Author: Jasmyne Jade Hill

What began as a chance encounter in a karaoke bar in Tokyo has grown into a cross-cultural story of devotion that bridges Wisconsin and Japan through the Green Bay Packers. The documentary film “No Packers, No Life” follows the journey of a fan group in Tokyo whose enthusiasm for American football rivals that of any crowd in Lambeau Field’s frozen stands. The film’s creator, Wisconsin native Ty Morse, first stumbled across members of the Japanese Packers Cheering Team in 2017 while traveling in Japan for business. He noticed several people in player jerseys singing in a Shibuya karaoke bar,...

Artificial intelligence systems marketed as safety-focused, creative tools for individuals are simultaneously being embedded in institutional frameworks that operate without scrutiny, regulation, or accountability. The result is a two-tiered ecosystem. In public-facing spaces, users are over-policed by hypercautious moderation protocols. Behind closed doors, the very same models are used by governments and corporations to profile citizens, deny services, and influence behavior without oversight. One of the clearest examples lies in the way AI systems conduct surveillance and behavioral profiling. Deployed into large-scale data infrastructures, these models can analyze communications, social media activity, or digital transaction histories to detect so-called...

When the Korean pop group Aespa appeared on Good Morning America in late September, the highly anticipated broadcast drew intense backlash online in South Korea. Korean fans, in particular, pounced on the performance, criticizing everything from low energy levels to an unimpressive visual presentation. But what may have looked like a subpar showing at first glance was also a lesson in how cultural expectations, production choices, and television styles shape the way performances are perceived. K-pop has long mastered the science of stagecraft. Korean music shows like SBS’s Inkigayo, Mnet’s M Countdown, or KBS’s Music Bank build their programming...

In the rapidly shifting landscape of artificial intelligence, one of the most urgent concerns facing digital artists is the widespread appropriation of visual styles by AI image generators. The practice, often referred to as “style scraping” or “style mimicry,” involves feeding copyrighted or uniquely identifiable artworks into machine learning models, which then generate images mimicking the original artist’s visual signature, often without consent, attribution, or compensation. This issue reached a breaking point as professional and freelance illustrators watched AI companies train commercial models on their work with no accountability. While some developers framed this data harvesting as part of...