A damaged concrete pillar supporting the Hachinohe Line in the city of Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, on Wednesday. False claims that a powerful earthquake in northern Japan was "human-caused," along with artificial intelligence-generated videos, are spreading rapidly across social media after the quake struck Aomori Prefecture on Monday evening. The earthquake registered an upper 6 on Japan's seismic intensity scale, prompting warnings from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the Cabinet Secretariat against the spread of unverified information that could hamper emergency response efforts. Misinformation circulated widely on platforms including X, echoing a pattern seen during previous disasters such as the Noto Peninsula earthquake in January 2024, when false rescue pleas and conspiracy theories also gained traction online. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Sam Altman's appearance on is part of a larger charm offensive currently being waged by the tech establishment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was at the center of Silicon Valley's most visible publicity push in recent memory Monday night when he appeared on . In a predictably softball interview with host Jimmy Fallon, Altman explained how ChatGPT has helped him alleviate the anxiety that comes with being a new parent. It was a distinctly clever, if somewhat surprising, choice from Altman who has mostly kept his personal life out of the media spotlight. But Altman is a salesman, and a good salesman understands the optics of good television.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on April 30. U.S. President Donald Trump decided to let Nvidia sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China after concluding the move carried a lower security risk because the company's Chinese archrival, Huawei Technologies, already offers AI systems with comparable performance, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Administration officials who weighed whether to clear Nvidia's H200 had considered multiple possible scenarios, factoring in the views of national security hawks in Washington, said the person. Options ranged from exporting zero AI chips to China to allowing exports of everything to flood the Chinese market and overwhelm Huawei. Ultimately the policy backed by Trump called for clearing H200s to China while holding back the latest Nvidia chips for American customers, the person said.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked much interest in creating LLM-based digital populations that can be applied to many applications such as social simulation, crowdsourcing, marketing, and recommendation systems. A digital population can reduce the cost of recruiting human participants and alleviate many concerns related to human subject study. However, research has found that most of the existing works rely solely on LLMs and could not sufficiently capture the accuracy and diversity of a real human population. To address this limitation, we propose CrowdLLM that integrates pretrained LLMs and generative models to enhance the diversity and fidelity of the digital population. We conduct theoretical analysis of CrowdLLM regarding its great potential in creating cost-effective, sufficiently representative, scalable digital populations that can match the quality of a real crowd. Comprehensive experiments are also conducted across multiple domains (e.g., crowdsourcing, voting, user rating) and simulation studies which demonstrate that CrowdLLM achieves promising performance in both accuracy and distributional fidelity to human data.

Ethical awareness is critical for robots operating in human environments, yet existing automated planning tools provide little support. Manually specifying ethical rules is labour-intensive and highly context-specific. We present Princi-ples2Plan, an interactive research prototype demonstrating how a human and a Large Language Model (LLM) can collaborate to produce context-sensitive ethical rules and guide automated planning. A domain expert provides the planning domain, problem details, and relevant high-level principles such as beneficence and privacy. The system generates op-erationalisable ethical rules consistent with these principles, which the user can review, prioritise, and supply to a planner to produce ethically-informed plans. To our knowledge, no prior system supports users in generating principle-grounded rules for classical planning contexts. Principles2Plan showcases the potential of human-LLM collaboration for making ethical automated planning more practical and feasible.

Modern businesses are increasingly challenged by the time and expense required to generate and assess high-quality content. Human writers face time constraints, and extrinsic evaluations can be costly. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential in content creation, concerns about the quality of AI-generated content persist. Traditional evaluation methods, like human surveys, further add operational costs, highlighting the need for efficient, automated solutions. This research introduces Generative Agents as a means to tackle these challenges. These agents can rapidly and cost-effectively evaluate AI-generated content, simulating human judgment by rating aspects such as coherence, interestingness, clarity, fairness, and relevance. By incorporating these agents, businesses can streamline content generation and ensure consistent, high-quality output while minimizing reliance on costly human evaluations. The study provides critical insights into enhancing LLMs for producing business-aligned, high-quality content, offering significant advancements in automated content generation and evaluation.

Community science observational datasets are useful in epidemiology and ecology for modeling species distributions, but the heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardization, data quality assurance and control, and workflow management. In this paper, we present a data workflow for cleaning and harmonizing multiple community science datasets, which we implement in a case study using eBird, iNaturalist, GBIF, and other datasets to model the impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza in populations of birds in the subantarctic. We predict population sizes for several species where the demographics are not known, and we present novel estimates for potential mortality rates from HPAI for those species, based on a novel aggregated dataset of mortality rates in the subantarctic.

International talks to revolutionise how the European Court of Human Rights handles migration cases will begin on Wednesday. The British government is urging partners to modernise the way states tackle the continent-wide illegal migration crisis. The talks are the most significant sign yet that international human rights law could be reinterpreted to make it easier for states to target people smuggling and set up'returns hubs' to hold people with no right to be in Europe. Writing ahead of the major meeting in Strasbourg, Sir Keir Starmer and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said other nations should rethink human rights laws to make protecting borders easier. Critics say the ECHR is getting in the way of removing more illegal migrants, while supporters say claims about the ECHR's role in migration are exaggerated.

Google plans to launch smart glasses powered by artificial intelligence (AI) in 2026, after its previous high-profile attempt to enter the market ended in failure. The tech giant set expectations high in 2013 when it unveiled Google Glass, billed by some as the future of technology despite its odd appearance with a bulky screen positioned above the right eye. Google pulled the product in 2015 less than seven months after its UK release, but is now planning on re-entering the market with smart glasses with a cleaner look. But it comes after Meta has already made waves with its smart specs, which have sold two million pairs as of February. Google's new tech will let users interact with its own AI products, such as its chatbot Gemini.

A video game at the centre of a debate over artificial intelligence (AI) is in the running for the top prize at next year's Bafta Game Awards. Arc Raiders, from Swedish developer Embark Studios, has been a smash-hit since its October launch, selling more than four million copies. But the multiplayer shooter has been criticised for using text-to-speech tools to create additional lines, based on dialogue previously recorded by the game's actors. It is one of 10 titles longlisted for the prestigious best game award, with a shortlist to be announced in the run-up to April's annual ceremony. Other games up for the top prize include blockbusters Ghost of Yōtei and Death Stranding 2, indie games Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II, and indie adventure Blue Prince.