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Unconventional Brain Action—This Week On VICE: Members Only

This week behind the paywall: a new documentary about men who batter each other for fun, and a journalistic experiment with a fruit fly’s neural network.

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Like all things, the virtues or drawbacks of AI depend entirely on whose hands it’s in. Scammers trying to extort the last of your nan’s savings by WhatsApping her deepfakes of you hog-tied in the boot of an Audi? Bad. Chipotle working with Palantir on food safety? Not ideal. Vibe coders playing around with a simulation of an adult male fruit fly’s brain like a kid with two Barbie dolls, forcing it to trade crypto, parallel park on a driving simulator, and be bisexual? Actually quite good tbf.

Mapped out by scientists using AI, the reproduction of the fruit fly’s neural network was considered a major and potentially life-saving breakthrough in neuroscience. We thought it would be fun to make it do something even more important, and asked it to come up with a series of VICE headlines. Results........

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