Author: NY TIMES

Yes, it’s yet another show of A.I.-generated art — but wait! The software known as AARON isn’t like other A.I.’s. Its developer, the British painter Harold Cohen — being an artist — understood that A.I. isn’t a shortcut to interesting art. It’s a tool, ultimately only as good as its user.Selections from the paintings Cohen made with AARON, on view at the Whitney Museum, represent their man-machine team’s increasingly sophisticated style. The early pictures, from the 1970s, were limited to abstract, wavering linework and crosshatched blobs — the available computing power couldn’t manage much more — which AARON drew with…

The head of the Internal Revenue Service warned on Thursday that proposed cuts to his agency’s budget would ultimately cost the federal government more money and pushed back against accusations that he had been disregarding laws for political purposes.The comments by the I.R.S. commissioner, Daniel Werfel, came in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee as he approaches his first full year on the job. He has been overseeing a $60 billion overhaul of the tax collection agency. That funding, under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, had been scaled back from $80 billion, and Republican lawmakers are seeking…

In April, a New York start-up called Runway AI unveiled technology that let people generate videos, like a cow at a birthday party or a dog chatting on a smartphone, simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen.The four-second videos were blurry, choppy, distorted and disturbing. But they were a clear sign that artificial intelligence technologies would generate increasingly convincing videos in the months and years to come.Just 10 months later, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI has unveiled a similar system that creates videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie. A…

CooperSurgical, a major medical supply company, is facing a wave of lawsuits from patients who claim that one of its products destroyed embryos created with in vitro fertilization.Fertility clinics across the world used the product, a nutrient-rich liquid that helps fertilized eggs develop into embryos. This week federal regulators made public that the company had recalled three lots of the liquid, which was used by clinics in November and December. The number of affected patients is unclear, although experts estimated that it is in the thousands.On Thursday, a couple in Virginia filed a lawsuit against the company, the eighth in…

The phrase “arc of oblivion” sounds apocalyptic, as if it ought to be uttered in the unmistakable voice of Werner Herzog and accompanied by grave proclamations about the end of all things. “The Arc of Oblivion,” a documentary directed by Ian Cheney, in fact delivers both of those things. But they’re delivered in such a lighthearted, weird, thought-provoking manner that it’s less frightening than fun. And if you’re left thinking about disasters, it’s only natural: Cheney’s building a literal ark throughout. (Wordplay!)A mass-extinction flood is the ur-apocalypse in many ancient texts, but Cheney isn’t building an ark to rescue humanity,…

Hours after the news broke on Wednesday that the United States had picked up worrisome intelligence about Russia’s capacity to strike American satellites, the Pentagon sent a missile-tracking system into orbit, part of a vast new effort to bolster the military’s growing presence in space.The timing was coincidental. But it underscored how concerns about advances in Russian and Chinese capabilities in space have led the United States to embrace innovative ways of protecting vital communications, surveillance and GPS systems on the battlefield of the future.The system put into orbit on Wednesday was a prototype developed to test a new plan,…

Outwardly, this season’s New York Fashion Week shows followed a familiar playbook. Marc Jacobs showed his collection before the week technically began. The official schedule ran for six days (albeit with fewer events) and it played the hits: Carolina Herrera, Michael Kors, Tory Burch.All of this brought a calm to a week that can sometimes be anything but. That calm extended to the streets outside shows, which drew smaller crowds with a relaxed energy. (Some rainy and snowy days surely played a part.) This laid-back attitude permeated people’s clothes, many of which were in neutral shades and worn with effortless…

By Matt RichtelReported from ice-cream shops and frozen-food aisles in Boulder, Colo.Feb. 15, 2024Banana pudding, chocolate fudge brownie, salted caramel, Cherry Garcia, Dr Pepper Float and dozens of other flavors packed the ice-cream freezer at a local Safeway. Robin Sawyer, one recent Sunday afternoon, hunted for her personal favorite, black raspberry chocolate chunk.Her husband, Mark, 68, has long been a fan of chocolate chip, but he doesn’t see it around much anymore.“Here it is!” Ms. Sawyer, 66, said to him, kneeling in front of the Haagen-Dazs section. “In the small container.” Then she corrected herself: “Oh, that’s chocolate chocolate chip.”Vanilla…

One set of 10 articles identified by Dr. David showed repeated reuse of identical or overlapping black-and-white images of cancer cells supposedly under different experimental conditions, he said.“There’s no reason to have done that unless you weren’t doing the work,” Dr. David said.One of those papers, published in 2012, was formally tagged with corrections. Unlike later studies, which were largely overseen by Dr. Yoon in New York, this paper was written by South Korea-based scientists, including Changhwan Yoon, who then worked in Seoul.An immunologist in Norway randomly selected the paper as part of a screening of copied data in cancer…

Near the end of “Blind Injustice,” an opera about six people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes and later freed, the exonerees reflect on the time they have spent behind bars.“What makes a person strong enough to endure injustice?” they sing. “What makes a person free?”Questions of prejudice, guilt and resilience run throughout “Blind Injustice,” composed by Scott Davenport Richards to a libretto by David Cote, which has its East Coast premiere on Friday at Peak Performances at Montclair State University.The work, which was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and premiered there in 2019, explores the effects of wrongful convictions on…