内容摘要：“They’re talking about tariffs in a totally different way,” he said.

“They’re talking about tariffs in a totally different way,” he said.

Back then, the tech industry alreadywith the branch of AI that trains machines to “see” and understand images. Computer vision held great commercial promise but echoed the historical biases found in earlier camera technologies that portrayed Black and brown people in an unflattering light.

“Black people or darker skinned people would come in the picture and we’d look ridiculous sometimes,” said Monk, a scholar of colorism, a form of discrimination based on people’s skin tones and other features.Google adopted a color scale invented by Monk that improved how its AI image tools portray the diversity of human skin tones, replacing a decades-old standard originally designed for doctors treating white dermatology patients.“Consumers definitely had a huge positive response to the changes,” he said.

Now Monk wonders whether such efforts will continue in the future. While he doesn’t believe that his Monk Skin Tone Scale is threatened because it’s already baked into dozens of products at Google and elsewhere — including camera phones, video games, AI image generators — he and other researchers worry that the new mood is chilling future initiatives and funding to make technology work better for everyone.“Google wants their products to work for everybody, in India, China, Africa, et cetera. That part is kind of DEI-immune,” Monk said. “But could future funding for those kinds of projects be lowered? Absolutely, when the political mood shifts and when there’s a lot of pressure to get to market very quickly.”

touching on DEI themes, but its influence on commercial development of chatbots and other AI products is more indirect. In investigating AI companies, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the judiciary committee, said he wants to find out whether former President Joe Biden’s administration “coerced or colluded with” them to censor lawful speech.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a Texas event this month that Biden’s AI policies were “promoting social divisions and redistribution in the name of equity.”It was difficult to say why the regal, mysterious and stinky flower had attracted such a following -– but perhaps the answer lay in the “reverence” viewers felt in the presence of “such an amazing living being,” Daniel said.

Along with her real-life visitors, Putricia’s online fandom has been rapid, global and deeply strange -– if much less smelly. A 24/7 live stream established by the botanic garden drew close to a million views in less than a week and prompted a shared language of memes and inside jokes.An endangered plant known as the “corpse flower” for its putrid stink, is about to bloom at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

An endangered plant known as the “corpse flower” for its putrid stink, is about to bloom at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)Frequently deployed acronyms included WWTF, or we watch the flower, WDNRP -- we do not rush Putricia – and BBTB, or blessed be the bloom. “Putricia is a metaphor for my life,” wrote one poster, who did not elaborate.