Four months into the war between Israel and Hamas, the combatants, their allies, and their neighbors are closer than ever to reaching a cease-fire or even a settlement of their disputes--and are also equally close to seeing it spin out of control into a widening regional conflict. They are tracing this thin line between negotiated peace and escalating mayhem along every front of the Middle East's hot spots, which are intensifying, enlarging, and mingling with one another--a fact that makes it harder but also potentially more manageable to douse the flames. On Friday, U.S. combat planes fired 125 precision-guided missiles and drones at 85 targets into seven facilities--command-control and intelligence centers, supply lines and storage sites for rockets, missiles, and drones, as well as other military targets--all run by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. The attack was in retaliation to a Jan. 28 drone strike launched by one of those militias in Iraq that killed three U.S. soldiers at a base in northeastern Jordan, near the Iraqi and Syrian borders. Militias had fired 165 drones or missiles at U.S. forces in the region since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, but this was the first strike that killed Americans.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. South Dakota is poised to update its laws against child sexual abuse images to include those created by artificial intelligence, under a bill headed to Republican Gov. Kristi Noem. The bill, which is a combined effort by Republican Attorney General Marty Jackley and lawmakers, also includes deepfakes, which are images or videos manipulated to look like a real person. In an interview, Jackley said some state and local investigations have required federal prosecution because South Dakota's laws aren't geared toward AI.

He was surrounded by seven staff from the world's leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill's view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

FIRST ON FOX: A coalition of state attorneys general is warning that an executive order signed by President Biden last year on artificial intelligence could be used by the federal government to "centralize" government control over the emerging technology and that that control could be used for political purposes -- including censoring alleged "disinformation." "The Executive Order seeks--without Congressional authorization--to centralize governmental control over an emerging technology being developed by the private sector. In doing so, the Executive Order opens the door to using the federal government's control over AI for political ends, such as censoring responses in the name of combatting'disinformation,'" the coalition of 20 attorneys general, led by Utah AG Sean Reyes, said in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Biden signed the order in October, which established new standards for AI safety and included moves to protect privacy and protect workers and consumers. Specifically, it requires developers to share safety test results and other information with the government.

Meta Platforms Inc.'s independent Oversight Board agreed with the company's recent decision to leave up a misleading video of US President Joe Biden, but criticized its policies on content generated by artificial intelligence as "incoherent" and too narrow. The board, which was set up in 2020 by management to independently review some of the company's most significant content moderation decisions, on Monday urged Meta to update its policies quickly ahead of the 2024 U.S. general election. "The Board is concerned about the manipulated media policy in its current form, finding it to be incoherent, lacking in persuasive justification and inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent, such as disrupting electoral processes," the organization said in a statement. The criticism from the board came after reviewing Meta's decision to leave up a manipulated video of Biden, which was edited to make it look like he was inappropriately touching his adult granddaughter's chest. The video included a caption that referred to Biden as a "pedophile."

Former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller joined'Fox & Friends' to discuss the latest on the escalation in the Middle East as the U.S. continues to strike Iranian proxies. A drone attack late Sunday evening that struck a military base in eastern Syria, where U.S. troops are stationed, left at least six allied Kurdish soldiers dead, officials said. The attack hit a training ground at al-Omar base in Syria's eastern province of Deir el-Zour, the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said in a statement Monday. According to the statement, the drone attack struck an area where the forces' commando units were being trained. No U.S. troops were killed or injured in the attack, they said.

Meta's Oversight Board, an independent collection of academics, experts and lawyers who oversee thorny content decisions on the platform, upheld the social media giant's decision to leave the video in place. But it called on the company to clarify its policies, amid widespread concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence.

When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China's bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand U.S. sanctions. The People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows. RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.

Topic modelling is a prominent task for automatic topic extraction in many applications such as sentiment analysis and recommendation systems. The approach is vital for service industries to monitor their customer discussions. The use of traditional approaches such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic discovery has shown great performances, however, they are not consistent in their results as these approaches suffer from data sparseness and inability to model the word order in a document. Thus, this study presents the use of Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KernelPCA) and K-means Clustering in the BERTopic architecture. We have prepared a new dataset using tweets from customers of Nigerian banks and we use this to compare the topic modelling approaches. Our findings showed KernelPCA and K-means in the BERTopic architecture-produced coherent topics with a coherence score of 0.8463.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in generating textual responses from visual inputs, yet their versatility raises significant security concerns. This study takes the first step in exposing VLMs' susceptibility to data poisoning attacks that can manipulate responses to innocuous, everyday prompts. We introduce Shadowcast, a stealthy data poisoning attack method where poison samples are visually indistinguishable from benign images with matching texts. Shadowcast demonstrates effectiveness in two attack types. The first is Label Attack, tricking VLMs into misidentifying class labels, such as confusing Donald Trump for Joe Biden. The second is Persuasion Attack, which leverages VLMs' text generation capabilities to craft narratives, such as portraying junk food as health food, through persuasive and seemingly rational descriptions. We show that Shadowcast are highly effective in achieving attacker's intentions using as few as 50 poison samples. Moreover, these poison samples remain effective across various prompts and are transferable across different VLM architectures in the black-box setting. This work reveals how poisoned VLMs can generate convincing yet deceptive misinformation and underscores the importance of data quality for responsible deployments of VLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/VLM-Poisoning.