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Why Satire Is No Laughing Matter

TIME - Tech

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Everyone Hates 'Digger.' It's the Perfect Climate Movie

WIRED

The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what types of stories we tell ourselves about who has economic and political power. Should you see a Looney Tunes-esque satire that stars Tom Cruise in prosthetics portraying a loud caricature of an American oilman, that's currently on track to be one of the biggest box-office failures of all time? Absolutely yes--and it's a movie that rewired my expectations of what a movie about climate change should be. The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what kind of characters we're the most comfortable making into climate villains . The film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who only wears cowboy boots and lives in a mansion covered in antlers and polar bear skin rugs. At the start of the film, one of Digger's oil-drilling platforms accidentally causes a massive iceberg to break loose, resulting in a huge methane leak.


Digger review: Tom Cruise swings big for Oscar gold, and dear God, does he miss

Mashable

Mashable Selects Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more In My Bag Look Up Creator Playbook Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series'Digger' review: Tom Cruise swings big for Oscar gold, and dear God, does he miss Alejandro G. Iรฑรกrritu's political satire is sure to have people talking, at least? Kristy Puchko is the Entertainment Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, and interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.


The New Movie From the Creator of em Succession /em Is Less a Satire Than a Documentary

Slate

For the quartet of tech billionaires in Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead, ideas are so powerful that nothing else seems real. Holed up in a resplendent snowy retreat built by meditation-app developer Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), they're glued to their phones as the outside world is erupting into chaos, thanks in no small part to the wildfire spread of A.I. deepfakes on the social media platform owned by the world's richest man, Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith). People in Gujarat are being burned alive after being falsely accused of desecrating religious symbols, and Midwestern Americans are machine-gunning each other over minor disagreements, but for these four men, the widespread devastation is in some ways proof of concept that they're as important as they believe themselves to be. And besides, those bodies going up in flames are just images on a tiny screen, so distant they might as well be theoretical. As he trudges through the snow with Randall (Steve Carell), the venture capitalist who serves as the group's self-appointed philosopher king, Venis asks him, "Do you โ€ฆ believe in other people?"


Jesus returns as an AI INFLUENCER who you can video call in real-time - but, there's a catch

Daily Mail - Science & tech

For Christians, Easter is a time to remember how Jesus was killed on the cross before returning three days later. But now, around 2,000 years later, the messiah has returned once more - this time as an AI influencer. The AI Jesus chatbot allows you to video call the son of God in real-time from the comfort of your computer. But faithful followers should be warned that there is a fairly major catch. This AI chatbot has been built not only to deliver words of wisdom and comfort, but also to advertise products. Designed as a'satire on spiritual consumerism', the bizarre website's creators say that the AI Jesus will always make sure to suggest a'strangely fitting product'.


Washington Post cartoonist quits after satire aimed at owner Bezos rejected

BBC News

In the cartoon, Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI's Sam Altman are depicted on their knees giving bags of cash to a statue of Trump. Mickey Mouse is also depicted prostrate in the cartoon. ABC News โ€“ which is owned by Disney โ€“ last month agreed to pay 15m to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump. Ms Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack post on Friday, saying she had worked for the newspaper since 2008. "In all that time I've never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at," she wrote.


Variation between Credible and Non-Credible News Across Topics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

'Fake News' continues to undermine trust in modern journalism and politics. Despite continued efforts to study fake news, results have been conflicting. Previous attempts to analyse and combat fake news have largely focused on distinguishing fake news from truth, or differentiating between its various sub-types (such as propaganda, satire, misinformation, etc.) This paper conducts a linguistic and stylistic analysis of fake news, focusing on variation between various news topics. It builds on related work identifying features from discourse and linguistics in deception detection by analysing five distinct news topics: Economy, Entertainment, Health, Science, and Sports. The results emphasize that linguistic features vary between credible and deceptive news in each domain and highlight the importance of adapting classification tasks to accommodate variety-based stylistic and linguistic differences in order to achieve better real-world performance.


YesBut: A High-Quality Annotated Multimodal Dataset for evaluating Satire Comprehension capability of Vision-Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding satire and humor is a challenging task for even current Vision-Language models. In this paper, we propose the challenging tasks of Satirical Image Detection (detecting whether an image is satirical), Understanding (generating the reason behind the image being satirical), and Completion (given one half of the image, selecting the other half from 2 given options, such that the complete image is satirical) and release a high-quality dataset YesBut, consisting of 2547 images, 1084 satirical and 1463 non-satirical, containing different artistic styles, to evaluate those tasks. Each satirical image in the dataset depicts a normal scenario, along with a conflicting scenario which is funny or ironic. Despite the success of current Vision-Language Models on multimodal tasks such as Visual QA and Image Captioning, our benchmarking experiments show that such models perform poorly on the proposed tasks on the YesBut Dataset in Zero-Shot Settings w.r.t both automated as well as human evaluation. Additionally, we release a dataset of 119 real, satirical photographs for further research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/yesbut_dataset.


AI meme wars hit India election campaign, testing social platforms

Al Jazeera

Bengaluru, India โ€“ On February 20, India's chief opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), uploaded a video parodying Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Instagram that has amassed over 1.5 million views. It is a short clip from a new Hindi music album named "Chor" (thief), where Modi's digital likeness is grafted onto the lead singer. The song's lyrics were humorously reworked to describe a thief's โ€“ in this case, a business tycoon's โ€“ attempt to steal, and Modi handing over coal mines, ports, power lines and ultimately, the country. The video isn't hyperrealistic, but a pithy AI meme that uses Modi's voice and face clones, to drive home the nagging criticism of his close ties to Indian business moguls. That same day, the official Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) handle on Instagram, with over seven million followers, uploaded its own video.


Team QUST at SemEval-2023 Task 3: A Comprehensive Study of Monolingual and Multilingual Approaches for Detecting Online News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To model the Task 3 (Piskorski et al., 2023) expects the participants features representation of news articles across different to develop algorithms to automatically detect languages, the XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R) the news genre, framing and persuasion techniques (Conneau et al., 2020) is fine-tuned since it can in a multilingual setup as shown in Table 1. Six different processes all the languages existing in Task 3, and languages are covered in this task, including typically outperforms other models such as mBERT English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian. (Kenton and Toutanova, 2019). In addition, three surprise languages, Spanish, In addition, this study also calculates the sample Greek and Georgian, are also included in the final weights and class weights to combat the data test phase for conducting a zero-shot learning imbalance. The sample weights enable a training scenario.