Happy June Bizarro Readers!

There’s been lots of interesting things happening all over the internet the past few weeks, and we’re here to share it with you. From Google algorithm leaks to the first ever satellite made from wood, to an interesting project that’s attempting to decipher the language of sperm whales, to…well, let me not give it all away. Let’s start with our top stories and take it from there:

• 🎥🇨🇳 YouTuber Finds AI Replica of Herself All Over Chinese Social Media

• 🤖📝 New AI Report Reveals Surprising Findings

• 💻👃 Is The World Ready for a “SmellGPT?”

Enjoy the read.

📰 From the Newsroom

🎥🇨🇳 YouTuber Finds AI Replica of Herself All Over Chinese Social Media

Imagine waking up one day to find out that an AI-generated duplicate of you has become mini-famous on Chinese social media. You have no idea who did it or how it happened, but the more you learn, the more disturbing the story gets. That’s exactly what happened to Olga Loiek shortly after she started a YouTube channel last year.

• Olga Loiek, who is ethnically Ukrainian, discovered her face plastered all over Chinese social media accounts, speaking Mandarin and promoting Russia-China friendship and Russian products – a situation she described as "creepy" and "crazy."

• In total, over 4,900 unauthorized videos featuring Olga's likeness were generated and posted to Chinese social media apps Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, which are the Chinese equivalents of Instagram and YouTube.

• Despite China's efforts to regulate AI and protect likeness rights, experts suggest that accounts promoting government-aligned narratives may face selective enforcement, highlighting the challenges of regulating an industry that's evolving at breakneck speed.

What makes this story even more maddening is putting yourself in Olga's shoes as a Ukrainian whose likeness was co-opted to promote Russian-Chinese narratives – all while her homeland is embroiled in a devastating war with Russia. The frustration of having her face and voice misappropriated is bad enough on its own, but then portraying her as a Russian propagandist has got to be extra frustrating.

🤖📝 New AI Report Reveals Surprising Findings

A recent report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford has revealed some eye-opening statistics. The report was based on a survey conducted by YouGov that took place between the 28th of March and the 30th of April 2024. The countries surveyed were Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and USA, with approximately 2,000 participants in each country.

• A sizable minority of the respondents – between 19% in Japan and 30% in the UK – have not heard about any of the most popular AI tools (including ChatGPT).

• ChatGPT was shown to be the most popular tool in all countries, but it’s still not as popular as you might think it is. The youngest age group (18 - 24) use it the most often, but even among that cohort, only 9% use it daily. From the oldest age group (55+), only 16% have used it, with a mere 1% saying they use it daily.

• As far as AI’s impact on society and their personal lives, on average, respondents were more optimistic about its impact on them personally, but slightly more pessimistic about its effects on society overall. However, not all countries fit this pattern. For example, the French and the Brits were pessimistic about both, while the Americans, Argentinians, and Japanese were optimistic about both.

For those who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields, the data from this report can be quite surprising. We’ve all been bombarded by AI content for more than a year now, which has probably skewed our perception of how popular AI tools actually are. It turns out that among the general population - at least according to this survey - AI isn’t quite as popular as it seems to be for us tech folk.

💻👃 Is The World Ready for a “SmellGPT?”

Your smartphone can already see and hear the world around you, but what if it could smell it too? Sounds like sci-fi, right? Well, hold on to your nose, because that’s exactly where technology is headed.

• The process of trying to create a “SmellGPT” has been challenging for several reasons. One of those reasons is lack of publicly available data. Machine learning models that have been used to create AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney were able to scrape the entire internet to create a foundational knowledge set. There’s no equivalent “internet of odors” available for olfactory learning models.

• As a solution to this problem, enthusiastic researchers launched the DREAM Olfaction Prediction Challenge in 2015. They released previously collected odor data and invited teams from around the world to submit their machine learning models. The models had to predict odor labels like “sweet,” “flower” or “fruit” for odor-causing compounds based on their molecular structure.

• Within four years, the largest olfactory datasets grew from less than 500 molecules submitted as part of the DREAM challenge, to about 5,000 molecules. In addition, a Google research team began applying deep learning techniques to machine olfaction. This significantly sped up the pace of progress.

As the field of machine olfaction continues to advance, it's clear that the future smells sweet (or maybe savory? musky perhaps? 🤔). Some of the likely outcomes we’ll see from this research include personalized perfumes, better insect repellents, and maybe even scent-based disease detection gadgets.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• A recent Google leak has revealed a lot of insightful information about how their proprietary search algorithm works. Two SEO professionals have reviewed the details of the leak. You can check them out here and here.

• What do the pyramids, the oceans, the blood of newborns, and human and canine testicles all have in common? Let’s just say that it’s not a good thing.

• The world's first human trial of a drug that can regenerate teeth will begin in a few months, less than a year on from news of its success in animals.

• A man forgot the password to his crypto wallet 11 years ago. At the time, his Bitcoin was worth somewhere between $3,000 - $4,000 USD. Since then, the value of his wallet has swelled to $3 million. So he decided to enlist the help of hackers to help him get back in.

• Conventional satellites are mainly composed of metals and some plastic. A team of Japanese scientists just changed the game by building the world's first wooden satellite. They call it LignoSat.

• The hacking group ShinyHunters has been on a massive data theft spree lately. Among their victims have been 30 million customers of Santander Bank, and 560 million users of the TicketMaster service.

• An international trial found that patients who had lost some or all use of their hands and arms after a spinal cord injury regained strength, control and sensation after using a new device called Arc-Ex.

• 📽️🎞️ CETI is a listening project that has been using advanced machine learning to understand what sperm whales are saying. The ultimate goal is to translate whale-speak and to be able to communicate with them in their own language.

• Did you know that hosting giants Bluehost and Hostgator are owned by the same parent company? That same company also owns the famous Yoast SEO WordPress plugin and more than a dozen other web businesses. Learn about the fascinating world of mergers and acquisitions in the web industry.

• Stack Overflow is running their annual developer survey if you’d like to add your two cents. Entries are being accepted until June 7th.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day."

– Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, from a long, but highly thoughtful read (if you care about the internet).

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 91% was the size of the traffic drop that HouseFresh, an air purifier review website, experienced after Google’s recent algorithm updates. They went from getting about 4,000 daily visitors in October 2023 to about 200 by the end of April 2024. Ouch!

• $1,400,000,000 USD is the estimated valuation of eFishery, an Indonesian seafood farming tech startup. It was founded in 2013 by a former catfish farmer who had built his own automated feeder to overcome a common problem – the over and under feeding of fish. From those humble beginnings, his business has skyrocketed to around 200,000 aqua-farmers using his technology.

• 47,000,000 is how many times the viral “All Eyes on Rafah” image was shared on Instagram in only 2 days. By the time you read this, it will likely surpass 50 million. Experts from around the world have shared their thoughts on how the AI-generated image was able to go so viral, so quickly.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

Last issue’s JavaScript winner was Tanja Klopper. Congrats Tanja! Several others also sent messages with the correct answer, which was that response.json was referenced without calling it as a function. Nicely done everyone. 👏🏻

Let’s do another Python one for this issue:

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

VitePress: VitePress is a static site generator designed to build fast, content-centric websites. In short, VitePress takes your source content written in Markdown, applies a theme to it, and generates static HTML pages that can be easily deployed anywhere (e.g., Cloudflare Pages)

https://vitepress.dev/

All Boiler Plates: If you’re planning on building an app or a piece of software and you want to save some serious time, then this directory is a gold mine of resources. It has a default layout you can browse, but it also includes two search filters so you can organize everything by either a specific anchor technology or by features.

https://allboilerplates.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The above is a side-by-side comparison of the same written text. One side was handwritten in cursive by Amy Goodchild. The other side was typed in her custom-made cursive font that she created using p5.js.

Creating a custom font is one thing, but creating a custom cursive font is much more challenging. As opposed to regular font, where each letter stands on its own next to other letters, cursive handwriting weaves from one letter to the next. This means that you not only have to create the 26 letters of the alphabet, but you also have to map out the various connections between letters. It’s a time consuming process, but the end result is really cool.

As someone who’s been lamenting the gradual loss of cursive handwriting that’s been happening over the past few decades, I really appreciate Amy’s experiment and her write up describing the process.

💬 What’s the Word?

Sprezzatura (Italian) is an Italian word that roughly means to display effortless mastery and make the difficult look easy.

This month, embrace the spirit of sprezzatura in your work. Whether you’re coding with nonchalant mastery or designing interfaces that radiate elegant ease, let sprezzatura guide you in making your work appear stunningly simple.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin