[This story from The Verge carefully notes what is new and potentially harmful about the latest incorporation of technologies that easily and effectively change the image taken by a smartphone camera. See the original version for a 41-second video (also available on YouTube). For related coverage, see The New York Times, where the lead consumer technology writer describes says he “shot and edited dozens of photos with the Pixel 8. I was impressed, creeped out and skeptical that I would want to keep generating fake photos.”  –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Allison Johnson / The Verge] The Pixel 8 and the what-is-a-photo…

[The nonprofit organization AIandYou works to increase “AI literacy” to help the public avoid being manipulated by technologies that use artificial intelligence. As Politico reports, AIandYou is planning a campaign that uses deepfake technologies to demonstrate and educate the public about their use in the 2024 elections. Watch the 5:25 minute video mentioned in the story and see the AIandYou website for much more information. In related news, see the NPR story “Video game clips and old videos are flooding social media about Israel and Gaza,” the NPR audio report “Detangling the online disinformation about the war between Israel and…

[There’s a new development in the ongoing debate about the possibility that our universe is a sophisticated, presence-evoking simulation. The details are reported in this story from ScienceAlert, where the original version includes a second image and an 11:47 minute video (also available on YouTube). While the debate will probably never be resolved, the continuing and apparently growing fascination in science and popular culture with the idea that everything we experience is an illusion is consistent with the fact that we’re living in an era in which humans are using technologies to produce increasingly more, and more convincing, illusions.…

[A new augmented reality public art project in Philadelphia features photographs and interviews with some of the diverse people who work and travel on the buses, trains and trolleys of SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority). As the artist, Anula Shetty, notes, “the goal is to create connections between people who cross paths during their daily commute”; QR codes are embedded in photos displayed throughout the system and as this SEPTA blog post puts it, “Through this augmented reality series of works born of Philadelphian stories, daydreams, thoughts, and performances that Shetty has filmed – Philly Daydreams allows travelers to…

[Presence-evoking augmented reality and artificial intelligence are being used to help more people experience and learn about the monuments and history of Greece, as reported by the Associated Press via ABC News. See the Greek telecom company Cosmote’s website for more, including a 2:19 minute video (also available on YouTube).  –Matthew] [Image: A man holds up a tablet showing a digitally overlayed virtual reconstruction of the ancient Parthenon temple, at the Acropolis Hill in Athens, Greece on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. Credit: Petros Giannakouris/The Associated Press.] An app shows how ancient Greek sites looked thousands of years ago.…

[Though he doesn’t use the term, the writer of this essay in The Verge describes how the nascent status of AI-based voices and images being added to social media platforms could lead to a dramatic increase in experiences of presence, especially medium-as-social-actor presence: “feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge] The synthetic social network is coming Between ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice and Meta’s AI characters, our feeds may be about to change forever By Casey Newton,…