Move over, human beauty pageant contestants: your AI replacements are arriving. CC-licensed photo by Paul Chin on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Please don’t cry. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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‘Miss AI’ beauty pageant and the complicated quest for the ‘perfect’ woman • CNN

Issy Ronald:

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Ten women participating in a beauty pageant is nothing new. Some pose candidly, some play to the camera, their beauty forever frozen in this moment in time. Like many other pageants held in countries around the world, the contestants are young, thin and embody many of the standards defining traditional “beauty.”

But that is where the similarities to a traditional beauty pageant end. None of these women are real — everything about them, even the emotion that flickers across their faces, is generated by artificial intelligence (AI), for the world’s first ever AI beauty pageant. Each has a creator or team of creators, who use programmes like Open AI’s DALL·E 3, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to generate images of the women from text prompts.

These ten contestants have been selected from a pool of more than 1,500 entrants to make the final of “Miss AI,” scheduled to be held at the end of June and broadcast online by its organizers “The World AI Creator Awards.”

For those involved, the event is an opportunity to showcase and demystify the technology’s extraordinary abilities. But for others, it represents a further proliferation of unrealistic beauty standards often linked to racial and gender stereotypes and fueled by the ever-increasing number of digitally enhanced images online.

“I think we’re starting to increasingly lose touch with what an unedited face looks like,” Dr Kerry McInerney, a research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, told CNN in a video interview.

Each of the contestants has a unique and distinctive personality, as well as face. One red-haired, green-eyed avatar named Seren Ay poses for Instagram photos as she travels around the world and through time, appearing next to Turkey’s first president Kemal Ataturk, on the Oscars red carpet or wandering through the neon-lit streets of Kyoto, Japan at night.

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The “contestants” all have the correct number of fingers, at least in the still pictures. I guess we’d need to wait for the video round.
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Making sense of the EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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If you’ve been online in the past week, you’ve probably seen one or two headlines about the European Union voting in favor of easy-to-replace batteries in smartphones by around 2027. That’s based on a June 14th vote in which the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of an agreement that would overhaul the rules around batteries in the bloc. 

The good news is that those headlines are fundamentally accurate; the EU is moving forward with regulation designed to require smartphones to have batteries that are easier to replace, to the benefit of the environment and end users. But this being the European Union, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. And it’s these details that could have a significant impact on how and when manufacturers will actually have to comply.

For starters, the widely cited 2027 deadline for offering smartphones with more easily replaceable batteries isn’t quite the whole story, according to Cristina Ganapini, coordinator of Right to Repair Europe. That’s because there’s another piece of legislation currently working its way through the EU’s lawmaking process called the Ecodesign for Smartphones and Tablets. It contains similar rules about making smartphone batteries easier to replace and is expected to come into effect earlier in June or July 2025. So by the time 2027 rolls around, some smartphone manufacturers may have already been selling devices with user-replaceable batteries in the EU for over a year.

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Will Apple claim that its repair kits, which people can hire to do various kinds of work on their own phones, fulfil this “user-replaceable” description, I wonder?
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Revealed: the tech entrepreneur behind a pro-Israel hate network • The Guardian

Jason Wilson:

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A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centered on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.

The Guardian investigation used public records and open source materials to corroborate information originally provided by the White Rose Society, an Australian anti-fascist research collective.

Linden set up Shirion’s crowdfunding efforts, appears to play a central role in operating the network’s social media accounts, and coordinates the group’s efforts on a Telegram channel. Public records and online materials indicate he lives in Gainesville, Florida, but he has also had recent stints in Durango, Colorado, and Medellin, Colombia.

The Guardian emailed Linden at several addresses associated with him and his business ventures, and attempted to contact him via phone, text, a direct message on Reddit and a post tagging an X account associated with one of his ventures seeking comment on this reporting, but received no response.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

“Regardless,” she added, “he is spreading hateful messages.”

The revelations shed light on the nature of Shirion, which has been criticized in the US congress and attracted media attention around the world, and its role in pushing back against criticisms of Israel’s conduct in its invasion of Gaza.

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Notable that this is categorised under news article about the “far right”.
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Biden aides plotted debate strategy for months. Then it all collapsed • The Washington Post

Tyler Pager:

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President Biden’s debate prep went fine.

In the sessions, the president still spoke haltingly. He sometimes confused facts and figures. He tripped over words and meandered. Debate prep would not fix his stutter or make him appear any younger, aides knew.

But as Biden boarded Marine One to leave the rustic Camp David presidential retreat for Atlanta, they sought to reassure anxious allies. The president, they said, was prepared and would perform well. Some said the debate might even be boring.

This story is based on conversations with eight individuals involved in or briefed on the president’s debate preparation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. The Biden campaign declined to comment.

For a full week, the president sequestered himself at Camp David with more than a dozen aides to prepare for Thursday’s presidential debate with former president Donald Trump. He rehearsed answers, met with policy aides and participated in mock debates, with his personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, playing the part of Trump.

Every topic he was asked about Thursday, he had practiced answers for — including the final one about his age.

So aides were bewildered by his performance. Many felt they had never seen him collapse so dramatically. After all, Biden was a veteran of numerous debates — as a senator, vice-presidential nominee and presidential candidate. And they did not understand why he gave an entirely different answer on the age question than the one they spent more than a week perfecting.

The president did not just stumble over words. He appeared to lose his focus and often was unable to finish sentences. His voice was raspy and thin, and when the debate concluded, first lady Jill Biden appeared to help her husband down the stairs.

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The debate was at 9pm. Up past his bedtime, basically. CNN had an article ahead of the debate about how each contender was preparing. Trump’s went better on the night, you could say.
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Tories ‘highly alarmed’ by network of pro-Russian Facebook pages interfering in UK election • ABC News

Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen:

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Revelations of foreign interference in the UK election, uncovered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC(, have been described as “highly alarming” by the Conservative Party, which will be writing to the Cabinet Office seeking urgent advice about how to combat it.

Ahead of the UK elections, the ABC has been monitoring five coordinated Facebook pages which have been spreading Kremlin talking points, with some posting in support of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party — a key challenger to the Conservatives in the July 4 poll.

The five pages identified by ABC Investigations as being part of a coordinated network appear to have little in common. One page presents itself as a pro-refugee left-wing group, while others reference white supremacist conspiracy theories and use AI-generated images of asylum seekers to stoke anti-immigration fears.

The ABC has been able to link these seemingly disparate pages by examining the location data attached to the pages’ administrators, tracking paid ads, and by analysing the pages’ similar or shared content.

The ABC shared its findings with disinformation experts, who said the network’s activity had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation.

“For me, it’s Russian,” said AI Forensics head of research Salvatore Romano.

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You may be surprised to hear that Nigel Farage has rejected this as “cobblers”. Makes a change from actors, though still a form of worker.
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What time will we know who won? Hour-by-hour guide to election night • The Guardian

Jamie Grierson, Jim Waterson and Ashley Kirk:

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After months of speculation on when the election might be held, six weeks of actual campaigning, D-day blunders, gambling scandals, smashing the gangs, stopping the boats, surrendering finances, triple-lock-pluses, national service, VAT on private schools, taxes up and taxes down, the election night will soon be upon us. Here’s how it may unfold.

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Basically: exit polls 10pm, nothing much until 3am, and then mayhem; all over bar the shouting (and weeping) by 7am.
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What happened when British GQ stopped trying to ‘feed the algorithm’ • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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GQ‘s European director of audience development, analytics and social, Neha-Tamara Patel, joined in July 2022 and told Press Gazette about a strategy shift that has seen the legacy men’s lifestyle brand move away from quick wins towards more considered content with the aim of a more engaged core audience.

She said: “It was apparent to me that we were doing a lot of what I call ‘feeding the algorithm content’: lots of short-form news, a lot of quick fashion news, all of which was still within GQ’s world but from an audience perspective wasn’t really serving us long term.

“It meant that we had a lot of churn, a lot of people coming in for that quickfire content and then leaving again without really accessing the broader spectrum of what we do as a brand.

“So we really made a conscious decision to slow things down, not necessarily feed the news cycle. We are a lifestyle magazine brand at the end of the day, not business of fashion or anything like that. So we obviously do touch on fashion news, but we try and think about where we can add to the conversation rather than it being like pure reportage. We’re not just about headlines. It’s like, how are we moving the story on and what else are we bringing to the table?”

…Ipsos iris data shared with Press Gazette shows gq-magazine.co.uk had a UK audience reach of 888,117 in May, down 25% in two years. But its total minutes were down by a lesser 12% to 2.2 million, with recovery of 19% in the past year after a slump in May 2023.

Across last year British GQ saw a 47% year-on-year increase in engagement among British users with 71 million engaged minutes in total, according to figures shared by the publisher.

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What are “engaged minutes”? Though it’s evident that for a monthly magazine to not attempt to keep up with the relentless hour-by-hour news cycle is a far more sensible approach.
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Einstein and his peers were ‘irrationally resistant’ to black holes. This illustrated story explores why • BBC Future

Ben Platts-Mills wrote the piece, and illustrated it too:

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Einstein showed that space and time were continually stretched and distorted by masses such as stars and planets, and that this accounted for gravity. The way bodies are drawn together is not due to a “force” attracting them, he argued, but to the “curvature” of the Universe caused by mass. The greater the mass, the more curvature it causes and so the greater the gravitational effect.

When Einstein first published his theory, he hadn’t pinned down the solutions to his own equations, which would have revealed to him the full implications of his discovery. It was another scientist who made this step.

In November 1915, Karl Schwarzschild was an artillery lieutenant in the German army, on the Eastern Front. He read Einstein’s new theory while working at a weather station close to the front line and wrote a letter in response.

His letter supplied the missing solutions and showed how they could be used to model a star’s gravity. One feature of the model, Schwarzschild noted later, was a radius of compression below which a star – or any other spherical mass – would begin to implode indefinitely under its own gravity. If applied to the physics of the real world, this had horrifying implications. It meant that a star would continue collapsing forever, its mass being crushed ever smaller. Its gravitation would become ever more powerful as it insatiably devoured surrounding masses until, finally, it reached the point of “singularity”, a moment where the laws of physics break down, and time and space cease to exist.

Decades later, the Schwarzschild singularity would be recognised as a turning point in theoretical physics – the first time black holes had been hinted at. Schwarzschild himself, however, dismissed the idea as a mathematical artefact.

The critical radius was, Schwarzschild concluded, simply the limit for a star’s compression – the point it would stop collapsing. Instead of discovering black holes, then, he became the first person to reject the evidence for them on principle. We will never know if he might have revised his ideas because he died of an autoimmune disease in 1916. 

Einstein’s reaction to Schwarzschild’s solutions was mixed.

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Which goes to show: even the greatest minds will dismiss real possibilities as quirks and artefacts because they’re too difficult to contemplate. And even in the midst of a war, people find ideas too tantalising to ignore.
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The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history • Casey Handmer’s blog

Handmer is a scientist and entrepreneur who founded Terraform Industries (which aims to generate fuel from air, using solar energy:

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To a good approximation, even as global population climbs towards 10 billion, the number of humans enduring extreme poverty has fallen in both absolute and relative terms, from nearly universal just 200 years ago to rapidly vanishing today. We are living in the first time in the history of any life form where we can put a finite upper bound on the number of poverty-stricken human years left to be endured by the human race: Almost certainly fewer than 10 billion. This is a lot but it’s a lot fewer than infinity.

This unprecedented improvement in the human condition has been unlocked by social and political innovation, and underwritten by the consumption of copious quantities of cheap energy, almost all of it from fossil coal, oil, and gas.

To a good approximation, oil is the antidote to poverty.

But oil is finite. The good stuff is gone. Fracking is expensive. Most places don’t have oil. Climate and scarcity will force us to use other forms of energy, most of them not as useful as oil. Are we headed for economic difficulties as a result of this? A handful of nations have endured severe energy shortages due to political instability, and it has never gone well for them. North Korea. Cuba. Venezuela. Are we doomed?

No.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) power got cheap, then big, then cheaper, then bigger. Last year, we installed about 460 GW globally. Check out the knee in the curve in 2009! A learning rate of 44% means that the cost falls by 44% for every doubling of production, and production is currently doubling roughly every 18 months.

Here’s a free heretical viewpoint, or at least an early prediction: solar PV is not just a partial substitute for oil, it’s a cheaper and better energy source in every way that matters.

Corollary: Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find. When it unlocks cheaper energy, first coal, then oil, then gas, and now solar, it drives up the rate of economic growth, due to an expanded spread between energy cost and application value.

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I think he’s right about the benefits of solar PV, at least.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified