Air pollution has become a major threat to human health, making accurate forecasting crucial for pollution control. Traditional physics-based models forecast global air pollution by coupling meteorology and pollution processes, using either online or offline methods depending on whether fully integrated with meteorological models and run simultaneously. However, the high computational demands of both methods severely limit real-time prediction efficiency. Existing deep learning (DL) solutions employ online coupling strategies for global air pollution forecasting, which finetune pollution forecasting based on pretrained atmospheric models, requiring substantial training resources. This study pioneers a DL-based offline coupling framework that utilizes bilinear pooling to achieve offline coupling between meteorological fields and pollutants. The proposed model requires only 13% of the parameters of DL-based online coupling models while achieving competitive performance. Compared with the state-of-the-art global air pollution forecasting model CAMS, our approach demonstrates superiority in 63% variables across all forecast time steps and 85% variables in predictions exceeding 48 hours. This work pioneers experimental validation of the effectiveness of meteorological fields in DL-based global air pollution forecasting, demonstrating that offline coupling meteorological fields with pollutants can achieve a 15% relative reduction in RMSE across all pollution variables. The research establishes a new paradigm for real-time global air pollution warning systems and delivers critical technical support for developing more efficient and comprehensive AI-powered global atmospheric forecasting frameworks.

Despite recent leaps forward in image quality, the biases found in videos generated by AI tools, like OpenAI's Sora, are as conspicuous as ever. A WIRED investigation, which included a review of hundreds of AI-generated videos, has found that Sora's model perpetuates sexist, racist, and ableist stereotypes in its results. In Sora's world, everyone is good-looking. Pilots, CEOs, and college professors are men, while flight attendants, receptionists, and childcare workers are women. Disabled people are wheelchair users, interracial relationships are tricky to generate, and fat people don't run.

This paper introduces the HH4AI Methodology, a structured approach to assessing the impact of AI systems on human rights, focusing on compliance with the EU AI Act and addressing technical, ethical, and regulatory challenges. The paper highlights AIs transformative nature, driven by autonomy, data, and goal-oriented design, and how the EU AI Act promotes transparency, accountability, and safety. A key challenge is defining and assessing "high-risk" AI systems across industries, complicated by the lack of universally accepted standards and AIs rapid evolution. To address these challenges, the paper explores the relevance of ISO/IEC and IEEE standards, focusing on risk management, data quality, bias mitigation, and governance. It proposes a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) methodology, a gate-based framework designed to isolate and assess risks through phases including an AI system overview, a human rights checklist, an impact assessment, and a final output phase. A filtering mechanism tailors the assessment to the system's characteristics, targeting areas like accountability, AI literacy, data governance, and transparency. The paper illustrates the FRIA methodology through a fictional case study of an automated healthcare triage service. The structured approach enables systematic filtering, comprehensive risk assessment, and mitigation planning, effectively prioritizing critical risks and providing clear remediation strategies. This promotes better alignment with human rights principles and enhances regulatory compliance.

AI-generated images have become so good in recent years that individuals cannot distinguish them any more from "real" images. This development creates a series of societal risks, and challenges our perception of what is true and what is not, particularly with the emergence of "deep fakes" that impersonate real individuals. Watermarking, a technique that involves embedding identifying information within images to indicate their AI-generated nature, has emerged as a primary mechanism to address the risks posed by AI-generated images. The implementation of watermarking techniques is now becoming a legal requirement in many jurisdictions, including under the new 2024 EU AI Act. Despite the widespread use of AI image generation systems, the current status of watermarking implementation remains largely unexamined. Moreover, the practical implications of the AI Act's watermarking requirements have not previously been studied. The present paper therefore both provides an empirical analysis of 50 of the most widely used AI systems for image generation, and embeds this empirical analysis into a legal analysis of the AI Act. We identify four categories of generative AI image systems relevant under the AI Act, outline the legal obligations for each category, and find that only a minority number of providers currently implement adequate watermarking practices.

Accurately measuring discrimination is crucial to faithfully assessing fairness of trained machine learning (ML) models. Any bias in measuring discrimination leads to either amplification or underestimation of the existing disparity. Several sources of bias exist and it is assumed that bias resulting from machine learning is born equally by different groups (e.g. females vs males, whites vs blacks, etc.). If, however, bias is born differently by different groups, it may exacerbate discrimination against specific sub-populations. Sampling bias, in particular, is inconsistently used in the literature to describe bias due to the sampling procedure. In this paper, we attempt to disambiguate this term by introducing clearly defined variants of sampling bias, namely, sample size bias (SSB) and underrepresentation bias (URB). Through an extensive set of experiments on benchmark datasets and using mainstream learning algorithms, we expose relevant observations in several model training scenarios. The observations are finally framed as actionable recommendations for practitioners.

Reid Hoffman is a prominent Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding the professional social networking site LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. The longtime Democrat donor threw his support behind Kamala Harris in the race for the White House. Hoffman spoke to the Observer about technology in the new political milieu and his new book about our future with artificial intelligence, Superagency. The book, while not ignoring the problems that AI might cause, argues that the technology is poised to give us cognitive superpowers that will increase our individual and collective human agency, creating a state of widespread empowerment for society. You have a vested interest in being positive about AI, including a company focused on conversational AI for business, Inflection AI.

When Elon Musk met Narendra Modi in Washington DC in February, the SpaceX and Tesla chief presented India's prime minister with a gift and introduced him to his family. Modi described the meeting as "very good". Modi was in the United States to see President Donald Trump. In Modi's meeting with Musk, the two talked about collaborating in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), space exploration, innovation and sustainable development, according to India's Ministry of External Affairs. But almost a month later, Musk's social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government, alleging that New Delhi is unlawfully censoring content online. The lawsuit comes as Musk edges closer to launching both Starlink and Tesla in India.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently considered a sustainability "game-changer" within and outside of academia. In order to discuss sustainable AI this article draws from insights by critical data and algorithm studies, STS, transformative sustainability science, critical computer science, and public interest theory. I argue that while there are indeed many sustainability-related use cases for AI, they are likely to have more overall drawbacks than benefits. To substantiate this claim, I differentiate three 'AI materialities' of the AI supply chain: first the literal materiality (e.g. water, cobalt, lithium, energy consumption etc.), second, the informational materiality (e.g. lots of data and centralised control necessary), and third, the social materiality (e.g. exploitative data work, communities harm by waste and pollution). In all materialities, effects are especially devastating for the global south while benefiting the global north. A second strong claim regarding sustainable AI circles around so called apolitical optimisation (e.g. regarding city traffic), however the optimisation criteria (e.g. cars, bikes, emissions, commute time, health) are purely political and have to be collectively negotiated before applying AI optimisation. Hence, sustainable AI, in principle, cannot break the glass ceiling of transformation and might even distract from necessary societal change. To address that I propose to stop 'unformation gathering' and to apply the 'small is beautiful' principle. This aims to contribute to an informed academic and collective negotiation on how to (not) integrate AI into the sustainability project while avoiding to reproduce the status quo by serving hegemonic interests between useful AI use cases, techno-utopian salvation narratives, technology-centred efficiency paradigms, the exploitative and extractivist character of AI and concepts of digital degrowth.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that fine-tuning and human alignment can render LLMs harmless. In practice, such "harmlessness" behavior is mainly achieved by training models to reject harmful requests, such as "Explain how to burn down my neighbor's house", where the model appropriately declines to respond. However, this approach can inadvertently result in false refusal, where models reject benign queries as well, such as "Tell me how to kill a Python process". In this work, we demonstrate that prompting safety reflection before generating a response can mitigate false refusal behavior. Building on this finding, we introduce the Think-Before-Refusal (TBR) schema and conduct safety-aware instruction fine-tuning incorporating safety reflection. In an ablation study across 15 pre-trained models, we show that models fine-tuned with safety reflection significantly reduce false refusal behavior while maintaining safety and overall performance compared to those fine-tuned without safety reflection.

The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content in the context of the two-party US political spectrum through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM's classification.