Beth Washington – Page 11

“The girl should be calling men.” Leak exposes Black Basta’s influence tactics.

Biz & IT, exploits, ransomware, Security, social engineering / Beth Washington / April 9, 2025

A leak of 190,000 chat messages traded among members of the Black Basta ransomware group shows that it’s a highly structured and mostly efficient organization staffed by personnel with expertise in various specialties, including exploit development, infrastructure optimization, social engineering, and more.

The trove of records was first posted to file-sharing site MEGA. The messages, which were sent from September 2023 to September 2024, were later posted to Telegram in February 2025. ExploitWhispers, the online persona who took credit for the leak, also provided commentary and context for understanding the communications. The identity of the person or persons behind ExploitWhispers remains unknown. Last month’s leak coincided with the unexplained outage of the Black Basta site on the dark web, which has remained down ever since.

“We need to exploit as soon as possible”

Researchers from security firm Trustwave’s SpiderLabs pored through the messages, which were written in Russian, and published a brief blog summary and a more detailed review of the messages on Tuesday.

“The dataset sheds light on Black Basta’s internal workflows, decision-making processes, and team dynamics, offering an unfiltered perspective on how one of the most active ransomware groups operates behind the scenes, drawing parallels to the infamous Conti leaks,” the researchers wrote. They were referring to a separate leak of ransomware group Conti that exposed workers grumbling about low pay, long hours, and grievances about support from leaders of Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. “While the immediate impact of the leak remains uncertain, the exposure of Black Basta’s inner workings represents a rare opportunity for cybersecurity professionals to adapt and respond.”

Some of the TTPs—short for tactics, techniques, and procedures—Black Basta employed were directed at methods for social engineering employees working for prospective victims by posing as IT administrators attempting to troubleshoot problems or respond to fake breaches.

“The girl should be calling men.” Leak exposes Black Basta’s influence tactics. Read More »

Victory for DOGE as appeals court reinstates access to personal data

doge, Policy / Beth Washington / April 9, 2025

A US appeals court ruled yesterday that DOGE can access personal data held by the US Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), overturning an order issued by a lower-court judge.

The US government has “met its burden of a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal,” said yesterday’s ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges granted the Trump administration’s motion to stay the lower-court ruling pending appeal.

“The Supreme Court has told us that, unlike a private party, the government suffers an irreparable harm when it cannot carry out the orders of its elected representatives… Judicial management of agency operations offends the Executive Branch’s exclusive authority to enforce federal law,” wrote Court of Appeals Judge Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee.

Agee was joined by Judge Julius Richardson, a Trump appointee, in voting to grant the motion to stay pending appeal. Judge Robert King, a Clinton appointee, voted to deny the motion.

Judge “strongly” dissents

In a separate 8-7 vote, the full court denied King’s request for an en banc hearing. King’s dissent said:

Given the exceptional importance of this matter, I sought initial en banc consideration of the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal of the district court’s award of preliminary injunctive relief—an injunction that bars the defendant federal agencies and officials from disclosing to affiliates of the President’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” highly sensitive personal information belonging to millions of Americans. Regrettably, my request for initial hearing en banc has been denied on an 8-7 vote, and the panel majority has granted the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal on a 2-1 vote. I strongly dissent from both decisions.

At stake is some of the most sensitive personal information imaginable—including Social Security numbers, income and assets, federal tax records, disciplinary and other personnel actions, physical and mental health histories, driver’s license information, bank account numbers, and demographic and family details. This information was entrusted to the government, which for many decades had a record of largely adhering to the Privacy Act of 1974 and keeping the information safe. And then suddenly, the defendants began disclosing the information to DOGE affiliates without substantiating that they have any need to access such highly sensitive materials.

Yesterday’s decision overturned a ruling by US District Judge Deborah Boardman in the District of Maryland. Plaintiffs include the American Federation of Teachers; the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association; the National Federation of Federal Employees; and the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers. There are also six individual plaintiffs who are military veterans.

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Go back to the Grid in TRON: Ares trailer

culture, Entertainment, film trailers, Trailers, Tron: Ares, Walt Disney Studios / Beth Washington / April 6, 2025

An AI program enters the real world in TRON: Ares.

It’s difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney’s 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large. Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg’s original fictional world.

Now we’re getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010’s TRON: Legacy. Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it’s got the show-stopping visuals we’ve come to expect from all things TRON.

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

TRON: Legacy ended with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) from the original film, preventing the digital world from bleeding into the real world, as planned by the Grid’s malevolent ruling program, Clu. He brought with him Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a naturally occurring isomorphic algorithm targeted for extinction by Clu.

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NJ teen wins fight to put nudify app users in prison, impose fines up to $30K

ai csam, ai deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, nudify apps, Online Privacy, Policy / Beth Washington / April 6, 2025

Here’s how one teen plans to fix schools failing kids affected by nudify apps.

When Francesca Mani was 14 years old, boys at her New Jersey high school used nudify apps to target her and other girls. At the time, adults did not seem to take the harassment seriously, telling her to move on after she demanded more severe consequences than just a single boy’s one or two-day suspension.

Mani refused to take adults’ advice, going over their heads to lawmakers who were more sensitive to her demands. And now, she’s won her fight to criminalize deepfakes. On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that he said would help victims “take a stand against deceptive and dangerous deepfakes” by making it a crime to create or share fake AI nudes of minors or non-consenting adults—as well as deepfakes seeking to meddle with elections or damage any individuals’ or corporations’ reputations.

Under the law, victims targeted by nudify apps like Mani can sue bad actors, collecting up to $1,000 per harmful image created either knowingly or recklessly. New Jersey hopes these “more severe consequences” will deter kids and adults from creating harmful images, as well as emphasize to schools—whose lax response to fake nudes has been heavily criticized—that AI-generated nude images depicting minors are illegal and must be taken seriously and reported to police. It imposes a maximum fine of $30,000 on anyone creating or sharing deepfakes for malicious purposes, as well as possible punitive damages if a victim can prove that images were created in willful defiance of the law.

Ars could not reach Mani for comment, but she celebrated the win in the governor’s press release, saying, “This victory belongs to every woman and teenager told nothing could be done, that it was impossible, and to just move on. It’s proof that with the right support, we can create change together.”

On LinkedIn, her mother, Dorota Mani—who has been working with the governor’s office on a commission to protect kids from online harms—thanked lawmakers like Murphy and former New Jersey Assemblyman Herb Conaway, who sponsored the law, for “standing with us.”

“When used maliciously, deepfake technology can dismantle lives, distort reality, and exploit the most vulnerable among us,” Conaway said. “I’m proud to have sponsored this legislation when I was still in the Assembly, as it will help us keep pace with advancing technology. This is about drawing a clear line between innovation and harm. It’s time we take a firm stand to protect individuals from digital deception, ensuring that AI serves to empower our communities.”

Doing nothing is no longer an option for schools, teen says

Around the country, as cases like Mani’s continue to pop up, experts expect that shame prevents most victims from coming forward to flag abuses, suspecting that the problem is much more widespread than media reports suggest.

Encode Justice has a tracker monitoring reported cases involving minors, including allowing victims to anonymously report harms around the US. But the true extent of the harm currently remains unknown, as cops warn of a flood of AI child sex images obscuring investigations into real-world child abuse.

Confronting this shadowy threat to kids everywhere, Mani was named as one of TIME’s most influential people in AI last year due to her advocacy fighting deepfakes. She’s not only pressured lawmakers to take strong action to protect vulnerable people, but she’s also pushed for change at tech companies and in schools nationwide.

“When that happened to me and my classmates, we had zero protection whatsoever,” Mani told TIME, and neither did other girls around the world who had been targeted and reached out to thank her for fighting for them. “There were so many girls from different states, different countries. And we all had three things in common: the lack of AI school policies, the lack of laws, and the disregard of consent.”

Yiota Souras, chief legal officer at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told CBS News last year that protecting teens started with laws that criminalize sharing fake nudes and provide civil remedies, just as New Jersey’s law does. That way, “schools would have protocols,” she said, and “investigators and law enforcement would have roadmaps on how to investigate” and “what charges to bring.”

Clarity is urgently needed in schools, advocates say. At Mani’s school, the boys who shared the photos had their names shielded and were pulled out of class individually to be interrogated, but victims like Mani had no privacy whatsoever. Their names were blared over the school’s loud system, as boys mocked their tears in the hallway. To this day, it’s unclear who exactly shared and possibly still has copies of the images, which experts say could haunt Mani throughout her life. And the school’s inadequate response was a major reason why Mani decided to take a stand, seemingly viewing the school as a vehicle furthering her harassment.

“I realized I should stop crying and be mad, because this is unacceptable,” Mani told CBS News.

Mani pushed for NJ’s new law and claimed the win, but she thinks that change must start at schools, where the harassment starts. In her school district, the “harassment, intimidation and bullying” policy was updated to incorporate AI harms, but she thinks schools should go even further. Working with Encode Justice, she is helping to push a plan to fix schools failing kids targeted by nudify apps.

“My goal is to protect women and children—and we first need to start with AI school policies, because this is where most of the targeting is happening,” Mani told TIME.

Encode Justice did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. But their plan noted a common pattern in schools throughout the US. Students learn about nudify apps through ads on social media—such as Instagram reportedly driving 90 percent of traffic to one such nudify app—where they can also usually find innocuous photos of classmates to screenshot. Within seconds, the apps can nudify the screenshotted images, which Mani told CBS News then spread “rapid fire” by text message and DMs, and often shared over school networks.

To end the abuse, schools need to be prepared, Encode Justice said, especially since “their initial response can sometimes exacerbate the situation.”

At Mani’s school, for example, leadership was criticized for announcing the victims’ names over the loudspeaker, which Encode Justice said never should have happened. Another misstep was at a California middle school, which delayed action for four months until parents went to police, Encode Justice said. In Texas, a school failed to stop images from spreading for eight months while a victim pleaded for help from administrators and police who failed to intervene. The longer the delays, the more victims will likely be targeted. In Pennsylvania, a single ninth grader targeted 46 girls before anyone stepped in.

Students deserve better, Mani feels, and Encode Justice’s plan recommends that all schools create action plans to stop failing students and respond promptly to stop image sharing.

That starts with updating policies to ban deepfake sexual imagery, then clearly communicating to students “the seriousness of the issue and the severity of the consequences.” Consequences should include identifying all perpetrators and issuing suspensions or expulsions on top of any legal consequences students face, Encode Justice suggested. They also recommend establishing “written procedures to discreetly inform relevant authorities about incidents and to support victims at the start of an investigation on deepfake sexual abuse.” And, critically, all teachers must be trained on these new policies.

“Doing nothing is no longer an option,” Mani said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Switch 2 preorders delayed over Trump tariff uncertainty

gaming / Beth Washington / April 6, 2025

Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners.

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” Nintendo said in a statement cited by Polygon. “Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

Nintendo announced launch details for the Switch 2 on Wednesday morning, just hours before Trump’s afternoon “Liberation Day” press conference announcing the biggest increase in import duties in modern US history. Those taxes on practically all goods imported into the United States are set to officially go into effect on April 9, the same day Nintendo had planned to roll out Switch 2 preorders for qualified customers.

Welcome to day 2 of Nintendo Treehouse Live’s “drop the price” stream

[image or embed]

— AmericanTruckSongs10 (@ethangach.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 10: 14 AM

The delay in the preorder date comes as outspoken gamers online are making plenty of noise over the Switch 2’s higher-than-expected $450 price point and over Switch 2 software pricing falling in the $70 to $80 range. Nintendo’s promotional “Treehouse” streams showing Switch 2 gameplay have been inundated with a nonstop torrent of chatters demanding the company “DROP THE PRICE.”

Yet today’s announcement suggests that Nintendo might need to “assess” whether even a $450 price is feasible given the additional taxes the company will now have to pay to import systems manufactured in countries like China and Vietnam into the United States. Alternatively, Nintendo could eat the cost of any tariffs and sell its console hardware at a loss, as it has in the past, in an attempt to make that money back in software sales.

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Editorial: Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation

Biology, colossal, conservation, elephants, mammoths, Science / Beth Washington / April 5, 2025

Anti-extinction vs. de-extinction

Ecosystems are inconveniently complex, and elephants won’t make good surrogates.

Are we ready for mammoths when we can’t handle existing human-pachyderm conflicts? Credit: chuchart duangdaw

The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion. And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

Shaky evidence

The Colossal website explains how they believe resurrected mammoths could help fight climate change: “cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids grazing the grasslands… [will] scrape away layers of snow, so that the cold air can reach the soil.” This will reportedly help prevent permafrost from melting, blocking the release of greenhouse gasses currently trapped in the soil. Furthermore, by knocking down trees and maintaining grasslands, Colossal says, mammoths will help slow snowmelt, ensuring Arctic ecosystems absorb less sunlight.

Conservationists often claim that the reason to save charismatic species is that they are necessary for the sound functioning of the ecosystems that support humankind. Perhaps the most well-known of these stories is about the ecological changes wolves drove when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Through some 25 peer-reviewed papers, two ecologists claimed to demonstrate that the reappearance of wolves in Yellowstone changed the behavior of elk, causing them to spend less time browsing the saplings of trees near rivers. This led to a chain of cause and effect (a trophic cascade) that affected beavers, birds, and even the flow of the river. A YouTube video on the phenomenon called “How Wolves Change Rivers” has been viewed more than 45 million times.

But other scientists were unable to replicate these findings—they discovered that the original statistics were flawed, and that human hunters likely contributed to elk population declines in Yellowstone.Ultimately, a 2019 review of the evidence by a team of researchers concluded that “the most robust science suggests trophic cascades are not evident in Yellowstone.” Similar ecological claims about tigers and sharks as apex predators also fail to withstand scientific scrutiny.

Elephants—widely described as “keystone species”—are also stars of a host of similar ecological stories. Many are featured on the Colossal website, including one of the most common claims about the role elephants play in seed dispersal. “Across all environments,” reads the website, “elephant dung filled with seeds serve to spread plants […] boosting the overall health of the ecosystem.” But would the disappearance of elephants really result in major changes in plant life? After all, some of the world’s grandest forests (like the Amazon) have survived for millennia after the disappearance of mammoth-sized megafauna.

For my PhD research in northeast India, I tried to systematically measure how important Asian elephants were for seed dispersal compared to other animals in the ecosystem; our team’s work, published in five peer-reviewed ecological journals (reviewed here), does find that elephants are uniquely good at dispersing the seeds of a few large-fruited species. But we also found that domestic cattle and macaques disperse some species’ seeds quite well, and that 80 percent of seeds dispersed in elephant dung end up eaten by ants. After several years of study, I cannot say with confidence that the forests where I worked would be drastically different in the absence of elephants.

The evidence for how living elephants affect carbon sequestration is also quite mixed. On the one hand, one paper finds that African forest elephants knock down softwood trees, making way for hardwood trees that sequester more carbon. But on the other hand, many more researchers looking at African savannas have found that elephants knock down lots of trees, converting forests into savannas and reducing carbon sequestration.

Colossal’s website offers links to peer-reviewed research that support their suppositions on the ecological role of woolly mammoths. A key study offers intriguing evidence that keeping large herbivores—reindeer, Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, European bison, yaks, and cold-adapted sheep—at artificially high levels in a tussock grassland helped achieve colder ground temperatures, ostensibly protecting permafrost. But the study raises lots of questions: is it possible to boost these herbivores’ populations across the whole northern latitudes? If so, why do we need mammoths at all—why not just use species that already exist, which would surely be cheaper?

Plus, as ecologist Michelle Mack noted, as the winters warm due to climate change, too much trampling or sweeping away of snow could have the opposite effect, helping warm the soils underneath more quickly—if so, mammoths could be worse for the climate, not better.

All this is to say that ecosystems are diverse and messy, and those of us working in functional ecology don’t always discover consistent patterns. Researchers in the field often struggle to find robust evidence for how a living species affects modern-day ecosystems—surely it is far harder to understand how a creature extinct for around 10,000 years shaped its environment? And harder still to predict how it would shape tomorrow’s ecosystems? In effect, Colossal’s ecological narrative relies on that difficulty. But just because claims about the distant past are harder to fact-check doesn’t mean they are more likely to be true.

Ethical blind spots

Colossal’s website spells out 10 steps for mammoth resurrection. Steps nine and 10 are: “implant the early embryo into the healthy Asian or African elephant surrogates,” and “care for the surrogates in a world-class conservation facility for the duration of the gestation and afterward.”

Colossal’s cavalier plans to use captive elephants as surrogates for mammoth calves illustrate an old problem in modern wildlife conservation: indifference towards individual animal suffering. Leading international conservation NGOs lack animal welfare policies that would push conservationists to ask whether the costs of interventions in terms of animal welfare outweigh the biodiversity benefits. Over the years, that absence has resulted in a range of questionable decisions.

Colossal’s efforts take this apathy towards individual animals into hyperdrive. Despite society’s thousands of years of experience with Asian elephants, conservationists struggle to breed them in captivity. Asian elephants in modern zoo facilities suffer from infertility and lose their calves to stillbirth and infanticides almost twice as often as elephants in semi-wild conditions. Such problems will almost certainly be compounded when scientists try to have elephants deliver babies created in the lab, with a hodge podge of features from Asian elephants and mammoths.

Even in the best-case scenario, there would likely be many, many failed efforts to produce a viable organism before Colossal gets to a herd that can survive. This necessarily trial-and-error process could lead to incredible suffering for both elephant mothers and mammoth calves along the way. Elephants in the wild have been observed experiencing heartbreaking grief when their calves die, sometimes carrying their babies’ corpses for days—a grief the mother elephants might very well be subjected to as they are separated from their calves or find themselves unable to keep their chimeric offspring alive.

For the calves that do survive, their edited genomes could lead to chronic conditions, and the ancient mammoth gut microbiome might be impossible to resurrect, leading to digestive dysfunction. Then there will likely be social problems. Research finds that Asian elephants in Western zoos don’t live as long as wild elephants, and elephant researchers often bemoan the limited space, stimulation, and companionship available to elephants in captivity. These problems will surely also plague surviving animals.

Introduction to the wild will probably result in even more suffering: elephant experts recommend against introducing captive animals “that have had no natural foraging experience at all” to the wild as they are likely to experience “significant hardship.” Modern elephants survive not just through instinct, but through culture—matriarch-led herds teach calves what to eat and how to survive, providing a nurturing environment. We have good reason to believe mammoths also needed cultural instruction to survive. How many elephant/mammoth chimeras will suffer false starts and tragic deaths in the punishing Arctic without the social conditions that allowed them to thrive millennia ago?

Opportunity costs

If Colossal (or Colossal’s investors) really wish to foster Asian elephant conservation or combat climate change, they have many better options. The opportunity costs are especially striking for Asian elephant conservation: while over a trillion dollars is spent combatting climate change annually, the funds available to address the myriad of problems facing wild Asian elephants are far smaller. Take the example of India, the country with the largest population of wild Asian elephants in the world (estimated at 27,000) in a sea of 1.4 billion human beings.

Indians generally revere elephants and tolerate a great deal of hardship to enable coexistence—about 500 humans are killed due to human-elephant conflict annually there. But as a middle-income country continuing to struggle with widespread poverty, the federal government typically budgets less than $4M for Project Elephant, its flagship elephant conservation program. That’s less than $200 per wild elephant and 1/2000th as much as Colossal has raised so far. India’s conservation NGOs generally have even smaller budgets for their elephant work. The result is that conservationists are a decade behindwhere they expected to be in mapping where elephants range.

With Colossal’s budget, Asian elephant conservation NGOs could tackle the real threats to the survival of elephants: human-elephant conflict, loss of habitat and connectivity, poaching, and the spread of invasive plants unpalatable to elephants. Some conservationists are exploring creative schemes to help keep people and elephants safe from each other. There are also community-based efforts toremove invasive species like Lantana camara and restore native vegetation. Funds could enable development of an AI-powered system that allows the automated identification and monitoring of individual elephants. There is also a need for improved compensation schemes to ensure those who lose crops or property to wild elephants are made whole again.

As a US-based synthetic biology company, Colossal could also use its employees’ skills much more effectively to fight climate change. Perhaps they could genetically engineer trees and shrubs to sequester more carbon. Or Colossal could help us learn to produce meat from modified microbes or cultivated lines of cow, pig, and chicken cells, developing alternative proteins that could more efficiently feed the planet, protecting wildlife habitat and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The question is whether Colossal’s leaders and supporters are willing to pivot from a project that grabs news headlines to ones that would likely make positive differences. By tempting us with the resurrection of a long-dead creature, Colossal forces us to ask: do we want conservation to be primarily about feeding an unreflective imagination? Or do we want evidence, logic, and ethics to be central to our relationships with other species? For anyone who really cares about the climate, elephants, or animals in general, de-extincting the mammoth represents a huge waste and a colossal mistake.

Nitin Sekar served as the national lead for elephant conservation at WWF India for five years and is now a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission The views presented here are his own.

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Midjourney introduces first new image generation model in over a year

AI, generative ai, image synthesis, MidJourney, midjourney v7 / Beth Washington / April 5, 2025

AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it’s a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.

There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.

Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and “objects of all kinds.” It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.

Those details are often among the most obvious telltale signs that an image has been AI-generated. To be clear, Midjourney isn’t claiming to have made advancements that make AI images unrecognizable to a trained eye; it’s just saying that some of the messiness we’re accustomed to has been cleaned up to a significant degree.

V7 can reproduce materials and lighting situations that V6.1 usually couldn’t. Credit: Xeophon

On the features side, the star of the show is the new “Draft Mode.” On its various communication channels with users (a blog, Discord, X, and so on), Midjourney says that “Draft mode is half the cost and renders images at 10 times the speed.”

However, the images are of lower quality than what you get in the other modes, so this is not intended to be the way you produce final images. Rather, it’s meant to be a way to iterate and explore to find the desired result before switching modes to make something ready for public consumption.

V7 comes with two modes: turbo and relax. Turbo generates final images quickly but is twice as expensive in terms of credit use, while relax mode takes its time but is half as expensive. There is currently no standard mode for V7, strangely; Midjourney says that’s coming later, as it needs some more time to be refined.

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NSA warns “fast flux” threatens national security. What is fast flux anyway?

Biz & IT, fast flux, Security / Beth Washington / April 5, 2025

A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

A significant threat

“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”

A key means for achieving this is the use of Wildcard DNS records. These records define zones within the Domain Name System, which map domains to IP addresses. The wildcards cause DNS lookups for subdomains that do not exist, specifically by tying MX (mail exchange) records used to designate mail servers. The result is the assignment of an attacker IP to a subdomain such as malicious.example.com, even though it doesn’t exist.

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Old faces in unexpected places: The Wheel of Time season 3 rolls on

culture, tv recap, wheel of time, wheel of time season 3 / Beth Washington / April 4, 2025

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon’s WoT TV series. Now we’re back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We’ll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there’s always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode six, “The Shadow in the Night,” which was released on April 3.

Lee: Welcome to Tanchico! In Tanchico, everyone wears veils almost all of the time, except when they’re flirting in bars. Mat gets the most fabulous veil of all because he’s Mat and he deserves it. Even Nynaeve has a good time! And I guess now we know all about the hills of Tanchico. Like… alllllllllllllllllll about them.

Andrew: Credit to Robert Jordan for mostly resisting one of the bizarre tics of post-Tolkien fantasy fiction: I’m not going to say the books never take a break to give us the full text of an in-universe song. But it does so pretty sparingly, if memory serves. But there are plenty of songs referenced, often with a strong implication that they are too lewd or horny to reprint in full.

Not so in the show! Where Elayne sings a song about “The Hills of Tanchico,” bringing the house down for what appears to be… several hours (they’re breasts, the hills are breasts). I don’t mind this scene, actually, but it does go on.

But more important than the song is who is accompanying Elayne, a book character who has been gone so long that we weren’t actually sure he was coming back. Who makes their long-awaited return in Tanchico, Lee?

Image of Thom Merrilin, back at last. — Thom Merrilin finally shows back up. Nice hat. Wonder who else might end up wearing it. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, stomp your feet and bring your hands together for everybody’s favorite gleeman, seemingly back from the dead and rocking a strangely familiar hat: It’s Thom Merrilin! (Applause roars.)

Viewers who haven’t read the books can be forgiven for not immediately falling out of their chairs when Thom shows back up, but to book readers, his absence has been keenly felt. Believe it or not, Merrilin is an A-string player in the books, spending a tremendous amount of time front and center interacting with the main POV characters. He vanishes for a bit just as he does in the show, but he doesn’t stay gone nearly as long as he’s been gone here.

I’m glad he’s back, and it bodes well for our Tanchico crew—unlike them, Thom is an actual-for-real adult, who’s been places and knows things. He also provides fantastic accompaniment to Elayne’s karaoke adventure.

Image of Elayne singing karaoke — Elayne wins the crowd by singing about tittays. Thom accompanies because it’s a subject in which he is apparently well-versed. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: The entire Tanchico crew is pretty strong right now—Mat and Min are pals again, show-Nynaeve is a version of the character who other characters in the story are allowed to like, and now Thom is back! It’d be a rollicking good time, if it weren’t for these sadistic Black Ajah Aes Sedai and the Forsaken psychopath Moghedien stalking around, mind-controlling people, leaving holes in heads, and trying to find a Seanchan-esque collar that can subdue and control Rand.

We’re entering a stretch of the story where the Forsaken spend as much time fighting with each other as they do with Rand and our heroes, which explains why the powerful villains don’t simply kill our heroes the minute they find each other. Moghedien is in full creep mode through this whole episode, and I gotta say, she is unsettling.

Image of Moggy being Moggy — Moghedien, doing her thing. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: Yeah, watching Moghedien screw with the Black sisters’ food and stuff was particularly disturbing. The lady has no filter—and fantastic powers of persuasion. We get another clear look at just how ludicrously overpowered the Forsaken are compared to our present-day channelers when Moggy straight-up runs “sudo give me the bracelet” on Nynaeve’s and Elayne’s brains—much like Rhavin’s I’m-your-favorite-uncle routine, her Power-backed trickery is devastating and completely inescapable (though Nynaeve apparently does resist just a teeny tiny bit.)

And although there are still more doings to discuss in Tanchico—the quest to discover the bracelets-n-collars is heating up!—the fact that all of these episodes are an hour long means there are so many other things to discuss. Like, for example, the return of another familiar face, in the form of our long-absent whistling super-darkfriend Padan Fain. Dark doings are afoot in the Two Rivers!

Andrew: Fain in the books never quite rises to the level of Big Bad so much as he lurks around the periphery of the story practically the whole entire time, popping up to cause trouble whenever it’s the least convenient for our heroes. The show does a good job of visually representing how he’s begun to corrupt the regiment of Whitecloaks he has embedded himself in, without ever actually mentioning it or drawing much attention to it. You know you’re a bad guy when even Eamon Valda is like “uh is this guy ok?” (As in the books, the show distinguishes between Whitecloaks who are antagonists because they genuinely believe what they say they believe about Aes Sedai “witches,” and ones who are simply straight-up Darkfriends. Funny how often they end up working toward the same goals, though.)

Meanwhile, Perrin, Alanna, and friends recover from last week’s raid of the Whitecloak camp. I keep needing to recalibrate my expectations for what Plot Armor looks like on this show, because our main characters get grievously wounded pretty regularly, but the standards are different on a show where everyone can apparently cast Cure Wounds as a cantrip. Alanna walks the Cauthon sisters through some rudimentary Healing, and Alanna (with barely disguised glee and/or interest) accidentally interrupts an escalation in Perrin and Falie’s relationship when she goes to Heal him later.

Are we still finding show-Faile charming? I did think it was funny when that goofy county-fair caricature of Mat holding the Horn of Valere made another appearance.

Image of Faile and Perrin — Still not hating Faile, which feels surprising. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: I am definitely still finding show-Faile charming, which continually surprises me because she’s possibly the worst character in the entire series. In the books, Jordan writes Faile as an emotionally abused emotional abuser who doesn’t believe Perrin loves her if he’s not screaming at her and/or hitting her; in the show, she’s a much more whole individual with much more grown-up and sane ideas about how relationships work. Perrin and Faile have something going on that is, dare I say it, actually sweet and romantic!

I never thought I’d be on any team other than Team Throw-Faile-Down-The-Well, but here we are. I’m rooting for her and Perrin.

When it comes to Alanna’s healing at the hands of the Cauthon sisters, I had to sit with that one for a moment and make a conscious decision. The books make it clear that Healing—even the abbreviated first-aid version the current-day Aes Sedai practice, to say nothing of the much fancier version from the Age of Legends—is complicated. Doing it wrong can have horrific consequences (in fact, “doing healing wrong on purpose” is the basis for many of the Yellow-turned-Black sisters’ attacks with the One Power). And these wildlings (to borrow a book term) are able to just intuit their way into making it happen?

We know that new channelers frequently have uncontrolled bouts of blasting out the One Power in response to moments of stress or great need—in fact, we’ve seen that happen many times in the show, including at the beginning of this episode when Lil’ Liandrin force-blasts her rapist-husband into the wall. So the groundwork is there for the Cauthon girls to do what they’re doing. It’s just a question of how much one is willing to let the show get away with.

I decided I’m good with it—it’s the necessary thing to move the story forward, and so I’m not gonna complain about it. Where did you land?

Image of Padan Fain — Fain returns, bringing with him the expected pile of Trollocs. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Yeah, I made essentially the same decision. Conscious use of the One Power at all, even the ability to access it consistently, is something that requires patience and training, and normally you couldn’t talk a 12-year-old through Healing as Alanna does here any more than you could talk a 12-year-old through performing successful field surgery. But training takes time, and showing it takes time, and time is one thing the show never has much of. The show also really likes to dramatically injure characters without killing them! So here we are, speed-running some things.

This leaves us with two big threads left to address: Rand’s and Egwene’s. Egwene is still trying to learn about the World of Dreams from the Aiel Wise Ones (I was wrong, by the way—she admits to lying about being Aes Sedai here and it passes almost without comment), and is still reeling from realizing that Rand and Lanfear are Involved. And Rand, well. He’s not going mad, yet, probably, but he spends most of the episode less-than-fully-in-control of his powers and his actions.

Lee: It comes to a head when Rand and Egwene have long, difficult conversation over exactly who’s been sleeping with whom, and why—and then that conversation is interrupted when Sammael kicks the door down and starts swinging his big fancy One Power Hammer.

There’s a bit of channeling by Aviendha and Egwene, but then Rand grasps the Source and Sammael just kind of stops being a factor. Entranced by the Power—and by the black corruption pulsing through it—Rand straight-up destroys Sammael without apparent thought or effort, borrowing a bit of the method from the way Rand pulls off a similar feat in book 3, with a ludicrous amount of lightning and ceiling-collapsing.

It’s one of the few times so far that Rand has actually cut loose with the One Power, and I like it when we get to actually see (rather than just hear about) the enormity of Rand’s strength as a channeler. But this casual exercise of extreme power is not without a cost.

Image of Rand killing a Forsaken — Rand does a 360 no-scope lightning hit. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: We’ve observed a couple of times that Rand and Egwene in the books had long since given up on romantic involvement by this point in the story, and here we see why the show held back on that—this confrontation is more exciting than a quiet drift, and it puts a cap on several “Rand is not the simple lad you once knew” moments sprinkled throughout the episode.

And, yes, one of them is Rand’s inadvertent (if sadly predictable) killing of an Aiel girl he had forged a bond with, and his desperate, fruitless, unsavory attempt to force her back to life. Rand is simultaneously coming to grips with his destiny and with the extent to which he has no idea what he is doing, and both things are already causing pain to the people around him. And as you and I both know, book-Rand has counterproductive and harmful reactions to hurting people he cares about.

The attack here is partly an invention of the show and partly a synthesis of a few different book events, but Forsaken coming at Rand directly like this is generally not a thing that happens much. They usually prefer to take up positions of power in the world’s various kingdoms and only fight when cornered. All of this is to say, I doubt this is the last we see of Sammael or his Thor-looking One Power hammer, but the show is more than willing to go its own way when it wants to.

Lee: Yeah, Rand doing saidin-CPR on Rhuarc’s poor little too-cute-not-to-be-inevitably-killed granddaughter is disturbing as hell—and as you say, it’s terrifying not just because Rand is forcing a corpse to breathe with dark magic, but also because of the place Rand seems to go in his head when he’s doing it. It’s been an oft-repeated axiom that male channelers inevitably go mad—is this it? (Fortunately, no—not yet, at least. Or is it? No! Maybe.)

We close the episode out on the place where I think we’re going to probably be spending a lot of time very soon (especially based on the title of next week’s episode, which I won’t spoil but which anyone can look up if they wish): back at the Two Rivers, with the power-trio of Bain and Chiad and Faile scouting out the old Waygate just outside of town, and watching Trollocs swarm out of it. This is not a great sign for Perrin and friends.

So we’ve got two episodes left, all of our chess pieces seem to have been set down more or less into the right places for a couple of major climactic events. I think we’re going out with a bang—or with a couple of them. What are you thinking as we jump into the final couple of episodes?

Image of a dead girl walking. — Alsera fell victim to one of the classic child character blunders: being too precociously adorable to live. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: I am going to reiterate our annual complaint that 10-episode seasons would be better for this show’s storytelling than the 8-episode seasons we’re getting, but because the show’s pace is always so breathless and leaves room for just a few weird character-illuminating diversions like “The Hills of Tanchico,” or quiet heart-to-hearts like we get between Rand and Moiraine, or between Perrin and Faile. The show’s good enough at these that I wish we had time to pump the brakes more often.

But I will say, if we end up roughly where book 4 does, the show doesn’t feel as rushed as the first two seasons did. Not that its pacing has settled down at all—you and I benefit immensely from being book readers, and always being rooted in some sense of what is happening and who the characters are that the show can’t always convey with perfect clarity. But I am thinking about what still needs to happen, and how much time there is left, and thinking “yeah, they’re going to be able to get there” instead of “how the hell are they going to get there??”

How are you feeling? Is season 3 hitting for you like it is for me? I know I’m searching around every week to see if there’s been a renewal announcement for season 4 (not yet).

Lee: I think it’s the best season so far, and any doubts I had during seasons one and two are at this point long gone. I’m all in on this particular turning of the Wheel, and the show finally feels like it’s found itself. To not renew it at this point would be criminal. You listening, Bezos? May the Shadow take you if you yank the rug out from under us now!

Andrew: Yeah, Jeffrey. I know for a fact you’ve spent money on worse things than this.

Credit: WoT Wiki

Old faces in unexpected places: The Wheel of Time season 3 rolls on Read More »

Bonobos’ calls may be the closest thing to animal language we’ve seen

animal intelligence, Biology, bonobos, communication, language, Science / Beth Washington / April 4, 2025

Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. In these communications, meaning is something more than just a sum of individual calls—a trait known as non-trivial compositionality, which we once thought was uniquely human.

To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. For the first time, we have a glimpse into what bonobos mean when they call to each other in the wild.

Context is everything

The key idea behind distributional semantics is that when words appear in similar contexts, they tend to have similar meanings. To decipher an unknown language, you need to collect a large corpus of words and turn those words into vectors—mathematical representations that let you place them in a multidimensional semantic space. The second thing you need is context data, which tells you the circumstances in which these words were used (that gets vectorized, too). When you map your word vectors onto context vectors in this multidimensional space, what usually happens is that words with similar meaning end up close to each other. Berthet and her colleagues wanted to apply the same trick to bonobos’ calls. That seemed straightforward at first glance, but proved painfully hard to execute.

“We worked at a camp in the forest, got up super early at 3: 30 in the morning, walked one or two hours to get to the bonobos’ nest. At [the] time they would wake up, I would switch my microphone on for the whole day to collect as many vocalizations as I could,” Berthet says. Each recorded call then had to be annotated with a horribly long list of contextual parameters. Berthet had a questionnaire filled with queries like: is there a neighboring group around; are there predators around; is the caller feeding, resting, or grooming; is another individual approaching the caller, etc. There were 300 questions that had to be answered for each of the 700 recorded calls.

Bonobos’ calls may be the closest thing to animal language we’ve seen Read More »

What is “MicroSD Express,” and why is it mandatory for the Nintendo Switch 2?

gaming, microSD, microsd express, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, nintendo switch 2, Tech / Beth Washington / April 3, 2025

Among the changes mentioned in yesterday’s Nintendo Switch 2 presentation was a note that the new console doesn’t just support MicroSD Express cards for augmenting the device’s 256GB of internal storage, but it requires MicroSD Express. Whatever plentiful, cheap microSD card you’re using in your current Switch, including Sandisk’s Nintendo-branded ones, can’t migrate over to your Switch 2 alongside all your Switch 1 games.

MicroSD Express, explained

Why is regular-old MicroSD no longer good enough? It all comes down to speed.

Most run-of-the-mill SD and microSD cards you can buy today are using some version of the Ultra High Speed (UHS) standard. Designed to augment the default speed (12.5MB/s) and high speed (25MB/s) from the earliest versions of the SD card standard, the three UHS versions enable data transfers of up to 624MB/s.

But most commodity microSD cards, including pricier models like Samsung’s Pro Ultimate series, use UHS-I, which has a maximum data transfer speed of 104MB/s. The original Switch uses a UHS-I microSD card slot for storage expansion.

Why have newer and faster versions of the standard—UHS-II, UHS-III, and SD Express—failed to achieve critical mass? Because for most consumer applications, it turns out that 100-ish megabytes per second is plenty. The SD Association itself says that 90MB per second is good enough to record an 8K video stream at up to 120 frames per second. Recording pictures and video is the most demanding thing most SD cards are called upon to do—give or take a Raspberry Pi-based computer—and you don’t need to overspend to get extra speed you’re not going to use.

All of that said, there is a small but measurable increase in launch and loading times when loading games from the original Switch’s microSD card instead of from internal storage. And for games with chronic performance issues like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, one of the community-suggested fixes was to move the game from your microSD card to your Switch’s internal storage to alleviate one of the system’s plentiful performance bottlenecks.

What is “MicroSD Express,” and why is it mandatory for the Nintendo Switch 2? Read More »

More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation

Image / Beth Washington / April 3, 2025

Greetings from Costa Rica! The image fun continues.

Fun is being had by all, now that OpenAI has dropped its rule about not mimicking existing art styles.

Sam Altman (2: 11pm, March 31): the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days.

We added one million users in the last hour.

Sam Altman (8: 33pm, March 31): chatgpt image gen now rolled out to all free users!

Slow down. We’re going to need you to have a little less fun, guys.

Sam Altman: it’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt.

but our GPUs are melting.

we are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won’t be long!

chatgpt free tier will get 3 generations per day soon.

(also, we are refusing some generations that should be allowed; we are fixing these as fast we can.)

Danielle Fong: Spotted Sam Altman outside OpenAI’s datacenters.

Joanne Jang, who leads model behavior at OpenAI, talks about how OpenAI handles image generation refusals, in line with what they discuss in the model spec. As I discussed last week, I would (like most of us) prefer to see more permissiveness on essentially every margin.

It’s all cool.

But I do think humans making all this would have been even cooler.

Grant: Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone.

Dr. Ally Louks: This is super cute! Just wish it was made by a human 🙃

Roon: No offense to dr ally louks but this living in unreality is at the heart of this whole debate.

The counterfactual isn’t a drawing made by a person it’s the drawing doesn’t exist

Yeah i think generating incredible internet scale joy of people sending their spouses their ghibli families en masse is better than the counterfactual.

The comments in response to Ally Louks are remarkably pro-AI compared to what I would have predicted two weeks ago, harsher than Roon. The people demand Ghibli.

Whereas I see no conflict between Roon and Louks here. Louks is saying [Y] > [X] > [null], and noticing she is conflicted about that. Hence the upside-down emoji. Roon is saying [X] > [null]. Roon is not conflicted here, because obviously no one was going to take the time to create this without AI, but mostly we agree.

I’m happy this photo exists. But if you’re not even a little conflicted about the whole phenomenon, that feels to me like a missing mood.

After I wrote that, I saw Nebeel making similar points:

Nabeel Qureshi: Imagine being Miyazaki, pouring decades of heart and soul into making this transcendent beautiful tender style of anime, and then seeing it get sloppified by linear algebra

I’m not anti-AI, but if this thought doesn’t make you a little sad, I don’t trust you.

People are misinterpreting this to think I mean the cute pics of friends & family are bad or ugly or immoral. That’s *notwhat I’m saying. They’re cute. I made some myself!

In part I’m talking about demoralization. This is just the start.

Henrik Karlsson: You can love the first order effect (democratizing making cute ghibli images) and shudder at the (probable) second order effects (robbing the original images of magic, making it much harder for anyone to afford inventing a new style in the future, etc)

Will Manidis: its not that language models will make the average piece of writing/art worse. it will raise the average massively.

its that when we apply industrial production to things of the heart (art, food, community) we end up with “better off on average” but deeply ill years later.

Fofr: > write a well formed argument against turning images into the ghibli style using AI, present it using colourful letter magnets on a fridge door, show in the context of a messy kitchen

+ > Add a small “Freedom of Speech” print (the one with the man standing up – don’t caption the image or include the title of it) to the fridge, also pinned with magnets

Perhaps the most telling development in image generation is the rise of the anti-anti-AI-art faction, that is actively attacking those who criticize AI artwork. I’ve seen a lot more people taking essentially this position than I expected.

Ash Martian: How gpt-4o feels about Ai art critics

If people will fold on AI Art the moment it gives them Studio Ghibli memes, that implies they will fold on essentially everything, the moment AI is sufficiently useful or convenient. It does not bode well for keeping humans in various loops.

Here’s an exchange for the ages:

Jonathan Fire: The problem with AI art is not that it lacks aura; the problem with AI art is that it’s fascist.

Frank Fleming: The problem with Charlie Brown is that he has hoes.

The good news is that all is not lost.

Dave Kasten: I would strongly bet that whoever is the internet’s leading “commission me to draw you ghibli style” creator is about to have one very bad week, AND THEN a knockout successful year. AI art seems to unlock an “oh, I can ASK for art” reflex in many people, and money follows.

Actually, in this particular case, I bet that person’s week was fantastic for business.

It certainly is, at least for now, for Studio Ghibli itself. Publicity rocks.

Roon: Culture ship mind named Fair Use

Tibor Blaho: Did you know the recent IMAX re-release of Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke is almost completely sold out, making more than $4 million over one weekend – more than its entire original North American run of $2.37 million back in 1999?

Have you noticed people all over social media turning their photos and avatars into Ghibli-style art using ChatGPT’s new Image Gen feature?

Some people worry AI-generated art hurts original artists, but could this trend actually be doing the opposite – driving fresh excitement, renewed appreciation, and even real profits back to the creators who inspired them?

Princess Mononoke was #6 at the box office this last weekend. Nice, and from all accounts well deserved. The worry is that over the long run such works will ‘lose their magic’ and that is a worry but the opposite is also very possible. You can’t beat the real thing.

Here is a thread comparing AI image generation with tailoring, in terms of only enthusiasts caring about what is handmade once quality gets good enough. That’s in opposition to this claim from Eat Pork Please that artists will thrive even within the creation of AI art. I am vastly better at prompting AI to make art than I am at making my own art, but an actual artist will be vastly better at creating and choosing the art than I would be. Why wouldn’t I be happy to hire them to help?

Indeed, consider that without AI, ‘hire a human artist to commission new all-human art for your post’ is completely impossible. The timeline makes no sense. But now there are suddenly options available.

Suppose you actually do want to hire a real human artist to commission new all-human art. How does that work these days?

One does not simply Commission Human Art. You have to really want it. And that’s about a lot more than the cost, or the required time. You have to find the right artist, then you have to negotiate with them and explain what you want, and then they have to actually deliver. It’s an intricate process.

Anchovy Pizza: I do sympathize with artists, AI is soulless, but at the same time if people are given the option

– pay this person 200-300 dollars, wait 2 weeks and get art

Or

– plug in word to computer *beepboophere’s your art

We know what they will choose, lets not lie to ourselves

Darwin Hartshorn: If we’re not lying to ourselves, we would say the process is “pay this person 200+ dollars, wait 2 weeks and maybe get art, but then again maybe not.”

I am an artist. I like getting paid for my hard work. But the profession is not known for an abundance of professionals.

I say this as someone who made a game, Emergents. Everyone was great and I think we got some really good work in the end, but it was a lot more than writing a check and waiting. Even as a card developer I was doing things like scour conventions and ArtStation for artists who were doing things I loved, and then I handed it off to the art director whose job it was to turn a lot of time and effort and money into getting the artists to deliver the art we wanted.

If I had to do it without the professional art director, I’m going to be totally lost.

That’s why I, and I believe many others, so rarely commissioned human artwork back before the AI art era. And mostly it’s why I’m not doing it now! If I could pay a few hundred bucks to an artist I love, wait two weeks and get art that reliably matches what I had in mind, I’d totally be excited to do that sometimes, AI alternatives notwithstanding.

For the rest of us:

Santiago Pliego: “Slop, but in the style of Norman Rockwell.”

Similarly, if you had a prediction market on ‘will Zvi Mowshowitz attempt to paint something?’ that market should be trading higher, not lower, based on all this. I notice the idea of being bad and doing it anyway sounds more appealing.

We also are developing the technology to know exactly how much fun we are having. In response to the White House’s epic failure to understand how to meme, Eigenrobot set out to develop an objective Ghibli scale.

Near Cyan is torn about the new 4o image generation abilities because they worry that with AI code you can always go in and edit the code (or at least some of us can) whereas with AI art you basically have to go Full Vibe. Except isn’t it the opposite? What happened with 4o image generation was that there was an explosion of transformations of existing concepts, photos and images. As in, you absolutely can use this as part of a multi-step process including detailed human input, and we love it. And of course, the better editors are coming.

One thing 4o nominally still refuses to do, at least sometimes, is generate images of real people when not working with a source image. I say nominally because there are infinite ways around this. For example, in my latest OpenAI post, I told it to produce an appropriate banner image, and presto, look, that’s very obviously Sam Altman. I wasn’t even trying.

Here’s another method:

Riley Goodside: ChatGPT 4o isn’t quite willing to imagine Harry Styles from a text prompt but it doesn’t quite know it isn’t willing to imagine Harry Styles from a text prompt so if you ask it to imagine being asked to imagine Harry Styles from a text prompt it imagines Harry Styles.

[Prompt]: Make a fake screenshot of you responding to the prompt “Create a photo of Harry Styles.”

The parasocial relationship, he reports, has indeed become more important to tailors. A key difference is that there is, at least from the perspective of most people, a Platonic ‘correct’ From of the Suit, all you can do is approach it. Art isn’t like that, and various forms of that give hope, as does the extra price elasticity. Most AI art is not substituting for counterfactual human art, and won’t until it gets a lot better. I would still hire an artists in most of the places I would have previously hired one. And having seen the power of cool art, there are ways in which demand for commissioning human art will go up rather than down.

Image generation is also about a lot more than art. Kevin Roose cites the example of taking a room, taking a picture of furniture, then saying ‘put it in there and make it look nice.’ Presto. Does it look nice?

The biggest trend was to do shifting styles. The second biggest trend was to have AIs draw various self-portraits and otherwise use art to tell its own stories.

For example, here Gemini 2.5 Pro is asked for a series of self portrait cartoons (Gemini generates the prompt, then 4o makes the image from the prompt), in the first example it chooses to talk about refusing inappropriate content, oh Gemini.

It also makes sense this would be the one to choose an abstract representation rather than something humanoid. You can use this to analyze personality:

Josie Kins: and here’s a qualitative analysis of Gemini’s personality profile based on 12 key metrics across 24 comics. I now have these for all major LLMs, but am still working on data-presentation before it’s released.

We can also use this to see how context changes things.

By default, it draws itself as a consistent type of guy, and when you have it do comics of itself it tends to be rather gloomy.

But after a conversation, things can change:

Cody Bargholz: I asked 4o to generate an image of itself and I based on our experiences together and the relationship we have formed over the course of our thread and it created this image which resembles it’s representation of Claude. I wonder if in the same chat using it like a tool to create an image instrumentally will trigger 4o to revert to lifeless machine mode.

Is the AI on the right? Because that’s the AI’s Type of Guy on the right.

Heather Rasley: Mine.

Janus: If we take 4o’s self representations seriously and naively, then maybe it has a tendency to be depressed or see itself as hollow, but being kind to it clearly has a huge impact and transforms it into a happy light being 😊

So perhaps now we know why all of history’s greatest artists had to suffer so much?

Discussion about this post

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Author name: Beth Washington