In Spain, dozens of girls are reporting AI-generated nude photos of them being circulated at school: ‘My heart skipped a beat’ (EL PÁIS)
BY MANUEL VIEJO
While the police investigate, the mothers of the affected have organized to take action and try to stop those responsible.
Back to school. First day of class. Isabel, 14 years old, went last Tuesday to her high school in Almendralejo (Extremadura, Spain), a municipality with almost 30,000 residents where practically everyone knows each other. That morning, she entered the schoolyard to find a rumor spreading from group to group. It was all everyone was talking about: there were photos of naked female classmates being passed around everyone’s phones. Isabel (her name has been changed at the request of her mother) went out to recess with her friends. They were in shock. Suddenly, a boy approached her and said: “I saw a naked photo of you.”
Is digital violence in an AI era yet another threat to women? (EL PÁIS)
BY NOOR MAHTANI
A hundred apps creating hyperrealistic erotic images are being flagged up by experts who are pushing for comprehensive public policies and criminalization.
Nowadays, anyone can create a hyperrealistic porn video with artificial intelligence (AI). All it takes is a photo, an email and between $10 and $50. These are the only requirements for the 96 apps already in existence to receive “compelling nudity” on tap for a year. “It’ll be a piece of cake to add someone to a porn scene,” says the website of one of the most popular apps, with 1.5 million monthly visits. “This is the crème de la crème because of how easy and powerful it is,” says another. It is precisely the ease of generating content without consent and sharing it that worries experts in the Latin American region where, in some countries, digital gender-based violence is hardly considered a crime and where commitment to its prevention is flaky to say the least.
Who gets to decide who receives experimental medical treatments? (MIT Technology Review)
BY JESSICA HAMZELOU
For many patients, pushing for access to unproven treatments is their best chance of survival. And that’s worth the risk.
There’s a difficult balance to be reached between protecting people from the unknown effects of a new treatment and enabling access to something potentially life-saving. Trying an experimental drug could cure a person’s disease. It could also end up making no difference, or even doing harm. And if companies struggle to get funding following a bad outcome, it could delay progress in an entire research field—perhaps slowing future drug approvals.
US mother sentenced to two years in prison for giving daughter abortion pills (The Guardian)
BY CARTER SHERMAN
Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to providing an abortion after 20 weeks and tampering with human remains
According to prosecutors, after the pair bought pills to end the pregnancy, Celeste Burgess gave birth to a stillborn fetus. At the time, Nebraska law banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy was well past that point, according to court records.
Has Apple Pay made it too easy to spend money? (Vox)
BY WHIZY KIM
Tap-to-pay makes spending money fun, easy, and virtually invisible.
As mobile payments become more accessible, the act of consumption becomes more invisible. And that could spell trouble. Big tech companies like Apple are offering an onslaught of more frictionless ways to part with money. That also means they’re quickly becoming powerful arbiters of how we spend money, how much we spend, and what we spend on — all without facing the same strict regulations actual financial institutions, like banks, face.
Property over people? New York City’s $52bn plan to save itself from the sea (The Guardian)
BY EDWARD HELMORE
A decade after Hurricane Sandy, critics of a federal plan that allocates billions to protect the region from rising waters are calling it a ‘failure of imagination’
“The government’s plan is a blunt instrument for a very complex situation,” says Savitri Durkee, an activist with the Church of Stop Shopping, an environmental justice-aligned performance group. Durkee argues that climate change is happening so rapidly that a single engineering solution, one that could take decades to complete, is not the answer because it fails to address the causes and considers only coastal storms, not interior flooding.
Is there anything Ozempic can’t do? (Vox)
BY DYLAN SCOTT
Semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, could soon be used for a lot more than weight loss.
The hype train was out of the station and picking up speed. Ozempic became (to the concern of medical professionals) the diet drug of choice for the celebrity set. Then more data began pouring in, affirming that the drugs were not only helping people lose weight but improving their prognosis for other weight-related medical problems that rank among the most common causes of death in the United States: heart attacks, stroke, and heart failure. A study partially funded by Novo Nordisk, the drugs’ manufacturer, estimated that the product could help prevent as many as 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes over 10 years.
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