on the outcome of a Call Of Duty: WWII multiplayer match. An argument broke out, and one of the participants decided to get his just desserts by having a SWAT team sent to another person’s house. You know, as one does. The target of the swatting gave a false address. It was the home of a guy named Andrew Finch.

The person who initiated the swatting hired an intermediary to do it for them, Tyler Barriss. He was essentially a swatting hitman with a reputation for calling in swats on behalf of people who don’t want to get caught doing it themselves. And his Twitter handle was “SWauTistic,” because he’s a professional who believes in discretion. Barriss called the Wichita police and reported that someone at Finch’s house had shot their own father in the head and was holding their mother hostage. When Finch answered the knock at his door, a Wichita SWAT officer immediately pulled the trigger. Finch was unarmed and nonviolent. His friends say he didn’t even play video games.

Barriss has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, giving false alarm, and interference with a law enforcement officer. Finch’s mother is suing the Wichita Police Department. And even with a cop’s itchy trigger finger, there’s no denying that if Barriss had instead called and asked if Fincher’s refrigerator was running, he would still be alive today.

Swatting has become a dangerous trend which, unlike the aforementioned Tide Pod eating, is actually happening and is actually harming people. California State Senator Ted Lieu, New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, and Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark have all proposed anti-swatting legislation — all three have been swatted in response.

1

A Scandal Involving Cops Forcing Nude Photos From A Teenage Boy Ended In Suicide

Before I get into it, just know this story deals with the sexual molestation of a minor. So it’s not going to be as rip-roaringly funny as swatting.

17-year-old Trey Sims sent a video of his penis to his 15-year-old girlfriend. In the state of Virginia, this paradoxically made him the creator and victim of child pornography. The detective assigned to the case, David E. Abbott, obtained a warrant to take pictures of Sims’ penis to match it with the penis in the video, as if the police have a dick pic database that analyzes head-to-balls distance and pubic hair density to find a perfect match. Of course, all of this is necessary, since it’s so difficult to identify a dick when it doesn’t have a tattoo or a peg leg. Why that warrant wasn’t contested from the start is a mystery.

Another mystery is why, at one point, Abbott decided to start taking pictures of Sims’ penis with his personal cellphone.

Detective Abbot deemed the pictures insufficient, because somehow Sims couldn’t get erect with cops recording him masturbating. Which they had asked him to do, you know, so the pics would match the ones he was accused of sending. Wait, who is this law supposed to protect, again? Anyway, Abbot asked for a second state-sponsored permission slip to photograph a teenager’s erect penis. Abbott also threatened to force feed Sims erectile dysfunction pills, because he was determined to get a picture of a kid’s erect penis come hell or high water, goddamn it.

It was granted, but then halted after Sims’ lawyers made a big deal about the first dick pic photo shoot in the media, claiming the police had infringed upon Sims’ Fourth Amendment rights. That’s the one that prevents the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures, in essence calling James Madison an idiot for not foreseeing the need to include a line about the sovereignty of teenage dicks in the Constitution.

Charges against Sims were eventually dropped after he served probation. And with that out of the way, it was time to sue Abbott. But the focal point of the lawsuit shifted from Abbott to Claiborne T. Richardson II, the guy who approved both warrants. This shift happened after Abbott shot himself in his goddamned front yard right before county police officers were going to arrest him on suspicion of molesting boys when he was a youth hockey coach. I just want to reiterate here that this story was barely a blip on the national media’s radar.

Sims’ lawsuit was thrown out when a judge said that Richardson and Abbott were immune, since the Fourth Amendment surprisingly makes no mention of cops taking pictures of a teen’s penis. Everyone up and down the chain kept coming up with creative interpretations of the law to protect a dead detective who killed himself to avoid charges of molesting a minor. The common argument was that Abbott was just following orders. But he was the one who asked for the warrant. Has your head exploded yet?

After four years of this shit, the Fourth Circuit Court sided with Sims, finally deciding that teenage penises are in fact covered by the Fourth Amendment. See? Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.

Luis’ brain feels funny after he played with unknown alloys. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

A previous version of the column stated that Andrew Finch was playing Call of Duty and had been directly involved in the online argument before he was swatted. That was incorrect. The text has been changed to reflect that.

Uhhh … have a stress ball or several.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more stories you should have heard about but probably didn’t, check out 29 Pieces Of Good News That Got Choked Out By Trump Stories and 7 Pieces Of Good News About Huge Stories (No One Told You).

Has anyone told you we’re on Facebook?

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-crazy-recent-news-stories-that-didnt-get-enough-attention/

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