After getting caught using an algorithm to write dozens of articles, the tech publication CNET has apologized (sorta) but wants everybody to know that it definitely has no intention of calling it quits on AI journalism. Yes, roughly two weeks ago Futurism reported that CNET had been using an in-house artificial intelligence program to pen droves of financial explainers. The articles--some 78 in total--were published over the course of two months under the bylines "CNET Money Staff" or "CNET Money," and weren't directly attributed to a non-human writer. Last week, after an online uproar over Futurism's findings, CNET and its parent company, media firm Red Ventures, announced that it would be temporarily pressing "pause" on the AI editorials. It would appear that this "pause" isn't going to last long, however.

CNet's AI SNFAU turned out to be merely the first pebble kicked down the slippery slope. In a Thursday morning internal memo acquired by the Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti announced plans to embrace AI in both editorial and business operations and utilize text generation systems similar to CNet's to produce, for example, the memeable quizzes that originally built Buzzfeed's following. Such AI-powered quizzes could provide more personalized answers based on the user's more specific responses rather than based on a score range or ranked choice system like they are today. Peretti envisions AI not only producing content on its own but drawing inspiration from human writers. We squishy meat sacks would serve as idea sources for AI text generators, or as Peretti described members of his own species, "cultural currency" and "inspired prompts."

ChatGPT has been causing a stir since its launch last year. The chatbot's ability to produce convincing essays, stories and even song lyrics has impressed users, and this week attracted a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft.

We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.

The most effective dimensionality reduction procedures produce interpretable features from the raw input space while also providing good performance for downstream supervised learning tasks. For many methods, this requires optimizing one or more hyperparameters for a specific task, which can limit generalizability. In this study we propose sparse compressed agglomeration (SparCA), a novel dimensionality reduction procedure that involves a multistep hierarchical feature grouping, compression, and feature selection process. We demonstrate the characteristics and performance of the SparCA method across heterogenous synthetic and real-world datasets, including images, natural language, and single cell gene expression data. Our results show that SparCA is applicable to a wide range of data types, produces highly interpretable features, and shows compelling performance on downstream supervised learning tasks without the need for hyperparameter tuning.

Several high-resource Text to Speech (TTS) systems currently produce natural, well-established human-like speech. In contrast, low-resource languages, including Arabic, have very limited TTS systems due to the lack of resources. We propose a fully unsupervised method for building TTS, including automatic data selection and pre-training/fine-tuning strategies for TTS training, using broadcast news as a case study. We show how careful selection of data, yet smaller amounts, can improve the efficiency of TTS system in generating more natural speech than a system trained on a bigger dataset. We adopt to propose different approaches for the: 1) data: we applied automatic annotations using DNSMOS, automatic vowelization, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) for fixing transcriptions' errors; 2) model: we used transfer learning from high-resource language in TTS model and fine-tuned it with one hour broadcast recording then we used this model to guide a FastSpeech2-based Conformer model for duration. Our objective evaluation shows 3.9% character error rate (CER), while the groundtruth has 1.3% CER. As for the subjective evaluation, where 1 is bad and 5 is excellent, our FastSpeech2-based Conformer model achieved a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.4 for intelligibility and 4.2 for naturalness, where many annotators recognized the voice of the broadcaster, which proves the effectiveness of our proposed unsupervised method.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., and Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., discuss the latest news emerging from the classified documents seized from President Biden on'Fox News Sunday.' This is a rush transcript of'Fox News Sunday' from January 22nd, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. A new round of classified items found in the president's home and new concerns about financial fallouts as the U.S. hits the debt limit again. JIM CLYBURN (D-SC): We've had these games before and it should not be done. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president has been clear on this. It should not be used as a political weapon. BREAM: Swing district, moderate Republicans are calling for the president to drop the take it or leave it approach and come to the table. We'll sit down for a bipartisan conversation with two co-chairs from the Problem Solvers Caucus. Republican Brian Fitzpatrick and Democrat Josh Gottheimer join me to talk about how to find consensus on the debt limit, immigration and more. Then -- thousands of pro-life advocates come to the nation's capital for the first March for Life since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. We'll look at the legal state of play now that abortion laws are up to the states, and sit down for a conversation with prominent voices from both sides. And eight months after the unprecedented leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling, there are still no answers from the high court about the leaker. JIM JORDAN (R-OH): The only way you're going to stop this in the future is to make sure you find out who did it and hold them accountable. BREAM: We'll ask our Sunday panel if we will ever find out who did it. Breaking overnight, at least ten people are dead, another ten injured after a mass shooting near Los Angeles. It happened late last night at a dance club in Monterey Park, California, close to where a lunar New York celebration had been taking place. Authorities say they believe the shooter is male and at this time it appears that person is not in custody. Deputies say they are reviewing security video in that area. Monterey Park is about ten miles east of Los Angeles. We'll keep you updated on any developments we get in from there. Also breaking this morning, the Justice Department seized more classified documents from the president's private residence just this week. The news comes as President Biden prepares to speak in person with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to discuss the new Congress, a range of challenges there, where they disagree. And that, of course, includes the debt limit. Congress is facing a deadline to strike a deal or risk a financial crisis as the Treasury department steps in to avoid a government default.

Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson helps you to find parking spots with this easy to use Apple Maps feature. An increasing number of you are turning to streaming as your primary way of consuming media. New streaming services and original content are also expected to drive growth in the industry. With all of this in mind, we want to ensure that you can watch all the content you love, so we've gathered up five of the best streaming devices on the market. CLICK TO GET KURT'S CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, SECURITY ALERTS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER With over 208,000 reviews on Amazon and an 84% approval rating at the time of publishing, the Amazon Fire Stick is an excellent streaming device choice.

In the top 10 list of my favourite-ever video game moments – a list that changes radically every year or so – there are two absolute immovables. And they both involve Star Wars. The first time I sat in the beautifully elaborate arcade cabinet of Atari's 1983 Star Wars game and experienced its thrilling depiction of the Death Star assault was a life-changing moment in an otherwise unremarkable holiday in Blackpool. To a boy who watched the film practically every week on video it was a dream come true. Much later, in 1996, I was a young writer for Edge magazine visiting Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for a feature on their Direct X graphics technology. After the interviews they took me to a new multiplayer gaming centre in the city; it was a roomful of pods, each housing a state of the art PC and flight controls.

This week, Dana, Julia, and Stephen start by discussing the film, Women Talking. Then they chat about the new U.K. import Traitors with Slate's own Carl Wilson. Finally, they finish by talking ChatGPT and the coming of AI chatbots. Dana: Werner Herzog is in his somber, elegiac mode with The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft. Not to be confused with Fire of Love, about the same people, but made by Sara Dosa.