Winners of the 2023 International Landscape Photographer of the Year Contest My Modern Met
The Atlas of Surveillance Hits Major Milestones: 2023 in Review
EFF: “If you haven’t checked out the Atlas of Surveillance recently, or ever before, you absolutely should. It includes a searchable database and an interactive map, and anyone can download the data for their own projects.
As this collaboration with the University of Nevada Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism (RSJ) finishes its fifth year, we are proud to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone: more than 12,000 data points that document the use of police surveillance nationwide, all collected using open-source investigative techniques, data journalism, and public records requests.”
: A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.
Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.
The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”
Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.
Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.
The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission, or even awareness.
The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures.
