Good Morning,
Google has built a tool that tells fact-checkers whether an image was machine-made, whether it’s been altered, and where else it has surfaced (Nieman Lab). Provenance as a service — infrastructure for a question that didn’t really need infrastructure five years ago.
Which makes the day’s other verification story more difficult. Harvard is closing its writing center, and faculty read the timing as of a piece with the university’s enthusiasm for AI on campus (The Atlantic). We’re building machines to certify authorship while shutting the institutions where people learn to earn it. Small wonder 52% of Americans now say AI worries them more than it excites them, up from 37% in 2021 (Pew Research). The anxiety isn’t about capability. It’s about not knowing who made what, or who answers for it when it goes wrong.
No algorithm would have caught the first L.A. Jazz Festival, which imploded on opening day and left the scene that had lent it credibility furious (Los Angeles Times).
What people do trust: a place with something happening in it. Ragtime closed as the highest-grossing production in Lincoln Center Theater’s history (Deadline). And Gia Kourlas watched a champion surfer and saw a dancer (The New York Times). The map of what counts as choreography just got a little bigger.
The rest of today’s stories below.
