<h2>Fringe Theory</h2>
One of the world's leading AI pioneers is warning not only that the increasingly powerful technology could harm the world, but that the people in charge of it may be equally dangerous.
In an <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/21/will-ai-replace-humans-yoshua-bengio-warns-of-artificial-intelligence-risks.html">interview with CNBC,</a> computer science luminary Yoshua Bengio said that members of an elite tech "fringe" want AI to replace humans.
The head of the University of Montreal's Institute for Learning Algorithms, Bengio was among the public signatories of the "<a href="https://righttowarn.ai/">Right to Warn</a>" open letter penned by leading AI researchers at OpenAI who claim they're <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-insiders-silenced">being silenced about the technology's dangers</a>. Along with famed experts Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, he's sometimes referred to as one of the "<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18280665/ai-godfathers-turing-award-2018-yoshua-bengio-geoffrey-hinton-yann-lecun">Godfathers of AI</a>."
"Intelligence gives power. So who’s going to control that power?" the preeminent machine learning expert told the outlet during the One Young World Summit in Montreal.
"There are people who might want to abuse that power, and there are people who might be happy to see humanity replaced by machines," Bengio claimed. "I mean, it’s a fringe, but these people can have a lot of power, and they can do it unless we put the right guardrails right now."
<h2>Money Talks</h2>
Because AI systems cost billions of dollars to build, the deep learning expert noted, the financial power aspect can't be ignored.
"Very few organizations and very few countries will be able to do it," the University of Montreal AI lab leader said. "That’s already the case."
"There’s going to be a concentration of power: economic power, which can be bad for markets; political power, which could be bad for democracy; and military power, which could be bad for the geopolitical stability of our planet," he continued.
Currently, experts disagree on whether artificial general intelligence, or human-level AI, can be reached and <a href="https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intelligence-singularity-timing/">when it might happen</a>. If it happens before global policy catches up, Bengio suggests, we're in trouble.
"If it’s five years, we’re not ready," he concluded, "because we don’t have methods to make sure that these systems will not harm people or will not turn against people."
While far from the first AI expert to offer <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-safety-expert-warning-loss-control">warnings about the dangers of AI</a>, Bengio has unusual gravitas; after all, he helped create it.
More on AGI warnings: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-bros-terrified-agi-trump">AI Bros Terrified Singularity Will Hit While Trump Is President</a>

Five Years

"Intelligence gives power. So who’s going to control that power?"

Godfather of AI Warns of Powerful People Who Want Humans "Replaced by Machines"

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has launched its mega-popular weight loss drug Wegovy in China — and it's charging just a tiny fraction of what the blockbuster drug costs in the US.
As the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/novo-nordisk-launches-wegovy-weight-loss-drug-in-china-5bcaa0cd">Wall Street Journal reports</a>, the drug will first be issued at a public hospital in Shanghai this week for the price of $193 per one-month supply. That's a staggering discount over the almost $1,350 American customers are shelling out for the exact same thing.
And that's despite the drug not being covered by China's national health insurance program.
The news highlights just how broken the pharmaceutical industry is in the US, with companies brazenly ripping off the American people for decades now, simply because they can get away with it. With a fractured commercial health insurance system, perverse incentives for drug makers, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/health/us-drug-prices.html">no comprehensive price controls in place</a>, pharmaceuticals often sell the exact same prescription drugs with a hefty markup in the US compared to abroad.
During a Senate hearing earlier this year, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders tore into Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Jørgensen over the issue, <a href="https://pharmaphorum.com/news/novo-nordisk-ceo-reticent-lowering-semaglutide-prices">calling out the company</a> for "corporate greed."
"Novo Nordisk has developed game-changing drugs which, if made affordable, can save the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year and significantly improve the quality of life of millions more," Sanders thundered. "If not made affordable, Americans throughout this country will needlessly die and suffer."
Wegovy was first approved by Chinese regulators in June. Researchers have noted that overweight and obesity have become a serious public health problem in the nation, particularly among children. Almost <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10357130/">every third child in China</a> was deemed overweight back in 2022, and signs point toward the trend accelerating in the coming years. And more than half of Chinese adults are now overweight or obese, according to a <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/series/obesity-in-china#:~:text=Published:%20May%2024%2C%202021,8587(21)00118%2D2">2021 study</a>.
Now that glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist (GLP-1) drugs such as Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Ozempic — both of which contain the same active ingredient called semaglutide — have shot up in popularity, the nation may have an effective solution on its hands.
Scientists have found that beyond allowing patients to shed weight, semaglutide seems to have other strikingly positive effects, such as <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/semaglutide-arthritis-study-success">treating arthritis</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/wegovy-approved-heart-disease-stroke">cutting heart disease</a>, and seemingly even making <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/ozempic-lowered-alzheimers-risk">developing Alzheimer's less likely</a>.
And most attractive of all, it's far more accessible from a price point perspective in China. Even taking lower average incomes into account, the cost of the drug is several times cheaper than what it's being sold for in the US.
Even in Canada, the drug is being sold for <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/10476494/wegovy-drug-canada-weight-loss-drug/">just under $300</a> for a month's supply, less than a third of the US price.
That kind of prohibitive pricing could prove a major problem in the US. The country has a long track record of struggling with obesity; according <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obesity-rate-us-adults-cdc-data-map/">to the Centers for Disease Control</a>, around 40 percent of US adults are currently obese.
But getting access to a potentially life-saving drug like Wegovy may prove a lot harder, particularly due to insurance reasons. At a whopping $1,350, the injections are out of reach for many Americans.
More on weight loss drugs: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/mounjaro-prevents-diabetes-study">Mounjaro Appears to Be Extremely Effective at Preventing Diabetes</a>

Ripped Off

Developments

Americans are getting seriously ripped off.

Wait, Why Is Novo Selling Weight Loss Drugs for So Cheap in China?

<h2>Link in Bio</h2>
A team of researchers led by Penn State have found that American conservatives on Facebook are substantially more likely to share article links containing false information — without even reading them. 
Liberals aren't off the hook, though; Facebook users overall were astonishingly bad at vetting information before spreading it online. 
"The closer the political alignment of the content to the user — both liberal and conservative — the more it was shared without clicks," study author and media effects researcher S. Shyam Sundar said in a Penn State <a href="https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/social-media-users-probably-wont-read-beyond-headline-researchers-say">writeup of the research</a>. "They are simply forwarding things that seem on the surface to agree with their political ideology, not realizing that they may sometimes be sharing false information."
<h2>Reading Rainbow </h2>
Sundar and his team's study, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02067-4">published in the journal </a><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02067-4">Nature Human Behaviour</a>, is an alarming indication about how dismal media literacy — and due to the time period it focused on, the past may be prelude to Donald Trump's upcoming second presidency.
Why? The group's research looked at 35 million public Facebook posts shared between 2017 and 2020, the bounds of Trump's first presidency. 
In total, about 75 percent of users, regardless of political stance, shared links without clicking on them first. Behavior sharply divided along political lines, though, with conservatives making up about 77 percent of those shares, compared to just 14 percent of liberals.
It's easy to imagine why. Trump often crusades against the media, repeating <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696131">many</a> <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/3820172-trump-calls-for-jailing-journalists-who-broke-supreme-courts-draft-abortion-decision/">times</a> that reporters should be jailed for breaking news, or <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-imagines-journalists-raped-prison-1234626493/">assaulted in jail</a> until they give up their sources. 
Trump's <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/musk-trump-president-bromance">favorite frenemy</a>, Elon Musk, likewise enjoys expressing his disbelief in factual reporting on X-formerly-Twitter, posting many times to his 205 million followers that the press "<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858762071938101406">[lies] relentlessly</a>," and <a href="https://x.com/Rothmus/status/1858296522229645577">shouldn't be trusted</a>. 
"Disinformation or misinformation campaigns aim to sow the seeds of doubt or dissent in a democracy — the scope of these efforts came to light in the 2016 and 2020 elections," Sundar said in Penn State's blurb. 
But Sundar wasn't prepared to discover how these powerful disinformation campaigns could be. 
"It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75 percent of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first," he said. "That was a surprising, very scary finding."
More on Trump: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-watch-elon-musk-starship-explodes">Trump Comes to Watch as Elon Musk's Spacecraft Crashes Into the Ocean and Explodes</a>

Undigested Media

Everyone is pretty bad at reading, though.

Research Finds Conservatives Vastly More Likely to Share Inaccurate Articles Without Even Reading Them

<h2>Firing Squad</h2>
The CEO of <a href="https://themusiciansclub.net/pages/welcome-to-brassclub">The Musician's Club</a>, an online instrument storefront, reportedly fired 99 out of 110 employees and contracted freelancers for missing a single morning meeting.
A Musician's Club intern described the surreal event in a viral and since-deleted <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1gs23tm/i_joined_an_internship_and_an_hour_later_the/">post on the subreddit mildlyinfuriating</a>, writing that "I joined an internship, and an hour later, the entire team got fired."
Music production magazine MusicTech has since <a href="https://musictech.com/news/industry/the-musicians-club-ceo-fires-99-employees-reddit/">obtained internal messages</a> the CEO sent on Slack, confirming the crazy story.
"I was a part of the [group of] 99" who didn't attend the meeting, the intern said in <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1gs47ia/comment/lxdywyh/">another Reddit thread</a>, because they'd learned from other employees that Musician's Club CEO Baldvin Oddsson was untrustworthy.
"After hearing about the work conditions, I deactivated my Slack account and just left," the user wrote.
This sudden departure isn't as unwarranted as it sounds. The self-described intern explained that every fired Musician's Club employee is an unpaid, remote worker — so this isn't a story of lost income as much as it is a moral tale about a CEO-sized ego.
<h2>Power Trip</h2>
On LinkedIn, Oddsson recently <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7264336882862280705/">bragged about</a> all the negative attention the intern's Reddit post and its subsequent news coverage has been bringing him. 
"While some attempted to 'cancel' me, it has completely backfired," he said. "Our traffic has surged to over 20,000 views, sales are at an all-time high, and we're receiving hundreds of applications daily."
"Firing those individuals was the right move for our organization," he continued, unrepentant, "and we are stronger than ever."
Though The Musician's Club is a small fry in the wasteland of exploitative companies out there, Oddsson's hubris is representative of many CEOs. Just looking at Washington, DC this month proves it. 
First, Washington Post CEO <a href="https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/1854634116345405515">Will Lewis intimated</a> to employees that if they did not comply with his abrupt decision to end the paper's remote work policy, they'd be fired. 
Then, there was multi-billionaire Elon Musk, notorious for his nonexistent professionalism. In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, Musk's <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-department-fake-feel-important">possibly made-up</a> Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-high-iq-work-free">let the public know</a> he was looking to hire "super high-IQ" unpaid interns, AKA "revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week." 
The Musician's Club Slack messages from Oddsson obtained by Music Tech summarize this dismissive attitude these CEOs have toward their workers well.
“I gave you an opportunity to make your life better," Oddson wrote, without a hint of self-awareness, after being stood up at his morning meeting. "Get the fuck out of my business right now.”
More on business: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-emails-elon-musk-agi">Internal OpenAI Emails Show Employees Feared Elon Musk Would Control AGI</a>

Stand-Up Job

"I joined an internship, and an hour later, the entire team got fired."

CEO Fires 99 Out of 110 Workers for Missing Morning Meeting

Scientists studied the cognitive behavior of astronauts who have spent six months on board the International Space Station — and <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2024/11/20/astronauts-slower-space-no-permanent-cognitive-decline">made some fascinating yet ominous discoveries</a>.
As outlined in a <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2024.1451269/full">paper</a> published in the journal Frontiers, the team led by NASA's Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory researcher Sheena Dev found that the astronauts' cognitive performance wasn't noticeably impaired after they returned to Earth.
However, a series of tests revealed that their cognitive abilities slowed down while in space, "suggesting that processing speed, visual working memory, sustained attention, and risk-taking propensity may be the cognitive domains most susceptible to change in Low Earth Orbit for high-performing, professional astronauts," the researchers wrote.
Nonetheless, the results are at least somewhat reassuring: whatever punishment the human brain takes in space, it doesn't appear to be permanent.
"We show that there is no evidence of any significant cognitive impairment or neurodegenerative decline in astronauts spending six months on the ISS," said Dev in a <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2024/11/20/astronauts-slower-space-no-permanent-cognitive-decline">statement</a>. "Living and working in space was not associated with widespread cognitive impairment that would be suggestive of significant brain damage."
A total of 25 professional astronauts underwent a series of tests — designed to study cognitive speed and accuracy — before, during, and after their six-month stays on board the space station.
The researchers found that their speed, working memory, and attention were slower than on Earth — albeit ultimately just as accurate.
"Slowed performance on attention, for example, was only observed early during the mission while slowed performance on processing speed did not return to baseline levels until after the mission ended and crew were back on Earth," Dev noted in her statement.
The team also didn't rule out the effects of stress, which can lead to a similar temporary slowing in cognitive abilities back on Earth.
"Other domains, such as memory, are less vulnerable to stressors," Dev noted. "For example, if you happen to have a really busy day but couldn’t get much sleep the night before, you might feel like it’s hard to pay attention or that you need more time to complete tasks."
In short, "the most vulnerable domains while astronauts are aboard the ISS are the same as those that are more susceptible to stressors on Earth," the scientist added.
More research still needs to be done to figure out why exactly these changes take place, which add to other health concerns for astronauts ranging from <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/space-astronaut-bones">loss of bone density</a> to <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-astronauts-steroids-testosterone-muscle">muscle atrophy</a> to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/space-tourist-vision-deteriorate">deteriorating vision</a>.
While Dev's team found no evidence of lasting cognitive impairment after six months in space, future missions into deep space that could take far longer may change that situation — particularly considering other spaceflight hazards such as much greater exposure to space radiation, or prolonged isolation and confinement.
More on astronauts' health: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-trump-loses-mars">Elon Musk Makes Embarrassingly Stupid Claim: If Trump Loses, Humanity Will Never Make It to Mars</a>

Slowed Down

Studies

Space does something to the human brain.

Something Is Malfunctioning With Astronauts' Brains

<h2>Everything Is Illuminated</h2>
Lighten up, people: a fascinating new paper has dropped that describes the shape of a single photon, the smallest possible form of energy in an electromagnetic field that we commonly know as light.
The work, published as a <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.203604">study</a> in the journal Physical Review Letters, goes into extreme detail to predict how these quanta of light are emitted by atoms and defined by their environment. There are limitless possibilities for how those interactions could unfold, but the researchers say they've developed a practical method for predicting them.
"Our calculations enabled us to convert a seemingly insolvable problem into something that can be computed," said study lead author Benjamin Yuen, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the UK, <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2024/new-theory-reveals-the-shape-of-a-single-photon">in a statement</a>. "And, almost as a byproduct of the model, we were able to produce this image of a photon, something that hasn't been seen before in physics."
<h2>Shaping Up</h2>
Assigning a specific shape to a photon is a fraught task, because these massless elementary particles exhibit wave-particle duality, a curious trait of objects inhabiting the quantum realm, which is governed by spooky uncertainties.
This means that scientists think of photons as behaving like both particles and waves, depending on how they're observed. Furthermore, photons are also understood as excitations in an electromagnetic field, or like a ripple of discrete energy.
In short, they're very hard to pin down, and complicating matters further, there are infinite ways that light can interact with its surroundings and with the atoms that emit them.
But the researchers say they were able to circumvent this by reducing those possibilities into discrete sets with the help of some classical mechanics — or dividing them into "pseudomodes" — thereby streamlining how they think of the photon interactions.
<h2>Going the Distance</h2>
The advantage to modeling a photon this way, according to the researchers, is that it can accurately describe how the tiny particles travel into a distant region of the electromagnetic field surrounding an object known as the far field. Previous methods had a disconnect between the near field and far field, providing an incomplete picture of systems of light at the quantum level.
"This work helps us to increase our understanding of the energy exchange between light and matter, and secondly to better understand how light radiates into its nearby and distant surroundings," said Yuen. "Lots of this information had previously been thought of as just 'noise' — but there's so much information within it that we can now make sense of, and make use of."
This new understanding has very practical implications. For quantum physicists and material scientists, it could transform the development of nano-optic technology, leading to "improved photovoltaic energy cells, or quantum computing," Yuen said, and also advances in communications technology.
And let's be honest: it's also an aesthetic delight.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-336306" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2024/11/shape-individual-photons-1.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="630" />
More on light: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/laser-light-cast-shadow">Scientists Intrigued by Discovery of Light That Can Cast a Shadow</a>

Photongraph

It's "something that hasn't been seen before in physics."

Scientists Say They've Discovered the Shape of Individual Photons

<h2>Bes Up</h2>
A team of researchers from the University of South Florida <a href="https://archaeology.org/news/2024/11/18/psychedelic-drugs-detected-in-ancient-egyptian-mug/">has discovered</a> the first-ever physical evidence that ancient Egyptians got messed up on rowdy cocktails of hallucinogenic drugs.
The findings add evidence to centuries-old myths surrounding the rituals and practices of ancient Egyptians, whose empire lasted from around five thousand years ago until shortly into the common era.
The team examined an ancient Egyptian "Bes" mug, which was donated to the Tampa Museum of Art in 1984. These mugs are decorated with the head of Bes, the ancient Egyptian god associated with protection, fertility, healing, and magical purification.
As detailed in their <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-78721-8">paper</a> published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers identified the remains of psychoactive compounds while closely examining the interior of the mug.
"There’s no research out there that has ever found what we found in this study," said study lead and University of South Florida anthropology professor Davide Tanasi in a <a href="https://archaeology.org/news/2024/11/18/psychedelic-drugs-detected-in-ancient-egyptian-mug/">statement</a>. "For the first time, we were able to identify all the chemical signatures of the components of the liquid concoction contained in the Tampa Museum of Art’s Bes mug, including the plants used by Egyptians, all of which have psychotropic and medicinal properties."
<h2>Ancient Jungle Juice</h2>
It's a fascinating new wrinkle in a mystery that has been puzzling scientists.
"For a very long time now, Egyptologists have been speculating what mugs with the head of Bes could have been used for, and for what kind of beverage, like sacred water, milk, wine or beer," said Tampa Museum of Art curator Branko van Oppen in a statement. "Experts did not know if these mugs were used in daily life, for religious purposes or in magic rituals."
Tanasi and his colleagues used advanced chemical and DNA analyses on samples carefully scraped from the mug's inner walls.
They found the mug once held an astonishing "cocktail of psychedelic drugs, bodily fluids, and alcohol" in possible evidence of a magical ritual reenactment, Tanasi posited.
Some of the hallucinogenic sources include wild rue and a water lily known to have been grown by ancient Egyptians, both of which were "traditionally proven to have psychotropic and medicinal properties," according to the paper.
"Egyptologists believe that people visited the so-called Bes Chambers at Saqqara when they wished to confirm a successful pregnancy because pregnancies in the ancient world were fraught with dangers," Van Oppen explained. "So, this combination of ingredients may have been used in a dream-vision inducing magic ritual within the context of this dangerous period of childbirth."
More on ancient Egypt: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-hydraulics-pyramid">Scientists Find Evidence of Advanced Technology Used to Build Egyptian Pyramid</a>

Nightmare Shot Rotation

They discovered a "cocktail of psychedelic drugs, bodily fluids, and alcohol" inside of a 2,000-year-old vase.

Scientists Find Evidence That Ancient Egyptians Were Tripping Balls

It's easy to be smug about AI "art" because, hey, doesn't that stuff <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/coke-hideous-ai-commercial">look like garbage</a>?
But the reality isn't so simple. To the untrained eye, it seems that <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-artist-furious-stealing-work">AI-generated images</a> are more than just passable; in some cases, they seem to match up to the old masters themselves.
That at least appears to be the findings of a <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing">recent blind test</a> conducted by the blog Astral Star Codex, which found that the readers who took part incorrectly distinguished between AI images and human art 40 percent of the time.
But perhaps the most striking takeaway was that overall, the participants slightly preferred the AI creations to human ones, with six of the top ten most-liked images being AI-generated, and the top two slots going to the AI paintings.
This preference was even the case among participants who identified as having a profound distaste for AI illustrations — perhaps demonstrating the unnerving capabilities of the technology.
For the record, this was not a scientifically conducted test. But with 11,000 participants, it's big enough to be interesting. Via an online survey, respondents were asked to look through fifty curated images that had no accompanying details, and on each, opine whether they were human or AI. The ending included additional questions asking to explain certain decisions, expand on participants' familiarity with art, and other relevant inquiries.
The blog's selection of images, meanwhile, was wide-ranging, including numerous classicist and impressionist paintings, a host of contemporary digital art, and AI facsimiles of all of the aforementioned. To make the test challenging, the chosen AI images did not include obvious giveaways like botched hands or gobbledygook text, and were often made by experienced prompt engineers (self-styled AI artists, in other words.)
Certainly, some pictures could be clocked as AI from a mile away, like one of <a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69373136-e480-40a0-a402-e8f401d81443_740x951.png">an anime girl</a>, and an especially gaudy depiction of <a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1767b6e8-a8bb-4bed-b96a-4c03691b6553_1487x934.png">giant cats in a throne room</a>. Others, though, like a <a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b25d6a8-dbe0-48d1-b94e-db8ea59b44fd_976x1232.png">quasi-impressionist night scene</a>, are far more difficult to pin down.
As we said, the takeaways are complicated. Perhaps the preference for the AI-images, many of which happened to be in the impressionist style, merely reflects partipants' taste for paintings of that era, as Astra speculates. It's also worth noting that significant human labor went into selecting only the most convincing AI art, meaning participants were being presented with only the cream of the crop.
As for the people who loathed AI images but seemed to prefer them when all the labels are stripped away, it's possible the selection don't reflect what they specifically associate as bad with AI images (like the weird "sheen" you see in so many of them).
The upshot, though, is that most of us don't have the refined visual palette to distinguish a human touch from a convincing machine one — which makes sense, since the AI models are fine-tuned to ape existing artworks by sort of averaging them all together and selecting for the most pleasing parts. Recently, we've seen people similarly leaning towards AI <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/humans-prefer-ai-generated-poems">with poetry</a>, something that very few people actually read regularly.
At the same time, the test showed that there are indeed total aliens out there who correctly identified almost every single picture, with an elite five readers scoring 49/50.
We'll close with a response from an experienced artist who partook in the challenge, and who displayed a remarkable talent for being a veritable art blade runner. A big telltale, she told Astral, is that the details in human pictures "have a logic to them," while AI ones are merely "superficially detailed."
Summarizing her view, AI art is like the culinary equivalent of trying to replace food with a tasty and nutritionally adequate protein shake that you could make for cheap.
Sure, you're getting your fill, and the slurry pleases the taste buds. But "imagine people calling this the future of food and saying chefs are obsolete," she wrote, per Astral. It'd probably drive you crazy, especially if you're an artist.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/newspaper-fires-two-ai-reporters-bizarre-behavior">Newspaper Fires Two AI Reporters After Bizarre Behavior</a>

Egg on Face

Uh oh.

Even People Who Hate AI Art Appear to Actually Prefer AI Art in a Blind Test

<h2>Slow Realization </h2>
Elon Musk has so suddenly transformed into a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-donald-trump-weird">Donald Trump shill</a> that even his most loyal investors are getting disillusioned with him.
"I feel horrible that I was one of Elon's greatest enablers over the last decade," said Ross Gerber, investor and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth &amp; Investment Management in a new <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/elon-musk-investor-gerber-says-he-is-kind-done-with-x-ross-kerber-2024-11-20/">interview with Reuters</a>. Earlier this fall, Gerber <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMF0GWfSRNQ">told Yahoo Finance</a> that, while his investment fund still owns $50 million worth of Tesla stock, he's been slowly dumping much of his original stake. 
"I have a Cybertruck, I have a Plaid — Full Self-Driving still doesn't work. I don't care how many videos they post about how close it is," he added. "Elon isn't focused on building Tesla." 
Gerber's assessment seems fair, considering the fact that Musk has been apparently spending the last few months <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-body-language">glued</a> to Donald Trump's spray-tanned side. 
<h2>Evacuation Plan</h2>
Musk is alienating plenty of people lately.
Artist and <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-accused-withholding-children-visiting-family">mother of three</a> of his children, Claire "Grimes" Boucher, <a href="https://x.com/Grimezsz/status/1859148117083304060">recently said</a> on X-formerly-Twitter that Musk is now "unrecognizable" to her. Because of that, not to mention the former couple's prolonged custody battle, Grimes says she's been forced to "[detach] from the love of my life."
"I didn't see one of my babies for five months," she wrote. "And this is only what can be said publicly, since most of my experience these last [few] years should remain behind closed doors."
Since Musk acquired Twitter <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-buys-share-twitter">back in 2022,</a> he's moved the website sharply into extremism, nullifying the block button and using the platform as a megaphone for regressive culture war content and misinformation. 
After Trump was named the next US president on November 6, millions of users left X-formerly-Twitter in favor of competitors <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/twitter-users-flee-rivals">like Bluesky</a>. This mass exodus sent Musk's site to the bottom of the <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/top-free-apps/36">App Store</a>, right below Google Docs.
"Nobody's on [X]," Gerber observed. "It's lost its power." 
More on Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/expert-warns-elon-musk-gut-nasa">Expert Warns That Elon Musk May Gut NASA</a>

Intervention

Lesson learned.

Elon Musk Investor Says He's Now Realized He Was an "Enabler"

<h2>Stainful Steel</h2>
The Cybertruck appears to be a magnet for just about every automotive embarrassment imaginable — literally.
As <a href="https://jalopnik.com/tesla-cybertruck-owners-discover-new-weakness-magnets-1851705001">Jalopnik reports</a>, owners of the Tesla pickup are complaining that slapping cosmetic magnets onto the vehicle's shiny surface is damaging its stainless steel body. Maybe making a car out of the same kind of stuff as kitchen utensils was a bad idea after all.
The complaints originate from a <a href="https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/don%E2%80%99t-put-magnets-on-your-ct-corrosion.30653/">thread</a> on the Cybertruck Owners Club forum started by a user named "cybertooth," who shared photos of extremely noticeable stains on his vehicle.
"I feel like an idiot..." the unfortunate Tesla owner wrote. "Decided to put advertising magnets on my CT. Happened to take them off to wash the truck after a month and my heart sunk... rust and corrosion."
<h2>Opposites Detract</h2>
The good news for the Tesla owner was that he was able to clean off most of the damage — but not all.
"There are a couple of small white spots left that have a slight rough texture to them," cybertooth wrote. And remember, the oldest of these cars have only been on the road for about a year.
His case doesn't appear to be a one-off. Several other owners chimed in to say they had the same issue as well.
In the thread, the owners speculate that the damage is being caused through the contact of different metal surfaces — like steel and copper, for example. If there's moisture present, this can facilitate electrolysis, the same chemical reaction that takes place in batteries, causing corrosion. Probably not good, huh?
It could also be the case that the magnet trapped water, grime, and dust underneath it, distressing the metal over time.
<h2>Dull Decision</h2>
Whatever the mechanism, it seems that the Cybertruck's stainless steel construction is at fault here.
The vehicle has a track record of easily losing its luster. Just months after Tesla first started delivering the trucks last November, for example, owners were reporting that their body panels were <a href="https://futurism.com/cybertruck-owners-already-rusting">already showing signs of rust</a>.
Others learned the hard way that putting a vinyl wrap on their Cybertruck could <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/peel-vinyl-cover-cybertrucks">also damage the exterior</a>.
Stainless steel, as it turns out, takes a lot of work to maintain. And if the point of the vehicle is to look obnoxiously shiny, any blemish on its surface will be that much more noticeable.
And so, our guess is that this won't be the last time that the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/thousands-cybertrucks-recalled-power">perenially-recalled</a> Cybertruck will attract negative attention.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/embarrassed-teslas-drivers-stickers">Embarrassed Teslas Drivers Buying Huge Numbers of Anti-Elon Bumper Stickers</a>