Category: Misc

From the Tampa Bay Times: “When Beach Park’s Howard Hilton was planning the Great Tampa Snow Show, he envisioned smiling kids, Santa Claus spreading good cheer, frolicking reindeer and lots of snow. A giant Christmas tree would hulk over the festivities, and there would be a massive, five-story ski slope. To create a festive atmosphere, the concept was to close five blocks of Franklin Street and cover it in ice and snow. Instead, Hilton’s eight-day event turned into the most flawed spectacle in Tampa history. The event took place 45 years ago and was designed to promote downtown businesses during the Christmas season. Even though hundreds of thousands came to the show, it resulted in 47 lawsuits, three dead deer and several sunburned seals.”

A convention where they want to return the Habsburg dynasty to the throne

From The Baffler: “Why did several hundred people in Texas pay good money to spend a beautiful Saturday inside, listening to three living members of the Habsburg family and a scattering of Carlists talk about what ails the world? It’s clear what the Habsburgs got out of it: the conference, held in Plano and organized by a Dallas realtor and right-wing Catholic, was in support of the family’s effort to win a sainthood for Emperor Karl I, perhaps the least successful and most tragic Habsburg monarch, who reigned for the last two years of World War I and then died penniless on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The family hoped to keep their memory alive—and maybe sell a few books. What everyone else might get out of it was unclear, at least at first.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The Tampa snow festival that became an epic fiasco”

via the excellent Depths Of Wikipedia account run by Annie Rauwerda

In December, the Financial Times described how a video that was posted on X in September by BD Politico, a pro-government news site in Bangladesh, showed a news anchor for something called “World News” accusing US diplomats of interfering in Bangladesh elections; the video was later shown to have been fabricated. According to the FT, it was made using HeyGen, a video generator that can create news-style video clips featuring AI-generated avatars for as little as twenty-four dollars a month. 

It’s unclear whether this deepfake or any other misinformation—AI generated or otherwise—had an impact on the Bangladesh election. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her party were re-elected and won an overwhelming majority of the seats in parliament, although voter turnout was also reported to be lower than in previous elections.

Whether it’s fabricated news clips like the one in Bangladesh, or fake audio clips like the one in January where a fake Joe Biden told Democrats not to vote, deepfakes and hoaxes continue to draw a lot of attention, as does the use of AI in creating them. But there are good reasons to be skeptical—not just about the amount of AI-generated deepfakes, but about the impact they are having on people’s beliefs, voting behavior, etc.—and some experts say that focusing on the role of AI is a mistake.

In much of the media coverage of these deepfakes, there’s an undercurrent of fear — in some cases expressed outright and in other cases implied. The fear seems to be that AI-generated deepfakes and hoaxes are so realistic and convincing (or soon will be) that they will distort the way that people think about elections—or just about anything else. But fake photos and videos have been around for a while, long before AI came along, and it’s not clear that any of them have had much of an impact (although they have had an effect on the individuals involved in some cases, such as revenge porn.)

Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “AI-generated deepfakes are not the problem”