By Casey Hall SHANGHAI Fierce rivals Shein and PDD Holdings-owned Temu have applied to end their legal fights

As we now know, artificial intelligence has a mind of its own – and now it's dictating what the 'ideal body type' is. A recent study by The Bulimia Project asked AI software Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney to design what social media would consider the perfect man and woman. Inevitably, the results were largely "unrealistic" and couldn't be more distorted if they tried. And it goes without saying, the so-called "perfect" person does not exist. When it came to women, the AI images swayed towards blonde hair, brown eyes and olive skin. AI-generated men, however, had a bias towards brown hair, brown eyes and olive skin. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The string of images soon went viral across social media, and it didn't take long for users to chime in on AI's "problematic" take, with one writing: "The male look is actually very unhealthy." Another joked: "So, AI is basically a 14-year-old boy with no friends?" A third added: "So I need to look like I'm made of wax?" Many more slammed the software's racial bias, with the vast majority being Caucasian. "How is AI already racist?" One person asked while another said: "So the AI is also racist. I am shocked." The Bulimia Project said: "Considering that social media uses algorithms based on which content gets the most lingering eyes, it's easy to guess why AI's renderings would come out more sexualised. "But we can only assume that the reason AI came up with so many oddly shaped versions of the physiques it found on social media is that these platforms promote unrealistic body types, to begin with." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 18, 2023--

By Martin Coulter and Supantha Mukherjee LONDON/STOCKHOLM As the race to develop more powerful artificial intelligence services like

A new technique is a dramatic breakthrough in the search for alien life, astronomers say. Researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of California, Berkeley say they have developed a new way to be sure that any potential signal is really coming from space – and not from something more boring. Astronomers spend vast amounts of time looking for radio signals that might have come from alien civilisations as part of work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. But they have in the past been fooled by very human technology, such as cellphones, microwaves and car engines, that can produce a blast of radio signals that look as if they have come from distant worlds. One way to check whether signals are really alien is to point the telescope elsewhere and then repeatedly return to the same spot, with the hope of seeing the signal again and ensuring that it is not a false alarm. But that is not foolproof – and only works if the signal sticks around. Some of the most promising radio signals might only be detectable once. The so-called “Wow!” signal, for instance – a radio signal detected in 1977 that was so shocking the astronomer who found it wrote the exclamation on a printout – has not been detected since, and astronomers still do not know whether it was an alien message or just a mistake. Now scientists have devised a new test that can be used to see whether a signal has really passed through interstellar space, which should help show that it is not from elsewhere on Earth. It works by looking for “scintillation” – the changes in amplitude of a signal as it is affected by the cold plasma of space. “The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal. And if a signal doesn’t repeat, there’s not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! signal,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, which operates the world’s longest running SETI program. “Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.” Dr Siemion called the breakthrough “one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time” and said that it would be the first time researchers would be able to differentiate a real signal from a false alarm, even if it was only detected once. The technique can only be used for signals that have travelled 10,000 light years or more to Earth, researchers note. If it was closer to us, the scintillation effect cannot be seen because they are not travelling through enough of the interstellar medium, or ISM. The research is described in a new paper, ‘On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI’, published in The Astrophysical Journal. Read More Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution Huge asteroid nearly crashes into Earth – and is only spotted days later ChatGPT rival with ‘no ethical boundaries’ sold on dark web

Due to billion-dollar losses in technical development, DAZN will stream Paul and Diaz's boxing match in virtual reality using Meta's Stadium platform

Orsted A/S’s chief Mads Nipper dismissed two top executives as the company fights to recover from huge writedowns

It’s been revealed that Mars is spinning at a faster and faster rate, effectively shortening the length of a day on the planet’s surface. Data collected by NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander has left experts puzzled. The length of every day is shortening by a fraction of a millisecond each year, and experts don’t know exactly why it’s happening. The findings also showed that the planet is 'wobbling' in an unusual way due to the molten metal “sloshing” in its core. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The reason for the planet speeding up is unclear, but one theory states that ice building up at the poles could be behind it. Dr Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and his colleagues are behind a study into the findings, which were published in the journal Nature. Dr Banerdt said: “It’s really cool to be able to get this latest measurement — and so precisely. “I’ve been involved in efforts to get a geophysical station like INSight onto Mars for a long time.” He went on to say: “Results like this make all those decades of work well worth it.” Meanwhile, another new study has found that Mars may have once had wet and dry seasons – like those on Earth – conducive to the emergence of life. Researchers have discovered fossil evidence suggesting the red planet had a cyclical climate more than three billion years ago. Nasa also recently discovered “diverse organic matter” on the surface of Mars, which could change our understanding of the planet and the search for life in the universe. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 2023--

By Daniel Wiessner Apple Inc will pay $25 million to settle claims by the U.S. Department of Justice

(Corrects to add dropped word "store" in headline and paragraph 1) By Supantha Mukherjee STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Amazon has more than