Plenty of force was with "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" on its first night in theaters, but it fell short of the two previous films in the trilogy. "The Rise of Skywalker" brought in an estimated $40 million in North America in its Thursday night previews, the fifth biggest Thursday opening ever. The first film, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," earned $57 million its Thursday night previews in 2015, at the time the biggest of all time. It was topped by the $60 million take of "Avengers: Endgame" earlier this year. The second film in the trilogy, "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," had a $45 million tally on its opening Thursday night in 2017.

Banking communications and press releases show conversational interfaces accounting for 38.87% of the AI use-cases at banks. In truth, most chatbots are pilot projects with little to no evidence of ROI; they're touted in the press to make banks appear more modern and convenient to customers. Emerj's AI in Banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map found conversational interface vendors score lowest in terms of funding and the AI talent they employ (2.4 out of 4.0). The average customer service vendor in banking raises $16 million, far less than the average vendor in financing and loans ($49 million), fraud and cybersecurity ($48 million), and compliance ($44 million). Companies raise more money when their products have traction, and conversational interface vendors make up only 5.5% of the total funding for AI vendors.

Facebook took down more than 600 accounts tied to the pro-Trump conspiracy website The Epoch Times for using identities created by artificial intelligence to push stories about a variety of topics including impeachment and elections. The network was called "The BL" and was run by Vietnamese users posing as Americans, using fake photos generated by algorithms to simulate real identities. The Epoch Media group, which pushes a variety of pro-Trump conspiracy theories, spent $9.5 million on ads to spread content through the now-suspended pages and groups. "What's new here is that this is purportedly a U.S.-based media company leveraging foreign actors posing as Americans to push political content. We've seen it a lot with state actors in the past," Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleiche, said in an interview.

These robots could revolutionize recycling thanks to artificial intelligence. In US news and current events today, NowThis News is exploring how these trash sorting industrial robots are changing recycling with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Waste management and how we recycle plastic, paper, and more is crucial to saving the environment and fighting the climate crisis. With machine learning algorithms, these artificial intelligence robots are sorting recycling faster than humans ever could. The future of artificial intelligence-fueled trash sorting robots is bright.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines for Dec. 19 are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. The first "Star Wars" film, "A New Hope" was released 42 years ago in 1977. Since then, countless films, video games, television spin-offs and books have been produced to fill in every corner of the galaxy far, far away. What started out as a campy, low-budget sci-fi flick that was expected to flop, quickly grew into a juggernaut of a film franchise with plenty of content for everyone.

In this sweeping romance, an American woman (Zoe Saldana) loves and loses a Sicilian man she meets in Italy. Based on Tembi Locke's best-selling memoir.

The EBU News Report 2019 examines what the fourth major wave of digital transformation means for journalism. Artificial intelligence has potential for unlocking new opportunities – but there are greater challenges for journalism too. The report addresses the issues and includes practical case studies, checklists and tool-kits.

AI and machine learning algorithms are quite skilled at generating works of art -- and highly realistic images of apartments, people, and pets to boot. But relatively few have been tuned to singing synthesis, or the task of cloning the voices of musicians. Researchers from Amazon and Cambridge put their collective minds to the challenge in a recent paper, in which they propose an AI system that requires "considerably" less modeling than previous work of features like vibratos and note durations. It taps a Google-designed algorithm -- WaveNet -- to synthesize the mel-spectrograms, or the representations of the power spectrum of sounds, which another model produces using a combination of speech and signing data. The system comprises three parts, the first of which is a frontend that takes a musical score as input and produces note embeddings (i.e., numerical representations of notes) to be send to an encoder.

In this day and age, everyone has heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI). It's proven to be very controversial, even though it shouldn't have been. The general populace still doesn't understand what it truly represents. In their minds, they may even equate it to Skynet from the Terminator films. But let's avoid jumping to extreme conclusions.

Samuel Holmes Doten of Plymouth, Mass., was born June 5, 1812, so after the Civil War ended in 1865, he would joke that he "served in the infantry in the war of that date." William Kendall Crossfield, a Peterborough, N.H. native, was having a rest during the battle of Fredericksburg when he was shot in the neck while turning over. The blanket he had pulled up to his chin miraculously cushioned the bullet, but he passed out from the shock of the blow. Vermonter Almeron C. Inman was recommended for the Medal of Honor of Feb. 9, 1887, "for intelligent coolness and bravery" in two 1864 engagements. After going missing for three months in 1895, he was found dead, thought to have killed himself.