| | | | The A.I. Issue | | Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way. .jpg) Photo illustration by Joan Wong; Source photograph from Getty As deepfake-video technology has improved to the point where it rivals reality, everyone, including academic researchers and politicians, has warned about an immediate future in which the public will be unable to discern fact from fiction. Yet, as Daniel Immerwahr argues in a sharp and provocative essay, published as part of this week’s A.I. Issue, “it’s easy to find videos that demonstrate the terrifying possibilities of A.I. It’s just hard to point to a convincing deepfake that has misled people in any consequential way.” That moment may still come, but for now, Immerwahr notes, the technology has mostly demonstrated the limits of the human imagination. “Able to depict anything imaginable, people just want to see famous women having sex,” he writes. “A review of nearly fifteen thousand deepfake videos online revealed that ninety-six per cent were pornographic.” This is a problem, perhaps, but, for now, not the reality-disintegrating one about which we’ve been warned. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | | | | Editor’s Pick | |  A Navy seaman keeps watch as the ship completes its maneuvers. | Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker With an exceptionally rare kind of access, the staff writer Dexter Filkins and the photographer Balazs Gardi recently sailed aboard the U.S.S. Rafael Peralta, a five-hundred-and-nine-foot-long warship armed with guided missiles, as it made the politically fraught passage through the strait between China and Taiwan. “For many observers,” Filkins writes, “the most alarming possibility is that a chance collision in the strait could spark a wider war.” The human and economic costs of such a conflict cannot be exaggerated, and, as Filkins notes, “in war games run by the Pentagon and by Washington think tanks, the United States usually loses.” Read more » | | | | From the News Desk | Our Columnists Trump’s Fascistic Rhetoric Only Emphasizes the Stakes in 2024As he leads the polls nearly a year out from Election Day, the former President is taking the sort of hateful language that in the past he’s used about immigrants and applying it to his political enemies. By John Cassidy | | Letter from the U.K. How Gaza and the British Right Split London on Armistice DayDuelling protests, a country divided over Israel and Palestine, and the return of David Cameron. By Sam Knight | | | | | Screening Room | |  The filmmaker Daniel Lombroso grew up around Holocaust survivors as a kid in suburban New York. Yet, when it came to the life story of his grandmother Nina, he remained in the dark. “On her piano, between images of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, is a small cutout photograph of her older sister, Irena, who disappeared eighty years ago,” Lombroso writes. “Why hadn’t I ever asked her who that was?” In his remarkable new documentary, “Nina & Irena,” executive-produced by the renowned director Errol Morris, Lombroso asks his grandmother, now in her nineties, the questions that he had never thought to ask. In Nina, we meet a woman who faces life with stoicism and moral clarity. “We are all born little adorable children,” she says at one point, about the capacity of people to do evil. “What happens?” | | | | | | Culture Dept. |  Cultural Comment “The Crown” Presents the Last Days of Princess DianaThe people’s princess remains irresistible in both fiction and memory. By Rebecca Mead | | | | | The Front Row “May December” Knows What It Thinks, and That’s a ProblemPresenting a battle between two narcissists, played by Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, Todd Haynes’s film misses dramas that don’t fit its schematic. By Richard Brody | | | | | Fun & Games Dept. | Daily Shouts A Day in the Life of the Guy Who Harassed You on a Dating AppAt 12:10 P.M., I ate my meat-only Chipotle bowl alone. By Jenny Arimoto | | Crossword A Lightly Challenging Puzzle Grand residences in Rome or Florence: seven letters. By Erik Agard | | Daily Cartoon Wednesday, November 15th By Adam Douglas Thompson | | | | |  | Name Drop: Can you guess the identity of a notable person—contemporary or historical—in six clues? Play a quiz from our archive » | | | | | P.S. Warner Bros. recently announced that it was cancelling the release of the completed movie “Coyote vs. Acme,” in order to save marketing costs and take a tax writeoff. (After an outcry in Hollywood, the studio said that it would allow the filmmakers to seek another distributor.) The movie is based on a Shouts & Murmurs by Ian Frazier, published in 1990, in which “Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states,” brings a lawsuit against the Acme Company for its variously malfunctioning products. The suit alleges that, among other bodily injuries, Wile E. Coyote suffered “severe singeing of the hair on the head, neck, and muzzle,” “sooty discoloration,” and “full or partial combustion of whiskers, producing kinking, frazzling, and ashy disintegration.” 🌵 | | | | Today’s newsletter was written by Ian Crouch. | | | | | | | |
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