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Welcome back to the weekly roundup! On the podcast this week: a tool Palantir is working on for ICE, and how AI influencers are making fake sex tape-style photos with celebrities. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level: Comic-Con’s ban of AI art. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
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EUREKA!Scientists have discovered that men with larger penises are not only more attractive to women, they are also deemed more threatening to men, which is “the first experimental evidence that males assess rivals’ fighting ability and attractiveness to females based partly on a rival’s penis size,” according to a study published in PLOS Biology on Thursday. “In humans, height and body shape are well known to influence attractiveness, but penis size has rarely been tested alongside these traits in a controlled, experimental setup,” said Upama Aich, a behavioral and evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia who led the study, in an email to 404 Media.  Examples of the computer-generated, male figures used in a new study. Image: Aich U, et al., 2025, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) EARTH TO MANYVIDSIn posts on ManyVids, the porn platform’s official account holds imaginary conversations with aliens, alongside AI-generated videos of UFOs, fractal images, “angel numbers,” and a video of its founder Bella French in a space suit shooting lasers from her eyes. Adult content creators use ManyVids to sell custom videos and subscriptions, and perform live on camera. French recently changed her personal website to state her new goal is to “transition one million people out of the adult industry and do everything we can to ensure no one new enters it.” This sudden shift away from years of messaging about being a compatriot with sex workers, combined with bizarre AI-generated text and images about talking to aliens and numerology on social media, has made some creators worry for their livelihoods, and caused others to leave the site completely.  Screenshots via ManyVids / Collage via 404 Media YOU HAD ONE JOBWhen authorities used Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app on a detained woman in an attempt to learn her identity and immigration status, it returned two different and incorrect names, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the app ICE is using to determine who should be removed from the United States, according to testimony from a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official obtained by 404 Media. ICE has told lawmakers the app, called Mobile Fortify, provides a “definitive” determination of someone’s immigration status, and should be trusted over a birth certificate. The incident, which happened last year in Oregon, casts doubt on that claim.  Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Flickr. "WE'RE NOT GOING TO SIT BY THE SIDELINES"San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week. It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money. Every year, tens of thousands of people descend on San Diego for Comic-Con, the world’s premier comic book convention that over the years has also become a major pan-media event where every major media company announces new movies, TV shows, and video games. For the past few years, Comic-Con has allowed some forms of AI-generated art at this art show at the convention. According to archived rules for the show, artists could display AI-generated material so long as it wasn’t for sale, was marked as AI-produced, and credited the original artist whose style was used.  Photo by Connor Gan / Unsplash READ MOREReplying to ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice, Brian D Jordan writes: “Your great reporting is much appreciated and much needed. Thank you. As a retired reporter/editor I recall one mentor telling me that part of the job is documenting in the public record various abuses of government and others. Please keep up your fine work.”
And in response to Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback, Conrad writes: “This feels like a huge W for artists! Wonderful to read some happy news today. IMO only sentient creatures can make art, and so I prefer to say AI-generated imagery or AI-generated music but it's a mouthful. A person prompting a tool to generate images on their behalf and ‘curating it’ isn't art to me. AI image generators are digital colonizers. Sure, the stuff in the British Museum may look cool but when you think about how it arrived there, it's pretty damn devastating, but even those pieces of art were painstakingly crafted by people. I find myself looking at less art online these days from artists I don't know because it's exhausting trying to figure out pieces' provenance and have been enjoying more time seeking out traditional art in museums.”
 This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss stances on AI, a conference about money laundering, and signs about slavery coming down. EMANUEL: Last week we published my interview with the Wikimedia Foundation CTO Selena Deckelmann. I was happy to talk to her because she’s uniquely positioned to talk about generative AI’s impact on the internet both as the CTO of the website that creates some of the most valuable training data, and one of the sites that’s threatened by generative AI output the most. Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber here.
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