A new Instagram page is using AI to make parodies of Republicans attempting to push anti-LGBTQ bills. The account, called @RuPublicans--a spin on name of the political party with a nod to the famed RuPaul–has gained nearly 100,000 followers in less than two weeks since its launch, going viral for its creative AI portraits of different Republicans in full drag. Created by partners and digital nomads Craig and Stephen (who asked to be identified by their first names only to maintain their privacy), the project sees the couple using art and technology for political activism. "We were bearing witness to the rhetoric and actions against the drag community," Craig tells TIME, "and it made us want to do something, so we had this idea of putting the GOP in drag." The pair were traveling in an Airstream through the American West when they came up with the idea for the Instagram account, which comes at a particularly vulnerable time for LGBTQ rights in the U.S. State lawmakers are introducing more anti-LGBTQ this year than in the past collective five years, according to Bloomberg and data from the American Civil Liberties Union.

AI and ChatGPT development should not be paused and neither should other large Artificial Intelligence experiments residents of Austin, Texas, told Fox News. In the tech world, AI means artificial intelligence. Many people would probably just scream it, "AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII," out of fear of how big a threat it could become. Like it or not, new, "artificial intelligence" platforms like ChatGPT are going to change our lives in ways likely more monumental than the creation of the internet. News coverage of AI has been nothing short of apocalyptic.

On a screen a pair of big, dark-lashed eyes grow out from amorphous smudges of orange and blue. A nose follows, and then a heavily lipsticked mouth, with the recognisably exaggerated aesthetic of a drag queen. But before the face takes a complete form it has already begun to dissolve into something – or someone – else. But these faces take drag's contortions one step further. The faces in the video, called Queering the Dataset, are all deepfakes generated by a hacked artificial intelligence (AI) system.

"The Uncanny Valley"is Flash Art's new digital column offering a window on the developing field of artificial intelligence and its relationship to contemporary art. The last decade has seen exponential growth in the aesthetic application of AI and machine learning: from DeepDream's convolutional neural networks that detect and intensify patterns within individual images; to NST (neural style transfer) techniques that manipulate one image into the style of another; to GANs (generative adversarial networks) that digest large datasets of images in order to generate new visions without human intervention. Although the community of computational artists and creative AI hackers still exists largely outside of the contemporary art scene, a growing body of artists has sought to traverse both territories, in the process foregrounding the cultural, ethical, and social problems that underpin our new digital architecture. In recent years, Jake Elwes has distilled the full range of AI-informed strategies into a diverse series of outputs: transcriptions of tech leaders' numerical babblings (dada da ta, 2016); video installations projecting conversations between two neural networks (Closed Loop, 2017); and 2016's Auto-Encoded Buddha -- a tribute to Nam June Paik's TV Buddha (1974) -- in which a computer struggles to depict the Buddha's true essence. Through these works and others, Elwes has actively positioned himself within the long histories of video and computer art, and against the notion that AI is capable of expressing intentionality.

Scientific studies do not find any links between video games and gun violence. The claim that they do has been repeatedly tested, studied and debunked. Yet on Monday, US president Donald Trump insisted that "gruesome and grisly video games" were causative in the gun massacre deaths of 22 people in El Paso and another 9 in Dayton (not Toledo) Ohio. Why scapegoat video games and demonise the people who play them? It's established that science, expertise, evidence and the truth are not dominant themes of the Trump presidency, and with increasing numbers of people bleeding to death in US streets, he has to find someone – something – anything!