You come for Taylor Swift, you best not miss

Hell hath no fury like a Swiftie scorned. Also: Santanic pranks, robotic Spanx, and Doritos shooting blanks.

It is Taylor Swift's universe. The rest of us are mere minions, grovelling at her cloven hooves. Source: Haunting Muse AI.

When it comes down to a battle between Taylor Swift and Vladimir Putin, my money is on Tay-Tay.

As Wired has reported, Russia is using faux quotes from Time's newly minted Person of the Year to spread anti-Ukraine propaganda, mostly in France and Germany.

In addition to The Queen of All Things, these attackers used bogus quotes from Beyoncé, Oprah, Gigi Hadid, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cristiano Ronaldo. They then buttered this propaganda across Facebook (remember Facebook?) and the Superfund site formerly known as Twitter. Some of the ads featured video of the celebrities overdubbed with AI-generated text-to-speech apps reciting Putin propaganda.

Disinformation researchers have traced back the bogus ads to accounts and bots controlled by the GRU, one of Russia's two major spy agencies. (You might remember them from when they hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 in an effort to help get Donald Trump elected.) I believe they have made a serious mistake.

Dear Vlad:

Sure, you can hack the emails from the Democratic National Committee, funnel money to the Republican party via the NRA, fund fake news sites, use racist Facebook ads to micro-target low-information voters, hack into multiple US state election websites, cause your political opponents to fall out of open windows, and create havoc on a global scale.

But mess with the Swifties, and you are in deep borscht. These people do not play. Time to ride off into the Siberian sunset shirtless on your horse, comrade.

What's new pussycat? Source: Time.

And if the Swifties don't get to him first, maybe Travis Kelsey will show up on his doorstep and beat the crap out of him.

Pranks for the memories

Rolling Stone magazine has helpfully named its picks for the nine dumbest AI-driven pranks of 2023 year. The list includes the Pope's puffy jacket, the faux explosion at the Pentagon, Instagram sexbots, and a crappy deepfake of Biden announcing a resumption of the US military draft.

But my favorite one is how Target is selling Satanic clothing for kids.

The devil wore nada. But that didn't stop faux Christian whackadoodles from sharing this video. Source: TikTok.

These images (and others like them) were created by digital artist Dan Reese using Midjourney 5 and shared in a Facebook group for AI art — presumably in response to the right wing loonie backlash against Target selling Pride clothing. They were then mixed into a video with a Satanic soundtrack and posted on Xitter and TikTok. Needless to say, the christofascists who got righteously angry about this did not get the joke. Or any other joke, for that matter.

Spanx for the memories

Regular readers will recall when I wrote about how Amazon is trying out humanoid robots made by Agility Robotics in some of their warehouses. Well, Spanx has beat them do it. With the help of GXO Logistics, these gut- and butt-sucking pantaloons are now being shuttled to their future customers with the help of Digit, your friendly robot overlord warehouse helper.

These robots will take on the dangerous, grueling work of hauling boxes of elastic undergarments weighing as much as [checks notes]… 10 pounds.

GXO operates nearly a thousand warehouse facilities for various companies. So expect to see more of this as we lurch ever closer to the robo-pocalypse.

Spanx but no spanx.

Model citizens

When most people talk about AI models, they usually mean something geeky like the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power things like ChatGPT. But there's another kind of AI model, and some of them earn up to $10K a month for photo shoots. Meet Aitana Lopez [1], a pink haired 25-year-old 'influencer' with 216,000+ followers on Instagram.

I know what you're wondering: Is she wearing Spanx? Source: Euronews.

Aitana is the brainchild of a beanie-wearing, septum-pierced Gen Z bro named Rubeñ Cruz, founder of the Barcelona-based modeling agency The Clueless [2]. His reason for creating her? Real models are too big a pain in the ass.

Per Business Insider:

Cruz told Euronews he decided to design López after having trouble working with real models and influencers."We started analyzing how we were working and realized that many projects were being put on hold or canceled due to problems beyond our control. Often it was the fault of the influencer or model and not due to design issues," he said.

"We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing," he added.

Per Clueless, Aitana is "passionate Scorpio with a love for video games and fitness," and has already been asked out by a famous actor who was unnamed in the news reports but was probably Leonardo Dicaprio. [3]

Crunch time

Stuffing your face with highly processed snack foods while lurking on Zoom calls is a time-honored tradition stretching back to, oh, March 2020. The problem? If you forget to also mute the audio, people can still hear you munching away. Well, no more. Doritos has come up with an AI plug in that will detect and mute the sound of crunching.

Per the website: "Crunch Cancellation is powered by artificial intelligence that has been trained by over 5,000 Doritos crunches, so no crunch will go undetected."

I think this is taking cancel culture a bit too far, don't you?

Shameless self promotion, part deux

The second segment of my interview with Friday Nuggets host Tschanen “TJ” Johnson has dropped, as the kids say. This one is about all the nasty dystopian scenarios that AI presents. (Actually, since we only had five minutes, it's only about some of the nasty dystopian scenarios. There are more where these came from.)

Enjoy?

Quick question for my regular readers (all 12 of you): Do you prefer these little collections of blurbs or the single topic essays? Cast your votes in the comments below.

[1] AItana, get it? Are these guys clever or what?

[2] Nope, not kidding. Some stuff you just can't make up.

[3] The good news for Leo is that she'll never be older than 25, so there's no need to break up with her in a year.