The Download: AI comics, and US tensions with China over EVs

—Will Douglas Heaven

Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about a man who eats luxury cat food. This morning, I sat and watched as a generative AI platform called Lore Machine brought my weird words to life.

Lore Machine analyzed the text, extracted descriptions of the characters and locations mentioned, and then handed those bits of information off to an image-generation model. An illustrated storyboard popped up on the screen. As I clicked through vivid comic-book renderings of my half-forgotten characters, my heart was pounding.

What sets Lore Machine apart from its rivals is how easy it is to use. Between uploading my story and downloading its storyboard, I clicked maybe half a dozen times. That makes it one of a new wave of user-friendly tools that hide the stunning power of generative models behind a one-click web interface—and heralds the arrival of one-click AI. Read the full story.

Chinese EVs have entered center stage in US-China tensions

So far, electric vehicles have mostly been discussed in the US through a scientific, economic, or environmental lens. But all of a sudden, they have become highly political. 

Last Thursday, the Biden administration announced it would investigate the security risks posed by Chinese-made smart cars, which could “collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China,”