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The Morning After: Crosswalks are being hacked to imitate tech billionaires

Welcome to your Friday edition of TMA. It’s a public holiday where I’m from, so it’s a shorter briefing than usual. Barring a barrage of new cars (tariffs? shh!) revealed at the New York International Auto Show, it’s been a relatively quiet week, but not without a bit of drama.
Engadget
“You know, they say money can’t buy happiness. And… yeah, OK… I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that’s pretty sick, right? …Right?? Fuck, I’m so alone.” That’s what a pretty realistic AI voice clone of Elon Musk was saying to pedestrians at crosswalks in Palo Alto. An AI Mark Zuckerberg joined him, with both billionaires’ voices mimicked to say, well, the things a lot of us are thinking, whether it’s the invasive AI push, billionaires wielding power over government or other bleak, beige real-world versions of Black Mirror premises.
They were in operation at downtown intersections in Redwood City, Menlo Park and Palo Alto but were gone, sadly, by Saturday.
No one’s staked a claim to the prank — but there are probably many people in Silicon Valley capable of pulling it off. More recently, an AI clone of Jeff Bezos was talking on Seattle crosswalks.
— Mat Smith
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18 percent of the new music uploaded to Deezer is AI-generated
20,000 tracks each day. 5 total listens.

Music streaming service Deezer said 20,000 completely AI-generated tracks are added to its music service daily, making up “over 18% of all uploaded content” the platform receives every day. At the start of the year, Deezer introduced a tool for detecting and tagging AI-generated content, which at the time accounted for only 10 percent of uploads.
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Panasonic S1R II camera review
Its video is great, it finally does stills well and it’s cheaper than its rivals.

The S1R II is Panasonic’s first camera that can both shoot up to 8K video and capture 44-megapixel (MP) photos in rapid bursts. And unlike its rivals, the new model is available at a more reasonable $3,300 — half the price of Sony’s A1 II. At the same time, it’s a massive upgrade over the original S1R. We have some issues with the rolling shutter, but it’s a minor problem on an otherwise excellent hybrid camera.
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The $666 edition of Doom includes a game box that, itself, plays Doom
The true physical edition.
Doom
Physical editions of the iconic shooters Doom and Doom II are on their way, and the highlight is something called the Will It Run Edition. This comes with a game box that actually runs the original Doom itself. All you have to do is connect a controller as the box also has a port. It’s an expensive gimmick: The copies cost $666 and are being kept to a limited run of 666. Because hell. There’s also the usual special edition content inside, including a soundtrack (on cassette), trading cards and a handheld cacodemon handheld console that also plays Doom.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-111621557.html?src=rss