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When Christopher Pelkey was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona, his family was left not only to grieve but also to navigate how to represent him in court. As they prepared to confront his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas, during sentencing, they made an unusual and deeply controversial choice: to have Pelkey appear to speak from beyond the grave. To do so, they turned to technology: An AI-generated video featuring a re-created voice and likeness of Pelkey was presented as a victim impact statement ahead of sentencing. The video showed a digitally resurrected Pelkey appearing to speak directly to the judge. Of course, the statement wasnt truly Pelkeys. He couldnt have possibly said those wordshe died the day Horcasitas shot him. Yet the judge accepted the AI-generated message, even acknowledging its effect. You allowed Chris to speak from his heart as you saw it, the judge said. Horcasitas was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison. The extraordinary courtroom moment has sparked widespread discussion, not just for its emotional power but for the precedent it may set. Arizona’s victims rights laws allow the families of deceased victims to determine how their impact statements are delivered. But legal and AI experts warn that this precedent is far from harmless. “I have sympathy for the family members who constructed the video,” says Eerke Boiten, a professor at De Montfort University in the U.K. specializing in AI. “Knowing Pelkey, they likely had a preconceived view of how he might have felt, and AI gave them a way of putting that across that many found attractive and convincing.” Still, Boiten is uneasy about how the video has been interpreted by both the public and possibly the court. The video should be read as a statement of opinion from the family members, with AI providing a convincing presentation of that, he explains. Yet public reaction suggests it was taken as something more. The reactions show that it was taken as an almost factual contribution from Pelkey instead, Boiten says. The victims’ rights attorney who represented Pelkeys family told 404 Media that at no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chriss own words. Yet the emotionally charged format of presenting a deepfaked version of the deceased gives those words far more weight than if they had simply been read aloud. And its worth emphasizing: Pelkey could never have written them himself. Its an inappropriate use of AI which has no relevance and should have no role at sentencing, says Julian Roberts, emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Oxford and executive director of the Sentencing Academy. Data protection specialist Jon Baines of the firm Mishcon de Reya adds that the incident is profoundly troubling from an ethical standpoint. Roberts argues that using an AI-generated likeness of a victim oversteps the purpose of a victim impact statement. The victim statement should inform the court about the impact of the crime on the victim and advise of any possible impact of the imposition of a community order, et cetera, he says. It is not an exercise in memorializing the victim. In his view, thats exactly what the Pelkey video did. Roberts also criticized the content of the statement itself: The statement should contain information, not opinion or inventionhuman or AI-derived. Still, a precedent has now been setat least in Arizona. One that blurs the line between mourning and manipulation. One that allows people to speak from beyond the graveand could, in the future, influence the length of prison sentences in ways that justice systems may not yet be prepared to handle.
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E-Commerce
Humans have long been transfixed by the moon, awed and inspired by its reassuring presence in the night sky and its influence on the tides. In recent decades, though, our fascination with our nearest celestial neighbor has become somewhat more opportunistic: The moon contains valuable resources, and governments and companies are eager to get their hands on them. One such resource is helium-3 (He-3), a gas that some experts say could unlock clean and abundant energy on Earth as a fuel for fusion. Its this gas that Interlune, a Seattle-based startup, has its sights on. The company wants to be the first to commercialize space resources, starting with He-3, which it plans to begin harvesting from the moon and selling on Earth by the end of the decade. Helium-3 is used mostly in medical diagnostics and national security, but it has great potential to unlock groundbreaking technological advancements, the most tantalizing of which is nuclear fusion. Fusion is what powers the stars, and as the climate crisis deepens, scientists are desperately trying to harness it in reactors to produce abundant energy without the use of fossil fuels. He-3 is a desirable fuel for fusion reactors because it would produce very little dangerous radioactive waste. [Photo: Interlune] Helium-3 fusion reactors open up the opportunity to have power available for people on Earth in a way that’s never been available before, says Aaron Olson, a research physicist at NASAs Kennedy Space Center who has studied helium-3 extraction. And that’s not only for those of us who happen to live in areas where we have grids that function really well, but it could bring energy to people who live in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the population doesn’t have access to electricity. The problem is that He-3 is extremely rare on Earth, and therefore very expensive. A kilogram of the stuff will set you back roughly $20 million. Most of the terrestrial supply comes from the decay of tritium, which is a byproduct of nuclear reactors and aging nuclear weapons. The United States has been rationing He-3 since 2010. By contrast, the moon holds an abundance of He-3. The isotope is emitted from the suns corona and carried through the solar wind, and because the moon isnt protected by an atmosphere or magnetic field, these particles have been embedding themselves in the lunar soilor regolithfor billions of years. Recent estimates suggest the moon has about 1.1 million metric tons of He-3, compared to Earths reserves of just 1.6 tons. Helium-3 is the only resource worth going all the way to the moon and back for, Interlunes director of business development, Nina Hooper, explained. Now its up to us to go develop the technology thats going to help us extract it. Interlunes plan is to send its harvesters to an area thats about a mile wide and located near the moons equator on its near side, or the side thats always visible to Earth. These unmanned machines will dig into the top three meters of lunar regolith, crush the rocks, extract the He-3 gas, and then put the regolith back where it belongs. When were done, it looks like a tilled field, says Interlune CEO and cofounder Rob Meyerson, who previously served as president of Blue Origin. Interlune is aiming to start with two test missions, one in 2027 and another in 2029, to measure He-3 levels on the moon, harvest it on a small scale, and bring some back to Earth. It wants to go to market with 20 kilograms of He-3 in 2030, ramping up to 100 kilograms over five years. That will do a great job to stabilize the supply chain, Meyerson adds. [Photo: Interlune] Could it also unlock the future of clean energy? Despite promising advances in fusion science, commercial fusion is still a ways off. There is still a lot of work to be done before a functional reactor goes online, says NASAs Olson. There are still questions that persist as to how quickly that can happen. An abundance of He-3 for fusion research could, however, help speed up that process. In the meantime, Interlune has another sector in mind for its first target market: quantum computing. This market is projected to balloon between now and 2030, with big tech players like IBM, Nvidia, and Apple pouring billions into quantum tech research and development with the hopes of creating breakthrough innovations and rapidly solving stubborn problems across science, medicine, and other fields. Helium-3 helps keep these supercomputers cool enough to function efficiently, and Meyerson says Interlune has already secured contracts with more than one company and letters of intent for more than a billion dollars worth of He-3 even before it has demonstrated its technology. These customers are relatively price insensitive, so they’re willing to pay something near the current market price, and they’re really, really eager to secure supply, he says. This week, Interlune announced Maybell Quantum, a quantum infrastructure compny, as its first commercial customer. Maybell agreed to buy thousands of liters of He-3 to be delivered between 2029 and 2035. The U.S. Department of Energy has also agreed to buy He-3 from Interlune in its quest to top up its reserves. Not everyone is eager to see the moon become an industrial hub, though. Astronomers are particularly worried about mining because the moon is an important outpost for space science thanks to how quiet, still, and cold it is. For example, the far-side of the moon is the most radio quiet part of the inner solar system, explains Richard Green, an astronomer emeritus at the University of Arizonas Steward Observatory and a vocal advocate for preserving lunar science. That makes it the best place to use radio astronomy to learn about the universe and look for signs of life beyond Earth. If the mining equipment is next door and blasting rocks and digging things up, that would just be inconsistent with the stable platform that those really sensitive detections need, Green adds. [Photo: Interlune] He and other researchers want to see the creation of an international system that evaluates claims to certain regions on the moon and allows scientists to reserve sites in advance so they can study the area before any mining takes place. Its not that there’s anything wrong with mining, it’s a legitimate activity, he says. But so is science. How do we set up a system of communication and coordination that doesn’t lead to conflict? The existing rules around space mining are fairly new, and dont offer much help. A 2015 U.S. law ruled that private American companies can own any space resources they mine. In 2020, NASAs Artemis Accords sought to introduce some guidelines on the practice of harvesting space resources, stating that any extraction must be done in compliance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. That means countries carrying out mining would have to do so for the benefit of all mankind. Theyd have to avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies, and would be liable for any damage they cause. All of that said, regulations might be hard to enforce. There are no police that are going to land on the moon, says Green. (Neither China nor Russia have signed onto the Artemis Accords, which arent legally binding anyway.) Meyerson is quick to underscore that what Interlune wants to do isnt traditional mining. There are no chemicals used to strip the helium-3 out of the material, he says. You’re not leaving contaminated tailings behind. So as far as comparing this to mining, it’s just 180 degrees apart. He believes that by being the first to harvest moon resources, Interlune can set the standard as the lunar gold rush accelerates. Eventually, Interlune plans to expand its scope to harvest other lunar resources that could be used to build infrastructure and produce rocket fuel on the moon, all of which could serve as a stepping stone for future space exploration. We’re in this for the long run of building an in-space economy, says Meyerson. We would be processing other resources on the moon, like water that we can turn into rocket fuel, metals like aluminum and titanium and silicon, and then construction material. Some proponents of space mining also argue its an environmental Hail Mary. There is the notion of the Earth becoming an oasis, says Olson. Its an idea that harvesting resources, whether it be the moon or other places in space, could help us preserve the Earth for future generations in a way where maybe we’re not doing as much damaging extractive work on Earth, and some of that could be put in places that are, for lack of a better term, barren.
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E-Commerce
Navigating professional transitions can be a whirlwind of emotions for employees, whether starting a new job or leaving a company. Onboarding is essential for creating a sense of belonging and shared purpose that extends throughout a new hires tenure. And this vital initiative should be about more than following a checklist. Onboarding provides an opportunity to make your newest colleagues feel genuinely connected to the team and confident in their contributions. This ensures they can thrive from day one until their final day with the company. The importance of onboarding The first 90 days are a crucial time for employees to establish themselves and for leadership to set the tone. Its a great time to encourage new hires to envision their contributions to the businesss success. When leadership actively engages and guides new team members through this process, it fosters a sense of alignment with the organizations goals. This transforms onboarding from a routine task into a long-term motivation, engagement, and loyalty initiative. Yet too often, companies miss the mark. A recent Gallup poll found that only 12% of workers strongly agreed that their firm excelled in onboarding them, and just 29% said they felt supported and fully prepared to start their role. These numbers reveal a huge opportunity gap. When companies approach onboarding as a mere formality, new employees can feel disconnected and disengaged, which leads to costly turnover and lost potential. Offboarding is another aspect of the employee experience that companies overlook. But its worth noting that how we support workers as they leave is just as important as onboarding them. A Gallup poll of 150 Fortune 500 CHROs found that just 10% considered their employer highly effective in managing departures. Leaders play a vital role in connecting employees to their colleagues and organization, especially during transitional seasons. Psychological safety invites belonging Thoughtfully designed onboarding and offboarding processes foster a supportive environment where the company makes new hires and seasoned veterans feel valued. Psychological safety is a critical element of this. It ensures employees can express themselvesask questions, offer ideas, or admit mistakeswithout fear of negative consequences. When managers promote this sense of security from day one, they lay the groundwork for their colleagues to make meaningful contributions to the businesss success throughout their tenure. Inclusion from the start The first three months are critical for new hires to understand their tasks and the companys culture and values. Preboarding and starting onboarding before an employees first day can ease the transition. Simple initiatives like giving a tour, pairing new employees with peers to answer questions, or sharing background materials in advance have a significant impact. By pacing out key details, you allow new hires to adjust in comfortable increments. This ensures that you make them feel supported and included from the start. A community approach to onboarding Onboarding isnt just about bringing our new colleagues up to speed. Its about helping them see themselves as integral team members. When you do this right, onboarding goes beyond basic training and allows new employees to envision the unique impact they can have on the companys success. This sense of ownership and alignment with the businesss values is critical, yet many companies still take a one-size-fits-all approach. Onboarding should be a strategic tool to drive long-term commitment and growth, benefiting both the employee and the company. Creating this connection requires a team efforteveryone has a role in making new team members feel welcomed and valued. Encourage early wins New hires often experience a mix of excitement and anxiety. While they may be eager to demonstrate what they can do, they might also be hesitant about when and how to engage. Empowering new recruits to take ownership of their work by notching early winswhether thats achievable projects or taskscan build confidence quickly. Assigning a familiar project that aligns with their prior experience validates employees contributions from the start and is a great way to ease them into their new role. An early win is more than a confidence boost. It creates a connection with the broader team, allowing new employees to find their footing during those pivotal first three months and beyond. Shape meaningful departures How a business approaches an employees departure reveals more about the leadership culture than it does about the individual who is leaving. A respectful and supportive offboarding process should be an extension of the sense of belonging that an employee cultivates throughout their career with the company. However, offboarding processes often lack care. An inclusive offboarding process aims to gather feedback, enhance retention, and build trust among current and future employees. Effective exit interviews allow departing workers to express their thoughts, helping organizations understand the employees reasons for leaving. When former employees feel appreciated, they advocate for the company, promoting a positive reputation in the job market. A valuable exit experience reflects the organization’s values and leaves a lasting impression, strengthening a sense of belonging for the departing employee and current and future team members. Foster cohesion through belonging Taking a team-based approach to onboarding deepens everyone’s sense of belonging. It fosters collaboration and empathy while bolstering cohesion and satisfaction. By working together to integrate new hires, existing team members can refine their leadership skills. This approach helps dismantle the hypercompetitive tendencies that can become destructive within some workplaces. When new employees feel that they are part of a team that works together, theyre more likely to engage fully and contribute to the company’s long-term success; then, when they are ready to move on, their experiences and insights shape and inform the next generation of talent.
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E-Commerce
If there’s one thing worse than having to assemble a PowerPoint presentation, it’s being forced to sit through an achingly dull one conducted by someone else. So what if there were a better optiona way anyone, regardless of skill, could create a sleek and actually engaging slideshow that looks like a professional designer had a hand in it? If you ask Grant Lee, we’ve already reached the point where that’s possible. And it doesn’t end with presentations. Lee is the founder of an AI-centric startup called Gamma. You may not have heard of it yet, but 50 million people haveand are already using the service. That’s led the scrappy, 30-person company to reach a milestone of $50 million in annual recurring revenue a mere two years into its existence. “I realized just how important it was for people to be able to communicate their ideas in a visual way that others can consume,” Lee says. “Many of us have these ideas in our heads, but then to be able to actually convey that in a way that gets in other people’s headsit’s really hard.” Lee came to that realization while working in investment banking. He spent his days immersed in underwhelming, clunky-to-create slide decks. Now, he wants to make sure no one else is forced to dawdle their days away with those sorts of distractions. If you’ve wasted any amount of time wading through painfully bad presentationsor documents, websites, or social media postsGamma could be just the upgrade you never knew you needed. But, like most generative AI tools of the moment, it isn’t without its limitations. A broader approach to AI creation Let’s get one thing out of the way now: On the surface, Gamma seems an awful lot like another AI-centric startup I wrote about for Fast Company last yeara now-eight-year-old presentation-making service called Beautiful.ai. But while both services do aim to take the pain out of presentation creation, they differ not only in their philosophical foundations but also in the scope of what they offer. “All of these [other] tools actually have the same sort of approach, which is a design-first approach,” Lee says. “We’ve always taken a completely different approach, which is: What if we were design later, or even design last? What if we were content first?” To that end, Gamma encourages you to not even think about things from a visual perspective. Instead, you just focus on the message, and the tool transforms that into any medium and form you want. “You start with writing or an outline or existing notes, then we turn that into something that’s much more dynamic, with rich content that can be shareable,” Lee says. Specifically, when you launch a new project in Gamma, you’re presented with three choices. You can paste in textbe it a series of loose notes or a fully finished document; you can import an existing document, presentation, or slideshow from PowerPoint, Google Slides, or another similar program; or you can simply input a single-line prompt and have Gamma’s network of AI models take the reins from there. Gamma gives you three choices to start creating, all with AI at the core. “We don’t expect you to go in and try to move pixels around,” Lee explains. “We expect you to go in with your thoughts. We’re going to help you shape them [and] visualize them.” So, yes: You can drag and drop elements and adjust specific parameters around colors, styling, and so on. But the idea is that you don’t have to do that. Instead, you can let Gamma handle that heavy lifting while you focus entirely on what you want to saynot how you want to convey it. “We’re not trying to be incrementally better slide-ware,” Lee says. “We’re introducing a new set of building blocks.” Lee’s ultimate goal is to allow us, as humans, to focus solely on the content itself by leaning on AI to handle practically everything else. Even if Gamma’s creations are more of a starting point than a final, polished product, working with the framework it gives you is intended to be akin to editing a documentwith a handy virtual helper at your side every step of the way. Want to improve the writing, for instance? Tighten up your copy? Even just make some block of text more visually appealingor replace some existing images with more eye-catching illustrations? You’ll find one-step commands for all of those things within Gamma’s slide-by-slide AI menus. All you’ve gotta do is click. Gamma has all sorts of AI-powered tools for editing, refining, and improving your creations. “It’s as if you have your expert designer sitting right next to you,” Lee says. “At the end, you get a beautiful output, and regardless of your technical or design abilities, you feel like you have something you’re proud to present to others.” The million-dollar question, of course, is how well all of that actually works in practice. After all, nearly every AI tool sounds incredible on paper. But when you move beyond the carefully controlled demos and start actually trying to use this type of technology in the wild, it’s frequently far less impressive than it initially appears. The short answer wth Gamma is that it dependsboth on the type of input you’re providing and on your expectations for how, exactly, the service should operate. The ups and downs of the AI designer We’ll start with the not-so-good piece of the puzzle: When I’ve tried putting in already-created PDFs or presentations and asking Gamma to jazz them up for me, the results haven’t exactly been awe-inspiring. Here, for instance, is a peek at Gamma’s take on an existing media kit presentation I had for my independent newsletter-publishing business, The Intelligence: Gamma’s adaptation of my existing presentation isn’t especially great. It’s an awkward and ineffective interpretation of the original that honestly feels like a step in the wrong direction. Where Gamma has worked better, for me, has been when I start fresh. I give it a simple prompt, let it build a completely new framework on its own, and then use that as a starting point to fill in the actual info I want and finish things off from there. A simple prompt allows Gamma to create a fantastic starting framework. With that in mind, I tried to re-create that very same media kit from scratch, and the results were actually pretty decent. The specific information here isn’t at all accurate or even remotely related to reality, but it creates an interesting and attractive structure to use for adding in the right data and molding it into something sensible. Gamma’s made-from-scratch framework provides a much better starting point for a professional presentation. And even that part of the process can be pleasingly easywith Gamma offering a helping hand, as needed, to refine and polish everything from text to the layout itself as individual assets move around. All that AI effort does come at a cost, as you’d imagine. Gamma leans on a variety of generative AI engines to power its producteverything from OpenAI to Anthropic and Google’s Gemini technology, though the underlying logic automatically selects what it believes to be the best option for any given purpose, and you’re rarely aware of which model is being used when. Because of the expenses involved, Gamma’s free tier limits you to 400 AI credits per account and only basic AI image generation. For the full experience, you’ll need to pony up $96 a year for unlimited AI creation and advanced image accessor bump up to $180 a year for even more powerful capabilities. Long term, Lee believes Gamma will be able to provide enough value in exchange that the tradeoff will be a no-brainer. The Gamma vision So far, Lee says Gamma’s customers have primarily been a category of users he calls “prosumers”individuals or small teams that need to create a lot of visuals and wouldn’t typically have the resources to work with a full-fledged design team in their organizations. But he envisions a future in which everyone, from freelancers and small business owners to sales and marketing teams in larger companies, relies on Gamma to do what’d otherwise require a lot of time, effort, and aggravationeven when traditional resources are readily available. And you’d better believe that same principle applies to creating PDFs, websites, and social media assets as much as it does presentations (and Lee says the list of available formats will only expand from here). The humble, hated slide deck was just the easiest and most logical entry point to what Lee sees as an entire ecosystem of convenient content creationall with AI at its core. Gamma’s current lineup is only the start of what the service may eventually offer. “We chose slides as the sort of initial wedge because slides as a format is ubiquitous,” he says. “[But] knowledge workers don’t just need to create slides. They actually have a need to create all forms of content.” Lee sees it all as a sliding scale with lots of blurred lines. At the end of the day, what’s really the difference between a presentation and a PDF? Or a PDF and a website? Or a website and a promotional LinkedIn post? Once you start relying on Gamma to help you create anything and everything, you quickly realize the various formats all share the same basic building blocks. And it doesn’t take much to move from one to the next. “Our bet is that presentations can always just be the gateway,” he explains. “We don’t want our users tohave to think about it in a traditional senselike, Oh, I’m creating a slide deck. It’s more, I’m creating a piece of content, and that can be consumed in different ways. The challenge, then, is getting peopleand organizationsto break their habits and inch away from the uninspiring but familiar tools they’ve relied on for ages. And by making Gamma so simple to use that it requires virtually no specific skills or training, Lee’s optimistic he can win over crowds and frame the service as the one-stop shop for anything creative. “A tool like Gamma is trying to lower the floor so any knowledge worker can pick up skills that they couldn’t have imagined being able to do in the past,” he says. “We really believe that’ll open up doors for them.” Be the first to find all sorts of interesting tech tools with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. You’ll get a single new off-the-beaten-path discovery in your inbox every Wednesday!
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E-Commerce
Influencers often face more negativity than most people experience in a lifetimeand with that comes a significant mental health toll. Now, a new therapy service has been launched specifically for content creators. CreatorCare, cofounded by digital creator Shira Lazar and backed by Creators 4 Mental Health and Revive Health Therapy, aims to break down both financial and systemic barriers to mental health care. While some creators earn millions of dollars, many struggle to make ends meet. To ensure therapy is accessible to all, CreatorCare offers sliding-scale rates starting at $60, with or without insurance. Launched initially in California, with plans for national expansion, the program provides licensed and associate therapists in person and via telehealth. These professionals specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness-based therapy. With more than 200 million creators worldwide, the mental strain of this profession is often overlooked. Behind the scenes, creators deal with online abuse, constant pressure to stay relevant, and financial instabilitychallenges that rarely receive public sympathy. Discussions around burnout are frequently met with dismissive remarks urging influencers to get a real 9-to-5 job. But the numbers tell a different story. A 2023 Awin & ShareASale Influencer Survey found that nearly 80% of creators reported burnout, and 66% said it directly impacted their mental health. Nearly half rely on alternative income streams to reduce the pressure. Lazar, host of the talk show Whats Trending, is now helping to build a safety net for creators. The creator economy has exploded but the support systems havent kept up, she told Passionfruit. As more Gen Z step into this space professionally, we need to treat it like the real workplace it is. That means sustainable systems not just for monetization, but for mental health, too. Amy Kelly, cofounder of CreatorCare and CEO of Revive Health Therapy, echoed that sentiment: Social media is not just a platformits a recruiter,” she said, noting that 57% of Gen Z teens in the U.S. say they would become influencers if given the chance. Were grooming teens into a digital workforce with proven mental health hazardsthe modern equivalent of sending kids into coal mines without protective gear. CreatorCare isnt the only initiative addressing creators well-being. SAG-AFTRAs new influencer committee aims to expand labor protections, while the National Association of Broadcasters recently launched a Creator Council to amplify creators voices. The Creators Guild of America also released a contract rider to safeguard creators in brand partnerships. Because, yes, content creation is a real job.
Category:
E-Commerce
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