Category: Laptops

• Django Kroner, 32, started his business, The Canopy Crew, to help people reconnect with nature.
• The business rents treehouses in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, some for up to $950 a night.
• Take a look at one of the properties with two single-room sheds he refers to as “Cliff Dweller.”

The entrepreneur Django Kroner describes his dream home as a treehouse on a cliff where he can see miles of forest and where tree-dwelling critters can come visit him in the morning. And it’s this vision that motivated the 32-year-old to bring a slate of treehouse vacation rentals from his imagination to reality.

As the owner of The Canopy Crew, which operates in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, Kroner said he wanted to give people a creative outlet to interact with wildlife the way he does.

“Everyone thinks about children when they think of treehouses,” Kroner said. “But an adult treehouse can bring out your inner child, which is something everyone should harness.”

Kroner moved to the Red River Gorge area in 2009 because of the location’s world-renowned rock climbing. He took a job building timber-frame cabins with a wilderness cabin-rental company called Red River Gorgeous soon thereafter, and he asked the owners whether he could build a treehouse on the property. The owners obliged, and he built his first 10-foot-by-8-foot structure out of scrap material about 45 feet in the air between a tulip tree and a sycamore, he explained. 

That first treehouse was more of a canopy, Kroner added. It didn’t have any walls, but he had a chest for his clothes and slept in a hammock. If he needed to keep food overnight, Kroner said, he used a net rope to lower a basket into the creek running between the two trees that supported the treehouse. Kroner said he slept in that canopy year-round. 

It was after Kroner’s friends began to visit his treehouse when he came up with the idea for The Canopy Crew. Kroner launched the company in November 2013 with just one treehouse that he built for about $10,000, he said. Since then, the company has added nine more treehouses that cost $200,000 to $400,000 to build, some of which rent for as much as $950 a night on Airbnb. The company also employs about 50 people, who are split between its vacation-rental business and the tree-service operation it provides in Cincinnati.

When he’s scouting a new location for a treehouse, Kroner said, he looks for a place in the woods where he’d like to hang out. Sometimes, he finds a few trees that can support one of the designs he’s sketched in his notebook. Other times, the landscape dictates the design, he said.

“Whenever I’m up in a treehouse, all I can think about are suspension bridges and other connections going out into the trees further into the gorge,” Kroner said.

The company’s most recent addition is a treehouse known as “Sky Dancer,” which looks like a pirate ship that was built into a cliff face. There are three separate structures that make up Sky Dancer, each of which is connected by wooden staircases and has its own primary bedroom and bathroom. It also has a giant net that serves as a hammock and unbeatable views of the gorge, Kroner said.

While there are plenty of treehouse builders to choose from, Kroner said The Canopy Crew was one of a handful of companies that could build treehouses into landscapes the way they do. 

The Canopy Crew uses techniques that Kroner picked up during an apprenticeship with an arborist that are meant to protect the trees they build in, including lowering materials into place instead of hoisting them off the ground and taking the time to appropriately prune the branches. This allows The Canopy Crew to build their structures higher off the ground than other treehouse builders.

“I like to think of these treehouses as blunt reminders that we don’t have to live in busy cities or chase material objects all day long,” Kroner said. 

• Comedian Sarah Silverman is one of three authors suing the company behind ChatGPT.
• They allege that the company infringed copyright by feeding the AI chatbot copies of their book.
• They are seeking statutory and other damages.

Comedian Sarah Silverman is suing the company behind ChatGPT, alleging copyright infringement of her book.

Silverman is one of three authors who are suing OpenAI, the company that created the AI chatbot, according to the court documents seen by Insider.

The three plaintiffs allege that when prompted, ChatGPT will produce a summary of their works. They claim this is copyright infringement, as they did not consent to their books being fed to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is a generative AI model trained by ingesting vast amounts of information from websites, news articles and books, and other sources.

When prompted by users, it can produce convincingly natural responses that mimic the experience of chatting with a human.

Silverman and the other plaintiffs allege that OpenAI “benefit commercial and profit richly” from their copyrighted works and multiple other copyrighted materials.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, which was sent outside of normal working hours.

Court documents

The work in question is Silverman’s book “The Bedwetter,” a memoir by actress and comedian, which she owns a registered copyright.

The other plaintiffs are writer Christopher Golden, whose copyrighted books include “Ararat,” a supernatural thriller, and writer Richard Kadrey, whose copyrighted books include the dark, urban fantasy “Sandman Slim.”

They are asking for a jury trial and to be awarded statutory and other damages.

While OpenAI has never revealed what books are part of the datasets it feeds to ChatGPT, the court document alleges that many are likely to come from “shadow library” websites that illegally aggregate content that is otherwise not readily accessible.

Daniel Gervais, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, previously told Insider that he anticipates more lawsuits involving copyright law and generative AI in the future. 

The Authors Guild, a US-based advocacy group that supports the working rights of writers, published an open letter in June calling on the chief executives of Big Tech and AI companies to “obtain permission” from writers to use their copyrighted work in training generative AI programs and “compensate writers fairly.”

• The United States is providing Ukraine with cluster bombs it says have a failure rate of 2.35%.
• But past use suggests “failure rates of 10% to 30%,” according to a report prepared for Congress.
• Cluster bombs that fail to explode can pose a risk to civilians for decades to come.

The US claim that the cluster bombs it’s sending to Ukraine have a failure rate of less than 3% is unlikely to hold up under real-world conditions, with past use of the widely-banned weapon suggesting as many as 3 in 10 fail to explode.

At a press conference on Friday announcing the transfer, Colin Kahl, US undersecretary of defense for policy, said that the “dud” rate for US-provided 155-millimeter DPICMs, or dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, is just 2.35%. He compared it to the alleged failure rate for Russian cluster munitions of 30-40%.

“I’m as concerned about the humanitarian circumstance as anybody,” Kahl said. “But the worst thing for civilians in Ukraine is for Russia to win the war.”

The failure rate is important because each cluster bomb that does not explode immediately is a threat to explode later when the war is over. In Laos, for example, littered with US cluster munitions from the 1970s, thousands of people have died during peacetime from stepping on or picking up unexploded ordinance.

Most countries have banned cluster bombs, citing the long-term threat they pose to civilians. The US, Russia, and Ukraine have not.

‘Failure rates of 10% to 30%’

Russia has been criticized not just for using cluster bombs but for deploying them in densely populated civilian areas. Ukraine insists it will only use cluster bombs against military targets, with experts saying that, against entrenched Russian forces in the east of the country, they are a particularly effective substitute for the 155 mm artillery shells it’s running out of (and which the US cannot manufacture quickly enough to replace).

But as The New York Times reported, past use of the particular munitions the United States is providing suggests a far greater potential harm to civilians in the aftermath of any battle, with an Army study from 2000 indicating a failure rate of up to 14% for artillery-fired M42/46 submunitions.

The US military has said it will select from its stockpile only cluster munitions that have been assessed to have a failure rate of 2.35%. But even so, there has been a gap between past claims of the weapon’s effectiveness and actual experience.

A 2022 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted that, despite manufacturers claiming a dud rate of just 2 to 5% for their cluster munitions, experts in real-world cleanup operations “have frequently reported failure rates of 10% to 30%.”

Defenders of the decision to send Ukraine cluster bombs argue that the weapons will ultimately save lives by pushing back a Russian occupation force accused of war crimes, including torturing and killing civilians.

In an interview with CNN on Friday, President Joe Biden said the decision to send Ukraine cluster bombs was “very difficult” but cast it as necessary given that the country is running out of alternatives, namely the artillery shells that the United States had previously provided.

“This is a war relating to munitions,” he said. “And they’re running out of that ammunition.”

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

• Some AI experts say we’re barreling headfirst toward the destruction of humanity.
• Some of these statements are vague and experts disagree on what exactly the main risks are.
• These are some of the potential threats from advanced AI, and how likely they are.

AI is as dangerous as nuclear war and global pandemics.

That’s according to the latest warning issued by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). The statement is backed by major players in the AI industry, including Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT creator OpenAI. 

The warning is one of many that have been issued in recent months. Some of the tech’s early creators said we’re barreling head-first toward the destruction of humanity and others said regulation is desperately needed.

Some of these statements have left people struggling to make sense of the increasingly hyperbolic claims.

David Krueger, an AI expert and assistant professor at Cambridge University, said that while people might want concrete scenarios when it comes to the existential risk of AI, it’s still difficult to point to these with any degree of certainty.

“I’m not concerned because there is an imminent threat in the sense where I can see exactly what the threat is. But I think we don’t have a lot of time to prepare for potential upcoming threats,” he told Insider.

With that in mind, here are some of the potential issues experts are worried about.

1. An AI takeover

One of the most commonly cited risks is that AI will get out of its creator’s control.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to AI that is as smart or smarter than humans at a broad range of tasks. Current AI systems are not sentient but they are created to be humanlike. ChatGPT, for example, is built to make users feel like they are chatting with another person, said the Alan Turing Institute’s Janis Wong.

Experts are divided on how exactly to define AGI but generally agree that the potential technology presents dangers to humanity that need to be researched and regulated, Insider’s Aaron Mok reported.

Krueger said the most obvious example of these dangers is military competition between nations. “Military competition with autonomous weapons — systems that by design have the ability to affect the physical world and cause harm — it seems more clear how such systems could end up killing lots of people,” he said. 

“A total war scenario powered by AI in a future when we have advanced systems that are smarter than people, I think it’d be very likely that the systems would get out of control and might end up killing everybody as a result,” he added.

2. AI causing mass unemployment

There’s a growing consensus that AI is a threat to some jobs.

Abhishek Gupta, founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, said the prospect of AI-induced job losses was the most “realistic, immediate, and perhaps pressing” existential threat.

“We need to look at the lack of purpose that people would feel at the loss of jobs en masse,” he told Insider. “The existential part of it is what are people going to do and where are they going get their purpose from?”

“That is not to say that work is everything, but it is quite a bit of our lives,” he added.

CEOs are starting to be upfront about their plans to leverage AI. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, for example, recently announced the company would slow hiring for roles that could be replaced with AI. 

“Four or five years ago, nobody would have said anything like that statement and be taken seriously,” Gupta said of IBM.

3. AI bias

If AI systems are used to help make wider societal decisions, systematic bias can become a serious risk, experts told Insider.

There have already been several examples of bias in generative AI systems, including early versions of ChatGPT. You can read some of the shocking answers from the chatbot here. OpenAI has added more guardrails to help ChatGPT evade problematic answers from users asking the system for offensive content.

Generative AI image models can produce harmful stereotypes, according to tests run by Insider earlier this year. 

If there are instances of undetected bias in AI systems that are used to make real-world decisions, for example approving welfare benefits, that could have serious consequences, Gupta said.

The training data is often based on predominantly English language data, and funding for training other AI models with different languages is limited, according to Wong.

“So there’s a lot of people who are excluded or certain languages will be trained less well as other languages as well,” she said.

• When inflation was at its peak last summer, Michael Burry predicted it would fall within months.
• The “Big Short” investor was right, as price growth has slowed from 9.1% last June to 4% in May.
• In contrast, Burry’s warnings of a historic stock-market crash and a recession are yet to pan out.

When inflation was at its peak last year, Michael Burry predicted it would tumble within months. The bold call from the investor of “The Big Short” fame is looking mightily prescient, but a few of his other forecasts are yet to come true.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) surged to a 40-year high of 9.1% last June. A couple of weeks before that reading was published, Burry wrote in a since-deleted tweet that he expected “disinflation in CPI later this year.”

Indeed, annualized price growth slowed to 6.5% by December. Burry returned to Twitter at the start of this year to forecast that inflation would continue falling. He’s been so right so far, as it slowed to 4% in May.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Burry has a penchant for making accurate, often dire predictions. For example, he called the collapse of the mid-2000s housing bubble, and his bet on a crash was chronicled in the book and movie “The Big Short.” He also flagged the risk of post-pandemic inflation as early as April 2020, when the CPI reading was below the Fed’s target rate of 2%.

However, some of the Scion Asset Management chief’s forecasts are yet to pan out. After diagnosing a historic market bubble and warning it would end with the “mother of all crashes,” he tweeted in May last year that the S&P 500 could bottom below 1,900 points, based on how the benchmark has fared during past crashes. While the stock index plunged nearly 20% in 2022, it has rallied 16% this year to around 4,400 points.

Burry also predicted last summer that American households, under pressure from rising prices and soaring borrowing costs, would exhaust their savings by the end of the year. He cautioned that could spark a decline in consumer spending and erode corporate profits.

Moreover, he tweeted in January that the US would likely fall into recession, spurring the Fed to cut interest rates and the government to stimulate the economy, causing inflation to spike once again.

For now, consumer spending and employment are proving resilient, fueling hopes that the US economy might keep growing and escape a downturn. The Fed, which has hiked rates from nearly zero to north of 5% since last spring, has also signaled it plans to raise them further.

Regardless, it’s worth paying attention to Burry, given his track record of predicting market events. The investor highlighted some of his greatest hits in a now-deleted tweet last summer:

“Just getting one thing right is hard. 1999 tech bubble, 01-05 value revival, 2005 housing bubble, 2009 almond farms, 2020 COVID bottom, 2020 lockdown horrors, 2021 meme stocks, 2021 crypto leverage, 2021 inflation, 2022 not done yet, late 2022 ????”

• Employees today go into the office an average of 1.4 times per week, according to a study from the Advanced Workplace Association.
• Many people work remotely, but they lack sustainable IT infrastructure to support them.  
• Providing flexible and user-friendly tech can help you sustain a hybrid workforce.

Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine a future where employees have autonomy over where and how they work. But today, as workers log into conference calls and answer emails from kitchen tables and neighborhood coffee shops, many can barely fathom the idea of going back to an office five days a week — if at all. According to a recent global study of 80 offices in 13 countries representing roughly 80,000 employees, people go into the office an average of only 1.4 times per week. 

The work-from-home lifestyle has its perks. But with this widespread shift in working patterns comes a number of technological challenges. 

The move away from the traditional office has ushered in the need for modernized technology, and businesses that haven’t refreshed their fleet of PCs could fall behind. 

Below are a few considerations to help you support your hybrid workforce with the PC technology they need to succeed. 

1. PCs underpin the hybrid workforce

Whether you’re under pressure to meet a deadline, collaborating with colleagues on a cloud-based platform, or hosting a video meeting with team members on the go, a stable work computer is a must-have. And most IT leaders understand this necessity: A report from Intel found that 85% of IT decision-makers prioritize purchasing new PCs that allow employees to work from anywhere. 

Older PCs with limited battery life, aging hardware, poor connectivity, or operating systems that are no longer supported, can slow productivity to a crawl. That goes for both individual employees and the IT teams that get pulled away from higher-value priorities to troubleshoot problems with underperforming equipment.

2. Employees expect better user experiences

Companies that want to recruit and retain top talent are increasingly considering how technology impacts the overall employee experience. According to a report by Forrester and commissioned by Intel, mature organizations are 20% more likely to see improvements in employee retention when IT invests in high-performing, stable PCs. 

Eliminating distractions such as updates, low battery life, or slow device response is crucial for enhancing employee productivity and satisfaction. For example, laptops powered by Intel vPro® offer businesses multi-layer security features, modern management capabilities, professional grade performance, and reliable stability to help them scale with confidence. 

Instead of adopting a companywide PC refresh every few years, businesses may see improved employee experiences by implementing alternate approaches, such as ongoing but staggered upgrades, expanding the types of devices employees are allowed to use, or adopting a PC-as-a-service model instead of ownership, a Forrester Consulting survey found.

3. PCs are critical to enterprise sustainability initiatives 

IT has become central to enterprise sustainability efforts, and PC purchases are a key factor in that work. Companies are under more pressure from consumers, regulators, and employees to make environmentally conscious decisions. Today’s buyers want devices that last longer and can be easily recycled or reused. 

Nearly nine out of 10 companies are required to submit reports on their sustainability activity, and 64% of IT decision-makers say expanding sustainability efforts is a critical or high priority. The bottom line? If a device — or manufacturer — doesn’t factor in sustainability, it can’t compete.

Responsible environmental stewardship is a top priority at Intel. In 2021, the company sent only around 5% of its total waste to landfill and is working to drop that number to zero by 2030. Intel also achieved net-positive water in three countries and 100% green power in the US, Europe, Israel, and Malaysia.

 

Nearly nine out of 10 companies are required to submit reports on their sustainability activity, and 64% of IT decision-makers say expanding sustainability efforts is a critical or high priority.

4. Remote management helps keep your business secure 

Maintaining a secure device environment while meeting employees’ connectivity expectations is a challenge for many companies. But without manageability either added on or baked into each device, IT teams will continue to lack visibility into needed PC improvements, like which devices need updates or specific vulnerabilities that must be addressed.

However, not all remote access features are created equal. Intel vPro Enterprise for Windows OS allows IT teams remote access even when the device is turned off or the operating system isn’t working. Meanwhile, Intel® Hardware Shield, which is included with PCs built on Intel vPro, relies on a multilayered security approach that defends at the hardware, BIOS/firmware, hypervisor, VM, OS, and application layers.

5. Tech should be able to handle the unexpected

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, IT teams had to react quickly to support a remote workforce — a shift in workflow that most organizations weren’t prepared or set up for. But in many cases, these IT teams needed even more modernized support to optimize their own productivity.

University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, for example, began upgrading to Intel vPro technology in 2020. This technology allowed IT teams to swiftly respond to technical issues in medical facilities without physically entering patient rooms, resulting in quicker problem-solving and enabling healthcare workers to focus on patient care — at a time when that mattered more than anything else.

Even in non-emergency situations, today’s workers need PCs built to help them handle the unexpected. When users can depend on key features like IT support from anywhere or a quick battery recharge, they’re free to refocus their energy on tasks that drive their organization forward.

Learn more about how Intel vPro can help you meet the needs of your hybrid workforce.

This post was created by Insider Studios with Intel. 

---

*Disclaimer: Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Results may vary. Intel does not control or audit third-party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy.​​​ Learn more at intel.com/ITHeroes. © Intel Corporation.

Video

CMO Insider

Description

Show more

• More and more senators and representatives have a famous or notable parent. 
• Political families have long been a staple of American politics.
• Incoming members are more likely to have notable parents than in previous decades. 

When Rodney Frelinghuysen announced he wasn’t running for reelection in 2018, it made headlines. The 76-year-old New Jersey Congressman had served 12 terms and chaired the powerful appropriations committee. But when you consider his Congressional retirement along with the fact that in 2009 he told NJ Monthly that his two daughters were “politically astute, but smart enough not to run themselves,” it becomes even more notable. 

Many Frelinghuysens have served in the federal government. Rodney’s father Peter was also a congressman. In the 1800s, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen served in the Senate and as secretary of state. Frederick’s adoptive father and grandfather both also served in the upper Congressional chamber. In short, the lack of political interest from Rodney’s daughters opens the doors for some non-Frelinghuysens to represent the people of New Jersey.

But how common are people like Rodney Frelinghuysen in Congress? In other words, how often do senators and representatives have at least one parent who is also a senator or representative? Frankly, it’s not that common. 

Given that we grabbed this parent-child relationship from Wikipedia, we decided to take this analysis a step further and answer a related query: How many senators and representatives have at least one parent who has a Wikipedia page? We thought this would help us measure political privilege or nepotism a bit more broadly. In short, if at least one of your parents was notable enough to have Wikipedia page, you likely had some advantages in your political career. We used this data to calculate a nepotism rate, or in the internet’s parlance, a “nepo baby rate.” This rate is notably higher than the much narrower measurement we just discussed.

We see two notable trends in this graph. Primarily, since 1900 the Senate has more nepo babies than the House of Representatives. This isn’t shocking. Given that the Senate is 22% of the size of the House of Representatives, the average senator wields more power than the average Representative. This makes getting a major party Senate nomination more susceptible to intra-party dealings and, thus, nepotism. In fact, this is sort of baked into the history of the upper chamber. Before the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913 senators were not elected directly by the people but by state legislators.

These inter-chamber differences aside, we see a second more glaring trend. Since the 1980s, there has been a dramatic increase in congressional nepo babies across congressional houses.

When we break things down by chamber and party, we see that while there has been growth in nepotism in both parties since the 1980s, the Democratic party has outpaced the Republican party during this period.

But this data might be deceptive for two related reasons. First, incumbents have an electoral advantage, meaning that if you’ve won an election, you are more likely to win again. Second, if you are a nepo baby in your first term, you will continue to be counted as a nepo baby in each subsequent term. 

Lawrence Jackson/AP

To illustrate how these two forces might affect this analysis, take Nancy Pelosi as an example. Pelosi is the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., the 39th mayor of Baltimore and a representative for Maryland’s 3rd Congressional district from 1939 to 1947. Thus, Pelosi has been counted as a nepo baby each year since she was first elected in 1987. It’s possible that this trend is the result of the Democratic party electing more nepo baby incumbents like Pelosi. This doesn’t seem to be the case, though.

Since 1900, we’ve seen a decline in the percent of first-time legislators by decade across both parties, meaning more incumbents are being elected across the board. If we focus on the last 40 years, the first-time election rate between the two parties is not large enough to explain the nepo baby disparity. Thus, it’s not surprising that the Democratic Party does not just have more incumbent nepo babies but also more first-time nepo babies.

While there is a good deal of variation by decade, we see that there is generally a higher degree of nepotism among first-time Democrats in the last few decades. This is more notable in the Senate, but Democrats still outpace Republicans in the House since 2000. On top of that, we continue to see that independent of party the Senate elects more nepo babies than the House. 

Does this methodology capture every nepo baby roaming the Capitol? Of course not. Some senator might not have been counted because while their parents were well-connected, they were not notable enough to have a Wikipedia page. Others might have fallen outside the scope of our project because their grandfather or mother-in-law were notable enough for a Wikipedia page, but their parents weren’t. We accepted these shortcomings to avoid the somewhat tenuous connections that often lead to people crying nepotism. Regardless, we found this methodology powerful enough to help us understand the evolution and dynamics of political nepotism.

This analysis also highlights how humans have a strange relationship with nepotism. In most cases, we not only expect it but encourage it. You wouldn’t bat an eye if some guy you went to high school with took over his father’s plumbing business. You also wouldn’t hesitate to push your sister’s resume along if she were applying to a job at the company you work for.

The difference between the child going into the family plumbing business as opposed to the family politics business is twofold. First, the supply of valuable jobs in the latter industry is much smaller than that of the former. The guy you went to high school with taking over his father’s plumbing company will likely have no bearing on you becoming a plumber. But there are only so many seats in Congress. If you are not a Frelinghuysen or Bush or Kennedy, it is harder for you to make it as a federal legislator. Secondly, if you find yourself in Congress long enough, you are likely to make a good deal of money. At present, both senators and representatives make $174,000 per year with fantastic benefits. This won’t necessarily be the case if you work in the plumbing industry for a few years.

---

How nepotistic is the state that you live in? We aggregated overall and first-time nepotism rates across both the senators and congresspersons for each member of the Union since 1980, the approximate year that nepotism rates began to increase during the 20th century. Please note that the gross number of elections and electees varies dramatically by state. California, for example, has 52 times the number of representatives as Wyoming and, thus, many more elections. In addition, some states, like Alaska, don’t have many first-time electees post-1980.

Additional reporting from Madison Hall.

Description

Show more

• Adding grain to AI-generated images makes them harder to identify as fake, the New York Times reports.
• The likelihood of detection drops from 99% to 3.3% when pixelated noise is added to images.
• The finding comes as users in the US and abroad begin to use AI images to influence election campaigns.

From falsified campaign ads to stolen artwork, AI-generated images have been responsible for a wave of disinformation online in recent months.

Now, the New York Times reports that AI detection software — one of the frontline defenses against the spread of AI-generated disinformation — can be easily fooled by simply adding grain to AI-generated images.

The Times’ analysis shows that when an editor adds grain — that is, texture — to an AI-generated photo, the likelihood of software identifying the image as AI-generated goes from 99% to just 3.3%. Even the software Hive — which showed one of the best success rates in the Times’ report — could no longer correctly identify an AI-generated photo after editors made it more pixelated.

As a result, experts warned that detection software should not be the only line of defense for companies trying to combat misinformation and prevent the distribution of these images. 

“Every time somebody builds a better generator, people build better discriminators, and then people use the better discriminator to build a better generator,” Cynthia Rudin, a computer science and engineering professor at Duke University, told the Times. 

The Times’ analysis comes at a time when users are increasingly deploying AI-generated misinformation online to influence political campaigns, Insider reported. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, for instance, distributed fake images of Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci earlier this month.