Dall-E Mini, the AI-powered text-to-image generator has taken over the internet. With its ability to render nearly anything your meme-loving heart desires, anyone can make their dreams come true.
DALL-E 2, a portmanteau of Salvador Dali, the surrealist and Wall-E, the Pixar robot, was created by OpenAI and is not widely available; it creates far cleaner imagery and was recently used to launch Cosmpolitan’s first AI-generated cover. The art world has been one of the first industries to truly embrace AI.
The open-sourced miniature version is what’s responsible for the memes. Programmer Boris Dayma wants to make AI more accessible; he built the Dall-E Mini program as part of a competition held by Google and an AI community called Hugging Face.
And with great technology, comes great memes. Typing a short phrase into Dall-E Mini will manifest 9 different amalgamations, theoretically shaping into reality the strange images you’ve conjured. Its popularity leads to too much traffic, often resulting in an error that can be fixed by refreshing the page or trying again later.
If you want to be a part of the creation of AI-powered engines, it all starts with code. CodeAcademy explains that Dall-E Mini is a seq2seq model, “typically used in natural language processing (NLP) for things like translation and conversational modeling.” CodeAcademy’s Text Generation course will teach you how to utilize seq2seq, but they also offer opportunities to learn 14+ coding languages at your own pace.
You can choose the Machine Learning Specialist career path if you want to become a Data Scientist who develops these types of programs, but you can also choose courses by language, subject (what is cybersecurity?) or even skill - build a website with HTML, CSS, and more.
CodeAcademy offers many classes for free as well as a free trial; it’s an invaluable resource for giving people of all experience levels the fundamentals they need to build the world they want to see.
As for Dall-E Mini, while some have opted to create beauty, most have opted for memes. Here are some of the internet’s favorites:
pic.twitter.com/DbLoe1s00c
— Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) June 8, 2022
pic.twitter.com/cxtliOrlHz
— Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) June 12, 2022
no fuck every other dall-e image ive made this one is the best yet pic.twitter.com/iuFNm4UTUM
— bri (@takoyamas) June 10, 2022
pic.twitter.com/rEBHoWR7lH
— Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) June 12, 2022
pic.twitter.com/RSZaCIDVV7
— Chairman George (@superbunnyhop) June 9, 2022
back at it again at the DALL•E mini pic.twitter.com/iPGsaMThBC
— beca. ⚢ (@dorysief) June 9, 2022
There’s no looking back now, not once you’ve seen Pugachu; artificial intelligence is here to stay.
Johnson & Johnson Issues Highlight How Incredibly Safe All the Vaccines Are
The risk of blood clots is so low it should actually make us feel safer.
This week the FDA and the CDC recommended a pause in the administration of Johnson & Johnson's single dose Covid-19 vaccine, after some recipients experienced life threatening blood clots.
While the pause is likely to be lifted within the next couple days — as officials investigate the issue to determine best practices moving forward, that hasn't stopped people from reacting like it's just been revealed that their baby powder contains asbestos.
Existing fears over the safety of the vaccines — which have been rumored to contain Bill Gates microchips, zombifying prions, or some sort of slow-acting execution serum — have sadly been bolstered and amplified. And many have been reacting as though this is a nail in the coffin for America's third-tier vaccine — which already suffered from unflattering comparisons to the higher efficacy rates of Pfizer and Moderna's two-dose options.
But that's not really the case. And closer examination of the issue reveals how much caution officials are exercising and how incredibly safe and effective all the vaccines actually are.
Dr. Anthony Fauci addresses J&J vaccine pause — 'This is a very rare event' www.youtube.com
While it's true that Johnson & Johnson's vaccine has shown a significantly lower efficacy in fully preventing COVID infections — 66-72%, compared to Pfizer and Moderna's 93-95% — all three vaccines share another, much more important figure: 100%. In studies, that's how effective they all were in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from COVID.
And while even a mild case of COVID can be spread to others, the chances are substantially reduced. The overall stats for Johnson & Johnson's vaccine would be considered phenomenal for an annual flu vaccine — let alone for a disease that was unheard of two years ago.
It's honestly incredible how quickly researchers around the world were able to collaborate in developing any vaccine at all, let alone run multiple versions through rigorous safety protocols. But they did; and as a result, cases of serious complications like this are incredibly rare.
Johnson & Johnson's vaccine alone would be considered miraculous if not for the existence of slightly better options. But — seeing as there are better options — is a Johnson & Johnson shot really worth the risk?
That depends on the person. But for most people, the correct response is, "What risk?" Of the 6.8 million Americans who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, only six cases of these frightening blood clots have been recorded — all in women under the age of 50.
While these cases are all frightening — particularly the death of one Virginia woman — they represent less than 1 in a million vaccine recipients. While recent recipients are recommended to look out for symptoms, including severe headaches and shortness of breath, there's not even a clear indication of a causal relationship. In other words, it could all be a sad coincidence in which six women just happened to get some nasty blood clots within two weeks of receiving their shots.
Considering that positively identified COVID-19 cases have had a 1.8% mortality rate in the US — and around 1 in 600 Americans have already died as a result — that "possibly-1-in-a-million chance of developing blood clots that could kill you or not" seems like a pretty reasonable risk. The fact that it's a story at all just points to the overall safety of these treatments.
In this context, it's no wonder Europe is still planning to start administering Johnson & Johnson vaccinations, with officials from the EU's European Medicines Agency stating that "the benefits of the vaccine in preventing COVID-19 outweigh the risks of side effects." The only reason for a brief pause is to operate with an abundance of caution and for officials to adjust their recommendations for who should receive which vaccine.
Rather than recommending that everyone rush to get whatever option is most accessible, they may recommend that pre-menopausal women receive the Pfizer or Moderna shots. Or it could be far more specific — possibly related to an interaction with one or multiple types of contraceptive pill, which are already known to increase the risk of blood clots.
All-in-all, the frightening news about a vaccine possibly killing a woman is not nearly as frightening as the prospect that this incredibly rare case will feed into so-called "vaccine hesitancy". With around 20% of Americans in a recent survey still saying that they do not want to be vaccinated, and an additional 17% operating on a "wait and see" basis, we already face a monumental task in pushing for the all-important 70-90% herd immunity.
Herd Immunity and Coronavirus: Can It Be Achieved? www.youtube.com
Once we reach that ballpark, it will finally — finally — be possible to return to normal activities without the valid fear of contracting and spreading a wildly contagious and deadly virus. But that's going to take the work not only of manufacturing, distributing, and administering the vaccines, but of convincing those still on the fence of how important it is for everyone that they get immunized.
Sensationalizing a story about a small handful of scary cases and one death — compared to the hundreds of thousands of deaths the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is likely to prevent — is not going to help us get there. Instead, we should all take this opportunity to recognize what this story truly reveals: how careful health officials are being, and how remarkably safe the vaccines actually are.
The Coronavirus Reveals How Fragile American Society Has Become
Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!
There is a saying that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
Entrenched systems of power have established bulwarks against the kind of institutional reform that younger Americans have recently been pushing for. By controlling the political conversation through lobbying, control of mass media, regulatory capture, and authoring of legislation, the ultra-wealthy maintain the status quo in a way that makes changing it seem impossible. The problem is that change is desperately needed if we are going to maintain any semblance of civilization.
While political dynamics have become so rigid that the boundaries of what we can achieve begin to feel impenetrable, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that the vital structures of our society—a society that is superficially so robust—have been so weakened that a collapse in one form or another is inevitable. We are the world's superpower, yet faced with a slightly more contagious, slightly more lethal virus than the flu, we are powerless. How did it get to be this bad? How were we so blind to it?
To clarify, depending on the part of the country you live in, it could seem like I'm exaggerating. It may not seem "so bad," or like we're on the verge of collapse. Not long ago the president and many of his loyalists on Fox News and AM radio were still calling dire forecasts around the coronavirus a hoax. At the time it seemed reckless but not unhinged from current events—which were still largely unaffected. In much of the country there is little cause for alarm, so few people are doing much to change their behavior. That's about to change, and the areas hit worst will soon be making the dire choices that Italian hospitals were recently faced with—which patients are we going to hook up to ventilators, and which are we going to allow to die. We are already started on a path that leads to overflowing hospitals in every major city.
A makeshift testing facility in Seattle, Washington
Getty Images
The problem is that our entire economy is set up around the same kind of short-term thinking that drive publicly traded corporations. The mentality that "government should be run like a business," leads to cost-cutting measures that only look to the current budget, with minimal consideration given to the kind of intermittent crises that we are bound to face—like a viral pandemic. If it's not particularly likely to happen before the next election cycle, it's better not to even worry about it. This is the kind of thinking that led Donald Trump's administration to push for cuts to the CDC and to disband their global health security team in 2018.
But the systemic issues go much deeper than that and started long before Trump took office. Trump and his ilk can't be blamed for the fact that the US has two hospital beds for every 1,000 citizens. Nor are they responsible for the fact that almost every aspect of America's critical infrastructure receives a near-failing grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers. This includes airport congestion—which has already become an issue with the current pandemic—and important shipping routes that we will rely on to maintain the movement of necessary goods as conditions around the country worsen.
Add to those issues the fact that we have a massive population of prisoners sharing tight quarters with poor sanitation, a substantial homeless population with no way to quarantine, a dearth of worker protections like paid sick leave, and it becomes hard to imagine how we'll get through this unscathed. And, of course, this is still ignoring the elephant in the room—a for-profit healthcare system that discourages millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans from seeking medical advice or treatment until it's too late.
Getty Images
Meanwhile, the economic hardships imposed by the necessity of social distancing are being exacerbated by an economy that is heavily reliant on the whims of financial speculators who create an echo chamber of divestment that heightens every crisis. The stock market, in other words, is going crazy in the worst possible way. It's too soon to say how thoroughly the weaknesses in our system will be tested by the developing pandemic, but even in the best case scenario they are going to be strained to a terrifying extent.
Fortunately, there are efforts underway to shore up some of the most obvious breaking points so we can avoid complete societal collapse. They may turn out to be too little too late, but even if they get us through this current disaster, how long will it be before the next one hits? The best models of climate change predict that we are nearing an era that will be ruled by powerful natural disasters and refugee crises that will threaten economic stability and critical infrastructure and may heighten the threat of infectious diseases. Temporary, reactive measures cannot save us if the next crisis hits a little harder or when multiple crises overlap.
A strong social safety net like the one the US tried to develop under FDR would serve to mitigate the damage from this kind of crisis. But modern American politics has worked for decades—in an effort that became an object of worship under Ronald Reagan—to whittle the welfare state of the New Deal and the Great Society down to a fragile bare minimum.
We need to take seriously the voices of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have called for the kind of broad, sweeping legislation that stands a chance of upending the rigid political dynamics that maintain the status quo. The Green New Deal would be a good start. The alternative, one way or another, is the end of our civilization and the world as we know it.
CDC Warns Untreatable Illness Is Afflicting U.S. Children
The rare condition is known to have polio-like symptoms, but no vaccine and no treatment.
An untreatable illness is afflicting young children at an alarming rate in the U.S. this year.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 62 cases of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) have been confirmed, spanning across 22 states. Last year, there were 33 confirmed cases across 16 states. To date, there are as many as 65 additional cases still under investigation in a total of 30 states. While the CDC is testing every confirmed patient in search of a cause for the flare of incidents this season, results offer no answers.
The CDC is raising concerns over the marked increase in the condition's occurrence since August 2014. On average, one in a million people in the U.S. contract AFM. The disease presents with polio-like symptoms such as weakness or sudden loss of muscle tone in the arms and legs. Other symptoms include fever or respiratory problems. Youth are particularly vulnerable to the illness; 90% of cases affect children under the age of 18, while the average age of patients is only 4 years old. The rare condition severely compromises the nervous system, particularly the gray matter surrounding the spinal cord, potentially causing paralysis or death. Although the disease is known to be caused by a virus, it's unknown why some people are more susceptible than others or why some patients recover quickly while AFM proves fatal to others.
NPR
Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, confirms, "We have not been able to find a cause for the majority of these AFM cases." She suggests, "AFM may be caused by other viruses, including enterovirus, environmental toxins and a condition in which the body's immune system attacks and destroys tissue that it mistakes for foreign material."
Despite its likeness to polio, there is no vaccine to prevent AFM. No specific treatments or interventions have been established in the medical community. Current treatment plans only include palliative care and physical therapy for chronic nerve pain, as well as medical intervention in the event that nerve weakness renders patients incapable of breathing on their own. Antidepressants are also recommended to help a patient cope.
ABC News
The CDC is urging parents and caretakers to remain vigilant of possible AFM symptoms in young people. As for prevention, the health agency is left grappling, recommending general precautions similar to those against the flu: thorough hand-washing, staying up-to-date on other vaccines, and using insect repellent to protect against mosquito bites. "This is a pretty dramatic disease," Dr. Messonnier said. "This is a mystery so far, and we haven't solved it yet, so we have to be thinking broadly."
Meg Hanson is a Brooklyn-based writer, teacher, and jaywalker. Find Meg at her websiteand on Twitter @megsoyung.