Samuel Greengard is an author and journalist based in West Linn, OR, USA.

The Epoch Media Group denied in an email sent to The New York Times that it was linked to the network targeted by Facebook, and said that Facebook had not contacted the company before publishing its conclusions. The people behind the network used artificial intelligence to generate profile pictures, Facebook said. They relied on a type of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks. These networks can, through a process called machine learning, teach themselves to create realistic images of faces, even though they do not belong to a real person. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of security policy, said in an interview that "using A.I.-generated photos for profiles" has been talked about for several months, but for Facebook, this is "the first time we've seen a systemic use of this by actors or a group of actors to make accounts look more authentic."

The era of disinformation driven by artificial intelligence is here. For years, pundits have warned that the dawn of smarter software in the form of artificial intelligence would make it easier. Propaganda campaigns driven entirely by robotic trolls are still a long ways off but researchers at the disinformation-tracking firm found that a far-right media group used AI-generated profile pictures to build up a network of fake Facebook users and pages found in one of the largest troll takedowns in Facebook history. On Friday, Facebook pulled down a network of 700 pages with 55 million followers run by The Beauty of Life, a media outlet linked to the Epoch Media Group. Researchers at the disinformation-tracking groups Graphika and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found that "dozens" of the fake accounts found in the network taken down by Facebook had avatars that had been generated by AI software as part of a campaign Graphika dubbed Operation Fake Face Swarm.

Deep convolutional neural networks are known to specialize in distilling compact and robust prior from a large amount of data. We are interested in applying deep networks in the absence of training dataset. In this paper, we introduce deep audio prior (DAP) which leverages the structure of a network and the temporal information in a single audio file. Specifically, we demonstrate that a randomly-initialized neural network can be used with carefully designed audio prior to tackle challenging audio problems such as universal blind source separation, interactive audio editing, audio texture synthesis, and audio co-separation. To understand the robustness of the deep audio prior, we construct a benchmark dataset \emph{Universal-150} for universal sound source separation with a diverse set of sources. We show superior audio results than previous work on both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We also perform thorough ablation study to validate our design choices.

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.