Earlier this month, several prominent outlets carried news that artificial intelligence will not pose a danger to humanity. A bunch of humanoid robot heads connected to simple chatbots. The news stories sprang from a panel at a United Nations conference in Geneva called AI for Good, where several humanoids appeared alongside their creators. Reporters were invited to ask questions to the robots, which included Sophia, a machine made by Hanson Robotics that has gained notoriety for appearing on talk shows and even, bizarrely, gaining legal status as a person in Saudi Arabia. The questions included whether AI would destroy humanity or steal jobs.

Google is testing an artificial intelligence tool that can write news articles, in the latest evidence that the technology has the potential to transform white-collar professions. The product, known as Genesis, uses AI technology to absorb information such as details of current events and then create news stories. The tool was pitched to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal's owner, News Corp as a "helpmate", according to the New York Times. Google said it was in the early stages of exploring the AI tool, which it said could assist journalists with options for headlines or different writing styles. It stressed that the technology was not intended to replace journalists.

Netflix has removed its $10 Basic tier -- once the service's cheapest plan without ads -- in the US and the UK. The company has updated its pricing page to say new and rejoining members in both countries can no longer sign up for the Basic tier. If you're already on the plan, you can keep your membership as is (and pay $10 a month) until you cancel or change your subscription – or Netflix changes its mind, I'm guessing. If new members don't want to pay for a Standard plan, they must now make do with the Standard Ad-Supported tier, which costs $7 a month in the US and £5 in the UK. It supports Full HD streams and viewing on two devices at a time, like the no-ads Standard plan but lacks offline viewing.

Google successfully helps people with the billions of searches they do each day, but we are always working to make it better,

By now you've seen the scenes of young and middle-aged Americans wearing cargo shorts and Patagonia Baggies Brimmers in front of movie studios holding ironic picket signs, such as "Chat GPT doesn't have childhood trauma!" As the battle grinds into its 12th week, with no end in sight--and the actors' union now part of the strike too--it's easy to think that a fight between a bunch of "rich Hollywood writers" and the big studios and networks may mean nothing to you, but it's quite the opposite. This is the labor fight of our generation. While in the broader labor force, the share of union members has fallen from 34 percent in the 1950s to 10 percent today, Hollywood remains a devout union town. Except for reality TV and some indie films, the majority of all personnel involved in film and TV production are part of organized labor.

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal's owner, News Corp., according to three people familiar with the matter. The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information -- details of current events, for example -- and generate news copy, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product. One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative AI. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' Artificial intelligence is opening the door to a disturbing trend of people creating realistic images of children in sexual settings, which could increase the number of cases of sex crimes against kids in real life, experts warn. AI platforms that can mimic human conversation or create realistic images exploded in popularity late last year into 2023 following the release of chatbot ChatGPT, which served as a watershed moment for the use of artificial intelligence. As the curiosity of people across the world was piqued by the technology for work or school tasks, others have embraced the platforms for more nefarious purposes. The National Crime Agency, which is the UK's lead agency combating organized crime, warned this week that the proliferation of machine-generated explicit images of children is having a "radicalizing" effect "normalizing" pedophilia and disturbing behavior against kids.

Google is testing a new AI technology codenamed "Genesis" that can generate news articles, according to The New York Times. The tech giant has reportedly demonstrated the tool not just for The Times, but also for executives at The Washington Post and News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal. Based on reports from people who witnessed the pitch, Genesis can whip up copy from the data fed to it, whether it's current events or other types of information. Apparently, Google believes journalists could use it as some sort of an assistant to automate tasks and free them up for other things. Some of the people who saw the demonstration described it as "unsettling."

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin has the latest on the Hollywood strike on'Special Report.' Mandy Moore is sharing just how much she's received in the "This is Us" streaming deal with Hulu. Moore -- who starred as Rebecca on the hit NBC series -- has voiced her support of the SAG-AFTRA strike. In a recent interview, Moore opened up about receiving "81 cent" checks for the show's streaming residual deal. "The residual issue is a huge issue," Moore told the Hollywood Reporter from the Disney picket line in Burbank on Tuesday.

The process of reconstructing experiences from human brain activity offers a unique lens into how the brain interprets and represents the world. In this paper, we introduce a method for reconstructing music from brain activity, captured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our approach uses either music retrieval or the MusicLM music generation model conditioned on embeddings derived from fMRI data. The generated music resembles the musical stimuli that human subjects experienced, with respect to semantic properties like genre, instrumentation, and mood. We investigate the relationship between different components of MusicLM and brain activity through a voxel-wise encoding modeling analysis. Furthermore, we discuss which brain regions represent information derived from purely textual descriptions of music stimuli. We provide supplementary material including examples of the reconstructed music at https://google-research.github.io/seanet/brain2music