Ana Corina Sosa (second from left), receives the Nobel Peace Prize for her mother, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, from the Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Jorgen Watne Frydnes next to a photo of Machado, in Oslo on Wednesday. OSLO - Democracies must be prepared to fight for freedom in order to survive, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado said on Wednesday, in a speech delivered by her daughter during a ceremony Machado could not attend. The Venezuelan opposition leader said that the prize held profound significance, not only for her country but for the world. "It reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace," she said, via her daughter Ana Corina Sosa Machado. "And the most important, the lesson Venezuelans can share with the world, is a lesson forged on a long and difficult path: If we want democracy, we must be prepared to fight for freedom."

McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash McDonald's has taken down a Christmas advert made with Artificial Intelligence (AI) following online backlash. The 45-second advert was produced with generative AI clips and released publicly on McDonald's Netherlands YouTube channel on 6 December. Viewers on social media denounced the use of AI in the film, with one commenter calling it the most god-awful ad I've seen this year . On 9 December McDonald's Netherlands removed the video, adding in a statement to BBC News that the moment served as an important learning as the company explored the effective use of AI. The advert was created for McDonald's by Dutch company TBWA\Neboko and US production company The Sweetshop.

Nissan Motor CEO Ivan Espinosa (left) Wayve Technologies CEO Alex Kendall shake hands at a signing ceremony for a collaboration agreement between the two companies in Tokyo on Wednesday. While fully driverless cars remain some way off, the two companies said in a joint statement that their tie-up would help develop systems in real-world conditions. The AI systems made by Wayve, which last year said it had raised more than $1 billion, do not rely on preprogrammed maps but can navigate in real time. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Ghislaine Maxwell's ultimate humiliation: Epstein's sex trafficker girlfriend poses in outrageous outfits and exposes herself in dozens of photos released from the billionaire paedophile's files Silent Trump flees growing storm over Epstein'cover-up' as he jets off for holidays without ANY comment How you can ease the agony of carpal tunnel syndrome. The'change of pace' sex move that sends ANY woman wild. Here's the precise moment to deploy it and what to do with your eyes. Corey Feldman walks back claim that Corey Haim'molested' him after late star's mother slammed his comments Emily in Paris cast left'aghast' and'walking on eggshells' as off-camera drama becomes overwhelming... and whispers swirl about a CURSE Truth about THIS photo of Karoline Leavitt's face... and why if she was non-binary and disabled, Vanity Fair would never have done this: KENNEDY After 27 years as a TV anchor I was suddenly pulled off screens. My boss's explanation was a brutal lesson in loyalty I was dead for 105 minutes and learned exactly how you get into heaven... then Jesus spoke six words into my mind and sent me back Jake Paul's jaw is broken in Anthony Joshua battering: YouTuber-turned-boxer rushes to hospital I was falsely accused of being the Brown University shooter... America's great divide laid bare as Wall Street splurges record bonuses on outrageously lavish homes while the rest of the country struggles Andrew's fury at anyone who doesn't bow and scrape.

Keio University President Kohei Ito (left) and OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon sign a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday in Tokyo. Keio University is working with OpenAI to integrate artificial intelligence into its education system. Keio University President Kohei Ito and OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon signed a memorandum of understanding Tuesday, making Keio the first Japanese university to form a strategic partnership with the producer of ChatGPT. "We will develop an environment where students and researchers can proactively learn and utilize AI," Ito said. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Unlike conventional keyword-based search tools, the AI service for searching through disclosure materials allows for prompts such as companies whose dividend predictions rose at least 20%. Japan Exchange Group, the operator of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), on Tuesday launched a service enabling users to search corporate disclosure materials using artificial intelligence. The J-Lens service, whose prototype version was released by JPX Market Innovation & Research, a unit of Japan Exchange, or JPX, is aimed at improving investor convenience by enhancing search functions for the massive volume of disclosure documents. Around 150,000 such documents are filed each year. Unlike conventional keyword-based search tools, J-Lens allows for prompts such as companies whose dividend predictions rose at least 20%.

A damaged concrete pillar supporting the Hachinohe Line in the city of Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, on Wednesday. False claims that a powerful earthquake in northern Japan was "human-caused," along with artificial intelligence-generated videos, are spreading rapidly across social media after the quake struck Aomori Prefecture on Monday evening. The earthquake registered an upper 6 on Japan's seismic intensity scale, prompting warnings from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the Cabinet Secretariat against the spread of unverified information that could hamper emergency response efforts. Misinformation circulated widely on platforms including X, echoing a pattern seen during previous disasters such as the Noto Peninsula earthquake in January 2024, when false rescue pleas and conspiracy theories also gained traction online. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Sam Altman's appearance on is part of a larger charm offensive currently being waged by the tech establishment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was at the center of Silicon Valley's most visible publicity push in recent memory Monday night when he appeared on . In a predictably softball interview with host Jimmy Fallon, Altman explained how ChatGPT has helped him alleviate the anxiety that comes with being a new parent. It was a distinctly clever, if somewhat surprising, choice from Altman who has mostly kept his personal life out of the media spotlight. But Altman is a salesman, and a good salesman understands the optics of good television.

Music improvisation is fascinating to study, being essentially a live demonstration of a creative process. In jazz, musicians often improvise across predefined chord progressions (leadsheets). How do we assess the creativity of jazz improvisations? And can we capture this in automated metrics for creativity for current LLM-based generative systems? Demonstration of emotional involvement is closely linked with creativity in improvisation. Analysing musical audio, can we detect emotional involvement? This study hypothesises that if an improvisation contains more evidence of emotion-laden content, it is more likely to be recognised as creative. An embeddings-based method is proposed for capturing the emotional content in musical improvisations, using a psychologically-grounded classification of musical characteristics associated with emotions. Resulting 'emovectors' are analysed to test the above hypothesis, comparing across multiple improvisations. Capturing emotional content in this quantifiable way can contribute towards new metrics for creativity evaluation that can be applied at scale.

We propose a post-training method for lower-resource languages that preserves fluency of language models even when aligned by disfluent reward models. Preference-optimization is now a well-researched topic, but previous work has mostly addressed models for English and Chinese. Lower-resource languages lack both datasets written by native speakers and language models capable of generating fluent synthetic data. Thus, in this work, we focus on developing a fluent preference-aligned language model without any instruction-tuning data in the target language. Our approach uses an on-policy training method, which we compare with two common approaches: supervised finetuning on machine-translated data and multilingual finetuning. We conduct a case study on Norwegian Bokmål and evaluate fluency through native-speaker assessments. The results show that the on-policy aspect is crucial and outperforms the alternatives without relying on any hard-to-obtain data.