🐀 Aw, rats, that’s a lot of money

AI image generators are fun to play with, but the problem with generative AI is, well, it’s generative. It absorbs information from the internet and spits out content influenced by that info.

If you’re an artist or photographer, you probably don’t appreciate AI “learning” from and copying your art without compensation. If you’re someone who appears in a photograph, you probably don’t want AI reimagining your likeness doing something weird.

To that end, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developed a new tool called “PhotoGuard” to protect images from malicious editing, per Engadget.

How it works

The smallest unit of information in an image is called a pixel. PhotoGuard changes certain pixels in a way that’s imperceptible to humans, but that throws off AI.

There are two methods:

• The Encoder attack makes it so AI can’t understand what it’s looking at.
• The Diffusion attack makes AI see an image as something else, rendering all edits unrealistic and unusable.

Here’s a video demo.

It’s not foolproof…

… per MIT doctoral student and lead author Hadi Salman. But Salman suggested that the companies that make AI models could offer APIs to protect — or “immunize” — other people’s photos.

And that might not be a bad idea, considering the numerous lawsuits regarding models trained on the work of authors, musicians, and other creators without consent.

For example, Getty Images is suing Stability AI, alleging it copied 12m+ images without permission or pay. Yikes.

BTW: If you want to play around with PhotoGuard yourself, the code is on GitHub.

You’re paying $3.5k per month for that one-bedroom New York City shoebox, but Pizza Rat is living inside Mayor Eric Adams’ head rent-free.

New York’s rat problem isn’t anything new, but progress on it sure is. And progress is appearing to be made.

• Rat complaints to the city’s 311 hotline are down 20% YoY in recent months and 45% in the city’s focused mitigation zones like Harlem, where the mayor recently invested $3.5m into new rat-fighting ammo.

This all comes after:

• The city paid McKinsey & Co. $1.6m for a study on, uh, “The Future of Trash” with street cleaning and rat deterrence being the key focuses (see page 78 for a rat wheeling a suitcase).
• The recent appointment of rat czar Kathleen Corradi, who beat out ~900 applicants with her “swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery” — actual requirements for the job (and its $155k salary).

It’s too early to tell if we’re out of the woods

Rats have long been an issue. Way back in 1982 — yup, 1982 is “way back” — the UN estimated rats destroyed 42m+ tons of food worldwide, worth $30B. More recent estimates have pegged rats’ worldwide economic damage between 1930 and 2022 at $297.4B.

In New York, Mayor Giuliani once tossed $8m at the issue. Mayor Bloomberg created a “rodent academy” for public employees. Mayor de Blasio committed $32m in 2017, but covid snagged efforts.

And that’s just the money. Cases of leptospirosis in NYC have been on the rise, and studies have connected rat infestations to anxiety and depression.

All that’s to say, the rat race may be showing signs of weakness, but it ain’t over yet.

1) Stock pickers must be glistening (sweating?) with excitement as they witness the HVAC Index climb up the charts, not unlike the temperatures outside. The index, which tracks HVAC manufacturers, is up ~20% since June, versus the S&P 500’s ~9%. This is not investment advice, nor do we want it to be, but it appears betting money on rising temps is a surefire strategy at the moment.

2) Could the ultimate meal combo be feeding yourself… and your electric car? With EV charging taking more time than filling up with gas, franchised restaurants with large geographic footprints are well-positioned to serve up a new item on their menus: battery juice. Subway, for instance, with 20k stores in the US, is planning to build Subway Oasis charging parks with car chargers, WiFi, picnic tables, and more.

3) The elderberry industry (which consists of nutritional supplements, flavoring, and coloring) is now worth $320m annually in the US. That’s according to the American Botanical Council — which, despite our hopes, is not a group of wise plants sitting around an old wooden table.

4) New York City is considering closing 20 acres of Van Cortlandt Park to house a temporary 34k-seat cricket stadium for six games of the 2024 T20 World Cup. The International Cricket Council estimates hosting the games would generate $163m for the city, including $129m for the Bronx, which seems a tad optimistic — and that isn’t how many locals feel. They are not thrilled by the idea.