One Sentence News / August 11, 2023
Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Author discovers AI-generated counterfeit books written in her name on Amazon
Summary: Author Jane Friedman recently discovered that a half-dozen books published via Amazon’s self-publishing service and produced by AI software were using her name; Amazon initially declined to remove the books from their marketplace, closing her case when they learned she didn’t have a trademark filed for her name, but after she called attention to what was happening in a blog post and on social media, the company quietly removed the titles in question.
Context: This isn’t an isolated event, and other authors have been checking the service and discovering that fraudulent listings—often ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks filled with AI-generated garbage content—are also using their names to trick people into buying these products, fraudsters seemingly able to churn out enough of these pseudo-books that they can take a spray-and-pray approach, producing enough of them at essentially zero cost that they can still make a profit, even if all of their listings will eventually be discovered and pulled; this is just one manifestation of a larger concern related to generative AI, namely that it’s so cheap and easy to produce content in this way, there’s a good chance most or all of our communication channels will eventually be filled with this stuff, and the platforms that manage said channels don’t seem to be ready for that potentiality.
—Ars Technica
Presidential candidate in Ecuador is assassinated during rally
Summary: An anti-corruption presidential candidate in Ecuador, Fernando Villavicencio, was killed outside a high school in the country’s capital, Quito, following a political rally during which he spoke to students about the ties between the country’s government and organized crime.
Context: This assassination occurred just days before the next presidential election, and though Villavicencio was only polling in the middle of an eight-candidate race, his anti-corruption message was popular with young people in particular; a suspect was killed in a melee that followed the shooting, and authorities have said they’ve detained six other people in connection with the assassination, as well.
—The New York Times
Biden restricts US investment in China
Summary: The US government has announced further restrictions on doing business with China, this time focusing on how and to what degree Americans are allowed to invest in Chinese entities.
Context: This new collection of restrictions will go into effect next year, and will prevent American investors from funneling money into Chinese companies working on advanced semiconductor and quantum computing technologies, among others, the idea being to further degrade China’s ability to compete in spaces that are considered to be the next, vital technological frontiers, which is meant to further increase America’s advantage in these spaces, reinforcing existing restrictions that hamper China’s ability to import relevant goods and deal with relevant companies based in the US and allied countries.
—The Wall Street Journal
The James Webb Telescope has captured an image of the most-distant star in the known universe, Earendel, which was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope last year; the star’s light takes about 12.9 billion years to reach Earth (though because of how the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate, it’s actually located about 28 billion light-years from Earth, today) and it’s thought that this star (which is named after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Simarillion”) has a companion star we haven’t caught a glimpse of yet.
—Space.com
>20%
Recently announced price increase Disney’s leadership is planning for their ad-free Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions.
That’s part of a larger effort to goose revenue by bringing in more revenue per subscriber, partially by nudging more users over to ad-supported plans.
They’re also going to be cracking down on password-sharing: something rival Netflix recently did, upsetting a lot of users but also increasing revenue figures substantially.
—The Wall Street Journal
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