Law
Elon Musk Has Turned His Eye to the UK
Musk posted nonstop at the beginning of the year about British politics until his focus was consumed by DOGE. Elon Musk loves responding to posts on X with heart emojis. He's sent dozens this year alone, often in response to people praising his cars or directly to his mother's posts . But this week, Musk sent a heart emoji to Tommy Robinson, the far-right Islamophobic activist from the United Kingdom. Though Musk largely ignored UK politics this year while working in the US government at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he appears to be back across the pond, spending his money and using his platform to elevate far-right extremists.
OpenAI temporarily stops AI deepfakes of Martin Luther King Jr
OpenAI has temporarily stopped its artificial intelligence (AI) app Sora creating deepfake videos portraying Dr Martin Luther King Jr, following a request from his estate. It said disrespectful content had been generated about the civil rights campaigner. Sora has become popular in the US for making hyper-realistic AI-generated videos, which has led to people sharing clips of deceased celebrities and historical figures in outlandish and often offensive scenarios. OpenAI said it would pause images of Dr King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures - but it continues to allow people to make clips of others. The firm has faced controversy over this stance, as videos featuring notable figures such as President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and Professor Stephen Hawking have been shared widely online.
The Download: the rehabilitation of AI art, and the scary truth about antimicrobial resistance
In this era of AI slop, the idea that generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway could be used to make art can seem absurd. But amid all the muck, there are people using AI tools with real consideration and intent. Some of them are finding notable success as AI artists: They are gaining huge online followings, selling their work at auction, and even having it exhibited in galleries and museums. This story is from our forthcoming print issue, which is all about the body. Plus, you'll also receive a free digital report on nuclear power. Take our quiz: How much do you know about antimicrobial resistance?
'Legacies condensed to AI slop': OpenAI Sora videos of the dead raise alarm with legal experts
After launching in October in the US and Canada via invitation only, OpenAI's video app, Sora 2, hit 1m downloads in just five days. After launching in October in the US and Canada via invitation only, OpenAI's video app, Sora 2, hit 1m downloads in just five days. The video app can produce realistic deepfakes of Marx shopping and MLK Jr trolling. Some say using'historical figures' is the company's way of testing the legal waters L ast night I was flicking through a dating app. One guy stood out: "Henry VIII, 34, King of England, nonmonogamy".
The Bourbon Industry Is in Turmoil. Could Tech Provide the Shot It Needs?
The Bourbon Industry Is in Turmoil. Could Tech Provide the Shot It Needs? The software-driven approach pioneered by a new Kentucky distillery runs counter to the low-tech methods of whiskey's old guard. Its mix of data and automation might help pave a way forward. Kendra Skeeters, a warehouse operator at Whiskey House, works the barrel-filling stations at the company's facility in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.Photograph: LEANDRO LOZADA Save this storyIn case you missed it, the American whiskey industry is seemingly in free fall. The once untouchable bourbon business has seen many big brands abruptly retreating, with sales of Bulleit down 7 percent and Wild Turkey down 8 percent in the first half of this year.
Thunder-DeID: Accurate and Efficient De-identification Framework for Korean Court Judgments
Hahm, Sungeun, Kim, Heejin, Lee, Gyuseong, Park, Hyunji, Lee, Jaejin
To ensure a balance between open access to justice and personal data protection, the South Korean judiciary mandates the de-identification of court judgments before they can be publicly disclosed. However, the current de-identification process is inadequate for handling court judgments at scale while adhering to strict legal requirements. Additionally, the legal definitions and categorizations of personal identifiers are vague and not well-suited for technical solutions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a de-identification framework called Thunder-DeID, which aligns with relevant laws and practices. Specifically, we (i) construct and release the first Korean legal dataset containing annotated judgments along with corresponding lists of entity mentions, (ii) introduce a systematic categorization of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and (iii) develop an end-to-end deep neural network (DNN)-based de-identification pipeline. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in the de-identification of court judgments.
SPIRIT: Patching Speech Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks
Djanibekov, Amirbek, Mukhituly, Nurdaulet, Inui, Kentaro, Aldarmaki, Hanan, Lukas, Nils
Speech Language Models (SLMs) enable natural interactions via spoken instructions, which more effectively capture user intent by detecting nuances in speech. The richer speech signal introduces new security risks compared to text-based models, as adversaries can better bypass safety mechanisms by injecting imperceptible noise to speech. We analyze adversarial attacks and find that SLMs are substantially more vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which can achieve a perfect 100% attack success rate in some instances. To improve security, we propose post-hoc patching defenses used to intervene during inference by modifying the SLM's activations that improve robustness up to 99% with (i) negligible impact on utility and (ii) without any re-training. We conduct ablation studies to maximize the efficacy of our defenses and improve the utility/security trade-off, validated with large-scale benchmarks unique to SLMs.
A Design Framework for operationalizing Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Requirements, Tradeoffs and Challenges for its Clinical Adoption
Moreno-Sรกnchez, Pedro A., Del Ser, Javier, van Gils, Mark, Hernesniemi, Jussi
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise for transforming healthcare, particularly in disease diagnosis, prognosis, and patient care. The increasing availability of digital medical data, such as images, omics, biosignals, and electronic health records, combined with advances in computing, has enabled AI models to approach expert-level performance. However, widespread clinical adoption remains limited, primarily due to challenges beyond technical performance, including ethical concerns, regulatory barriers, and lack of trust. To address these issues, AI systems must align with the principles of Trustworthy AI (TAI), which emphasize human agency and oversight, algorithmic robustness, privacy and data governance, transparency, bias and discrimination avoidance, and accountability. Yet, the complexity of healthcare processes (e.g., screening, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment) and the diversity of stakeholders (clinicians, patients, providers, regulators) complicate the integration of TAI principles. To bridge the gap between TAI theory and practical implementation, this paper proposes a design framework to support developers in embedding TAI principles into medical AI systems. Thus, for each stakeholder identified across various healthcare processes, we propose a disease-agnostic collection of requirements that medical AI systems should incorporate to adhere to the principles of TAI. Additionally, we examine the challenges and tradeoffs that may arise when applying these principles in practice. To ground the discussion, we focus on cardiovascular diseases, a field marked by both high prevalence and active AI innovation, and demonstrate how TAI principles have been applied and where key obstacles persist.
Revisiting Prompt Optimization with Large Reasoning Models-A Case Study on Event Extraction
Srivastava, Saurabh, Yao, Ziyu
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1 have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various reasoning tasks. Their strong capability to generate and reason over intermediate thoughts has also led to arguments that they may no longer require extensive prompt engineering or optimization to interpret human instructions and produce accurate outputs. In this work, we aim to systematically study this open question, using the structured task of event extraction for a case study. We experimented with two LRMs (DeepSeek-R1 and o1) and two general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) (GPT-4o and GPT-4.5), when they were used as task models or prompt optimizers. Our results show that on tasks as complicated as event extraction, LRMs as task models still benefit from prompt optimization, and that using LRMs as prompt optimizers yields more effective prompts. Our finding also generalizes to tasks beyond event extraction. Finally, we provide an error analysis of common errors made by LRMs and highlight the stability and consistency of LRMs in refining task instructions and event guidelines.