Viral

The most viral group in recent weeks is also the strangest and most incomprehensible group you will hear today

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Two figures with masks with very long noses and white suits with black polka dots (or black ones with white polka dots). A double-neck guitar with more frets than usual. A looper operated with bare feet, also painted with polka dots. And 27 minutes of music that divide the scale into 24 tones instead of the 12 of the Western system. This is how Angine de Poitrine entered the lives of millions of people who had never heard of math rock in their lives. How we met Angine De Poitrine. The video that changed everything was recorded by the Seattle public station KEXP during the Transmusicales festival in Rennes, in December 2025. They published it on YouTube in February 2026. In a matter of weeks it has accumulated millions of views, it has almost 8. In the comments, someone wrote: “The AI: Humans no longer have anything to do in music. Angine de Poitrine: Hold the triangular Martian beer for me.” Quite a diagnosis of the crux of the matter. Twenty years playing the Martian. Khn and Klek de Poitrine (pseudonyms, obviously) have been making music together for more than two decades, since they were teenagers. They launched Angine de Poitrine just before the pandemic, in 2019, although they didn’t start performing regularly until 2023. The name, which in French means “angina pectoris”, is a devotion to the absurd, like everything in this project: the costumes came about as a joke because they wanted to play twice in the same week in the same venue, but the venue wouldn’t allow it, so they dressed up to be booked as if they were another group. And they kept the costumes. But what is this? The music that Angine de Poitrine plays is objectively difficult to describe. Themselves They have defined it as “dada-Pythagus-cubist rock-mantra”which does not clarify much but does point to the unclassifiable spirit of the project. Khn plays a double-neck bass guitar custom builtwhich allows you to play microtones, the intervals between conventional notes. Activate the looper with bare feet while Klek maintains a usually frenetic rhythm on the drums, brimming with changes of rhythm and time signature. What is microtonality. The melodies are based on a system of 24 tones per octave instead of the 12 usual in Western music. Some of his compositions move in time signatures as infrequent as 10/4, 17/4 or 28/4. For a listener accustomed to the Western tradition, the result sounds slightly “out of place”, in a constant tension that is difficult to express. Danick Trottier, musicologist at UQAM, has explained that the duo works primarily with quarter tones, half a standard semitone, creating a dramatically dissonant effect. Influences? There are a few: Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, Primus, King Crimson, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and more exotically, Indonesian gamelan and Middle Eastern music. It is not exactly the list of references of a group that thinks about the mass market. And that is the key to why they have attracted so much attention. Nobody knows who they are. The anonymity of its members goes beyond a mere nod to the Internet, but is taken very seriously. Their manager, Sébastien Collin, has undertaken a task of meticulously removing any mention of the band’s two members’ real names on the internet, and the group’s website warns that Angine de Poitrine is “an anonymous artistic project” and that any speculation about the identity of its members may constitute an invasion of their privacy. It goes viral. When KEXP (with a long history of presenting groups that end up becoming references) published the video, the reactions came in cascade: guitarists, jazz fans, progressive rock fans and people who had not paid attention to current music for years decided to spread it. Rick Beatoone of the most watched music analysis YouTubers in the world, claimed to receive 25 emails a day asking about the duo, more than about any other artist in the history of his channel. Dave Grohl He stated that the duo “literally blew his mind” and that he didn’t know how to explain it except to say that they had to be seen. The snowball was unstoppable. What makes the phenomenon unique is that the virality It wasn’t just from top to bottom.: Many of those respected voices started talking about the duo because their own listeners kept sending them the linkmaking fans the real engine of spread, not passive recipients. Ahead of the popes music intellectuals. Immediate success. Success has immediate and quite striking economic translation. Tickets for his concerts in Toronto already have resale prices of over $500. The vinyls of their first album, ‘Vol. YO’, They have sold for $2,000.. Their concert dates in New York, Los Angeles, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium sold out in minutes. This past April 3, 2026 they published ‘Vol. II’, their second album, which includes three of the songs from the already iconic KEXP video and three new compositions. Complex but accessible. There is something paradoxical about Angine de Poitrine: inaccessible music usually slows down uninitiated listeners. Here the opposite happens: difficulty generates analysis and curiosity, and this attracts more listeners, who return to the original video, wondering: “Why do I react like this to this strange thing?” James Gutierrez, assistant professor of music at Northeastern University, point because the thirst for something “obviously insimilable” is the axis of the reaction: this band is the emblem of something that no AI can convincingly replicateand in these times of predictable successes, where it is valued that everything is categorizable, the inimitable is an unexpected value. Another distinguished opinion: Pierre Michaud, associate professor of composition at the Université de Montréal, attributes the success to a “stroke of genius” that combines extreme complexity with a casual presentation. The geopolitical context also appears in the analyses. Gutierrez points out that in a 2026 marked by political gravity, something admirable, creative and playful activates the right mechanisms in the public. We can breathe easy: we continue … Read more

Seedance 2.0 has used Hollywood intellectual property to go viral. Hollywood has used the courts

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ByteDance is not only the company responsible for TikTok: This is a conglomerate that is pushing the development of artificial intelligence in China. And a few weeks ago they presented a Video generation AI which was the most brutal thing we had seen: Seedance 2.0. He perfectly matched any animated character, but also to flesh and blood actors. The West was quick to react, raising its voice and arguing “what happens to my copyrights.” And, in the background, there is something more important: one more chapter in the technological power struggle between China and the rest of the world. In short. Seedance 2.0 is a multimodal AI that allows us to generate video from text, images and other video chips. With a single promptAI takes care of the rest, combining video, audio and visual effects that can be extremely realistic. During the days following the announcement we were able to see a multitude of examples that showed a level of “perfection” not previously seen in other video models. “China is coming”. And the problem is what you are imagining: to recreate a photorealistic Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, he has evidently been inspired by those in the flesh. Also in the Douyin’s inexhaustible librarythe Chinese TikTok, which allowed him a complex understanding of facial and physical expressions and lighting calculations in a multitude of situations. My colleague Lacort already said it: This is not “China is coming”, but rather “China already does this… and we don’t”. Hollywood picks up the phone. And of course, just like the Japanese industry did when OpenAI blatantly copied his works so that we could create our Ghibli-style dog in ChatGPT, the American film industry was quick to raise its voice. One of the first was Disney, which in the purest Nintendo stylesent a cease and desist letter to ByteDance, accusing the Chinese company to use Disney characters to train your model. Disney is bothered by this threat, but it bothers it more that it doesn’t get a cut like it does from its alliance with OpenAI. Days later it was Motion Picture Association (to which Netflix, Amazon Prime, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner or Disney belong) which sent the same letter of interruption of operations to the Chinese company, accusing it of using its characters and protected material to train the model. And it has had consequences. Putting on the brake. In China, Seedance 2.0 remains operational, where it has achieved a high degree of virality among users, but where it also serves as a tool for creators. ByteDance planned to open global access in mid-March, but due to threats from the Western film industry, have put those fallow plans. “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users” – ByteDance’s response Disney has surely seen this video: Geopolitical pulse. It is not known how or when Seedance 2.0 will be launched outside of China, but in the background there is something very interesting: the use of copyright as a weapon in the technological war. If this has already gone from “the wolf is coming” to “the wolf is already here”, the West is using its available weapons to stop the advance. We have been following the technological and trade war between the United States for years (dragging Europe) and China, and if this movement implies another movement in the current geopolitical game in which the two poles are developing their AI by leaps and bounds. And China is achieving it without having the same resources at hand as the US AI Big Tech. Seedance is estimated to have been built without NVIDIA H100 chips banned for China, some that its rivals do have. Precedents. Is something similar to what happened with DeepSeek in LLMs And now it’s happening with synthetic video: the US has tried hard to leave China out of the conversation, but they are managing to have a strong presence in it. Another example is the reverse engineer ASML machines o what SMIC and Huawei are making progress in building cutting-edge chips. Capacity vs regulation. And another important theme of the ‘Seedance case’ is that it has become an example of the head-on collision between the technical capacity of AI and the regulatory power of the industry. It’s funny that when it became known that the American AI had ‘borrowed’ the entire Internet to train their models, other industries would be more lukewarm than when a Chinese company does it. And at the center of it all is a European Union that is expressing its intention to bring some sanity to progress for the sake of progress, overriding copyrights that can be trampled depending on who does it. In a proposal to “protect creative work with copyright in the age of AI, the European Parliament requires a series of measures so that companies pay for the resources they need for technology training. According to these companies, such a measure would go against progress and smaller AI companies. It would be curious if ByteDance responded to Disney with that same argument. In Xataka | All the big AIs have ignored copyright laws. The amazing thing is that there are still no consequences

China has turned OpenClaw into a viral phenomenon. And then it has prohibited its officials from using it

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The appearance of the AI ​​agent OpenClaw has meant that we are living in a kind of second “DeepSeek moment“They know it well in China, where its use has exploded in such a way that the Government has had to act. And it has probably done well. An absolutely viral AI. The OpenClaw project has caused a real earthquake in China. In cities like Shenzhen there are queues to physically install it and people paying for others to install it remotely or in person. The AI ​​agent is breaking all popularity records for programming projects, and for example has already surpassed two legends such as React or Linux in terms of stars awarded on GitHub, a measure of the popularity of open source projects. In just three months, OpenClaw has managed to surpass the legendary leaders of this ranking in GitHub stars: react and linux. Source: Star-History.com Solution to Chinese fragmentation. The secret of this success in the Asian giant is not based only on the curiosity of users, but also on the fact that OpenClaw provides a striking solution to an endemic problem in the country: the fragmentation of business software. With an average of 150 independent IT systems per company and 60% of them without APIs or documentation, AI integration seemed to be an insurmountable wall. OpenClaw solves the problem because you can take control of the machine, “see” buttons and text boxes, click and type in browsers, and operate as if you were a human. Tokens everywhere. That ability has turned this project into an absolute “token hole.” Unlike a conventional chatbot like ChatGPT, OpenClaw works continuously and autonomously, and it is not uncommon to see an advanced user consume 50 million tokens daily. The impact has been massive: at the end of February, Chinese models such as Kimi 2.5 or DeepSeek were already devouring 61% of the global OpenRouter tokens, a platform that allows you to easily use APIs from dozens of AI models. The fever has been such that Kimi has generated in 20 days more income than all expected by its creator, Moonshot IA, by 2025. Alarm. The problem is precisely that: when software has the ability to “see” everything that happens on a screen and execute commands by itself, the security risks are enormous. This has made the Beijing government go from enthusiasm—cities like Shenzhen offer million-dollar subsidies for their development—to a policy that is now totally restrictive. Government agencies, state-owned companies and large national banks have received urgent notices prohibiting the installation of OpenClaw in office devices and even in mobile phones that are used in this type of segments. Be careful with your data. Practically since it went viral, many have warned of the cybersecurity risks involved in using OpenClaw. An initial audit of the skills available on ClawdHub detected hundreds of them as malicious. That was the germ of the OpenClaw alliance with the Spanish cybersecurity firm VirusTotalpart of Google. The risk with this project is threefold: You have access to private data Can communicate with the outside You are exposed to untrustworthy content and attacks from prompt injection One of lime and one of sand. For large Chinese technology companies, the government’s measures are bittersweet. On the one hand, they have rushed to offer one-click OpenClaw deployments in their clouds for interested users. On the other hand, state restriction has meant that some of the AI ​​startups such as Zhipu (Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd.) or MiniMax Group have quickly fallen on the stock market for the news. China and control. There is another key element in that political movement: the loss of control. The Beijing government has already fought a battle in the past to curb the power of giants like Alibaba, and that caused the “Asian Jeff Bezos”, Jack Ma, came out very badly. An autonomous AI agent that operates outside of that government control represents a challenge to the mechanisms that China has been perfecting, especially with its Great Firewall. An uncertain future. These new restrictions pose a complex future for the project in China. The Asian giant has embraced AI more than anyone else, but the security risks in this case are so clear that limits had to be set before things got out of control. Even so, the project is Open Source, which will make it difficult for its deployment to be halted by end users and enthusiasts, no matter how much the Chinese Government wants it. Image | OpenClaw | Paul Kagame In Xataka | Every time Facebook had a competitor, it bought it: it is exactly the same thing that OpenAI is doing

the dangerous viral trend that turns a common medicine into a lethal Russian roulette

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Something that may be quite internalized in society is that taking too much of a medication Anyone can have a very harmful effect on the body, and logically we avoid taking a lot of ibuprofen or paracetamol at once. But social networks have taken this as a new challenge which consists of taking paracetamol pills in a group to see who can achieve spend more time admitted in the hospital due to the liver failure it generates. Crazy. What has been dubbed the “paracetamol challenge” on social media is becoming a real nightmare for emergency and toxicology services. And it is no wonder, since behind the false sense of security that an over-the-counter medication such as paracetamol gives, hides a mechanism of implacable toxicity capable of destroying the liver of a teenager in a matter of hours. At an international level. The phenomenon is not new, but it has raised alarm bells internationally due to its recent outbreaks. In the United Kingdom, newspapers such as The Independent have been echoed of police warnings after registering cases of teenagers intentionally intoxicated in Soutampaton due to this challenge. And, although the first thing you might think is that it is a suicide attempt, since paracetamol is one of the ways used to do it, the reality is that they do it because of a challenge seen on TikTok. This too has reached countries like Belgiumwhere health authorities have had to launch a strong alert about videos that encourage people to overdose on this medication. In Spain. Has not been left behind our country, which has also reported cases of adolescents who have followed this challenge. But to such an extent that in Malaga There have been two hospital admissions due to liver failure due to a drug overdose. The paracetamol trap. Although it is a medication that can be found over the counter, in the case of Spain, generally the dose is 500 mg, the truth is that it has a great danger behind it, since paracetamol overdose is one of the most frequent and potentially lethal pharmacological poisonings. But the great deception of this challenge is that symptoms of poisoning do not occur in the first hoursbut a teenager can ingest several grams of acetaminophen and feel at most mild nausea or vomiting. In this way, while the young man thinks that “nothing has happened” and that he has won the challenge to his friends, the liver is silently collapsing. In days. International clinical guidelines place special emphasis on this: late liver deterioration, since the symptoms of severe liver failure appear only three days after taking the paracetamol overdose. And here on many occasions it is too late to act from medicine, which causes the death of the patient. The mechanism. Playing the “paracetamol challenge” is, in medical terms, playing Russian roulette, since massive intake of this drug saturates the metabolic pathways of the liver, generating a highly toxic metabolite called NAPQI that destroys liver cells when in large doses. With a normal and scheduled intake, this metabolite is produced, but the liver can control it by transforming it into another product that it quickly discards. But when the amount is very high, the liver literally has no capacity to process it into something less harmful. The treatment. Right now, the only thing that has shown a reversal of liver damage from acetaminophen overdose is N-acetylcysteine. However, the effect decreases as time passes, and it is ideal to administer it in the first eight hours after an overdose with paracetamol. The problem is that the teenager can hide that he is beginning to feel bad because he has a feeling of guilt or even fear of the consequences that his actions may have on his parents. This is why it may be the case that you arrive late to a hospital to receive treatment and that the window available to do a stomach lavage or even for a liver transplant to arrive is very small. Raise awareness. The “paracetamol challenge” is not just another Internet hoax, but rather it is a direct fight against the biology of the human body in which the prize for “lasting longer in the hospital” can be multiple organ failure or ending up on the waiting list to receive a transplant. In this way, the most important thing is always to make minors aware of how serious it can be to take too much paracetamol, since it is possible that they do not know that something that a priori ‘cures’ their fever or discomfort can end up killing them. Images | danilo.alvesd In Xataka | Ozempic not only eliminates hunger, it is rewriting the supermarket ticket: goodbye to ultra-processed foods and spending on snacks

OpenClaw is the most viral, fascinating and dangerous AI of the moment. For this last reason, it has joined forces with VirusTotal from Malaga

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In 2025 we had a ‘DeepSeek moment’ and in 2026 we are having an ‘OpenClaw moment’. This AI agent is super powerful, but also super insecure. There is, however, good news, because the Malaga company VirusTotal has partnered with the OpenClaw project to try to mitigate one of the most important cybersecurity risks of this AI agent: its skills. what has happened. OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot, and before Clawdbot) has announced that it has begun a collaboration with the Malaga cybersecurity company VirusTotal, owned by Google. The agreement will see VirusTotal be in charge of “scanning” and analyzing the so-called “skills”, which work like OpenClaw plugins and add all kinds of functions. They do it, of course, but many take the opportunity to introduce malicious instructions that allow them to steal data and remotely operate other people’s AI agents. More security for disturbing AI. Peter Steinberger, creator of the project, has joined Jamieson O’Reilly, cybersecurity expert and founder of the company Dvulnand Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, to offer that “additional layer of security for the OpenClaw community.” In it official announcement explain that “all the skills published in ClawdHub (the project’s official skills “store”) are now scanned through Virus Total’s Threat Intelligence system, including its new capability Code Insight (code inspection)”. Bernardo Quintero indicated on Twitter how the effort has already allowed 1,700 skillls to be identified as malicious. If the skill is malicious, it is blocked. This analysis carried out with the VirusTotal tools allows us to identify skills as malicious and block them immediately so that they cannot be downloaded. Not only that: those skills that have been classified as benign are analyzed again every day to detect scenarios in which for some reason they could end up becoming malicious. Still, be careful. Those responsible for OpenClaw warn: the VirusTotal scan helps a lot, but it is not a total guarantee that any skill can perform malicious actions on the machine on which we have our AI agent installed. The attacks of prompt injection Sophisticated skills can manage to cross that barrier, but of course this collaboration means that OpenClaw users can be much calmer regarding the skills available in the ClawdHub repository. OpenClaw wants to be much more secure. This first effort joins OpenClaw’s ambition to have a complete cybersecurity model which includes things like a public roadmap for your new developments in this area, a formal communication process, and details about full audits of your code. Plugging a problem that could kill OpenClaw. The OpenClaw project soon went viral due to its eye-catching options, but shortly after doing so a security audit initial 2,851 skills detected 341 malicious skills. Companies like BitDefender also joined these efforts to avoid problems with tools like AI Skills Checker to check whether a skill was dangerous or not. These malicious skills were, for example, capable of executing shell commands on the victim machine, which gave the attacker complete control of those resources. Attacking the machine is confusing it with natural language. Normally cybersecurity attacks are complex, but the problem with AI agents is that they work with natural language. This implies that to infiltrate these systems you do not have to use code, but simply “convince” and “trick” the AI ​​with natural language. That is where prompt injection attacks come in, which consist of giving instructions to those AI agents that can confuse them to obtain something that theoretically they should not allow them to obtain. Personal data, API keys of the models we use at OpenClaw, email accounts and passwords for all types of services… the possibilities are endless, and OpenClaw, which has access to all of this to operate autonomously, can end up being “tricked” into transferring said data. Beware of OpenClaw. These problems now seem a little less feasible thanks to the collaboration with VirusTotal, but those who are trying OpenClaw on their machines or any other platform should be very alert from the beginning. There are guides that help you install it with some barriers important security issues, and the project itself has a command (‘openclaw security audit –deep –fix’ to audit the most important problems and address them. In Xataka | OpenAI has a problem: Anthropic is succeeding right where the most money is at stake

A YouTube video that lasts 140 years has gone viral. Nobody is clear why

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A YouTube video which, on paper, would not end for more than a century is the type of oddity that the internet knows how to turn into a phenomenon. It is enough to see an impossible figure in duration and verify that that same clip exceeds 2.3 million views to understand why half the world has stopped to watch it. Not because someone intends to reproduce it in its entirety, but because something like this challenges what we think we know about how the platform works. Even more so when it comes from a strange channel, with only three published videos and 137,000 subscribers. The longest video on YouTube? What has triggered the confusion is not only that exorbitant figure, but the way in which YouTube shows it depending on where you look. A counter appears in the channel view and in the video thumbnail that, translated into real time, is equivalent to about 140 years of continuous playback, as we can see in the screenshots. However, when you press play and load the player, the duration changes and is around 12 hours, with variations of minutes and seconds. The length of the video when embedded in a web page The limits of the platform. On your own help pagesGoogle explains that the maximum upload is 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever comes first, and remembers that these limits have varied over the years, leaving longer videos from previous times on the platform. This framework is essential to not get carried away by the impact of the number that appears on the screen. If the player shows something close to 12 hours, it’s within what YouTube considers normal, while a duration of decades simply doesn’t fit with the service’s known rules. The only direct source of this entire case is the file of the channel that hosts the video. On YouTube he appears as @shinywrand in your profile YouTube indicates as location “North Korea”. It also shows minimal but striking activity: three videos published, 137,000 subscribers and 2,551,606 accumulated views, with the channel’s registration date on July 31, 2023. There is no additional information or descriptions that clarify what it is or where it comes from, beyond what the platform itself shows. A metadata failure. The hypothesis that best fits what we see is that we are not dealing with a real duration, but rather a number that is poorly recorded or poorly read within the YouTube infrastructure. Each video has several time measurements associated with it, the one declared by the original file, the one calculated by the system when processing it and the one used by the different interface modules. If one of them fails, inconsistencies could appear as striking as a preview that points to decades of playback and a player that moves in a normal range. The threshold of direct. Google explains that Live shows of less than 12 hours are automatically archived, but if they exceed that time they may be lost, a detail that helps to understand why that number appears again and again as a border. Although there is no confirmation that this video comes from a glitch in a live broadcast, that technical framework adds context to the duration displayed by the player. The result is a phenomenon that lives on the border between what the platform teaches and what really happens in its internal functioning. There is a video with an impossible length, a player that tells another story and a channel that provides no clues other than its own figures. And while the reasons remain unclear, the video continues to gain views and more than 30,000 comments. Images | BoliviaIntelligent | Screenshot In Xataka | Before, advertising was to monetize. Now it is to punish you and YouTube has taken it to the extreme

Matt Kiatipis is the viral street basketball sensation. What no one is clear about is if it is really basketball

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If you are interested in sports content on social networks, it is very possible that your algorithmic paths have crossed at some point with Matt Kiatipisbetter known as MK, a street basketball player who is injecting an aggressiveness into his videos that many see it as the antithesis of the sporting spirit. We delve into the phenomenon and what it contributes to the abundant content of this type on social networks. Who is MK? Matt Kiatipis accumulates 3 million followers on TikTokwhere matches are recorded basketballusually one on one (although not exclusively) where extreme physical contact is the norm. This content creator, calling himself “1V1 KING”, has turned street confrontations into a viral spectacle that divide opinions: while some defend the authenticity of the streetball more aggressive, others claim that their videos they glorify conflict and they betray the fundamentals of basketball. How it works. Kiatipis follows a formula: one-on-one confrontations on street courts around the world, from Toronto to Greece, passing through Brazil, Italy or Spain, where it has been recently. In them, intense physical contact is combined with aggressive verbal disrespect towards opponents. His videos, which have amassed 120 million likes, show pushing, elbowing and body defenses that would rarely be allowed in regulated basketball games. The moneys. The Canadian has converted this format in a complete business: training program, merchandising themed by country, sponsorships from brands like YoungLA and AirVert… And the project ISOa match league with global franchise aspirations. And all embedded in an amazingly familiar business model (brother records, father edits, sister manages networks) that allows him to maintain total control over his image. Is this basketball? The division is sharp. Critics point out that Kiatipis’ videos normalize unsportsmanlike behavior: constant pushing, defensive grabbing, elbowing without penalty, and use of the body that in the NBA would constitute an immediate personal foul. According to the Spanish Basketball Federation, physical contact that disadvantages the player with the ball is punishable, but in streetball The rules vary from court to court. Street basketball has historically operated under unwritten codes where each player calls his own fouls. MK’s defenders argue precisely that: that it respects the tradition of streetball more physical, where spectacle and authenticity matter more than the regulations. The debate transcends sports and asks what “real basketball” means in the era of immediate content, where attention needs to be continually drawn. The streetball phenomenon. MK’s appeal has deep roots in American urban basketball culture. Mythical fields like Rucker Park in Harlem (where stars such as Julius Erving or Kevin Durant once played) or Venice Beach in Los Angeles established in the seventies the cult of individual spectacle, one-on-one duels and the absence of referees. But it was the phenomenon of the sports footwear and equipment brand AND1 (1998-2008) who turned violent streetball into a television business: as a sponsorship, street players like “Hot Sauce” and “The Professor” toured the United States challenging local players in matches that were broadcast on ESPN. The mixtapes with the meetings sold more than 200,000 copies in three weeks. But even then detractors emerged. Critics at the time already warned that AND1 “polluted the purity of the game.” The difference with Kiatipis lies in the platform: where AND1 needed ESPN to reach its audience, MK only requires TikTok. Now aggressiveness and testosterone are not only on the surface, but also within the reach of millions of followers. In Xataka | Michael Jordan’s mansion was so luxurious that no one could buy it. After 12 years it has found a mysterious buyer

we have gone from medical diagnoses to adopting viral labels

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Social media has changed the way we understand, share and fear for our health. In this accelerated ecosystem, certain expressions born in science—or on its margins—propagate with astonishing rapidity. We have all heard words like microplastics, cortisol or, most recently, endocrine disruptors. Cold, technical terms, which nevertheless burn on TikTok and Instagram, turned into universal explanations for diffuse symptoms. Thus, they stop being a biomedical term and become something more: an identity label, a cause, a refuge from uncertainty. From scientific word to hashtag viral. The phenomenon is not new. Every once in a while, a word of medical jargon slips into everyday discourse, amplified by short videos and emotional narratives. In fact, recently the Chinese government has begun to regulate influencers that talk about health, demanding credentials or blocking imprecise terminology. The move illustrates the power of these terms: They no longer remain in the laboratory, but permeate popular culture. As explained the psychologist Alejandra de Pedro to Xatakaplatforms “not only amplify terms because they are new, but because they keep you inside.” On TikTok, he comments, if someone writes “endocrine disruptor” in the comments, the app highlights it in blue to invite a search. “And from there you enter a hole of videos on the subject. The platform wants you to spend more time, not learn more,” he points out. Furthermore, the logic of the algorithm is mixed with that of the human being: curiosity, fear, the desire for control. According to the psychologist Sergio Traver also consultedviralization is explained by two simultaneous factors: novelty (“attracts attention”) and simplification (“if this also solves a problem, it has a greater impact on us”). Various investigations confirm that the dissemination of incorrect or simplified information about health on networks is high. A systematic review found that the most viral topics They were vaccines, chronic diseases and diets, and that the spread of misinformation reached up to 87% in some cases. The more “credible” a content appears—and the less harm it appears to cause—the greater its dissemination. Viral words or authority? Viral words are not innocent labels, they function as symbols: they evoke authority (they sound scientific), they offer explanation (albeit simplified) and they generate community. Traver points out that the belief system is key: biomedical terms have greater impact because we “accept” the medical system as legitimate. De Pedro adds that there is a component of “borrowed authority”: if I say “endocrine disruptor”, it sounds technical, diffuse, the user does not usually question the source. For this reason, a viralized health term can become a kind of linguistic refuge, a formula for name what worries us without needing to go into nuances. In times of uncertainty—pandemic, climate crisis, information saturation—these terms act like amulets: they give a name to fear, they make it shareable, create community: “I know it too”, “I take care of myself”. Traver comments that sharing these terms can provide validation (“I identify with this”), and De Pedro speaks of the search for identity/belonging that acts in the background. The social function of the term. In a world where fear of the unknown is high (post-pandemic, mediatization of health, ecological crisis), these terms offer something that many demand: quick responses, labels that clear ambiguity, community. De Pedro describes it like this: “If a person is distressed and I tell him that it is all the fault of the ‘traumas’ (without explaining well what that is), I will be able to give him a pseudo-explanation… When using a fashionable term in health there is a feeling of control, of knowing something that others did not know.” Traver complements this by pointing out that “when someone names microplastics, we remember that news story that was related to cancer… These terms generate a network of associations that arouse fear and these emotions have been related to faster responses, seeking information.” And therein lies the crux of the matter: emotion—fear, indignation, anxiety—is not the error, it is the fuel. Recent studies show that false health rumors they spread faster than true information when they convey strong emotions (for example, condemnation, indignation) that appeal to morality. Furthermore, it comes into play confirmation bias: we tend to believe first what fits with our previous ideas. In this way, the user searches and shares only what reinforces their vision of the world, closing the circle of viralization. Viralization vs veracity. The problem comes when simplification becomes distortion. The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned of the danger of infodemics: the overabundance of information—correct or not—that confuses more than it guides. Scientific reviews, such as those published in Health Promotion International and PLOS ONEagree that social networks are fertile ground for the spread of health misinformation, especially when emotion is appealed to rather than evidence. Traver summarizes it like this: “Technical concepts rarely explain the why of something, they only delimit probabilities. But in networks they become closed certainties.” And De Pedro adds: “A false illusion of knowledge is generated. People believe they understand what they do not understand and they begin to distrust professionals.” The result is a scenario where anxiety fuels the search for explanations, and networks offer answers that are as quick as they are inaccurate. And the influencers arrive. The spread of these terms is not accidental. Platforms prioritize retention, engagement, and emotional hooks. The rise of influencers health has multiplied this phenomenon. Some do rigorous outreach work; others, not so much. “The problem is with those who put the share to scientific evidence,” warns Sergio Traver. Studies confirm that false or viral content circulates more easily if it evokes moral emotions, if it seems credible and if it is not excessively harmful. a study published in Nature shows that viral posts can significantly modify user behavior in the short and long term. In short, the viralization of health works at the intersection of four elements: technical term, emotion, algorithm and vulnerable audience. A cocktail is very difficult to control. What is at stake. The most worrying consequence is not … Read more

A viral message claims that “AIs can access group messages” on WhatsApp. It’s a manual hoax

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There are many WhatsApp users You are receiving a disturbing message. It indicates that “if we do not activate an advanced privacy option, AIs can access group messages, see phone numbers and even obtain personal information from the mobile phone… even in private chats.” The message is nothing more than a hoax that was already spread in the summer and that uses WhatsApp again as a means of dissemination. We explain why. manual hoax. According to this hoax, the chats you have on your WhatsApp could be at the mercy of tools like Meta AIthe chatbot that Meta integrated into WhatsApp some time ago. That would imply that they could read everything you write and write to you if you don’t take that immediate action. Although the notice may originate with good intentions, it is false: there is no invasion of privacy. Or at least, none that we didn’t already know. WhatsApp message that is being spread and that is nothing more than a hoax. Advanced chat privacy. The function “Advanced chat privacy” was presented by Meta months ago and its objective was none other than to offer more control over the dissemination of content shared in a conversation. The idea is to be able to limit the ability of group participants when redistributing messages and multimedia files. Specifically, and as They already pointed out in Genbeta a few months ago: Prevent messages from being shared in other chats, preventing you from using the forwarding option. Block automatic saving of media filessuch as photos or videos, in the users’ gallery. Disable the ability to use AI features within the chat, such as invoking Meta AI by typing its name. What does that option do then? Just the opposite of spying on you: it protects you more, in fact. Above all, other participants share things that you do not want to be shared. With this you can block group messages from being sent to other contacts (including chatbots), but you can also block Meta AI from being used within those specific chats. From reading your private messages, nothing. Goal AI, the chatbot integrated into WhatsAppcan’t see the private messages you’re sending with someone else. The only way this chatbot can access those messages is if you explicitly share that message with her. To do this you have two options: Share the message with AI: for example, by copying and pasting it into a conversation with Meta AI, ChatGPT or any other chatbot. Invoke Meta AI in the chat: if you write “@meta AI” in that private chat, you will make this chatbot able to access the messages of the chat in which it has been mentioned. WhatsApp’s AI only reads what you let it read. Precisely with the “Advanced chat privacy” option you can prevent the use of Meta AI from being invoked in those private chats (with another person or a group). If you do not do this, Meta AI will be able to access the messages in which you mention it or to which you give it access so that it can summarize them, for example. We continue to use end-to-end encryption. It is convenient to remember that when we use WhatsApp we do so with messages that are end-to-end encryption. Not even Meta (nor its AI) can read them, nor can they access or read group messages, including information such as phone numbers or personal information. Don’t worry. The conclusion is this: that viral message is nothing more than a textbook hoax, and everything it says is false. Meta’s AI is not and will not spy on you, and only accesses messages when you summon it. This AI cannot “spy on you alone”, enter your mobile phone through WhatsApp and steal your private chats or your phone number. What it will use to train its AI models—if you don’t prevent it— are your Facebook and Instagram postsbut of course, those are public. In Xataka | How to translate WhatsApp messages: converting them from any language to Spanish

Sora’s AI is resurrecting dead celebrities to turn them into cheap viral content: it’s technological nonsense

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What of digitally resurrect deceased public figures It’s not new, but Sora 2 by OpenAI is crossing the line from homage to pure morbid entertainment, with videos ranging from harmless humor to the most explicit cruelty. This phenomenon, which has provoked the indignation of relatives of the daughter of actor Robin Williams, raises serious ethical and legal questions. What is happening. Michael Jackson shows up at a KFC and steals a man’s fried chicken while dancing away. Pope John Paul II does some skate tricks. Albert Einstein gives an interview after a UFC fight. These are just a few examples of what people are doing with Sora 2. There’s more: Martin Luther King, Kennedy, Nixon…many videos have a humorous and seemingly harmless tone. Others, however, are in very bad taste, such as those that show a Stephen Hawking being abused brutally. And the worst thing is that no one seems to be stopping it. The Robin Williams case. Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor, has used her Instagram account to show her rejection of this trend. “Please stop sending me AI-generated videos of dad. Stop believing that I want to see them or that I will understand them. I don’t want them and I won’t understand them,” he said in his message. Although he does not give details about whether the videos he has received are made with Sora 2, his complaint comes just a few days after its release. The cameos. They are the great novelty of Sora 2 and one of the reasons for its popularity. In fact, the app was launched with a cameo by Sam Altman that has already generated all kinds of memes. With cameos you can create funny videos of yourself or a friend, but Sora won’t let you make videos of real people unless they have given their consent. Except if those people are dead. Blurred boundaries. In it Sora security document 2OpenAI states that “only you can decide who can use your cameo, and you can revoke access at any time. We also take steps to block depictions of public figures.” However, they don’t say anything about public figures who have died, and from what we’re seeing, it doesn’t seem like these guidelines apply in the same way. According to the TechCrunch teststhe app does not allow you to create videos of Jimmy Carter or Michael Jackson (although there are published videos), but it does not cause problems when doing so with Robin Williams or Richard Nixon. defaming the dead. Although it is ethically questionable, at a legal level things change. In the United States, where OpenAI operates, legally it is not possible to open a process for defaming a deceased personso the company would not have any responsibility. In Spain it is similar; the Organic Law 1/1982 includes the right to honor, personal and family privacy and one’s own image. However, according to the article 32 of the civil codecivil personality is extinguished after death. Yes, it could be the case that heirs claim the right to honor of the deceasedbut it is a complex process and full of nuances. The new AI dump. At the beginning of the year we talked about how Junk AI or ‘AI Slop’ had flooded the networks. Were most disturbing videosof very bad tastebut they were clearly made with AI. With Sora 2 a dangerous door opens and it is that of a new AI dump more realistic than ever. If we add to this the use of the image of deceased people as if they were toys with which we can do whatever we want, no matter how legal it may be, it sets a very worrying precedent. Image | tiktok In Xataka | OpenAI and AMD have just signed more than just an AI agreement: it’s the barter of desperation

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