Vanity Fair / Fred Ritchin
Regarding the pain of others in Israel and Gaza: How do we trust what we see? →“Widely published photo essays in the heyday of picture magazines helped transcend such reactive coverage by offering nuance and complexity. Now such in-depth essays are harder to find. Without such context, conflicts end up looking like incomprehensible variations of one another, spectacles of violence and destruction.”
Rest of World / Victoria Turk
How AI reduces the world to stereotypes →“In July, BuzzFeed posted a list of 195 images of Barbie dolls produced using Midjourney, the popular artificial intelligence image generator. Each doll was supposed to represent a different country: Afghanistan Barbie, Albania Barbie, Algeria Barbie, and so on. The depictions were clearly flawed: Several of the Asian Barbies were light-skinned; Thailand Barbie, Singapore Barbie, and the Philippines Barbie all had blonde hair. Lebanon Barbie posed standing on rubble; Germany Barbie wore military-style clothing. South Sudan Barbie carried a gun.”
CNN / Donie O'Sullivan and Allison Gordon
Microsoft’s AI is making a mess of the news →Anna Bateson, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, wrote a sharply worded letter to Microsoft. “Not only is this sort of application potentially distressing for the family of the individual who is the subject of the story, it is also deeply damaging to the Guardian’s hard-won reputation for trusted, sensitive journalism, and to the reputation of the individual journalists who wrote the original story,” Bateson wrote.
The Atlantic / John Palfrey
I saw the importance of local news firsthand. Now I’m trying to save it. →“[Press Forward’s] goal is to raise the next $500 million at the local level. For local news to be sustainable over the long term, communities will need to stand up and support their local news providers—whoever that may be in any given area. Americans will need to support local news the same way that they invest in arts and culture, hospitals, or alma maters. They will need to add it to their list of philanthropic commitments—or at least to their list of subscriptions, alongside Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix.”