Day In Pictures: 30 September

As amusing as the headline for this is, Kolodin's bill is not the usual daft nonsense that Republicans usually propose. And since it wasn't it passed both chambers of the Arizona Legislature. Kolodin hopes his bill will become a model for other states because he has worried that well-intentioned efforts to regulate AI in elections could trample on speech rights. Source: The Guardian An Arizona state representative behind a new law that regulates deepfakes in elections used an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, to write part of the law – specifically, the part that defines what a deepfake is. Republican Alexander Kolodin’s bill, which passed unanimously in both chambers and was signed by the Democratic governor this week, will allow candidates in Arizona or residents to ask a judge to declare whether a supposed deepfake is real or not, giving candidates a way to debunk AI-generated misinformation. Kolodin said he used the chatbot ChatGPT to help define what “digital impersonation” is for the bill in part because it was a fun way to demonstrate the technology.

Extreme heat in Mexico, Central America and parts of the U. S. South has left millions of people in sweltering temperatures, strained energy grids and resulted in iconic Howler monkeys in Mexico dropping dead from trees. Meteorologists say the conditions have been caused by what some refer to as a heat dome — an area of strong high pressure centered over the southern Gulf of Mexico and northern Central America that blocked clouds from forming and caused extensive sunshine and hot temperatures.

If the Middle East is a puzzle, it’s one that grew even harder to imagine ever clicking together as the evening of May 19 gave way to May 20. In the space of 24 hours, the President of Iran was killed, and the Prime Minister of Israel learned that a warrant for his arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity were sought by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who also wanted warrants for leaders of Hamas.

A few years ago, a friend of a friend declared that he wanted to pick my brain about The Good Doctor. He’d recently learned that I was an autistic culture writer and was eager to hear my feelings on the hit ABC medical drama’s fictional portrayal of a promising young surgeon on the spectrum.

A second farmworker in the U. S. has tested positive for bird flu, public health officials from the patient’s home state of Michigan announced May 22. During a press conference, health officials said the case was “not unexpected,” given the ongoing spread of avian influenza among birds and mammals in the U.

The first thing you say when someone tells you their bad news determines where the rest of the conversation goes—and, sometimes, where the relationship goes. Responding in a less-than-ideal way can prompt your conversation partner to pull back and decide, “‘Well, I’m not going to bring that to you anymore,’” says Jenny Dreizen, an etiquette expert and the Scotland-based co-founder of Fresh Starts Registry, a website that offers dozens of scripts in order to provide words for moments that leave you at a loss.