Goto

Collaborating Authors

 depiction



The Anti-Woke Right Can't Figure Out How to Stop 'Grand Theft Auto VI'

WIRED

A subset of male gamers have spent years warning that the transgressive series has been neutered by progressive developers, but the backlash isn't taking hold. Rockstar Games' best-selling series wasn't often accused of political sensitivity during its legendary run from the late 1990s through the early 2010s. In fact, parents and activists denounced the franchise for exposing children to a seedy world of sex, violence, crude humor, and wanton crime. Elon Musk even claimed that he couldn't get into the last installment,, because he was mortified to play as a character who shoots police officers. In the 13 years that fans have waited for --finally out on November 19 --the American right-wing grievance machine has drifted from fears of impressionable kids turning to a life of larceny to concerns that they will grow up "woke."


A Teen Girl's Death Is Prompting Calls to Ban Choking in Porn

WIRED

A Teen Girl's Death Is Prompting Calls to Ban Choking in Porn Despite the many health risks, sexual strangulation has become popular among young people--with some experts blaming adult content for normalizing it. An Australian teenage girl's death, suspected to be preceded by consensual "choking" during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn . This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren't aware of just how dangerous the trend is. Sexual strangulation or "choking" during sex, as it's referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular--especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death.


Rainbow Serpent rock art grew larger as Europeans colonized Aboriginal Australia

Popular Science

One depiction of the agent of chaos and creation is nearly 410-feet-long. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. This particular Rainbow Serpent art in Awunbarna is nearly 20 feet long. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .



A Tipping Point in Online Child Abuse

The Atlantic - Technology

Thousands of abusive videos were produced last year--that researchers know of. In 2025, new data show, the volume of child pornography online was likely larger than at any other point in history. A record 312,030 reports of confirmed child pornography were investigated last year by the Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that works around the globe to identify and remove such material from the web. This is concerning in and of itself. It means that the overall volume of child porn detected on the internet grew by 7 percent since 2024, when the previous record had been set.


Horses, the Most Controversial Game of the Year, Doesn't Live Up to the Hype

WIRED

Then its sales blew up. But fails to meet the lofty goals of its own ideas. Shortly before the December 2 release of horror game, developer Santa Ragione shared some news: the game would not be available on Valve's mega platform, Steam . Valve had already banned an early, incomplete version of the game two years ago and offered, according to Santa Ragione, little clarification about why at the time. Then, hours before the game's release, the Epic Games Store banned as well.



OpenAI video app Sora hits 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT

BBC News

OpenAI says the latest version of its text-to-video artificial intelligence (AI) tool Sora was downloaded over a million times in less than five days - hitting the milestone faster than ChatGPT did at launch. The app, which has topped the Apple App Store charts in the US, generates ten second long realistic-looking videos from simple text prompts. The figures were announced in an X post from Sora boss Bill Peebles, who said the surging growth came even though the app was only available to people in North America who had received an invite. The Sora app - which makes it easy for users to post videos they have created to social media - has resulted in a deluge of videos on social feeds. Some have included depictions of deceased celebrities such as musicians Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur.


Draw an Ugly Person An Exploration of Generative AIs Perceptions of Ugliness

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI does not only replicate human creativity but also reproduces deep-seated cultural biases, making it crucial to critically examine how concepts like ugliness are understood and expressed by these tools. This study investigates how four different generative AI models understand and express ugliness through text and image and explores the biases embedded within these representations. We extracted 13 adjectives associated with ugliness through iterative prompting of a large language model and generated 624 images across four AI models and three prompts. Demographic and socioeconomic attributes within the images were independently coded and thematically analyzed. Our findings show that AI models disproportionately associate ugliness with old white male figures, reflecting entrenched social biases as well as paradoxical biases, where efforts to avoid stereotypical depictions of marginalized groups inadvertently result in the disproportionate projection of negative attributes onto majority groups. Qualitative analysis further reveals that, despite supposed attempts to frame ugliness within social contexts, conventional physical markers such as asymmetry and aging persist as central visual motifs. These findings demonstrate that despite attempts to create more equal representations, generative AI continues to perpetuate inherited and paradoxical biases, underscoring the critical work being done to create ethical AI training paradigms and advance methodologies for more inclusive AI development.