[Parmy Olson] Don't believe your eyes in AI era

A fake photo of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral across Twitter on Monday, and stocks dipped. The incident confirmed what many have said for months: Misinformation is on course to be supercharged as new AI tools for concocting photos get easier to use. Fixing this problem with technology will be an endless game of whack-a-mole. It’s certainly worth trying to track image provenance, as Adobe is doing with its Content Authenticity Initiative. But as the saying goes, a lie can trav

May 30, 2023

[Kim Seong-kon] Belonging nowhere and everywhere

Recently, I came across an article in Axios with the headline, “Asian Americans least likely to feel they belong in U.S., study finds.” Quoting from a survey jointly conducted by the Asian American Foundation, the article reported, “Only 22% of Asian Americans said they feel they belong and are accepted in the U.S.” CNN, too, recently reported that many second-generation Korean immigrants to the US are moving to South Korea because “they always felt like outcasts, a

May 26, 2023

[Lee Kyong-hee] South Korea deflects on US-China conflict

Henry Kissinger’s warning of a possible US-China military conflict over Taiwan within the next 5 to 10 years is a sobering prediction for the global community, especially South Korea. Due to its geographic and strategic proximity, it could be quickly embroiled in the fighting. There are plenty of reasons to feel anxious, though publicly the situation is only addressed in measured and oblique terms here. “We are in the classic pre-World War I situation,” says Kissinger, “w

May 25, 2023

[Eric Kim] G-7 2023: Are we repeating history?

I did a recorded interview two weeks ago for the G-7 summit held in Hiroshima. This year’s summit marks the 50th year of G-7, which started in 1973. South Korea was invited as a guest amid the United States pushed for an initiative to decouple with China. The latest G-7 summit was seen as a parallel to the 1980s when Japan started to rise against the US on the global stage. Japan’s rapid rise came after the US transferred semiconductor technology to Japan, laying the foundation for t

May 25, 2023

[Garrett Ehinger] We need treaties on biological labs

The conflict in Sudan suddenly drew new levels of alarm when hostile forces in the capital city of Khartoum seized a biological research lab containing lethal viruses such as cholera, measles and polio. It is unclear whether the viruses will be properly contained by the occupying soldiers, or if they will somehow be released and cause new outbreaks. Scenarios like these could have been avoided if there were proper prophylactic measures in place, such as treaties and disincentives. Fighting in Su

May 24, 2023

[Theodore Kim] Can today’s AI truly learn on its own?

One of the boldest, most breathless claims being made about artificial intelligence tools is that they have “emergent properties” -- impressive abilities gained by these programs that they were supposedly never trained to possess. “60 Minutes,” for example, reported credulously that a Google program taught itself to speak Bengali, while the New York Times misleadingly defined “emergent behavior” in AI as language models gaining “unexpected or unintended

May 23, 2023

[Noah Feldman] The pro-artist, anti-art ruling

The Supreme Court has sided with individual artists -- but against art itself. In a fascinating copyright decision that transcended ideological lines, the court held that Andy Warhol’s distinctive reworking of a photograph of Prince did not count as fair use, thus requiring the Andy Warhol Foundation to compensate the original photographer. The upshot is that little-guy artists win, because they now have more rights than they had before to claim credit for works re-used by others. But art

May 23, 2023

[Sarah Green Carmichael] Is AI the answer to moms’ mental overload?

Earlier this year, I made a dumb financial decision. I bought a car that was beyond our budget. We had just been through an eight-week stretch of demanding work schedules, kitchen renovations and checking-account fraud. Our daughter’s day-care center closed three times, for a COVID outbreak, a bout of norovirus and a water leak. Not exactly tragedies, but when our old car died, my fried brain had no bandwidth for comparison shopping. I walked into a dealership and said I’d look at wh

May 22, 2023

[Sławomir Sierakowski] The Polish Missile Crisis

On Dec. 16, 2022, a Russian KH-55 missile flew halfway across Poland before landing 12 kilometers outside Bydgoszcz, a city of over 300,000 people that is host to five NATO units and the Joint Forces Training Center. NATO’s largest producer of TNT, Nitro-Chem, is in nearby Belma. The Russian missile, designed to carry a nuclear payload of up to 200 kilotons -- 13 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- was six meters long and weighed 1.7 tons. Fortunately, it appears to have be

May 22, 2023

[Jean Guerrero] Shouting down racists isn't effective

We've become accustomed to the weaponization of words. Words are used to divide, dehumanize and incite violence. Conservative leaders spread hateful rhetoric to whip up support for attacks on women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and more. Progressives fight back by trying to shout down the purveyors of bigotry. Meanwhile, Americans are losing faith in their capacity to tap into the opposite power of words -- bringing people closer together. Polls show a tendency to avoid political

May 19, 2023

[Daniel Hogsta] Delivering on nuclear disarmament

From May 19-21, the leaders of the G-7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) as well as high-level representatives from the European Union will meet in Hiroshima, Japan. Many of these leaders will be visiting the city, one of two where nuclear weapons were used in August 1945, for the first time. And since the nuclear threat is now higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War, they must not use this occasion to pass off the same deca

May 18, 2023

[Wang Son-taek] Wolf warriors retreat, worries diminish

Several days ago, there was a significant diplomatic event in Vienna, Austria. Jake Sullivan, the White House's national security adviser, and Wang Yi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo, held talks there. The talks were reported to last more than eight hours over two days. It shows that in-depth conversations have been exchanged on various topics. Fortunately, the issues include the effective management of bilateral relations so that the US-China strategic competition

May 18, 2023

[Kim Seong-kon] Only a fool trips on what is behind him’

Suppose there are two types of men: One is a pleasant fellow to be with, and the other is not. One enjoys respect and adoration in the community, while the other does not. Which one would you prefer to be? The first man has a positive attitude. Although he has some sad memories of his past life, he does not harbor any grudges or enmities. He is generous enough to “forgive and forget” because he knows “a happier heart is the key to a happier life,” as Gandhi said. He tries

May 17, 2023

[Cory Franklin] High COVID-19 death rate in US

Following his recent retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci reflected on his government role during the COVID-19 pandemic. When asked about the high per capita COVID-19 death rate in the US, Fauci replied, “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country lik

May 17, 2023

[Daniel DePetris] US still very much at war on terrorism

At a time when the Biden administration has its hands full trying to reverse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and manage a US-China relationship stuck in the doldrums, America’s vast, lethal counterterrorism machine continues to be in high gear. The US intelligence community, in close partnership with America’s special operators, are tracking and hunting down terrorists in several countries -- Syria and Somalia, most especially -- with such regularity that it barely makes a dent in

May 16, 2023

[Lisa Jarvis] Isolation is as harmful as smoking

Your doctor’s orders for staying healthy might include a daily routine of eating your broccoli, going to the gym and getting a good night’s sleep. Now, the US surgeon general would like to add another action item to the list: Reach out to a friend. In a new report, Vivek Murthy says that the US is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation that can be as harmful to our health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Murthy also offers practical fixes: public policies and spac

May 16, 2023

[Ana Palacio] A BRICS revival?

There was a time when everyone was talking about a group of fast-growing emerging economies with huge potential. But the BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- struggled to transform themselves from a promising asset class into a unified group of real-world diplomatic and financial players. Is this finally changing? The story of the BRICS begins with a November 2001 paper by Jim O’Neill, then the head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, called

May 15, 2023

[Mark Z. Barabak] Will Trump pay a political price?

There is a long list of descriptors used to identify Donald Trump: real estate magnate, reality TV star, former president, insurrectionist, criminally indicted payer of hush money. As of Tuesday, a new particularly incriminating label can be added: sexual assailant. Even so, the determination of a civil jury -- that Trump physically brutalized writer E. Jean Carroll -- seems unlikely to make much difference to his unshakable political base or, for now, change the fundamental dynamics of the 202

May 12, 2023

[Lee Kyong-hee] History matters in Korea-US-Japan relations

On the cusp of World War II, Syngman Rhee warned Americans about Imperial Japan’s expansionist ambitions. “To review the past is to preview the future,” wrote the future president of Korea in his 1941 book, “Japan Inside out: The Challenge of Today.” Months after the book’s release, Japanese planes bombed US naval ships at Pearl Harbor. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korea-US alliance and mutual defense treaty, hailed as a historic success. Yet, t

May 11, 2023

[Doyle McManus] Concerns grow about US debt ceiling

It's time to start worrying about the debt ceiling. The US federal government is careening toward its borrowing credit limit, beyond which the Treasury won't be able to pay all its bills. The consequences could be truly catastrophic -- a global financial crash -- or merely damaging: a jump in interest rates, a plummeting stock market and a more likely recession. Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said the "X Date," the day the money runs out, could arrive as soon a

May 11, 2023