3 . Artificial intelligence (AI ) has been increasingly good at fooling people. A series of photos showing former US president Donald Trump being aggressively arrested by police have caught people’s attention. They were fake but very convincing.

Created by the AI program Midjourney, the photos were highly realistic, from the characters’ movements to the surroundings. However, many details can give away the fact that they are made by AI. The Washington Post’s technology writer Shira Ovide shared her tips. The main idea is to spot the problems anything that would look strange in a photo.

AI software has a history of generating human hands incorrectly. It sometimes can create hands with more than five fingers. This is because AI isn’t sure what a “hand” exactly is, according to Popular Science. The data AI uses to learn often show hands and fingers in various gestures, which can be very confusing for AI.

AI-generated images also usually contain details that are against reality. To spot this, focus on items like accessories. For example, people in an image may be missing earrings or one part of their sunglasses. If there’s text in an image, such as a newspaper or poster, it’s usually garbled (篡改), even though the text may look realistic from a distance.

Another thing AI is terrible at handling is the background. If there’s a crowd in the image, people’s faces in the background are usually blurry - or they don’t have faces at all!

The development of AI-generated art also raises alarm bells about how these fake images could be used to spread misinformation. “I think misinformation is going to hit an all-time high,” Jamie Cohen, a digital culture and AI expert in the US, told New York Post. Generating an AI artwork is to “create reality”, Cohen argued, adding that, being able to tell whether the work is real or not requires high media literacy(素养) skills. “The world may not be ready for how realistic the images have become,” Shane Kittelson, a US researcher, told The Washington Post.

4 . The Mogao Grottoes were a center of Buddhist life and some of the world’s great cultures for hundreds of years. However, by the late Qing Dynasty they had been abandoned and nearly forgotten and many of the caves had become damaged by the elements. Around 1900, with the discovery of a library of thousands of ancient documents, the caves received new interest from Chinese and foreign researchers. Unfortunately, this resulted in tens of thousands of items from the caves being taken to foreign museums

In the 1940s, many researchers and artists visited the area to study traditional Chinese art. Copies of some of the artwork painted by respected artists such as Zhang Daqian and GuanShanyue helped people all over the country learn about Dunhuang. These artists were also inspired by the artwork they saw in the caves and it began to influence their painting styles. Others staved in the desert for much longer, Chang Shuhong stayed for the rest of his life — struggling to record the cultural treasures and protect them from the weather. As a result of their efforts the Dunhuang Academy was formed to protect and study the Mogao Grottoes.

In 1987, the Mogao Grottoes were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While the caves are open to the public, access is now limited in order to protect the artwork. However, the caves can be seen online in digital form so that people around the world can study and enjoy them.

Despite its remoteness, the Mogao Grottoes continue to draw visitors. And just as the sand and desert have survived largely unchanged through the centuries, this small art gallery in the desert has also survived largely unchanged providing an amazing look at a world long ago past.

5 . This week, Google researchers published a paper describing results from an AI tool built to create music. The tool, called MusicLM, is not the first AI music tool to be launched. But the examples Google provided demonstrate musical creative ability based on a limited set of descriptive words.

Several different music examples produced by MusicLM were published online. Some of the generated music came from just one- or two-word descriptions, such as “jazz”, “rock” or “techno (高科技舞曲)”. The tool also created other examples from more detailed descriptions containing whole sentences.

In one example, Google researchers included these instructions to MusicLM, “It is a soundtrack of a game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff (反复乐节). The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds ...” In the resulting recording, the music seemed to keep very close to the description. The team said the more detailed the description was, the better the system could attempt to produce it.

The MusicLM model operates similarly to the machine-learning systems used by ChatGPT. ChatGPT and MusicLM both require powerful computers to operate complex machine-learning models. The San Francisco-based company OpenAI launched ChatGPT late last year. ChatGPT has recently received a lot of attention because of its ability to generate complex writings and other content from just a simple description in natural languages. Such tools can produce human-like results because they are trained on huge amounts of data. Many different materials are fed into the systems to permit them to learn complex skills to create realistic works.

However, the MusicLM researchers said there were some risks linked to the new tool. One of the biggest issues the researchers identified was biases (偏好) present in the training data. A bias might be including too much of one side and not enough of the other. The researchers said this raised a question about appropriateness for music generation for cultures underrepresented in the training data.

6 . If you had boarded a passenger plane in 1950, you would have seen five people in the cockpit (驾驶舱): two pilots, a radio operator, a navigator and a flight engineer. Over the years, technical advances have gradually removed the need for the last three, leaving just two pilots. That has been the norm (标准) in commercial aviation for decades.

However, things could be simplified further — one of the two remaining pilots could soon go. Many military aircraft are already manned by a single pilot, and for commercial aviation this would mean stepping into a brave new world.

But how will airlines make this brave innovation come true? One way is to greatly increase automation in the cockpit, devoting more tasks to computers. Another is to shift the same tasks from the cockpit to the ground. “The latter approach seems to be more workable, at least in the short term, because much of what is required already exists,” says Patrick Smith, an airline pilot flying Boeing 767 aircraft. “A trained ground operator could observe a number of flights at once and even fully control the plane remotely if needed.”

It’s true that single-pilot operations could help airlines save money, but there is another reason which makes them quicken their pace for this crucial breakthrough. Boeing predicts a need for 600,000 new pilots in the next two decades, but by some estimates, there will be a deficit (赤字) of at least 34,000 pilots globally by 2025. Reducing the number of pilots on some crews or aircraft could lessen the impact of this.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to a single pilot will be selling the idea to passengers. In 2019, Don Hairis, a professor at Coventry University, conducted a survey on the prospect of flying on an airliner with just one pilot. Just a minority of participants said they’d be willing to take that flight, and the general idea was that removing a pilot increased the possibility of accidents. In the study, Harris concluded that the single-crew airliner would be still probably 20 years away.

7 . I try to be a good father. Cook my kids good dishes, and take them to photo shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck. Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, in marathons.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled (缠住)by the umbilical cord（脐带）during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs (四肢). “He’ll be a vegetable（植物人）the rest of his life,” doctors told Dick and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an institution.” But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room.

When Rick was 11, they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University. Equipped with a computer, Rick was finally able to communicate. After a high school classmate was paralyzed（使瘫痪）in an accident, and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick said, “Dad, I want to do that.” How was Dick, a man who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

That sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. They even decided to try marathons. “No way,” Dick was told by a race official. They weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years, Dick and Rick joined the massive field and ran anyway. In 1983, they ran another marathon so fast that they made the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon the following year.

Now they’ve done 212 triathlons and 85 marathons. “ My dad is the Father of the Century,” Rick typed.

8 . Having spent more than a decade on the dance floor, ROME — Niccolo Filippi, a 23-year-old Italian dance performer, recently decided to explore Chinese culture and its traditional dance forms and believes that this experience will not only boost his career, but also broaden his horizons beyond the world of dance.

His interest in diversifying his skills grew after he stumbled upon a short video of traditional Chinese-styled dance on YouTube. “I saw it as an art that combines tradition and modernity, which was mostly the reason why I liked it,” says Filippi.

Ever since, he has been closely following Chinese dance performers and watching numerous videos to learn more about the traditional style that he admires. “I prefer the traditional style because of its light movements. It also reflects my personality with elegance,” he adds.

Filippi’s chance came when he was invited to perform for a Chinese New Year celebration in the central Italian city of Florence. He has since fully committed himself to the art form, learning several pieces and putting his newfound passion into practice.

“The biggest difference that I found (compared to other disciplines) is the change of mood and emotional expressions among dances,” says Filippi, adding that he needed to shift from the dynamic moves of hip-hop to the graceful and fluid movements of Chinese dance. Despite various obstacles, Filippi’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. Two of his friends shared videos of his performances on social media, and the response was overwhelming. One video garnered 500,000 views, while the other received 200,000 views.

Filippi believes that learning about different cultures is priceless, and he sees it as a means of personal growth. “I like to think of a person as a book,” he says. “Embracing different traditions and cultures, such as Chinese culture and many others, is like adding new chapters to my book, making it more diverse and wonderful.”