A screenshot of Loverse app shows an AI-generated woman, characterized as a 25-year-old hair and makeup artist Miyu, registered as a female companion. When artificial intelligence first started receiving attention around the end of 2022, Goki Kusunoki was tinkering around to see what kind of services he could create with the technology. One thing clicked for him after he created an image of an attractive woman with AI -- an AI companion -- and wondered what it would be like to engage in a conversation with her. "As I kept talking with her, I found that the conversations were more enjoyable than I had expected and as the exchanges continued, my feelings gradually grew -- at some point I caught myself thinking, 'I might actually like her,'" he recounted. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' More than two dozen countries from the so-called "coalition of the willing", along with Ukraine and the United States, issued a joint declaration, noting that "any settlement" to end Russia's war on Ukraine "will have to be backed up by robust security guarantees for Ukraine". Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer signed a separate agreement, declaring their shared intent to deploy multinational forces to support Kyiv's defence and reconstruction if a ceasefire with Russia is agreed on.

Text-based causal inference increasingly employs textual data as proxies for unobserved confounders, yet this approach introduces a previously undertheorized source of bias: treatment leakage. Treatment leakage occurs when text intended to capture confounding information also contains signals predictive of treatment status, thereby inducing post-treatment bias in causal estimates. Critically, this problem can arise even when documents precede treatment assignment, as authors may employ future-referencing language that anticipates subsequent interventions. Despite growing recognition of this issue, no systematic methods exist for identifying and mitigating treatment leakage in text-as-confounder applications. This paper addresses this gap through three contributions. First, we provide formal statistical and set-theoretic definitions of treatment leakage that clarify when and why bias occurs. Second, we propose four text distillation methods -- similarity-based passage removal, distant supervision classification, salient feature removal, and iterative nullspace projection -- designed to eliminate treatment-predictive content while preserving confounder information. Third, we validate these methods through simulations using synthetic text and an empirical application examining International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs and child mortality. Our findings indicate that moderate distillation optimally balances bias reduction against confounder retention, whereas overly stringent approaches degrade estimate precision.

AI company's chatbot faces criticism over its generation of sexualized, nonconsensual images of women and girls Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company has raised $20bn in its latest funding round, the startup announced Tuesday, even as its marquee chatbot Grok faces backlash over generating sexualized, nonconsensual images of women and underage girls. The funding round exceeded its initial $15bn target, according to xAI's press release. The company touted Grok's image-generation abilities in the announcement of its latest funding round. Nonetheless, the company has been able to win government contracts and billions of dollars in investment amid the AI boom. Over the past week, Grok has responded to tens of thousands of prompts from users on X requesting the chatbot remove women's clothing in images or pose them in sexualized ways.

During a two-hour period on December 31, the analyst gathered more than 15,000 URLs of images created by Grok and screen-recorded the chatbots' "media" tab on X, where generated images--both sexualized and non-sexualized--are posted. WIRED reviewed more than a third of the URLs that the researcher gathered and found that over 2,500 were no longer available, and nearly 500 were marked as "age-restricted adult content," requiring a login to view. Many of the remaining posts still featured scantily clad women.

When the US Department of Energy announced that it would stop funding the tokamak at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Dennis Whyte considered giving up on fusion research. But then he had a brainstorm--and challenged his students to bring the idea to life. This full-scale high-temperature superconducting magnet designed and built by Commonwealth Fusion Systems and MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) has demonstrated a recordbreaking 20 tesla magnetic field. It is the strongest fusion magnet in the world. Ever since nuclear fusion was discovered in the 1930s, scientists have wondered if we could somehow replicate and harness the phenomenon behind starlight--the smashing together of hydrogen atoms to form helium and a stupendous amount of clean energy. Fusing hydrogen would yield times more energy than simply burning it. Unlike nuclear fission, which powers the world's 440 atomic reactors, hydrogen fusion produces no harmful radiation, only neutrons that are captured and added back to the reaction.

Aomawa Shields '97 was equally enticed by the prospect of studying stars and the dream of becoming one herself. Today, she draws from her exploration of acting and astronomy to search for life on other planets. Few people, if any, contemplate stars--celestial or cinematic--the way Aomawa Shields does. An astronomer and astrobiologist, Shields explores the potential habitability of planets beyond our solar system. But she is also a classically trained actor--and that's helped shape her professional trajectory in unexpected ways. Today, Shields is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, where she oversees a research team that uses computer models to explore conditions on exoplanets, or planets that revolve around stars other than the sun.

As the Institute's first VP for energy and climate, Evelyn Wang '00 is marshaling MIT's expertise to meet the greatest challenge of our age. Professor Evelyn Wang '00 sits beside a compact, portable water-harvesting device that she developed in collaboration with Professor Rohit Karnik of MIT and Krista Walton, then a professor at Georgia Tech. It's designed for portable and emergency use. Water shortages in Southern California made an indelible impression on Evelyn Wang '00 when she was growing up in Los Angeles. "I was quite young, perhaps in first grade," she says. "But I remember we weren't allowed to turn our sprinklers on. And everyone in the neighborhood was given disinfectant tablets for the toilet and encouraged to keep flushing to a minimum. I didn't understand exactly what was happening. But I saw that everyone in the community was affected by the scarcity of this resource."

Brewing byproduct may be a key sustainable secret ingredient. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Brewing beer relies on a very simple living thing-brewer's yeast. The microorganisms thrive on mashed grains, converting sugars into both alcohol and carbon dioxide along the way. But there's not much use for yeast after the pints are poured .

President Donald Trump proposes mandatory cognitive tests for all presidents and vice presidents while criticizing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats at GOP retreat.