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Earlier today, the FBI shared two blurry photos on X of a person of interest in the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Numerous users replied with AI-upscaled, “enhanced” versions of the pictures almost immediately, turning the pixelated surveillance shots into sharp, high-resolution images. But AI tools aren’t uncovering secret details in a fuzzy picture, they’re inferring what might be there — and they have a track record of showing things that don’t exist.

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

We’re drowning in this nothingness.

So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?

The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:

• Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
• YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse

In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”

Designers are burnt out, disillusioned, and constantly joking that design ruined their life – but underneath the memes lies a deeper reckoning. Our US editor-at-large explores how irony became the industry’s dominant tone, and what it might mean to care again.

Not all borrowing is the same. From public domain illustrations on book covers to AI’s data hoarding, who really owns culture – and who gets away with taking it?

Understanding when and why men outperform women, and under what circumstances that can change, is suddenly a fraught topic.

One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?

the immediately sharable dressing-room selfies, appetizer snapshots, and view-from-the-hotel-balcony landscapes that aren’t meant to be art works but are, instead, “about developing and conveying your view, your experience, your imagination in the now.”

Like a lighthouse that helps sailors avoid crashing into rocks, Lighthouse Parents provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges. They demonstrate that they trust their kids to handle difficult situations independently. The key is learning when to step back and let them find their own way.

The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson.