Day: March 31, 2023

The literally unprecedented indictment against Donald Trump marks an outright dangerous—and politically fraught—moment for the United States and serves as a reminder of the unparalleled level of criminality and conspiracy that surrounded the 2016 election.

It’s easy to look back at the 2016 election as though its outcome was inevitable—that Hillary Clinton was too weak of a candidate, one whose years of high-priced speeches had made her lose touch with the working-class voters of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; that “but her emails” and Jim Comey’s repeated, inappropriate, and misguided meddling in the election turned the tide. But the new indictment of Trump is an important historical corrective, a moment that makes clear how the US, as a country, must reckon with the fact that Trump’s surprise victory was aided by not one but two separate criminal conspiracies.

In the 2016 race’s final push, in an election that came down to incredibly narrow victories in just three states—10,704 voters in Michigan, 46,765 in Pennsylvania, and 22,177 in Wisconsin—and where Trump lost the overall popular vote by some 3 million votes, he was helped along by a massive and wide-ranging official Russian government operation. That effort was funded in part by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is now behind the brutal combat of his Wagner Group mercenary army in Ukraine, which targeted US social media companies and activists on the ground. According to the US Department of Justice’s exhaustive report, in the second arm of the Russian operation, the military intelligence service GRU hacked top Democratic officials, leaked their emails, and shifted the national narrative around Clinton and other Democrats. (Not to mention that this gave rise to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and, arguably, QAnon.) 

Then there was the separate criminal conspiracy that was the subject of today’s new indictment in New York: the plot in the final weeks of the 2016 election by Trump’s campaign, Trump family fixer Michael Cohen, and the National Enquirer to pay hush money to bury stories of two of the candidate’s affairs, including infamously one with porn star Stormy Daniels. 

While it may seem like news of such an affair would have ended up being a nothingburger amid the campaign’s final weeks, it’s worth remembering the specific context that Cohen and the Trump orbit faced in those finals hours of the campaign. They were performing a fraught and knife’s-edge balancing act to hold onto support from conservatives and evangelicals in the wake of the devastating Access Hollywood tape, a moment where vice presidential nominee Mike Pence seriously considered throwing in the towel himself. The follow-on of more non-family-values-friendly stories might well have begun an unrecoverable spiral. (It’s also worth remembering the still-suspicious interplay of these two threads: how, on a single Friday in October 2016, US intelligence leaders announced publicly for the first time that Russia was behind the election meddling, the Washington Post scooped the existence of the lewd Access Hollywood tape, and then, hours later, Wikileaks began dumping a fresh set of stolen emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.)

The new criminal case related to that second Stormy Daniels conspiracy, brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, also is a reminder of the historic mistake by the US Justice Department to not pursue its own charges against Trump in the same matter. This was a mind-boggling abdication of responsibility given that the Justice Department—in the midst of Donald Trump’s own presidency, no less!—prosecuted Cohen for the same conspiracy, naming Trump in the charges against Cohen as “Individual 1” and, according to a new book by Elie Honig, outlined in a draft indictment Trump’s personal direction and involvement in the case.

You may have seen photographs that suggest otherwise, but former president Donald Trump wasn’t arrested last week, and the pope didn’t wear a stylish, brilliant white puffer coat. These recent viral hits were the fruits of artificial intelligence systems that process a user’s textual prompt to create images. They demonstrate how these programs have become very good very quickly—and are now convincing enough to fool an unwitting observer.

So how can skeptical viewers spot images that may have been generated by an artificial intelligence system such as DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion? Each AI image generator—and each image from any given generator—varies in how convincing it may be and in what telltale signs might give its algorithm away. For instance, AI systems have historically struggled to mimic human hands and have produced mangled appendages with too many digits. As the technology improves, however, systems such as Midjourney V5 seem to have cracked the problem—at least in some examples. Across the board, experts say that the best images from the best generators are difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from real images.

“It’s pretty amazing, in terms of what AI image generators are able to do,” says S. Shyam Sundar, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University who studies the psychological impacts of media technologies. “There’s been a giant leap in the last year or so in terms of image-generation abilities.”

Some of the factors behind this leap in ability include the ever-increasing number of images available to train such AI systems, as well as advances in data processing infrastructure and interfaces that make the technology accessible to regular Internet users, Sundar notes. The result is that artificially generated images are everywhere and can be “next to impossible to detect,” he says.

One recent experiment highlighted how well AI is able to deceive. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University in England who focuses on digital technology, co-authored a study that tested whether online volunteers could distinguish between passportlike headshots created by an AI system called StyleGAN2 and real images. The results were disheartening, even back in late 2021, when the researchers ran the experiment. “On average, people were pretty much at chance performance,” Nightingale says. “Basically, we’re at the point where it’s so realistic that people can’t reliably perceive the difference between those synthetic faces and actual, real faces—faces of actual people who really exist.” Although humans provided some help to the AI (researchers sorted through the images generated by StyleGAN2 to select only the most realistic ones), Nightingale says that someone looking to use such a program for nefarious purposes would likely do the same.

In a second test, the researchers tried to help the test subjects improve their AI-detecting abilities. They marked each answer right or wrong after participants answered, and they also prepared participants in advance by having them read through advice for detecting artificially generated images. That advice highlighted areas where AI algorithms often stumble and create mismatched earrings, for example, or blur a person’s teeth together. Nightingale also notes that algorithms often struggle to create anything more sophisticated than a plain background. But even with these additions, participants’ accuracy only increased by about 10 percent, she says—and the AI system that generated the images used in the trial has since been upgraded to a new and improved version.

Ironically, as image-generating technology continues to improve, humans’ best defense from being fooled by an AI system may be yet another AI system: one trained to detect artificial images. Experts say that as AI image generation progresses, algorithms are better equipped than humans to detect some of the tiny, pixel-scale fingerprints of robotic creation.

Creating these AI detective programs works the same way as any other machine learning task, says Yong Jae Lee, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “You collect a data set of real images, and you also collect a data set of AI-generated images,” Lee says. “Then you can train a machine-learning model to distinguish the two.”

Still, these systems have significant shortcomings, Lee and other experts say. Most such algorithms are trained on images from a specific AI generator and are unable to identify fakes produced by different algorithms. (Lee says he and a research team are working on a way to avoid that problem by training the detector to instead recognize what makes an image real.) Most detectors also lack the user-friendly interfaces that have tempted so many people to try the generative AI systems.

Moreover AI detectors will always be scrambling to keep up with AI image generators, some of which incorporate similar detection algorithms but use them as a way to learn how to make their fake output less detectable. “The battle between AI systems that generate images and AI systems that detect the AI-generated images is going to be an arms race,” says Wael AbdAlmageed, a research associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. “I don’t see any side winning anytime soon.”

AbdAlmageed says no approach will ever be able to catch every single artificially produced image—but that doesn’t mean we should give up. He suggests that social media platforms need to begin confronting AI-generated content on their sites because these companies are better posed to implement detection algorithms than individual users are.

And users need to more skeptically evaluate visual information by asking whether it’s false, AI-generated or harmful before sharing. “We as human species sort of grow up thinking that seeing is believing,” AbdAlmageed says. “That’s not true anymore. Seeing is not believing anymore.”

Where does the fun stop and the societal harm begin? Artificial intelligence companies behind image and text generators seem to be grappling with that question in real-time, as their products gain traction across the internet. Simultaneously, the same companies are also running up against some very standard internet issues—like users angling to take advantage of free trial offers.

Popular AI image generator, Midjourney, halted its free trial access this week, as first reported by the Washington Post. The announcement came in a Tuesday morning Discord post from Midjourney CEO, David Holz citing “extraordinary demand and trial abuse.”

According to a follow-up post, Holz and co tried to address the issues of abuse with safety patches. However, the attempted changes weren’t enough to fix the problems. “We tried turning trials back on again with new safeties for abuse but they didn’t seem to be sufficient..we are turning it back off again,” the CEO posted Wednesday afternoon. The company’s paid service remains available and while the free trials remain paused for now, they could come back at any time.

Though the Washington Post report initially insinuated that the “abuse” in question was related to a recent slew of viral deepfakes, the company denies that account. “There were some pretty big misunderstandings in the [WaPo] article,” Holz wrote to Gizmodo in an email. “We stopped trials because of massive amounts of people making throwaway accounts to get free images…This happened at the same time as a temporary gpu shortage. The two things came together and it was bringing down the service for paid users,” he added.

The “new safeties” referenced in the Wednesday Discord post? According to Holz, this, too, was about trying to limit users to one free trial each. “We’re still trying to figure out how to bring free trials back, we tried to require an active email but that wasn’t enough so we’re back to the drawing board,” he said to Gizmodo.

Thanks to the recent generative AI boom, the use of image generators to create deepfakes are having a moment. Social media feeds have become clogged with not real, but pretty convincing, images of things like a dripped out, swaggy AF Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket or signing the hood of a Ferrari-esque sports car.

Various fakes of Donald Trump being arrested in various positions circulated widely after news broke of the former president’s expected indictment.

Elsewhere, you may have come across such images as Russian President Vladimir Putin facing a Hague tribunal, or maybe John F. Kennedy aiming a rifle out of a window. All of these images were created using Midjourney, one of the most popular, publicly available AI’s.

Yet the images aren’t reason enough to restrict or shut down Midjourney access, Holz implied. Instead, the company claims its current prohibition on free trials is a form of profit protection. It wants users to move from the free trial to a paid subscription, not another free trial.

Holz further implied that the most recent suite of problematic, political images are the product of Midjourney v5—which has only been made available to paying users, anyway. When they were open, free trial sign-ups limited users to the 5-month old v4, Holz said.

Nonetheless, the CEO still said that Midjourney is working on improved moderation. “I think we’re still trying to figure out what the right moderation policies are. We are taking feedback from experts and the community and trying to be really thoughtful. We already have some new systems coming which should ship soon,” he wrote.

The company’s so-far limited efforts to halt the rise of entertaining, yet potentially dangerous and deceptive, false images demonstrate the murky issues of AI-regulation we’ve waded into. How will generative AI software developers balance the pressure for access, “free speech,” and making a product people actually want to use with social responsibility and the risk for glaring misuse? And will any U.S. agencies step in?

For now, the answers remain unclear, to everyone—tech CEOs included.

Compared with some of its peers like OpenAI’s DALL-E, which has policies barring users from creating any sexual or violent content and including real political figures, Midjourney’s standards are much more permissive. Yet compared with Stable Diffusion, where users can download an open-source software and effectively do whatever they like, Midjourney has more guardrails.

You can’t, for instance, use Midjourney to generate images of China’s president Xi Jinping, though other world leaders remain fair game. Holz explained this decision with a Discord post last year. “Political satire in [China] is pretty not-okay,” the CEO wrote, per the Washington Post. “The ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire,” he added.

And the company recently added the term “arrested” to its list of banned prompt phrases, according to The Verge, likely in response to those aforementioned Trump images.

But still, navigating the vast and nebulous center of what should and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet is clearly proving difficult for Holz. On Wednesday, during a live Discord session, the exec told an audience of thousands that he was having a hard time zeroing in on content rules—particularly surrounding the use of real peoples’ images, according to WaPo. “There’s an argument to go full Disney or go full Wild West, and everything in the middle is kind of painful,” the CEO reportedly said. “We’re kind of in the middle right now, and I don’t know how to feel about it.”

The moratorium on free Midjourney access doesn’t solve the issue. And, again, the CEO claims the decision to stop free trials isn’t the result of deepfake dissemination at all. But maybe, perhaps, it might slow the problem down by limiting the number of people who can produce scary-real, fake pictures of nearly whatever they want. For $10, $30, or $60 per month, anyone willing to pay up can still opt for content chaos.

Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides to The Best Free AI Art Generators and Everything We Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The blockbuster industries of pop music and gaming have been collaborating for almost as long as games have existed—at least since 1983, when Journey got their very own Midway arcade cabinet. Those kinds of branded crossovers have only grown with time, especially in online games like Fortnite, which has transformed from a straightforward multiplayer battle royale to a unique multimedia experience. Pop music has had an audible presence in Fortnite for years now, with artists like Travis Scott and Ariana Grande spearheading the virtual concert trend that’s spread to other platforms like Roblox.

Epic Games even has purchasable skins modeled on musicians like Bruno Mars, J Balvin, and Kid Laroi, and countless emotes featuring every song from “Gangnam Style” to “Pump Up The Jam” to NBA Youngboy’s “Right Foot Creep.” There’s a feedback loop between the music you hear in Fortnite and music that goes viral elsewhere: sometimes I can’t tell if a song is in Fortnite because it’s a TikTok trend, or if it’s a TikTok trend because it was in Fortnite.

You’re now listening to Fortnite radio

Fortnite introduced its in-game radio feature as a fun easter egg for players in June 2020, with stations like “Beat Box” and “Rock & Royale” available for your listening pleasure whenever you entered a vehicle, and a new selection of songs featured every time an update or season released. Initially, the featured music skewed toward what you might expect to hear in an online game already, mostly instrumental pieces from Fortnite’s own soundtrack, glitchy electronic cuts, and lo-fi beats. Then it started to change.

Where most of Epic’s previous collaborations with musicians have been visual, the expansion of the in-game radio created a new auditory market for placing music in the game—in my own hours logged in the game, I’ve heard everything on Fortnite’s radio stations from Drake to German techno, from Rosalía to Korn. And now, Epic Games has taken its music licensing to an entirely new dimension, as the battle royale has begun to position itself not just as a virtual billboard for promoting pop artists, but as its own kind of full-service streaming platform.

Of course, the obvious model here is something like Grand Theft Auto, which has featured extensive music curation on its stations from artists like Flying Lotus and The Blessed Madonna. But games like GTA are fundamentally more static than Fortnite—the soundtrack might be new when the game drops, but it will inevitably become dated until the next DLC comes out. Fortnite’s existence as a never-ending online experience, with new seasons of content and constant updates, has allowed for the growth of an entirely new market, as Epic can perpetually refresh its own playlists.

Increasingly, Fortnite has been offering up a space for artists who aren’t brand names, or who work in genres that aren’t what we conventionally think of as “video game music.” Chris Burque is one of the co-founders of Ghost Town, a company that handles media licensing for artists like Sufjan Stevens and Son Lux. With a client list skewing toward indie and experimental music, Ghost Town has generally done more work in film and television than gaming, but the Chicago-based firm has licensed music to critical darlings like Hotline Miami and Life Is Strange, and helped curate a soundtrack of local Chicago artists for the first Watch Dogs game. Since the expansion of Fortnite’s in-game radio service, Ghost Town has seen a growth of its business in the gaming sector, as Epic Games draws together a diverse spectrum of sounds to accommodate its equally diverse playerbase.

Fortnite and music licenses

Regardless of any specific genre or artists, Burque explains that when Epic has reached out to his company with licensing opportunities, they’re more interested in what’s new and upcoming than any one specific sound—the first song Ghost Town licensed to Fortnite was from Sufjan Stevens and Angelo de Augustine’s 2021 album A Beginner’s Mind.

Since its purchase of Bandcamp, Epic also has its own stream of readily-available indie music to pull from, with a Bandcamp-curated selection recently featured on the game’s Radio Underground station. Even if Fortnite still represents a smaller share of Ghost Town’s business than television, Burque sees this emergent platform as representative of a larger boom in streaming content: “Especially over the last few years, there’s just a never-ending stream of content being created, so there are more opportunities to license music than ever before, even if it’s just a song playing in the background of a bar in a TV show.” Fortnite offers a similar potential for optimizing the background as, say, a party scene in Succession, as Epic finds new spaces where licensed music can be inserted.

Josh Briggs oversees the licensing team at Terrorbird Media, a full-service music management company and label that also handles publishing for artists like Deerhoof, Kathleen Hanna, and Shamir. “At Terrorbird, we especially focus on artists you might consider left-of-center, so we’re always looking for mainstream outlets for that kind of music,” he explains. “It’s exciting when something like Fortnite comes along in a space like gaming that’s been harder to tap.” Briggs notes that in the past, the bulk of Terrorbird’s work with game developers has been for promotional purposes—their first game-related license was the use of a song in a commercial for the PlayStation Vita.

Alongside Grand Theft Auto, Briggs notes titles like Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk Pro Skater as games that helped open the genre up to a diverse range of music genres, alongside licensing powerhouses like FIFA and 2K. But unlike Fortnite, those games have still been limited to a more confined soundtrack—in many ways, having a track licensed to Fortnite is more like receiving placement on a Spotify or Apple Music playlist than being featured in a conventional video game.

The Fortnite bump

It’s obviously still a beneficial financial opportunity for artists, but Briggs notes that placement in a game like Fortnite doesn’t necessarily lead to greater exposure: You spend less of the game inside a car than something like GTA, so there’s fewer opportunities to fully survey all the stations, and a track might come and go from the game’s playlist before you even have the chance to hear it. Additionally, there’s no DJ to read out the track or artist name, and probably little time to pull out your phone and Shazam something that catches your ear, given the fast pace of the game.

He explains, “The hard part is, how do you take someone from being obsessed with your song in Fortnite, and get them to leapfrog out of the closed ecosystem to the rest of your catalog, or to seeing you play live?” Licensing to a platform like Fortnite offers a new revenue stream, and it can be a novel achievement for musicians who are themselves gamers, but it’s difficult to discern what kind of impact it actually has on broader listenership.

Briggs points out that Epic’s increased interest in the music space is part of a larger strategy that almost every content provider is adopting: In a bid for fractured attention, streaming platforms are increasingly transforming into multimedia spaces that attempt to satisfy all of our sensory needs. “A huge driver for streaming platforms is time spent on the platform, so they’re doing anything they can to keep people in their ecosystem, which I think means a conscious effort to consolidate. Like, why leave to go sit and listen to Spotify when they can bring music to you? Why jump to Netflix or Twitch or TikTok if we can bring what they do here? If you’re hanging out with your friends all the time in Fortnite, that becomes where you listen to music or go to concerts, instead of going to another platform.”

Of course, some of those fans are the very musicians whose music might end up on Fortnite radio. “So many artists are gamers,” says Briggs. “Touring or in the studio, there can be intense moments of downtime for musicians. We’re waiting for soundcheck, or we’re driving to the next spot, or we’re waiting for the drums to be recorded, so we’re hanging out here and playing the Switch to pass the time.”

The expansion of music licensing in Fortnite shows just how deeply embedded multiplayer gaming has become in pop culture, as the battle royale transforms from a straight-forward game concept to a massive streaming portal for media of all stripes. “A constant conversation with our artists is not just how do you monetize music, but how do you connect with fans?” explains Briggs. “If your fans are spending their social time on a platform like Fortnite, you have to meet them there.”