This is the real Annie Colbert. The person writing you is not an AI trained on thousands of random tweets, hours of Zoom calls, and combing through half-baked Google Doc drafts.But I asked pop science‘s design director took advantage of Photoshop’s generative AI fill feature to give my headshot a little more life. The result is…well, see for yourself:
Thankfully, my adventures with two-headed cats and off-brand Muppets aren’t the only problems dipping into AI. We’re bringing all seven Ask Me Anything articles (including one about how safe it is to get health advice from AI) to bring artificial intelligence to life in our fall Fake issue. dedicated to answering pressing questions about the impact of Will AI influence elections? ” “Can AI chatbots provide appropriate medical advice?”
If you read and think about these questions, Absolutely not, but or Well, maybeYou can then understand why the topic of fakery has sparked such lively debate across newsrooms. It’s that vague nuance in between when something can’t be 100 percent good, 100 percent bad, or 100 percent something.
Fakes have been used as insults (“You’re so fake!”), as a means of discrediting (“fake news,” sigh), and as the antithesis of the real thing. But if you can let go of your desire for something definitive and step into the gray area, you’ll find intricate, nuanced details that can make you question your beliefs about things that aren’t entirely real. You will be able to.
In this issue, we consider different aspects of fakery. Maddie Stone ran a scratch test in her thriving fake crystal business to dull the shine of cotton candy-colored quartz sold at a discount on eBay. In rural Colorado, Riley Black visits a fossil reconstruction studio filled with bones made from modern materials like polyurethane resin rather than sediment from tens of millions of years ago. Ted Kavanaugh’s photo essay captures the morbid beauty of taxidermy, where art and science swirl in the afterlife.
We also wandered beyond Earth with Tatiana Udall, who is looking to the future for pioneering space medical innovations that could change the way earthbound humanity treats diseases. And on his home planet, CERN, Rahul Rao visits physicists attempting an otherworldly triumph: reconstructing the early universe with the help of the Large Hadron Collider.
Finally, in celebration of the spooky season, a time of nifty tricks and ghost stories, Bill Gorsey unearths something special from our archives with the DIY “Ghost Telephone” first published in 1930. ” are all written by real people and can reshape your perception of fakes. because-Boo!— you never know what’s real.
cheers pop scienceAutumn 2023 issue created by me and AI!
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