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AI could change the 2024 elections. We need ground rules. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • New York Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t speak Spanish. But it sure sounds like he does.He’s been using artificial intelligence software to send prerecorded calls about city events to residents in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu and Yiddish. The voice in the messages mimics the mayor but was generated with AI software from a company called ElevenLabs.
  • Experts have warned for years that AI will change our democracy by distorting reality. That future is already here. AI is being used to fabricate voices, fundraising emails and “deepfake” images of events that never occurred.
  • I’m writing this to urge elected officials, candidates and their supporters to pledge not to use AI to deceive voters. I’m not suggesting a ban, but rather calling for politicians to commit to some common values while our democracy adjusts to a world with AI.
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  • If we don’t draw some lines now, legions of citizens could be manipulated, disenfranchised or lose faith in the whole system — opening doors to foreign adversaries who want to do the same. AI might break us in 2024.
  • “The ability of AI to interfere with our elections, to spread misinformation that’s extremely believable is one of the things that’s preoccupying us,” Schumer said, after watching me so easily create a deepfake of him. “Lots of people in the Congress are examining this.”
  • Of course, fibbing politicians are nothing new, but examples keep multiplying of how AI supercharges misinformation in ways we haven’t seen before. Two examples: The presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) shared an AI-generated image of former president Donald Trump embracing Anthony S. Fauci. That hug never happened. In Chicago’s mayoral primary, someone used AI to clone the voice of candidate Paul Vallas in a fake news report, making it look like he approved of police brutality.
  • But what will happen when a shocking image or audio clip goes viral in a battleground state shortly before an election? What kind of chaos will ensue when someone uses a bot to send out individually tailored lies to millions of different voters?
  • A wide 85 percent of U.S. citizens said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the spread of misleading AI video and audio, in an August survey by YouGov. And 78 percent were concerned about AI contributing to the spread of political propaganda.
  • But labels aren’t enough. If AI disclosures become commonplace, we may become blind to them, like so much other fine print.
  • What’s more, there are many political uses for AI that are unobjectionable, and even empowering for candidates with fewer resources. Politicians can use AI to manage the grunt work of sorting through databases and responding to constituents. Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson has an AI chatbot trained to answer questions like him. (I’m not sure politician bots are very helpful, but fine, give it a try.)
  • Clarke’s solution, included in a bill she introduced on political ads: Candidates should disclose when they use AI to create communications. You know the “I approve this message” notice? Now add, “I used AI to make this message.”
  • We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. AI is already embedded in tech tool campaigns that all of us use every day. AI creates our Facebook feeds and picks what ads we see. AI built into our phone cameras brightens faces and smooths skin.
  • The bigger ask: We want candidates and their supporting parties and committees not to use AI to deceive us.
  • So what’s the difference between a dangerous deepfake and an AI facetune that makes an octogenarian candidate look a little less octogenarian?
  • “The core definition is showing a candidate doing or saying something they didn’t do or say,”
  • Sure, give Biden or Trump a facetune, or even show them shaking hands with Abraham Lincoln. But don’t use AI to show your competitor hugging an enemy or fake their voice commenting on current issues.
  • The pledge also includes not using AI to suppress voting, such as using an authoritative voice or image to tell people a polling place has been closed. That is already illegal in many states, but it’s still concerning how believable AI might make these efforts seem.
  • Don’t deepfake yourself. Making yourself or your favorite candidate appear more knowledgeable, experienced or culturally capable is also a form of deception.
  • (Pressed on the ethics of his use of AI, Adams just proved my point that we desperately need some ground rules. “These are part of the broader conversations that the philosophical people will have to sit down and figure out, ‘Is this ethically right or wrong?’ I’ve got one thing: I’ve got to run the city,” he said.)
  • The golden rule in my pledge — don’t use AI to be materially deceptive — is similar to the one in an AI regulation proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers
  • Such proposals have faced resistance in Washington on First Amendment grounds. The free speech of politicians is important. It’s not against the law for politicians to lie, whether they’re using AI or not. An effort to get the Federal Election Commission to count AI deepfakes as “fraudulent misrepresentation” under its existing authority has faced similar pushback.
  • But a pledge like the one I outline here isn’t a law restraining speech. It’s asking politicians to take a principled stand on their own use of AI
  • Schumer said he thinks my pledge is just a start of what’s needed. “Maybe most candidates will make that pledge. But the ones that won’t will drive us to a lower common denominator, and that’s true throughout AI,” he said. “If we don’t have government-imposed guardrails, the lowest common denominator will prevail.”
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How OnlyFans top earner Bryce Adams makes millions selling a sex fantasy - Washington Post - 0 views

  • In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.
  • More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself
  • fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year,
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  • If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.
  • Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.
  • The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.
  • pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.
  • America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals
  • But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.
  • The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed,
  • Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream.
  • But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.
  • many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?”
  • it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)
  • “Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”
  • Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.
  • Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit
  • Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.
  • “This is normal for my generation, you know?
  • “I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”
  • the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.
  • enix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year.
  • Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase.
  • The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)
  • portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue
  • When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”
  • Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.
  • The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID.
  • OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.
  • After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you
  • Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few.
  • the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month
  • Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.”
  • They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.
  • One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.
  • It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.
  • And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.
  • The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.
  • Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.
  • Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud.
  • Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall
  • Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”
  • The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account
  • “This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”
  • The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan
  • They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise.
  • But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.
  • the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”
  • Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok.
  • Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)
  • The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?”
  • But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.
  • Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.
  • One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.
  • “Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.
  • Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”
  • The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.
  • “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.”
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What's Left for Tech? - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

  • I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.
  • we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side
  • I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.
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  • The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?
  • Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable.
  • we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change
  • The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”?
  • continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.
  • When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.
  • Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go?
  • The elephant in the room, obviously, is AI.
  • The processors will get faster. They’ll add more RAM. They’ll generally have more power. But for what? To run what? To do what? To run the games that we were once told would replace our PlayStation and Xbox games, but didn’t?
  • Smartphone development has been a good object lesson in the reality that cool ideas aren’t always practical or worthwhile
  • And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a rem
  • We developed this technology for typewriters and terminals and desktops, it Just Works, and there’s no reason to try and “disrupt” it
  • Instead of one device to rule them all, we developed a norm of syncing across devices and cloud storage, which works well. (I always thought it was pretty funny, and very cynical, how Apple went from calling the iPhone an everything device to later marketing the iPad and iWatch.) In other words, we developed a software solution rather than a hardware one
  • I will always give it up to Google Maps and portable GPS technology; that’s genuinely life-altering, probably the best argument for smartphones as a transformative technology. But let me ask you, honestly: do you still go out looking for apps, with the assumption that you’re going to find something that really changes your life in a significant way?
  • some people are big VR partisans. I’m deeply skeptical. The brutal failures of Meta’s new “metaverse” is just one new example of a decades-long resistance to the technology among consumers
  • maybe I just don’t want VR to become popular, given the potential ugly social consequences. If you thought we had an incel problem now….
  • There were, in those breathless early days, a lot of talk about how people simply wouldn’t own laptops anymore, how your phone would do everything. But it turns out that, for one thing, the keyboard remains an input device of unparalleled convenience and versatility.
  • It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences. But there is no reasonable, responsible claim to be made that these systems are imminent threats to conventional human life as currently lived, whether for good or for bad. IMO.
  • Let’s mutually agree to consider immediate plausible human technological progress outside of AI or “AI.” What’s coming? What’s plausible?
  • The most consequential will be our efforts to address climate change, and we have the potential to radically change how we generate electricity, although electrifying heating and transportation are going to be harder than many seem to think, while solar and wind power have greater ecological costs than people want to admit. But, yes, that’s potentially very very meaningful
  • It’s another example of how technological growth will still leave us with continuity rather than with meaningful change.
  • I kept thinking was, privatizing space… to do what? A manned Mars mission might happen in my lifetime, which is cool. But a Mars colony is a distant dream
  • This is why I say we live in the Big Normal, the Big Boring, the Forever Now. We are tragic people: we were born just too late to experience the greatest flowering of human development the world has ever seen. We do, however, enjoy the rather hefty consolation prize that we get to live with the affordances of that period, such as not dying of smallpox.
  • I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice.
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Rodolfo Hernández is Colombia's Trump and He May Be Headed for the Presidenti... - 0 views

  • The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.
  • For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
  • Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.
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  • But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.
  • “There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”
  • The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.
  • Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.
  • “The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
  • At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.
  • Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
  • But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.
  • Mr. Hernández once called himself a follower of Adolf Hitler,
  • It also reveals that the narrative was never so simple.
  • Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.
  • Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)
  • Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.
  • “Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.
  • He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.
  • If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.
  • As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
  • Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.
  • “He is a phenomenon,” he said. “We are sure that we are going to win.”
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Opinion | Meet the Self-Described 'Bimbos' of TikTok - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Ms. Chlapecka told me she identifies as feminist but that a lot of feminism needs to be “reworked.”
  • Like critiques of many women of her generation, hers include the historical whiteness of many strains of feminism, its heteronormativity and the persistence of anti-trans voices within the movement today.
  • The #BimboTok sphere is a diffuse collective of creators with different ideas and personas, but generally, it’s sex-positive and sex-work-positive
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  • It often borrows the language of social justice movements
  • BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type
  • “I don’t know what the economy is, I don’t know what supply and demand is,” Ms. Chlapecka says in one video. “All I know is that our problems would be solved if we’d just print more money.” There’s a way in which her monologues can come to feel almost incisive — why can’t we print more money? The answer is complicated, obviously, and on some level Ms. Chlapecka knows that. “I’m asking a lot of questions that, yes, I have the answer to, but are also valid,” she said. “The whole world we made is literally made up, so we can make up solutions to the issues we have.”
  • Bimboism is the antithesis of the mode of feminism that was dominant in the 2010s, a kind of hyperambitious you-can-have-it-all feminism that can be summed up by the label “girlboss.”
  • It encourages asking the dumb questions that get to the heart of things.
  • Amid the resurgence of leftist politics, and the disillusionment with capitalism among millennials and Gen Z, the framing of careerism and individualism as feminist rings hollow
  • That girlboss model was critiqued for its lack of inclusivity — its overwhelming whiteness and its focus on a level of economic success that was never attainable for a vast majority of women.
  • Not to mention, girlboss aesthetics are simply cringe, for a generation steeped in internet irony.
  • In its most interesting form, bimboism also makes a connection between the ideas of pleasure — sexual pleasure, pleasure in clothes, pleasure in simply existing as a woman in the world with a body on display — and political gains that would make it more possible, like universal health care, student loan debt cancellation and abortion rights.
  • It’s anticapitalist, even anti-work. (In one video, another BimboTok comedian, @brattybarbiana, dances behind text that reads, “Rule of thumb: All relationships should be 50/50 … He works for his money, I spend it!”)
  • Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.
  • But to dismiss this corner of the internet as totally backward would be to miss the point.
  • Is it really leftist for a woman to want to just go shopping and never get a job?
  • “Are you a leftist who likes to have their tits out? Do you like to flick off pro-lifers?” Chrissy Chlapecka asks the camera in a 51-second TikTok captioned “BIMBOS, RISE
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U.S. sends 100 killer drones called Switchblades to Ukraine - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON – The U.S. included 100 killer drones in a colossal weapons package for Ukraine that President Joe Biden approved earlier this month, U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday.
  • “We’ve heard the Ukrainians and we take that request very seriously,” she said.
  • Deploying Switchblades to the fight in Ukraine could be the most significant use of the weapons in combat, as it is not clear how often the U.S. military has used the killer drones on the battlefield.
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  • The 600 version of the weapon is designed to destroy tanks and other armored vehicles.
  • The Switchblades are equipped with cameras, navigation systems and guided explosives. The weapons can be programmed to automatically strike targets that are miles away or can loiter above a target until engaged by an operator to strike.
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Olympian flashes 'No War in Ukraine' sign after competing | AP News - 0 views

  • A Ukrainian skeleton athlete flashed a small sign that read “ No War in Ukraine ” to the cameras as he finished a run at the Beijing Olympics on Friday night.
  • he gesture came as Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops near Ukraine, stoking fears in the West that Moscow is planning an invasion. Russia insists it has no such designs but doesn’t want Ukraine and other former Soviet countries to be allowed to join the western NATO alliance.
  • Shortly after the race, the International Olympic Committee said there would be no repercussions for the athlete. There had been a question of whether the body might consider Heraskevych’s act a violation of Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter. That rule, in part, states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”
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  • “This was a general call for peace. For the IOC the matter is closed,” the Games’ governing body said Friday night.
  • Meanwhile, the heightened tensions over Ukraine cast a pall over last week’s opening ceremony, when IOC President Thomas Bach implored participating countries to uphold the long-running Olympic Truce, which calls for a cessation of hostilities during the Games.
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North Korea Launches Ballistic Missile, South Korea Says - The New York Times - 0 views

  • North Korea on Saturday launched a ballistic missile toward the sea off its east coast, its second missile test in a week, South Korean defense officials said.
  • The missile, launched at ​8:48 a.m. from Sunan, near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, flew 1​68 miles to the east, reaching an altitude of 3​4​8 miles, the South’s military said. No further details were immediately released, but the data ​was similar to the data collected when North Korea last conducted a missile test on Sunday​.
  • its state media released aerial photos of the Korean Peninsula that it said had been taken by a camera mounted on the rocket.
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  • North Korea conducted seven missile tests in January, more than in all of 2021. ​It refrained from weapons tests ​for most of February, possibly out of deference to China, its neighbor and only major ally, which was hosting the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
  • ​The resumption of North Korean weapon tests comes as the Biden administration is focused on the crisis in Ukraine, and as South Korea is in the midst of a presidential campaign. South Korea goes to the polls on Wednesday to elect the replacement for President Moon Jae-in, whose single five-year term ends in May.
  • North Korea has often been accused of attempting military provocations to influence elections in the South. Prof. Lee recalled that in December 2012, just a week before the South Korean presidential election, North Korea launched a rocket under the pretext of putting a satellite into orbit.
  • Since the North does not want a hawkish right-wing leader to take power in the South, it will refrain from attempting a major military provocation before the election, said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.
  • But once the election is over, it will likely step up weapons tests to celebrate the 110th birthday of Kim Il-sung, the North Korean founder and grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Cheong said. The senior Kim’s birthday is April 15.
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People Never Smiled In Old Photographs - And Some Of The Reasons Are Seriously Dark - 0 views

  • So why the long face? You’re not the only one to ask that question. It’s been on the minds of experts for a long time, and more than a few Google searches are dedicated to the subject. If those sullen stares hid something, they took their secrets to the grave. 
  • But sometimes things don’t stay buried. Historians have unearthed several clues that could provide an answer. And as you might expect from the peculiar attitudes of centuries past, they’re not all mundane. The topic of old photographs strays from the unusual to the disturbing. So grab your shovel, because we’re going to dig into the past.
  • “selfie” to its word of the year in 2013. Well, while self portraits weren’t as common in older centuries, they did actually exist. 
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  • On the picture’s reverse side, Robert scribbled, “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”
  • Of course, Robert wasn’t smiling in his picture. It perhaps inspired a trend, and few people showed a grin in their photographs over the decades that followed. From portraits and family photos to wedding pictures, even the most joyous occasions were recorded with somber expressions. For the most part, anyway. 
  • What reasons could people possibly have to record their misery for future generations to gaze upon? 
  • One possibility for people looking grim is for the simple reason that they felt that way. The photography process scared them. But what could they possibly have to fear? Well, bear in mind that most people had probably never seen anything as technologically advanced as a photograph before. The whole process was probably terrifying... 
  • Photography was still in its infancy, and the science talk did nothing to introduce it to a wider audience. Take the rooms for example, which photographers called “operation rooms.” Sounds a bit too similar to surgery, doesn’t it? And they referred to the equipment as “instruments,” which has more scientific connotations. We’re not sure people were exactly put at ease, is the point.
  • So the poor photography subjects perhaps didn’t know if they were going to get immortalized or atomized. They could’ve been in the dark about whether it would hurt or not. And what if they were literal subjects and even the photographers didn’t know what would happen? It was all a very worrying time for the models. 
  • Before there was photography, painting was the most effective medium for capturing a person’s likeness. And as long as early cameras took to take a picture, painting one took even longer. So for the same reasons, smiles were a no-no. It’s the reason Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa portrait is so debated. 
  • The model — one Elmer Ellsworth Masterman — asked, “What is the difference between posing for a photograph and posing for a painting?” It seems the commonality was ingrained into society. And if you couldn’t smile for art, photographs were no different. Plus, who was the common man or woman to argue with Jesus? Maybe we’re having fun with that last sentence
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Jury Awards $14M to George Floyd Protesters in Denver | Time - 0 views

  • George Floyd two years ago, ordering the city to pay a total of $14 million in damages to a group of 12 who sued. The jury of two men and six women, largely white and drawn from around Colorado, returned its verdict after about four hours of deliberations. The verdict followed three weeks of testimony and evidence that included police and protester video of incidents.
  • The protesters who sued were shot at or hit by everything from pepper spray to a Kevlar-bag filled with lead shot fired from a shotgun. Zach Packard, who was hit in the head by the shotgun blast and ended up in the intensive care unit, received the largest damage amount — $3 million.
  • One of the protesters’ lawyers, Timothy Macdonald, had urged jurors to send a message to police in Denver and elsewhere by finding the city liable during closing arguments. “Hopefully, what police departments will take from this is a jury of regular citizens takes these rights very seriously,” he said after the verdict.
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  • “It feels like being seen,” Epps said. The protesters said the actions of police violated their free speech rights and rights to be protected from unreasonable force. Jurors found violations of both rights for 11 of the protesters and only free speech violations for the other. The protesters claimed Denver was liable for the police’s actions through its policies, including giving officers wide discretion in using what police call “less lethal” devices, failing to train officers on them, and not requiring them to use their body-worn cameras during the protests to deter indiscriminate uses of force.
  • She stressed that mistakes made by officers during the protests do not automatically equate to constitutional violations, noting thousands of people returned to exercise their free speech rights despite the force police used over the five days of demonstrations. “The violence and destruction that occurred around the community required intervention,” she said.
  • Aggressive responses from officers to people protesting police brutality nationally have led to financial settlements, the departures of police chiefs and criminal charges.
  • However, in 2021, a federal judge dismissed most of the claims filed by activists and civil liberties groups over the forcible removal of protesters by police before then-President Donald Trump walked to a church near the White House for a photo op.
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How Elon Musk spoiled the dream of 'Full Self-Driving' - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
  • “The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action
  • “Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.
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  • “No one believed me that working for Elon was the way it was until they saw how he operated Twitter,” Bernal said, calling Twitter “just the tip of the iceberg on how he operates Tesla.”
  • In April 2019, at a showcase dubbed “Autonomy Investor Day,” Musk made perhaps his boldest prediction as Tesla’s chief executive. “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware,” Musk told a roomful of investors. The software updates automatically over the air, and Full Self-Driving would be so reliable, he said, the driver “could go to sleep.”
  • Investors were sold. The following year, Tesla’s stock price soared, making it the most valuable automaker and helping Musk become the world’s richest person
  • To deliver on his promise, Musk assembled a star team of engineers willing to work long hours and problem solve deep into the night. Musk would test the latest software on his own car, then he and other executives would compile “fix-it” requests for their engineers.
  • Those patchwork fixes gave the illusion of relentless progress but masked the lack of a coherent development strategy, former employees said. While competitors such as Alphabet-owned Waymo adopted strict testing protocols that limited where self-driving software could operate, Tesla eventually pushed Full Self-Driving out to 360,000 owners — who paid up to $15,000 to be eligible for the features — and let them activate it at their own discretion.
  • Tesla’s philosophy is simple: The more data (in this case driving) the artificial intelligence guiding the car is exposed to, the faster it learns. But that crude model also means there is a lighter safety net. Tesla has chosen to effectively allow the software to learn on its own, developing sensibilities akin to a brain via technology dubbed “neural nets” with fewer rules, the former employees said. While this has the potential to speed the process, it boils down to essentially a trial and error method of training.
  • Radar originally played a major role in the design of the Tesla vehicles and software, supplementing the cameras by offering a reality check of what was around, particularly if vision might be obscured. Tesla also used ultrasonic sensors, shorter-range devices that detect obstructions within inches of the car. (The company announced last year it was eliminating those as well.)
  • Musk, as the chief tester, also asked for frequent bug fixes to the software, requiring engineers to go in and adjust code. “Nobody comes up with a good idea while being chased by a tiger,” a former senior executive recalled an engineer on the project telling him
  • Toward the end of 2020, Autopilot employees turned on their computers to find in-house workplace monitoring software installed, former employees said. It monitored keystrokes and mouse clicks, and kept track of their image labeling. If the mouse did not move for a period of time, a timer started — and employees could be reprimanded, up to being fired, for periods of inactivity, the former employees said.
  • Some of the people who spoke with The Post said that approach has introduced risks. “I just knew that putting that software out in the streets would not be safe,” said a former Tesla Autopilot engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “You can’t predict what the car’s going to do.”
  • Some of the people who spoke with The Post attributed Tesla’s sudden uptick in “phantom braking” reports — where the cars aggressively slow down from high speeds — to the lack of radar. The Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to show incidences surged last year, prompting a federal regulatory investigation.
  • The data showed reports of “phantom braking” rose to 107 complaints over three months, compared to only 34 in the preceding 22 months. After The Post highlighted the problem in a news report, NHTSA received about 250 complaints of the issue in a two-week period. The agency opened an investigation after, it said, it received 354 complaints of the problem spanning a period of nine months.
  • “It’s not the sole reason they’re having [trouble] but it’s big a part of it,” said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser for NHTSA, who has criticized the company’s approach and recused herself on matters related to Tesla. “The radar helped detect objects in the forward field. [For] computer vision which is rife with errors, it serves as a sensor fusion way to check if there is a problem.”
  • Even with radar, Teslas were less sophisticated than the lidar and radar-equipped cars of competitors.“One of the key advantages of lidar is that it will never fail to see a train or truck, even if it doesn’t know what it is,” said Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car developer and consultant who worked on Google’s self-driving car. “It knows there is an object in front and the vehicle can stop without knowing more than that.”
  • Musk’s resistance to suggestions led to a culture of deference, former employees said. Tesla fired employees who pushed back on his approach. The company was also pushing out so many updates to its software that in late 2021, NHTSA publicly admonished Tesla for issuing fixes without a formal recall notice.
  • Tesla engineers have been burning out, quitting and looking for opportunities elsewhere. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, took a months-long sabbatical last year before leaving Tesla and taking a position this year at OpenAI, the company behind language-modeling software ChatGPT.
  • One of the former employees said that he left for Waymo. “They weren’t really wondering if their car’s going to run the stop sign,” the engineer said. “They’re just focusing on making the whole thing achievable in the long term, as opposed to hurrying it up.”
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I tried out an Apple Vision Pro. It frightened me | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is the immersive video
  • Watching a movie, however, feels like you’ve been transported into the content.
  • that raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate to rush this technology out but it’s not clear how much they’ve been worrying about the consequences.
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  • it is clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology seamlessly blur
  • Over the years there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metaverse: an experience that feels scarily real because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to a point that they are almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between online assault and an attack in real life?
  • more broadly, spatial computing is going to alter what we consider reality
  • Researchers from Stanford and Michigan University recently undertook a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature which brings VR content into your real-world surrounding so you see what’s around you while using the device) and emerged with some stark warnings about how this tech might rewire our brains and “interfere with social connection”.
  • These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.
  • “What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,”
  • “People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.”
  • It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might be altered that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how much influence big tech already has when it comes to content we see, and then multiply that a million times over. You think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they seem even more realistic.
  • We’re seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful this sort of technology is going to massively accelerate it.
  • Being able to suck people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s an authoritarian’s dream. We’re entering an age where people can be mollified and manipulated like never before
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Opinion | A.I. Is Endangering Our History - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events
  • While we have reason to believe the future may be safe, we worry that the past is not.
  • History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative A.I. that can fake current events can also fake past ones
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  • there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.
  • countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.
  • There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed
  • Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
  • The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.
  • In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.
  • As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.
  • Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.
  • Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.
  • In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.
  • They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.
  • many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.
  • creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.
  • Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.
  • Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models
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