Let People Sell Their Kidneys. It Will Save Lives. (NYT Opinion)
BY DYLAN WALSH
Creating a market for kidneys is not a new concept, but it’s historically been met with disgust: Sell what? To be fair, some of the ways to structure such a market would be irresponsible, coercive and deserving of that disgust.
But others are more thoughtful and prudent. One approach is to make the federal government the sole purchaser of kidneys. Donor and recipient would never meet. Compensation would be fixed, haggling impossible. After the kidney is acquired, the transplant process would unfold in the typical manner.
Eating Toward Immortality (The Atlantic)
BY MICHELLE ALLISON
Diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.
The act of ingestion is embroidered with so much cultural meaning that, for most people, its roots in spare, brutal survival are entirely hidden. Even for people in extreme poverty, for whom survival is a more immediate concern, the cultural meanings of food remain critical. Wealthy or poor, we eat to celebrate, we eat to mourn, we eat because it’s mealtime, we eat as a way to bond with others, we eat for entertainment and pleasure. It is not a coincidence that the survival function of food is buried beneath all of this—who wants to think about staving off death each time they tuck into a bowl of cereal? Forgetting about death is the entire point of food culture.
When it comes to food, Becker said that humans “quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment,” and that the desire for more life—not just delaying death today, but clearing the bar of mortality entirely—grew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object that might achieve a sort of immorality. Diet culture and its variations, such as clean eating, are cultural structures we have built to attempt to transcend our animality.
The Real-Time Deepfake Romance Scams Have Arrived (WIRED)
BY MATT BURGESS
Watch how smooth-talking scammers known as “Yahoo Boys” use widely available face-swapping tech to carry out elaborate romance scams.
The Yahoo Boys have been experimenting with deepfake video clips for around two years and shifted to more real-time deepfake video calls over the last year, says David Maimon, a professor at Georgia State University and the head of fraud insights at identity verification firm SentiLink. Maimon has monitored the Yahoo Boys on Telegram for more than four years and shared dozens of videos with WIRED revealing how the scammers are using deepfakes.
A WIRED review of the videos and three associated Yahoo Boy Telegram channels shows how the con artists’ techniques have evolved as deepfake applications and artificial intelligence have improved. It is one of the first times the specific tactics and outlandish techniques of scammers using deepfake video calls has been documented in this detail.
Plagiarism Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy (The Markup)
BY Tara García Mathewson
The tools that likely brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay are improperly used on students all the time
The companies that are marketing plagiarism detection tools tend to acknowledge their limitations. While they may be referred to as “plagiarism checkers,” the products are described as highlighting “text similarities” or “duplicate content.” They scan billions of webpages and scholarly articles looking for those matches and surface them for a reviewer. Some, like Grammarly’s, are marketed to writers and offer to help people add proper citations where they may have forgotten them. It isn’t meant to police plagiarism, but rather help writers avoid it. Turnitin specifically says its “Similarity Report” does not check for plagiarism.
Still, the tools are frequently used to justify giving students zeroes on their assignments—and the students most likely to get such dismissive grading are those at less-selective institutions, where faculty are overstretched and underpaid.
How AI is changing gymnastics judging (MIT Technology Review)
BY JESSICA TAYLOR PRICE
Proponents say the AI-powered Judging Support System will promote fairness and transparency in the sport. But can it deliver?
“When you make an inquiry, you can never be sure about what the judges did in the first place, so you have to make your best guess,” says David Kikuchi, an elite gymnastics coach from Canada. “There is also the risk of your score going down after a review.”
Srbić took the gamble—even though there was a new element of risk in this case. As it turns out, it wasn’t the typical judge that would decide whether he’d in fact landed all his maneuvers. It was AI.
Srbić’s routine, like all routines at the competition, had been captured by a handful of high-definition cameras, which together had built a three-dimensional image of his body as it moved. The footage had then been fed into AI software that was able to analyze each angle and movement to a specificity beyond the capabilities of the human eye.
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