Can AI tools make meal plans that help us lose weight the right way? In a new study, a team of researchers compared AI’s meal planning abilities to those of a dietician. The results showed that AI-made meal plans – when compared to dietician plans – severely undercalculated the needed amount of calories and macronutrients like carbs and overemphasized other macronutrients like proteins and lipids. The team cautioned that teens should not solely rely on AI to make meal plans for weight loss, saying that the consistent deviation of five different AI models from nutritional guidelines recommended by health organizations could have negative effects on growing bodies.

Reddit.

Senate Republicans released an online ad this week in which a real-looking but fake version of a Democratic candidate, fabricated with artificial intelligence, appears to speak directly into the camera for more than a minute.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s deepfake of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in the US Senate race in Texas, is only the latest in a series of AI-generated creations from the national GOP campaign organization in the past year. But it’s the first featuring a phony version of a candidate talking in a lifelike manner for so long – an example of how far AI technology has come in a short time and an indicator of the direction attack ads may be heading.

“The face and voice are very good. There is a slight misalignment between audio and video, but otherwise this is hyper-realistic and I don’t think that most people would immediately know it is fake,” Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley professor specializing in digital forensics, said in an email.

The use of AI deepfakes in campaign advertising raises a host of ethical questions. It has also prompted some bipartisan calls for federal legislation or regulation on the practice, though those ideas have also faced pushback on First Amendment grounds.

The 85-second ad depicts an AI-created “Talarico” appearing to proudly read excerpts from 2021 tweets in which the real Talarico made statements on transgender issues, race and religion and a 2013 tweet in which he recalled having attended a Planned Parenthood event as a teenager. In addition, the ad depicts the fake “Talarico” making new self-praising comments that there is no evidence the real Talarico actually made – praising the past tweets by “saying” things like “oh, this one is so touching” and “oh, I love this one too.”

The ad begins and ends with a narrator describing it as a “dramatic reading,” and an “AI GENERATED” disclosure appears on screen for almost the entire ad. But the disclosure text is small, mostly faint and confined to a bottom corner of the screen – and the fake “Talarico,” shown wearing a blazer and open-collared shirt, looks uncannily like the actual candidate.

A source familiar with the NRSC’s thinking described AI as a “consistently effective” way to highlight opposing candidates’ statements and said, “These are Talarico’s real words … all we have done is visualize them for voters using a modern tool, within all legal and ethical parameters.” The source, however, said they did not have a comment to offer on the additional “Talarico” commentary the ad appears to have invented.

NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez asserted in an email that Democrats are “panicking after hearing James Talarico’s own words.” Talarico campaign spokesperson JT Ennis asserted in a text message that it is the candidates in the ongoing Republican primary who are “scared of James Talarico,” adding, “While they spend their time making deepfake AI videos to mislead Texans, we are uniting the people of Texas to win in November.”

Source: CNN.

Hacker News.

A landmark international study across five Central European countries has found hazardous chemicals in every single pair of headphones analysed, from premium models to cheap imports. Authors say the results reveal a systemic failure in consumer safety regulation across the electronics industry. The investigation, conducted as part of the EU-funded ToxFree LIFE for All project, analysed 180 samples of hard and soft plastic components from 81 headphone products marketed to children, teenagers, and adults in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Austria.

• Advance UK paid a secretive AI operation to make its political campaign content
• The same group created Danny Bones, a white-nationalist rapper whose videos target Muslims. They have been viewed millions of times
• Experts said this could mark new ground in the use of AI tools for political ends