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An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an "AI Stan Lee hologram" that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend. [Watch it in action here.] Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator's death at the age of 95, fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show. The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea "demonic" and said we need to "kill it with fire before it's too late...." But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. "We're not afraid of people seeing it and we're not afraid of criticism," he told Ars. "I'm just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what's been out there so far has not really been informed...." [DeMoulin said he saw] "the leaps and bounds that they were making in improving the technology, improving the interactivity." Now, he said, it's possible to create an AI-powered version that ingests "all of the actual comments that people made during their life" to craft an interactive hologram that "is not literally quoting the person, but everything it was saying was based on things that person actually said...." [Hyperreal CEO and Chief Architect Remington Scott] said Hyperreal "can't share specific technical details" of the models or training techniques they use to power these recreations. But Scott added that this training project is "particularly meaningful, [because] Stan Lee had actually begun digitizing himself while he was alive, with the vision of creating a digital double so his fans could interact with him on a larger scale...." Still, DeMoulin said he understands why the idea of using even a stylized version of Lee's likeness in this manner could rub some fans the wrong way. "When a new technology comes out, it just feels wrong to them, and I respect the fact that this feels wrong to people," he said. "I totally agree that something like this-not just for Stan but for anyone, any celebrity alive or dead-could be put into this technology and used in a way that would be exploitative and unfortunate." That's why DeMoulin said he and the others behind the AI-powered Lee feel a responsibility "to make sure that if we were going to do this, we never got anywhere close to that." The "premium, authenticated digital identities" created by Hyperreal's system are "not replacing artists," says Hyperreal CEO/Chief Architect Remington Scott, but "creating respectful digital extensions that honor their legacy." Still, DeMoulin says in the article that "I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans interact with [it] and they don't like it, we'll stop doing it."

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A COLCHESTER supermarket has provided an update on an urn labelled to contain cremated human ashes which was found in a trolley.

A COLCHESTER supermarket has provided an update on an urn labelled to contain cremated human ashes which was found in a trolley.

A WOMAN from Great Yeldham is continuing a campaign to improve the village bus service, after a reduced timetable was issued earlier this year.

24 schools in Essex have been rated as 'requires improvement' by the school watchdog

Speculation over who would be performing at the halftime show ramped up after no one had been announced in Week 1 which, in recent years, has been when the NFL has revealed the artist.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum has been given permission to knock down the historic home on Longcross Estate, next to Chobham Common, in Surrey.

Alleges bias and security problems

US President Donald Trump has demanded Microsoft fire its recently appointed head of global affairs Lisa Monaco.…

Selena Gomez's mother Mandy Teefy revealed who walked her daughter down the aisle as the actress tied the knot with Benny Blanco during a romantic ceremony on Saturday.

"As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment," reports the Los Angeles Times. They note that the drug's proponents "tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. " Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are "game-changing".... Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD. In Stanford's study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory. "No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury," Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. "The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further...." States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use... In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans. Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.

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Despite evidence that the practice carries an increased risk of birth defects, it says that cousin marriage offers benefits such as 'stronger extended family support systems'.

Torsten Bell, who became the MP for Swansea West last summer, was delivering a speech at a Labour Party conference event when he made the jibe about the Lib Dems leader's weight.

Police said a 40-year-old man opened fire on hundreds of people who had gathered for a service at the Church of Latter Day Saints in Grand Blanc on Sunday morning.

The editors of the culture magazine n + 1 decry the "well-funded upheaval" caused by a large and powerful coalition of pro-AI forces. ("According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you...") "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." The AI bubble — and it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admitted — will burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots... Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that tries — as Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?" — "through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...." Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence... Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it does — nervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utility — and it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool... As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype" — a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake — of real literature. It should be smashed, and can. The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."

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RIATH AL-SAMARRAI AT BETHPAGE BLACK: The Ryder Cup is returning home to Europe after Rory McIlroy and his band of brothers sneaked over the line against Team USA to retain the trophy.

DANIEL MATTHEWS AT BETHPAGE BLACK: Europe sealed a 15-13 win on Sunday afternoon thanks in part to half a point from Viktor Hovland - despite him withdrawing from his singles match.

To say that Fleetwood collapsed would be unfair. Just like his many past near-misses on the PGA Tour, the result doesn't show the full story. He was a talisman for Europe.

PLUS: Interpol recoups $439M from crims; CISA criticizes Feds security; FIFA World Cup nets dodgy domain deluge

Infosec In Brief  Police in the Netherlands arrested two 17-year-olds last week over claims that Russian intelligence recruited them to spy on the headquarters of European law enforcement agencies.…

They claim it would lead to the immediate resignation of that senior aide, the PM's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Still others believe it could result in the resignation of the Prime Minister himself.