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As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Googles Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color. Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame. This is the kind of thing AI lets you do nowvirtually bring back the dead. As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesnt necessarily mean we should. Grilling the dog The sketch, which The Atlantic has already called SNLs Black Mirror Moment, features Ashley Padilla as an aging grandmother in a nursing home. Her family membersplayed by Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernándezvisit her on Thanksgiving, and use an AI photo app to bring her old family photos to life as short videos. At first, things go well. Padillas character marvels over a black and white image of her father waving as he stands in front of a spinning ferris wheel. But then, things go hilariously, predictably wrong. A photo of family members at a barbecue turns into a horror scene when the fictional AI app has Padillas father (played by host Glen Powell) roast the family dog, which happens to have no head. As other photos come to life, Padillas father pays a bowling buddy to perform a lewd act, and in a baby photo, her mothers torso splits from her body and floats around the frame as a nuclear bomb explodes in the background. The sketch is hilarious because its so relatable. Anyone who has played with AI video generators knows that they can make delightfully wonky assumptions about the laws of physicsoften with spectacular results. In my testing of AI video generator RunwayML, for example, I asked the model to create a video of a playful kitten at sunset. Things start out cute enough, until the kitten splits in two, with its front half attempting to exit stage-right as its back half continues adorably cavorting around. Show me the movements Video generators make these errors because of the way theyre trained. Whereas a text-based AI model can learn by reading essentially every book, website, and other piece of textual data ever published, the amount of training-ready video content is far more limited. Most AI video generators train on videos from social media platforms like YouTube. That means theyre great at creating the kinds of videos that often appear on those platforms. As Ive demonstrated before, if you want people knocking over wedding cakes or having heated arguments with their roommates, video generators like Veo and Sora excel at making them. For less commonly posted scenes, though, the available training data is far more limited. Most online videos, for example, show interesting things happening. People rarely post hour-long clips of themselves casually walking around (or to SNLs example, holding a baby or grilling a hot dog) on YouTube or Instagram. Those videos would be so terminally boring that no person would want to watch them. Yet copious amounts of video of these kinds of boring, everyday activities are exactly what AI companies need to properly train their video generators. This has created a fascinating market for such clips. Companies like Waffle Video are popping up to serve the need, paying creators to film themselves doing things like chopping vegetables or writing specific words on pieces of paper for AI training. Until AI companies can get their hands on more videos of these kinds of mundane actions, though, AI video generators will struggle to mimic them. Ironically, video generators are currently great at showing fanciful, dramatic actions. Ask them to make the kinds of everyday scenes you might find in an old black and white family photo, though, and you get Fido on the barbie. Reanimate grandma? All that brings us to the question: should you use todays AI tools to reanimate your dead loved ones? My best advice: wait a bit. AI video tech is advancing incredibly quickly. The first tools that added movement to family photoslike Deep Nostalgia from My Heritage, which launched in 2021used machine learning to perform their wizardry. The tech felt revolutionary at the time. Today, it looks primitive compared to the full motion scenes like the one of my Veo-animated grandpa. And even with those advances, Veo and its ilk are still in their avocado chair moment. Image generators have improved tremendously as their creators have gotten better at training them. Video generators will see similarly vast improvementsespecially as AI companies invest millions in buying bespoke training data of everyday movements. Personally, I brought photo of my grandpa to life because I thought the real Grandpa Max would find it amusing. Ive resisted reanimating photos of more recently departed loved ones, though, for many of the reasons implicit in SNLs sketch. Family photos are intimate things. Its nice to see your late loved one smile and wave at you. Seeing them split in two or explode in a nuclear fireball, though, would be disturbingand something you couldnt unsee once youve conjured it up from the depths of Sora or Veos silicon brain. Until AI models can be trusted to avoid these kinds of distributing, random visual detours, we shouldnt trust them with our most prized memories. A splitting kitten is amusing. A splitting grandma, less so.
Category:
E-Commerce
In late October, Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white-nationalist streamer, onto his popular podcast and Youtube show for a friendly interview. Fuentes has amassed a loyal following with hundreds of thousands of viewers who tune into the racist, misogynist, and antisemitic sentiments he voices in lucid monologues on his nightly show, America First. A talented broadcaster with a biting sense of humor and a combative persona, hes tailor-made for the no-holds-barred environment of big-tech platformsso long as he manages to stay on them. In 2021, he was booted from essentially every tech platform for hate speech, forcing him to start his own streaming service to host his show.Where did Fuentes come from? Why are old-guard conservative institutions and media stalwarts alike catering to himor even cowering before him?The answer lies in how Fuentes has mastered the right-wing online swamps of the Trump era, and the increasingly porous boundaries between the extremely online right and the Republican establishment, explains Ben Lorber, an analyst at Political Research Associates, a group that monitors and studies the far right. You cant tell the story of Fuentess rise without telling the story of alternative tech platforms and transformations of large tech platforms, Lorber says.As the Fuentes interview rippled across social media, conservative sites and prominent figures on the right including Senator Ted Cruz and Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro, asked: What, exactly, had Carlson been thinking by platforming a figure like Fuentes? Three days after the Carlson appearance, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the storied conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 roadmap for the Trump administration, weighed in. I disagree with, and even abhor, things Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer, either, Roberts said in a video on X, in which he also defended the right of conservatives to criticize Israel as well as Carlsons decision to host Fuentes. Carlsons critics, Roberts added, were globalists and part of a venomous coalition, language that many decried as trafficking in antisemitic tropes. Within the halls of Heritage, Robertss video provoked an insurrection, forcing him to issue a lengthy apology condemning Fuentes. In a speech, Roberts explained that hed wanted only to reach the disaffected young men that comprise Fuentess audience, many of whom identify as Groypers.But the damage has been done. Heritage staff lambasted him at a town hall-style discussion. Numerous employees and a member of the board of trustees have resigned. The cochairs of their antisemitism task force, the creator of Project Esther, a campaign targeting pro-Palestine protestors, also announced they would be severing ties with Heritage. Last Thursday, Democratic Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer announced he would introduce a resolution condemning Fuentes, and he called on his Republican colleagues to join him. They have to engage Once, figures like Fuentes were relegated to the far-right fringes of the internet. Cassie Miller, an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, explains that an older generation of conservative activists learned to speak in dog whistles to code racist appeals to voters. This model was pioneered by people like Lee Atwater, an advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush, whose southern strategy infamously deployed euphemisms like states rights in place of explicit appeals to racism. But acolytes of Fuentes grew up in an entirely different media and technology environment, one where the far right saw the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as a vehicle to seed their ideas into mainstream politics. There are a lot of younger people, even within the institutionalized right, who are far more comfortable with the kind of overtly racist, transgressive language of someone like Fuentes, Miller says. Fuentes has built his profile through a command of the incentive structures of large tech platforms. He forces people to contend with his views and feel like they have to respond to him. They have to engage in some sort of discourse with him, and it ends up platforming him and legitimizing what hes saying, says Miller. Thats what he did here with Tucker Carlson. Short-form video has also proven to be a powerful weapon for Fuentes. His followers take bite-sized clips from his broadcasts and pump them out on X and other platforms. You might not have context when you come into contact with it, and you might think that, well, he has some legitimate points, Miller adds. Theres also Fuentess ugly blend of fair critiques of Israels wanton slaughter of Palestinians with outright antisemitism, a rhetorical strategy since adopted by figures like Candace Owens and Carlson. Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes, and others are all competing for the same kind of market on the anti-Zionist right, Lorber says. Theyve identified that almost as a growth market. Staying power Fuentess proficiency across online platforms, and the way those platforms have changed in recent years, have allowed him to stage his comeback. After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X, he reinstated Fuentess account, where he now has over 1 million followers. His show went on to find a home on Rumblea conservative competitor to Youtube with financial backing from Silicon Valley billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, among otherswhere it is broadcast to thousands nightly. All this has coincided with the slow death of once good faith efforts at hate-speech moderation by large tech platforms, Miller says. A lot of his career, hes been pushed to the margins of online spaces. But what weve seen is that hes had really incredible staying power, she adds. That staying power in the online world may have already spilled over into the real world. Fuentes and others on the far-right like the pseudonymous author Bronze Age Pervert have advised their followers to hide their power level and infiltrate so-called normie conservative institutions. Recently, right-wing writer Rod Dreher wrote of the remarkable prevalence of Groypers among the Republican partys professional ranks in Washington, including, he alleged, in the Trump administration. Reports from Politico have revealed text threads of young Republicans and one Trump appointee sympathizing with Nazism, showing the embrace of Groyper-like ideology. But trying to pinpoint the exact percentage of closeted Groypers might be missing the point. Theres very little difference between whether someone is a dedicated Groyper, or whether they just agree with Fuentess politics independently of being one of his followers, Lorber says. It might be better, Lorber says, to think of Fuentes as a stand in for a worldview and a brand of politicslike an ambassador of the Gen Z radical right. On the rise There is no reason to think that the recent controversy will slow Fuentess ascendancy within the GOP. Trump has long since made common cause with the extreme right. Trump infamously claimed there were very fine people, on both sides of the 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville, where men marched with tiki torches chanting Jews will not replace us. (An 18-year-old Fuentes was in attendance). In 2022, Fuentes himself attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Examples, in other words, are not hard to find. Great Replacement ideology is now mainstream. Christian Nationalism is now mainstream, and antisemitism is rapidly becoming mainstream too, Lorber says. So for people like Nick Fuentes, the movement has caught up with him. As for Heritage, the fine print of Project 2025 reveals an extremist vision in its own right, one that seeks to transform the country into a Christian Nationalist autocracy. A softening stance towards Fuentes, in other words, doesnt seem so odd. Drawing the line at outright Nazism is certainly preferable to welcoming it. But the time for condemnation may be long since past. Fuentes, meanwhile, will keep posting and streaming, and likely continuing to bend the party to his will in the process. He has a really clear understanding of the way the media environment works, Miller says. For Fuentes, its a huge victory just to have people say his name.
Category:
E-Commerce
As it faces a growing number of lawsuits alleging it helps facilitate child sexual exploitation, online gaming platform Roblox has unveiled a new age verification system. That system, however, could open it up to a different sort of criticism. The popular app, which has roughly 151 million users, announced last week that it plans to require a facial age check for all users who utilize the Roblox chat system. User verification can be accomplished by either submitting a government ID or by submitting a selfie, which AI will examine to estimate the age of the user. The verification will begin rolling out in early December in select markets (which do not include the U.S.) and expand globally in January 2026. “This initiative is designed to provide even more age-appropriate experiences for all users, which we believe will improve interactions for users of all ages on Roblox,” Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement. “Enforcing age checks allows us to implement age-based chat, which helps users better understand who theyre communicating with and limits chat between minors and adults.” Roblox is facing at least 35 lawsuits that allege users met and abused children on the platform. (More than one-third of the platform’s users are under the age of 13.) Attorneys general in Kentucky and Louisiana filed separate lawsuits accusing the company of harming children earlier this year. And a California judge, earlier this month, denied Roblox’s attempt to force one father’s dispute into a private resolution. Roblox already has parental controls and blocks photo sharing and the exchange of personal information. It also uses a mix of human and AI to moderate text and voice interactions. Under the new system, though, users who verify their age will only be allowed to chat with others in a similar age range (unless they are classified a “Trusted Connection” with people they know). Those age groups will be broken into six categories: Under 9, 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or over 21. (Chat will not be offered to users under 9 years old, unless a parent provides consent after an age check.) Because families have kids of all ages, Roblox says it will soon roll out solutions for direct chat between parents and children younger than 13 or between siblings in different age groups. Submitting age verification is still optional, but will be required for any user who wishes to utilize the system’s chat feature, which is a popular component with users. Roblox says submitted selfies will be completed through the app using a smartphone’s camera. It also tried to get ahead of possible security concerns, saying “images and video for age checks completed through Facial Age Estimation are processed by our vendor, Persona, and deleted immediately after processing.” Still, some parents could be wary of letting their young children submit photos to the company, given the number of lawsuits and the polarizing nature of facial recognition. In 2021, Facebook abandoned its facial recognition program, which suggested name tags for people in pictures, following privacy watchdog warnings and European Union regulators cracking down on the practice. (The company brought back facial recognition tools last year to assist with reclaiming compromised accounts.) Even Senate Republicans have expressed wariness over facial recognition software, proposing a limit on that technology in U.S. airports (though the bill has not found momentum so far). Folks dont want a national surveillance state, but thats exactly what the TSAs unchecked expansion of facial recognition technology is leading us to,” said Oregons Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, a cosponsor of the bill, in May. Roblox says its age checks won’t stop with the current program. Early next year it will require age checks to access social media links on user profiles, communities, and experience details pages.
Category:
E-Commerce
When entrepreneurs list their principal reasons for launching a company, small business owners often cite being their own boss, flexibility in setting their working hours, and turning a commercial concept into reality as their main motivations. Now, new data identifies another incentive that may convince future entrepreneurs to take the plunge. According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the average self-employed person earns significantly more income during their career than people who work for someone else. However, the reports findings also note the widely varying levels of income among small business owners, and the length of time usually required before stronger earnings start flowing in. Those details may lead some less enterprising prospective entrepreneurs to stick with punching a clock after all. The analysis by the Minneapolis Fed differs from most research on small business owners, which often relies heavily on survey responses. The shifting makeup of participants in those inquiries often produces widely contrasting results, creating what Minneapolis Fed authors likened to the parable of the blind men and an elephant: Each poll was essentially touching only one part of the body, and led to researchers drawing different and incomplete conclusions. To establish a more complete picture of the nations entrepreneurs, the Minneapolis Fed used U.S. tax and Social Security Administration data from 2000 to 2015. That allowed it to determine the income those small business owners collectively generated for themselves, and identify why they stuck it out with companies that were often slow to reach profitability. And that wasnt due to setting their own hours. (W)e find that self-employed individuals have significantly higher income and steeper income growth profiles than paid-employed peers with similar characteristics, the report said, while also refuting frequent survey results that suggest many entrepreneurs stay in business for the perks of not having to answer to a boss. Contrary to earlier studies based on surveys plagued by underrepresentation in the right tail of the income distribution, we find that non-pecuniary benefits of self-employment are not substantial when considering the source of most business income, it said. What that means, in non-economist-speak, is that many entrepreneurs earn up to 70% more than people working for other employers over their careers, with their income increasing considerably faster than paid workers. That winds up vastly outweighing the advantages surveys often identify of founders setting their own work schedules or getting to ask employees to fetch their coffee. The study found that during the 15-year period, a 25-year-old entrepreneur earned on average about $27,000 per year in 2012 dollars, while an employee of the same age made $29,000. About five years later, that income disparity had typically reversed, and then continued growing larger in small-business owners favor. By age 55, our estimate is an average (entrepreneur) income of $134,000 in 2012 dollarsmuch higher than the estimate of $79,000 for the paid employed, the study said. It added that gap was probably even larger before government agencies adjusted small-business income declarations by 14% to 46% to account for presumed underreporting. These dierences in profiles for the self- and paid-employed would be even more striking if we were to (re)adjust reported incomes to account for business income underreporting. Not every small-business owner winds up earning as much as people working for salaries, howeveror as much as their more successful peers. The study said about 80% of the total income of entrepreneurs it identified was generated by people earning $100,000 annually or more. That means a lot of small-business owners fared less well than the more affluent minority at the top. As a result, the authors said in wonky terms, a minority of self-employed people made even less than workers working for someone else. IRS data shows that many of the primarily self-employed earned less over the sample years than paid-employed peers with similar characteristics, but in the aggregate this subgroup has a much lower share of the total income than those that earned more than their peers, it noted. The Minneapolis Fed noted some other interesting observations in its findings. One was that many entrepreneurs continued working salaried jobs, or had other income coming in as they supported their still unprofitable new ventures. Those supporting funds improved the cohorts overall positive revenue figures, even during early lean years. In other words, when starting a new business, owners rely on other sources of labor earnings, through either paid employment or other business enterprises, it said. Thus, even though most businesses have losses, few owners have negative individual incomes. Another significant detail was what the authors said was their use of official data to create a more precise collective financial portrait of entrepreneurscontrasting the results of many surveys that may simplify the motives and activities of limited samples of small-company owners. (T)he literature on entrepreneurship has an array of narratives, describing the typical business owner in many possible ways: as a gig worker seeking flexible arrangements, a misfit avoiding unemployment spells, an inventor seeking venture capital, a tax dodger misreporting income, it said, before noting its own use of official income statistics collected from millions of entrepreneurs. This data provides new insights into the central questions of the entrepreneurship literature and will hopefully prove useful for researchers interested in calibrating models of self-employment and business formation. Bruce Crumley This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
Theres a scene in Office Space where Peter sits across from two consultants during a company downsizing. They ask him, What would you say you do here? He hesitates, smirks, and admits he only works about 15 minutes a week. The rest of the time, hes pretending. It was comedy in 1999. Its confession now. That question has come back to us. For years, we filled our calendars, stayed visible, and kept the machine moving. Our worth was measured in hours, output, and presence. It had to be. Humans were the system, and the system required us to keep it running. We didnt question it because that was how things got done. AI has changed that. It can now do many of the things we once did to keep things moving: the summaries, the reports, the follow-ups, the updates, the spreadsheets. It can organize, calculate, write, and execute at a pace we cant match. That realization feels strange at first, but its also freeing. Now we get to hand that part over. We can give the robotic work to the robots and return to the human work. The work of thinking, deciding, designing, and connecting. So what does that look like? For one, it means our conversations are changing. When the noise quiets, the meetings sound different. Theres more space to ask better questions. We can finally talk about what matters: What is the business really trying to accomplish? Whats next? What do we need to build the product, craft the strategy, organize the team, and align around purpose? Its fantastic, really. Because when people stop being buried in repetitive work, they start showing up differently. They bring curiosity. They tell the truth. They collaborate in new ways. Im hearing it everywherein companies that are deep into their AI transformation and in those that are just starting. The tone is changing. The conversations are more human. Were still in the waiting room of this transition. Some are pacing the floor, some are seated patiently, some are already being called in. Wherever a company sits on that curve, the shift has begun. Deloittes 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report describes this moment as a readiness gap. Most leaders recognize that AI and technology will transform their organizations in the coming years, yet few say they feel prepared to lead their people through that change. The tools are ready. The humans are still catching up. For leaders, this is the moment to adjust the focus. The work still needs watching, but the focus of that attention is different. Its no longer about overseeing tasks; Its about overseeing direction. How we design. How we execute. How we build and with whom. Leadership now is about being intentional and accountable for how work is created, not just how it is completed. Many leaders are rebuilding, or at least redesigning, how they lead. The language is changing. The tone is shifting. Its not a different language, but it has a new accent. And those who thrive in this era will be the ones who can translate it. Theyll know how to take complexity and turn it into clarity. Theyll bring forward a sharper vision, a stronger purpose, and a deeper ability to communicate the why. Theyll be what I call full-stack leaders: people who can support the front, the back, and the middle layer. They understand product, people, and process, and they move fluidly across them all. AI has taken the repetitive pieces off our plates and has given us back the chance to think, create, and build with intention. It gives us room to lead.
Category:
E-Commerce
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