What are your plans for AI Appreciation Day? What are your plans for AI Appreciation Day? The best way to celebrate AI Appreciation Day is to not. It's AI Appreciation Day on July 16 and we're all left wondering who asked for this. In name, it's about as serious as the marketing stunts that gave us gems like National Hot Dog Day or National Doughnut Day.

Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The trees are now considered invasive, and their bark contributes to wildfire risk. In 2023, author and poet Victoria Chang watched as the massive eucalyptus tree across the street from her home in Los Angeles was cut down. As the men lopped off the tree's limbs, Chang realized she hadn't spent much time really looking at it. She reflected that the tree had probably taken years to grow and was so easily cut down in just a few days. Chang felt compelled to write poems about this feeling that would later evolve into her latest poetry collection, which asks what it means to be human in the face of nature.

Jamir Nazir, the controversial winner of the Commonwealth award, tells his side of the story. Jamir Nazir has become the face of the AI-writing crisis. In May, the largely unknown 62-year-old Trinidadian writer was named a regional winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for his short story " The Serpent in the Grove " But after it was published in the literary magazine, signs began to emerge that the story--about a cocoa farmer who cheated on his wife, and then tried to kill her--may have been AI-generated. Inscrutable lines plucked from Nazir's dense prose were mocked and memed. A young woman in the story "had the kind of walking that made benches become men."

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Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama speaks during an interview on Monday. The Group of Seven nations will discuss standards on artificial intelligence security and defense, Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama has said. Speaking in a recent interview, Katayama said that financial institutions "need to decide the order of priority for fixing their systems," in order to prepare for the possibility of advanced AI models detecting a large number of vulnerabilities in their systems. She added that the G7 nations, which include Japan, will discuss related criteria and work together to tackle cyberattacks. State-of-the-art AI models, such as Claude Mythos, developed by U.S. startup Anthropic, are believed to be highly proficient in identifying system vulnerabilities. Katayama has been negotiating with the United States to ensure that major financial institutions in Japan have access to these technologies.

For decades, the senator has argued that concentrated wealth threatened American democracy. Now he's betting that frustration with Big Tech, billionaires, and unchecked AI is reaching a tipping point. It's hard to believe Bernie Sanders . Not because the longtime Vermont senator bears the hallmarks of a liar. Yes, he's a career politician, but the 84-year-old progressive torchbearer counts more viral memes than scandals to his name. Rather, it's hard to believe Bernie Sanders because, for decades, he's told Americans that this country can radically change, while championing ideas too far afield from the status quo to really have a chance. He wants to bring billionaires to heel, for one. And implement universal, government-run health care. If Sanders had his way, it wouldn't even exist. I believe it, and WIRED champions it. Sanders, though, is now hard at work adding one more big, improbable change to the pile: Since 2023, he's been advocating for firm and decisive regulation of the AI industry . In March of this year, Sanders and his frequent collaborator, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, proposed legislation that would halt data center construction until a series of safeguards are implemented. In June, Sanders announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would essentially tax AI's richest companies and result in direct payments to American citizens. I wanted to talk to Sanders about those bills, and his perspective on AI more broadly. On a deeper level, though, I was curious about how Sanders sees the barriers to regulation--from tech oligarchs and deep-pocketed super PACs, to a federal administration happier to enrich itself via technology than actually govern it--and whether he thinks those seemingly intractable obstacles can be overcome. After a few months of haranguing, Sanders agreed to sit down, which is how I found myself in his modest DC campaign office watching the senator--thoughtful, genuine, vociferous as ever--grapple in real time with what he describes as "the most consequential, transformational technology in the history of humanity." Sanders and I spoke on Tuesday, June 23, as the New York Democratic primary was underway. I woke up the next day, our conversation echoing in my head, to find that a coalition of democratic socialists had swept their respective elections and sent party stalwarts into an existential tailspin. A few hours later, New Jersey representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, became the most mainstream member of the party to publicly support an AI data center moratorium .

AI-assisted interviews promise to reduce respondent burden in surveys by allowing respondents to describe experiences naturally while an AI system noisily maps those accounts into structured survey variables. That mapping is a measurement process that is fallible, versioned, adaptive, and potentially behaves differently across subgroups. This paper proposes Adaptive Matrix Validation (AMV), a design in which each respondent completes an AI-assisted interview, which is then mapped into tabular data by the AI. Respondents are also asked a small, randomized set of structured questions, which are used for statistical adjustment. The estimator first calibrates the mapped values using validation answers from other respondents, then corrects the remaining error with the validation answers observed for the target respondent. The paper develops estimators for item means, subgroup estimates, and regression coefficients when outcomes, predictors, or both are mapped from interviews. It also gives planning formulas the number of validation questions required and the sample size. A design-calibration simulation, an American Time Use Survey emulation, and a CHAMPS verbal-autopsy narrative study show when sparse validation can improve precision and when it cannot

President Trump probably can't get rid of her yet, but FCC commissioner Anna Gomez still checks her email every day to see if he has. Until then, she wants to stand up for the First Amendment. If you've given much thought to the Federal Communications Commission in recent years, it probably had something to do with Brendan Carr . The group's chairman since 2025, Carr has been on an ongoing, public rampage against freedom of speech: he's gone after late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, and targeted networks for their DEI policies. Disturbing as Carr's rhetoric and actions have been, he does count at least one opponent within the agency: Commissioner Anna Gomez, currently the lone Democrat among three FCC commissioners, has been vocal about the damage she thinks the agency is doing to American press freedom--and has repeatedly urged the public and the press, namely major networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC, to fight back. In May, Commissioner Gomez penned a stunning public letter to Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro, wherein she warned that the company--which owns ABC--was being subjected to "a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC's authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press." Gomez urged D'Amaro to fight the actions her own agency was taking, adding that "this is a fight worth having, and one that I am confident you will win." I wanted to talk to Commissioner Gomez about that bold letter, the risks she sees for the media and the American public under the Trump administration, and how she works alongside a chairman with whom she disagrees so fiercely. Gomez, whose FCC term ends this month, was generous enough to sit down and talk about all of it. You can read our conversation below, or listen to it on the podcast platform of your choice. KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Commissioner Gomez. Thank you for being here. It's great to be here. I want to start, before we talk more about Disney and your letter and all the rest of it, with a very basic question for our listeners. What is your agency's basic role?

The race--whose candidates include Micah Lasher, Alex Bores, George Conway, and Jack Schlossberg--is at once glitzy, confusing, and uninspiring. Alex Bores is one of many candidates in the hotly contested race for New York's Twelfth Congressional district. A good seat in Congress can be hard to find, and difficult to get up from. The average district--and there are four hundred and thirty-five of them--is roughly the size of Wales, or New Jersey. New York's Twelfth District, which spans the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, midtown, and Chelsea, is one of the richest, smallest, and most solidly Democratic districts in the country. It has the most people with college degrees and is in the ninety-fifth percentile for members of the Silent Generation. After its incumbent, Jerry Nadler, who has been in Congress since 1992, announced his retirement last year, the race to fill his seat has also become one of the most contested.

Engineering Out Loud: S13E1 - How many robots can a single human supervise? Will swarms of autonomous aerial vehicles be able to aid humans in wildland firefighting or package delivery? Research summarized in a new paper in Field Robotics represents a big step towards realizing such a future. In this interview, Professor Julie A Adams describes the research showing that one person can supervise more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots. "Engineering Out Loud" is a podcast from the College of Engineering at Oregon State University.