Recent advancement in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has triggered a new surge in LLMs' evaluation. Most recent evaluation works tends to evaluate the comprehensive ability of LLMs over series of tasks. However, the deep structure understanding of natural language is rarely explored. In this work, we examine the ability of LLMs to deal with structured semantics on the tasks of question answering with the help of the human-constructed formal language. Specifically, we implement the inter-conversion of natural and formal language through in-context learning of LLMs to verify their ability to understand and generate the structured logical forms. Extensive experiments with models of different sizes and in different formal languages show that today's state-of-the-art LLMs' understanding of the logical forms can approach human level overall, but there still are plenty of room in generating correct logical forms, which suggest that it is more effective to use LLMs to generate more natural language training data to reinforce a small model than directly answering questions with LLMs. Moreover, our results also indicate that models exhibit considerable sensitivity to different formal languages. In general, the formal language with the lower the formalization level, i.e. the more similar it is to natural language, is more LLMs-friendly.

Do AI companies need to pay for the training data that powers their generative AI systems? The question is hotly contested in Silicon Valley and in a wave of lawsuits levied against tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up. Today, at a Senate hearing on AI's impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. "It's not only morally right," said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing.

AI poses a grave threat to journalism, experts warned Congress at a hearing on Wednesday. Media executives and academic experts testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law about how AI is contributing to the big tech-fueled decline of journalism. They also talked about intellectual property issues arising from AI models being trained on the work of journalists, and raised alarms about the increasing dangers of AI-powered misinformation. "The rise of big tech has been directly responsible for the decline in local news," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and chair of the subcommittee. "First, Meta, Google and OpenAI are using the hard work of newspapers and authors to train their AI models without compensation or credit. Adding insult to injury, those models are then used to compete with newspapers and broadcasters, cannibalizing readership and revenue from the journalistic institutions that generate the content in the first place."

If you squint and tilt your head, you can see some similarities in the blurry shapes that are Harvard and OpenAI. Each is a leading institution for building minds, whether real or artificial--Harvard educates smart humans, while OpenAI engineers smart machines--and each has been forced in recent days to stare down a common allegation. Namely, that they are represented by intellectual thieves. Last month, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and the journalist Christopher Brunet accused then–Harvard President Claudine Gay of having copied short passages without attribution in her dissertation. Gay later admitted to "instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars' language, without proper attribution," for which she requested corrections. The two cases share common ground, yet many of the responses to them could not be more different.

False and misleading information supercharged with cutting-edge artificial intelligence that threatens to erode democracy and polarize society is the top immediate risk to the global economy, the World Economic Forum said in a report Wednesday. In its latest Global Risks Report, the organization also said an array of environmental risks pose the biggest threats in the longer term. The report was released ahead of the annual elite gathering of CEOs and world leaders in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos and is based on a survey of nearly 1,500 experts, industry leaders and policymakers. The report listed misinformation and disinformation as the most severe risk over the next two years, highlighting how rapid advances in technology also are creating new problems or making existing ones worse. The authors worry that the boom in generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT means that creating sophisticated synthetic content that can be used to manipulate groups of people won't be limited any longer to those with specialized skills. AI is set to be a hot topic next week at the Davos meetings, which are expected to be attended by tech company bosses including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and AI industry players like Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun.

The New York City skyline is seen Aug. 17, 2022, from Jersey City, New Jersey. STREAMLINE YOUR COMMUTE: New AI-powered tech could ease traffic jams. JOB THREAT: New tech could make wide range of high-skilled work'obsolete': expert. 'HUMAN' ELEMENT': Hollywood execs warn AI could steal jobs of true artists. DOUBLE TAKE: Americans worry these'creepy' deepfakes will manipulate people in 2024 election, 'disturbingly false.' Continue reading… PLAGIARISM PROBE: Business leader Bill Ackman calls for AI review of MIT leaders, faculty.

Nothing beats the experience of powering down the highway in your car with the speakers blaring out your favourite tunes. But often the music doesn't match up to the moments of the drive – whether it's the chorus kicking in when you hit the accelerator or steady beats breaking up the monotony of the motorway. Now, a solution has come from an unlikely source – will.i.am, the entrepreneur and musician best known as the founder of the Black Eyed Peas. He's partnered with German car maker Mercedes Benz on futuristic in-car software called Sound Drive that'turns your car into a musical instrument'. When the driver accelerates, brakes or turns, the software reacts to create new sounds or remix existing tunes, making the driver'the conductor' and the car'the orchestra'.

Taylor Swift is not giving out free Le Creuset products in social media advertisements -- though deepfakes of her voice would like you to believe otherwise. A series of posts have recently surfaced on TikTok and in Meta's Ad Library claiming to show Swift offering free Le Creuset cookware sets, the New York Times reports. The ads featured clips where Swift was near Le Creuset products and used a synthetic version of her voice. The scammers used AI to have the cloned voice address her fans, "Swifties," and produce other little remarks. These posts led interested parties to fake versions of sites like The Food Network with made-up articles and testimonials about Le Creuset.

The Israeli military has seemingly walked back its justification for targeting a vehicle in Gaza last week, killing two Al Jazeera journalists, United States broadcaster NBC reported. Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was killed in an Israeli missile strike on Sunday in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Journalist Mustafa Thuraya was also killed in the attack, while a third passenger, journalist Hazem Rajab, was seriously injured. At the time of the attack, the Israeli army said it was targeting a "terrorist" in the vehicle. It confirmed in a statement that a military aircraft "identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft that posed a threat to (Israeli) troops," adding that "we are aware of the reports that during the strike, two other suspects who were in the same vehicle as the terrorist were also hit".

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI's impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom--with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant's ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks. Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September.