On a recent expedition in Gujarat, India, photographer Hardik Shelat captured a rare phenomenon along a river in sweltering heat. With temperatures topping 110 degrees Fahrenheit, he and his colleagues weren’t the only ones staying hydrated to try to keep cool.

“It was a summer afternoon, and we were on a day trip to click these amazing creatures, the fruit bat,” Shelat recently told PetaPixel. “We waited almost two-and-a-half hours with nothing to see in the intense heat.” Eventually, the wait proved worthwhile, as the normally nocturnal creatures emerged from the trees to cool themselves and drink some water.

The Indian flying fox, or giant fruit bat, gets its name from its long, canid-like snout and incredible size, with a wingspan of nearly four feet. Gathering in trees, where they live in large colonies, the animals nourish themselves with fruits, nectar, seeds, and insects, using sight and smell to find food rather than echolocation like many other bat species.

Explore more incredible wildlife images by Shelat, who has worked with the BBC, National Geographic, WWF, Discovery, and more, on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article In a Rare Daytime Appearance, Flying Foxes Keep Cool in an Indian River appeared first on Colossal.

A crowd of people dressed in rags stare up at a tower so tall it reaches into the heavens. Fire rains down from the sky on to a burning city. A giant in armor looms over a young warrior. An ocean splits as throngs of people walk into it. Each shot only lasts a couple of seconds, and in that short time they might look like they were taken from a blockbuster fantasy movie, but look closely and you’ll notice that each carries all the hallmarks of AI-generated slop: the too smooth faces, the impossible physics, subtle deformations, and a generic aesthetic that’s hard to avoid when every pixel is created by remixing billions of images and videos in training data that was scraped from the internet.

“Every story. Every miracle. Every word,” the text flashes dramatically on screen before cutting to silence and the image of Jesus on the cross. With 1.7 million views, this video, titled “What if The Bible had a movie trailer…?” is the most popular on The AI Bible YouTube channel, which has more than 270,000 subscribers, and it perfectly encapsulates what the channel offers. Short, AI-generated videos that look very much like the kind of AI slop we have covered at 404 Media before. Another YouTube channel of AI-generated Bible content, Deep Bible Stories, has 435,000 subscribers, and is the 73rd most popular podcast on the platform according to YouTube’s own ranking. This past week there was also a viral trend of people using Google’s new AI video generator, Veo 3, to create influencer-style social media videos of biblical stories. Jesus-themed content was also some of the earliest and most viral AI-generated media we’ve seen on Facebook, starting with AI-generated images of Jesus appearing on the beach and escalating to increasingly ridiculous images, like shrimp Jesus. 

But unlike AI slop on Facebook that we revealed is made mostly in India and Vietnam for a Western audience by pragmatically hacking Facebook’s algorithms in order to make a living, The AI Bible videos are made by Christians, for Christians, and judging by the YouTube comments, they unanimously love them.

“This video truly reminded me that prayer is powerful even in silence. Thank you for encouraging us to lean into God’s strength,” one commenter wrote. “May every person who watches this receive quiet healing, and may peace visit their heart in unexpected ways.”

“Thank you for sharing God’s Word so beautifully,” another commenter wrote. “Your channel is a beacon of light in a world that needs it.”

I first learned about the videos and how well they were received by a Christian audience from self-described “AI filmmaker” PJ Accetturo, who noted on X that there’s a “massive gap in the market: AI Bible story films. Demand is huge. Supply is almost zero. Audiences aren’t picky about fidelity—they just want more.” Accetturo also said he’s working on his own AI-generated Bible video for a different publisher about the story of Jonah.

Unlike most of the AI slop we’ve reported on so far, the AI Bible channel is the product of a well-established company in Christian media, Pray.com, which claims to make “the world's #1 app for faith and prayer.”

“The AI Bible is a revolutionary platform that uses cutting-edge generative AI to transform timeless biblical stories into immersive, hyper-realistic experiences,” its site explains. “ Whether you’re exploring your faith, seeking inspiration, or simply curious, The AI Bible offers a fresh perspective that bridges ancient truths with modern creativity.”

I went searching for Christian commentary about generative AI to see whether Pray.com’s full embrace of this new and highly controversial technology was unique among faith-based organizations, and was surprised to discover the opposite. I found oped, after oped and commentary from pastors about how AI was a great opportunity Christians needed to embrace. 

Corrina Laughlin, an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture, a book about the intersection of American evangelicalism and tech innovation, told me she was not surprised.

“It's not surprising to me to see Christians producing tons of content using AI because the idea is that God gave them this technology—that’s something I heard over and over again [from Christians]—and they have to use it for him and for his glory,” she said.

Unlike other audiences, like Star Wars fans who passionately rejected an AI-generated proof-of-concept short AI-generated film recently, Laughlin also told me she wasn’t surprised that some Christians commented that they love the low quality AI-generated videos from the AI Bible. 

“The metrics for success are totally different,” she said. “This isn't necessarily about creativity. It's about spreading the word, and the more you can do that, the kind of acceleration that AI offers, the more you are doing God's work.”

Laughlin said that the Christian early adoption of new technologies and media goes back 100 years. Christian media flourished on the radio, then turned to televangelism, and similarly made the transition to online media, with an entire world of religious influencers, sites, and apps. 

“The fear among Christians is that if they don't immediately jump onto a technology they're going to be left behind, and they're going to start losing people,” Laughlin said. The thinking is that if Christians are “not high tech in a high tech country where that's what's really grabbing people's attention, then they lose the war for attention to the other side, and losing the war for attention to the other side has really drastic spiritual consequences if you think of it in that frame,” she said.

Laughlin said that, especially among evangelical Christians, there’s a willingness to adopt new technologies that veers into boosterism. She said she saw Christians similarly try to jump on the metaverse hype train back when Silicon Valley insisted that virtual reality was the future, with many Christians asking how they’re going to build a Metaverse church because that’s where they thought people were going to be. 

I asked Laughlin why it seems like secular and religious positions on new technologies seemed to have flipped. When I was growing up, it seemed like religious organizations were very worried that video games, for example, were corrupting young souls and turning them against God, especially when they overlapped with Satanic Panics around games like Doom or Diablo. When it comes to AI, it seems like it’s mostly secular culture—academics, artists, and other creatives—who shun generative AI for exploiting human labor and the creative spirit. In fact, many AI accelerationists accuse any critics of the technology or a desire to regulate it as a kind of religious moral panic. Christians, on the other hand, see AI as part of the inevitable march of technological progress, and they want to be a part of it. 

“It’s like the famous Marshall McLuhan quote, ‘the medium is the message,’ right? If they’re getting out there in the message of the time, that means the message is still fresh. Christians are still relevant in the AI age, and they're doing it and like that in itself is all that matters,” Laughlin said. “Even if it's clearly something that anybody could rightfully sneer at if you had any sense of what makes good or bad media aesthetics.”

Aesthetic standards for design are highly visual, elements of light and color effecting our physiology, our mood, and even our neural plasticity over time. The Aedo collection by Debonademeo for Adrenalina is instead developed with another sense, touch, as the driving factor for form. This presents new possibilities within inclusive design, accommodating design features that have been developed specifically with and for visually impaired people. On display at Milan Design Week, Aedo speaks to this intriguing mindset: how do you design a sofa without seeing its shape and color? How do you highlight its fundamental characteristics such as comfort, softness, presence in space?

At Salone del Mobile, attendees were encouraged to wear blindfolds while experiencing the exhibit, as the furniture is meant to be perceived primarily by touch. Raised Braille inscriptions on the side speak to the project’s origins, communication methods largely subverting convention. A simple upholstered arm, an unobtrusive yet defined boundary, can be easily understood through a brush of the fingertips. This, along with the rounded and soft forms, allow for safer exploration of forms overall, promoting openness and freer movement. Yellow satin upholstery was chosen for its tactility and smoothness, creating satisfying folds where the upholstery meets a generous curve.

The Omero Museum, the first Italian tactile museum, added insight to the project by fielding the tactile feedback concerns, and offering advice on how to navigate the design of the exhibition. The Cavazza Institute was also consulted to provide unique feedback about the professional and social lives of the visually impaired. Furniture based on perception in space, rather than the visual characteristics it might happen to have, creates a new paradigm in design – one that helps us understand our world in a fuller and more empathetic way.

Luca de Bona and Dario De Meo founded Debonademeo on the principle of ‘hic et nunc,’ the here and now. They translate different cultural contexts from across history into creative strategies, infusing their signature innovative approach to their brand identity, art direction, and product design work. Working as creative directors for Adrenalina since 2022, the duo has taken on the helm of the Italian brand with grace, instilling an elegance to the work that is both appropriate and refreshing.

Eclectic form meets advanced materials technology in the Adrenalina portfolio, founded in 1999 and remaining faithful as ever to their original premise. Dedicated to providing a unique twist within upholstery, the sculptural qualities of the equally considered and comfortable lineup are all at once inspiring, thoughtful, and visually stunning. They continue this shared ethos through Aedo, adding more voices to the design conversation, creating for all, not just for some.

To learn more about the Aedo Seating collection from Debonademeo for Adrenalina, please visit their website adrenalina.it.

Photography courtesy of Adrenalina.

 La Maison des Soleils, the French edition of my 2008 novel HOUSE OF SUNS, was recently awarded the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire at La Comédie du Livre in Montpellier. I'm delighted with this award, not just because my friends at Belial have been doing a grand job bringing my work back into the French market, but because (as far as I can remember) it's the first award of any kind picked up by HOS. Not that books have an automatic entitlement to awards, but it's one of my personal favorites and the recognition is therefore particularly appreciated.

I wasn't able to attend the festival - I did go last year, and was wowed by Montpellier -  but I had other commitments this May. I was able, though, to record a short message of thanks for the award and to the editors, translator and art team at Belial.

Cheers, Al

The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector. 

Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a “free, easy, and trustworthy” piece of software that made tax filing “more efficient.” About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network. 

But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS’s Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump’s massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that “ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money.”

That means it’s quite big news that the IRS released most of the code that runs Direct File on Github last week. And, separately, three people who worked on it—Chris Given, Jen Thomas, Merici Vinton—have left government to join the Economic Security Project’s Future of Tax Filing Fellowship, where they will research ways to make filing taxes easier, cheaper, and more straightforward. They will be joined by Gabriel Zucker, who worked on Direct File as part of Code for America.

“Establishing trust with taxpayers was core to our approach for designing and building Direct File,” Given wrote on his personal blog. “By creating the most accurate option for filing, by making taxes accessible to all, by keeping taxpayer data secure, and now, by publicly sharing Direct File’s code, the Direct File team showed our dedication to earning taxpayers’ trust.”

When the code for Direct File was released on Github last week, some people speculated that, because of the political pressure against it, its release must have been an act of resistance by someone within the IRS. But the open sourcing of the program was always part of the plan, and was required by a law called the SHARE IT Act. It happened “fully above board, which is honestly more of a feat!,” Given told 404 Media. “This has been in the works since last year.” 

Initial analyses of the code suggest that it is very good and will be useful to people developing software in this field.

In a report published last year, the IRS suggested that open sourcing Direct File would have numerous benefits: “First, it would enable public scrutiny of that code and invite independent groups to assess its accuracy and report potential issues. Second, other tax administrators, both in states and internationally, could build upon and contribute to the IRS’s work, improving the robustness of the software over time and providing additional public value,” it wrote. “Finally, the IRS’s work could serve as a reference for implementation of the Internal Revenue Code as computer code, enabling businesses and others to incorporate the IRS’s code into their own software and increasing the vibrancy of the tax ecosystem.”

Given told 404 Media that Direct File relies in part on internal IRS systems (like the ability to pull W-2 data directly from the IRS, and internal IRS authentication systems), so it cannot be run off-the-shelf using only the code that was released. “Being from the IRS, Direct File doesn’t file state tax returns, and relies on integrations with tools provided by state revenue agencies to facilitate that task, and unnecessary complication if you’re rolling your own filing tool and you aren’t the IRS,” he said. 

Vinton said that the Direct File team worked for a long time knowing that there were people within government and external companies who did not want the IRS to create Direct File. “We had to really focus and not get distracted by all of the noise, wherever the noise was coming from. The way you get through it is you keep your head down and not get distracted by focusing on our users. That is how we found our way through this,” she said. “We always assumed there would be people gunning for it, but we also knew it was something people wanted. We knew it was an idea whose time had come. The noise now is, well, it’s a situation that has been  brewing for a while.”

Even though Direct File is not runnable off the shelf, the codebase itself is still incredibly valuable and can help developers guide the next generation of tax filing software.

“I think there’s also a lot of value,” Given said. “Each of the more than 700 screens of Direct File was vetted by the IRS Office of Chief Counsel. It asks questions no other tool asks, and provides an authoritative, plain language interpretation of a significant swath of the Internal Revenue Code.”

Vinton told 404 Media in a phone call that the open sourcing of Direct File “is just good government.”

“All code paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open source, available for comment, for feedback, for people to build on and for people in other agencies to replicate. It saves everyone money and it is our [taxpayers’] IP,” she said. “This is just good government and should absolutely be the standard that government technologists are held to.”

Given said that at the Economic Security Project, he and his colleagues will first start by documenting how Direct File was made and what it does, and they will hopefully work with outside groups to come up with new ways to make tax filing easier.

They will “suggest some opportunities to continue to advance access to filing and tax benefits, both short-term things that can be done by states and/or nonprofits and longer-term policy ideas,” he said. “I know there’s a lot of interest in how to keep Direct File’s lights on, even without the IRS, but I think the loss of that key player necessitates a more imaginative approach than just keeping on keeping on.”

The group is also considering using its experience creating Direct File—which involved parsing the incredibly complex tax code—to think up new ways to explain how the tax code works and to consider how that process could be applied to other complicated government programs. 

“I’ve had conversations about the potential of the Direct File ‘Fact Graph’ as civic infrastructure. When you break it down, taxes are just the gnarliest and most complex form in all of government, and a solution that demonstrably scales to that challenge could also have many other uses (think applying for benefit programs),” he said. “I think there could be interest in continuing that work to make not only a future Direct File easier to build, but to enable more Direct File-like services in the future. But there’s the perennial question of whether it’s worth focusing on the technology when it’s generally the people/political problems that are the bigger blockers to delivering great government services.”

Vinton said that she hopes the learnings of Direct File can eventually be applied to other government processes, and that it’s an example of government working very well. 

“We had highly empowered, autonomous teams doing this work,” she said. “I think that should be a model for how government agencies should work. That’s what I want to do is start thinking through different lessons, leadership lessons, executive level lessons for how government institutions can learn from Direct File. There’s a lack of trust in government that’s been around for a while. DirectFile increased trust in the IRS by 86 percent among people who used it. You go in, you complete your experience and transaction and people will not just come back but it will increase their trust. It helps our institutions and our democracy.”

What do the largest Picasso painting in the world, punky Vivienne Westwood apparel, pins for securing a 17th-century ruff, and a complete Frank Lloyd Wright interior have in common? That’ll be the U.K.’s Victoria and Albert Museum, or the V&A, the world’s largest collection of design and applied and decorative arts.

In South Kensington, the palatial museum has awed visitors since 1852, and in recent decades, the institution has greatly expanded, with locations like the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, the Wedgwood Collection in Stoke-on-Trent, the ship-like V&A Dundee in Scotland, and the brand new V&A East Storehouse in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Spanning 5,000 years of human creativity through hundreds of thousands of objects requires a lot of space. Rather than hiding it all away in a dark warehouse, the new Storehouse takes over a portion of the former 2012 London Olympics Media Centre, providing a purpose-built home for more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books, and 1,000 archives from across the V&A’s diverse collections.

The best part? You can visit! Storehouse hosts workshops, screenings, performances, and pop-up displays of special collections, along with the opportunity to observe conservators at work preserving a wide range of cultural heritage objects.

Peruse more than 100 curated mini-displays throughout the building, and book in advance to get up-close and personal through the Order an Object experience. Pick any object in storage, and a member of the Collections Access team will assist you in interacting safely with everything from artworks to textiles to musical instruments.

Plan your visit on the V&A website.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Order an Object at the New V&A East Storehouse to Get Up-Close to 5,000 Years of Cultural Heritage appeared first on Colossal.