Technology

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202504/1331334.shtml

There are two parallel image channels that dominate our daily visual consumption. In one, there are real pictures and footage of the world as it is: politics, sport, news and entertainment. In the other is AI slop, low-quality content with minimal human input. Some of it is banal and pointless – cartoonish images of celebrities, fantasy landscapes, anthropomorphised animals. And some is a sort of pornified display of women just simply … being, like a virtual girlfriend you cannot truly interact with. The range and scale of the content is staggering, and infiltrates everything from social media timelines to messages circulated on WhatsApp. The result is not just a blurring of reality, but a distortion of it.

A new genre of AI slop is rightwing political fantasy. There are entire YouTube videos of made-up scenarios in which Trump officials prevail against liberal forces. The White House account on X jumped on a trend of creating images in Studio Ghibli style and posted an image of a Dominican woman in tears as she is arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). AI political memefare has, in fact, gone global. Chinese AI videos mocking overweight US workers on assembly lines after the tariff announcement raised a question for, and response from, the White House spokesperson last week. The videos, she said, were made by those who “do not see the potential of the American worker”. And to prove how pervasive AI slop is, I had to triple-check that even that response was not itself quickly cobbled-together AI content fabricating another dunk on Trump’s enemies.

The impulse behind this politicisation of AI is not new; it is simply an extension of traditional propaganda. What is new is how democratised and ubiquitous it has become, and how it involves no real people or the physical constraints of real life, therefore providing an infinite number of fictional scenarios.

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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE, has just signed an additional deal with Palantir Technologies worth $30m to track immigrants accused of violent crime, but also those who have overstayed their visas, Business Insider reported on Thursday.

Palantir's expanded and refined surveillance tools are also meant to help ICE keep an eye on those who "self-deport", which is something the Department of Homeland Security has been asking certain immigrants to do to avoid being forcibly - and sometimes very publicly - removed.

The new software, dubbed "ImmigrationOS" according to Business Insider's review of the contract, will save "time and resource expenditure" when locating and arresting immigrants, and bring together all the data needed for "end to end immigration lifecycle from identification to removal".

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW DELHI/SEOUL April 18 (Reuters) - Tesla's long-awaited plans for an affordable car include a U.S-made, stripped-down version of its best-selling electric SUV, the Model Y, but the production launch has been delayed, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Tesla (TSLA.O) has promised affordable vehicles beginning in the first half of the year, providing a potential boost to flagging sales. Global production of the lower-cost Model Y, internally codenamed E41, is expected to begin in the United States, the sources said. That would occur at least a few months later than outlined in Tesla's public plan, they added, offering a range of revised targets from the third quarter to early next year.