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10 hours ago

Celebrities including Piers Morgan, Nigella Lawson and Oprah Winfrey have criticised the use of AI deepfake online adverts that gave the false impression they had endorsed a US influencer's controversial self-help course.

The adverts promoted the so-called "Genie Script", the centrepiece of a "manifestation" course sold for $37 (£29) a time by Wesley "Billion Dollar" Virgin.

He describes himself as a motivational coach who has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and claims to be worth $40m.

The videos, used to lure buyers to purchase the product, claim the Genie Script is a "missing" Hebrew Bible scripture of just 20 words that could - supposedly - change your life.

Its promotion blends pseudo-science, conspiracy theories and the manipulation of celebrity likenesses - all to draw in customers desperate for the chance to take control of their fate.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/02/b ... start.html
Los Alamos national lab made an artificial intelligence framework called Blackout Diffusion generates images from a completely empty picture. The machine-learning algorithm, unlike other generative diffusion models, does not require initiating a random seed to get started.

The results are comparable to DALL-E or Midjourney, but require fewer computational resources than these models.

Diffusion models create samples similar to the data they are trained on. They work by taking an image and repeatedly adding noise until the image is unrecognizable. Throughout the process the model tries to learn how to revert it back to its original state.

An important unique aspect of Blackout Diffusion is the space it works in. Existing generative diffusion models work in continuous spaces, meaning the space they work in is dense and infinite. However, working in continuous spaces limits their potential for scientific applications. Blackout Diffusion means that entirely new types of images can be created by AI.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/ ... -computers
Scientists used "knowledge distillation" to condense Stable Diffusion XL into a much leaner, more efficient AI image generation model that can run on low-cost hardware.