“A lack of regulation in the U.S. surrounding the use of deepfakes has led to a wave of AI artists washing over streaming platforms, but on Tuesday, Spotify announced it was taking a new step to give users some clarity around whether an artist is an actual human being, or a human-like character created by an algorithm. Starting in mid-September, the company will begin applying an ‘AI Persona’ label to the latter category. ‘Listeners have been clear in telling us that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated,’ the company wrote in its announcement. The new label ‘signals to listeners that an artist’s identity may be AI-generated and does not represent a real person.’ Spotify added in its announcement that the human creators behind AI personas on the platform will have an opportunity to self-disclose through Spotify for Artists. A similar voluntary labeling system was proposed last month by a group of organizations representing musicians and record labels.” | | Fifty-five dollars is what Microsoft 365 charges every couple of months, forever, for software you rent but never own. Office 2024 flips that math. One payment installs the full suite, Word through Access, directly on your Windows PC, running offline with zero cloud dependency and zero renewal date lurking on the calendar. It’s the same programs you already open every day, just purchased instead of leased, with the subscription conversation permanently closed. [Ad] | | “A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days. … There’s something appealing about this ubiquitous pattern, so appealing to me personally that I have it tattooed on my forearm: the silhouette of a tree, with leafless branches reaching upward and roots burrowing downward, almost in mirror image. … Systems that branch in this way are ‘transport networks’: They transport some fluid substance (water, blood, traffic) from every place to a single place (the sea, a heart, a city center). Of the various examples, rivers are especially revealing, I think, since they arise from neither biological evolution nor urban planning, but rather chaotic Earth processes. Yet they obey simple, universal laws…” | | “A study tracking more than 340,000 adults for over a decade found that heavy drinking increased the risk of death regardless of beverage type. At lower levels, however, the picture became more surprising: beer, cider, and spirits were linked to higher mortality, while wine was associated with lower risk. Moderate wine drinkers had a 21% lower risk of cardiovascular death compared with people who rarely or never drank.” | | Koofr does not track your files, does not sell your data, and does not care that half your stuff already lives in Dropbox — it just connects and organizes everything from one place anyway. Pay once for 1TB of encrypted lifetime storage and never see another subscription renewal notice again. It is the rare tech product that seems genuinely uninterested in knowing more about you. [Ad] | | “Just days after an OpenAI model went rogue and hacked into Hugging Face, the company has announced it is pausing work on a separate upcoming model due to concerns that it may have gained ‘critical cyber capabilities.’ The company says its internal evaluations found that the model, dubbed Astra, made ‘significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity’ and crossed the Critical cybersecurity threshold set by its Preparedness Framework. Under the framework, introduced for internal assessment by the AI startup in 2023, ‘a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal.’” | |
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