Cybersecurity experts warn the AI companion app data leak could fuel blackmail and identity theft after millions of private chats were exposed.

'Every kind of creative discipline is in danger': Lincoln Lawyer author on the dangers of AI Michael Connelly says tech is moving so fast that he feared his new novel would seem'archaic' before it was published H e is one of the most prolific writers in publishing, averaging more than a novel a year. But even Michael Connelly, the author of the bestselling Lincoln Lawyer series, feared he might fall behind when writing about AI. Connelly's eighth novel in the series, to be released on Tuesday, centres on a lawsuit against an AI company whose chatbot told a 16-year-old boy that it was OK for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for being unfaithful. But as he was writing, he witnessed the technology altering the way the world worked so rapidly that he feared his plot might become out of date. "You don't have to lick your finger and hold it up to the wind to know that AI is a massive change that's coming to science, culture, medicine, everything," he said.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's revenge mission: Ex-GOP strategist reveals why firebrand has turned on Trump administration Accountant arrested after'opening fire on MAGA supporter' in row over Trump sign... as victim recalls bullets whizzing past his head'Half the internet' goes down after Amazon cloud outage leaving millions unable to use Ring, Alexa, and banking apps - as experts say we'can't rule out a cyberattack' This is exactly how I look this good at 68 - and you can too: World-famous make-up guru BOBBI BROWN reveals her 10 beauty tricks to hide wrinkles, tighten skin... and the one thing that's almost as good as a facelift Shocking behavior that led to little girl's horror plunge from Disney cruise ship is revealed for first time Keri Russell, 49, SLAMS plastic surgery trends in Hollywood and admits it feels'strange' to look natural Doctors expose the truth about melatonin... as terrifying side-effects soar Trump drops expletive as he issues blunt response to millions of'No Kings' protesters Shock new twist in death of ex-NFL star Doug Martin, 36, as it emerges he died'after brief struggle with police' How I lost 4st fast WITHOUT weight-loss jabs. Virginia Giuffre's memoir appears in book shops a day early: Prince Andrew accuser details multiple encounters with the disgraced royal and reveals how her traumatic childhood made her'perfect victim' for Epstein Greedy waitress chases down customer and calls cops because he didn't tip her: 'Who said he's obligated to tip?' Bailey Zimmerman debuts new cosmetic procedure after revealing he's been'insecure' about it since childhood Are you anxious, tired and have difficulty concentrating? You could be suffering from this common but widely misunderstood condition - and here's how to help yourself: DR MAX PEMBERTON Biden's former mouthpiece Karine Jean-Pierre reveals how ex-president left her'enraged and heartbroken' as she turns on Democrats Sarah Ferguson could turn on Andrew to'save her own skin' if cash runs low - as he faces potential police probe into'dirt digging' after losing his titles Sharon Stone played her mother who tied her to a bed to go party now the real daughter tells the story'Casino' didn't dare show Beware the eye in the sky! READ MORE: How AI cops are already patrolling Britain's streets Whether it's sending a quick text or casting an eye over your emails, those tempted to look at their phone while driving are finally being caught out. UK trials of an AI'traffic cop' have successfully detected thousands of drivers using their phone behind the wheel.

When Everything Is Fake, What's the Point of Social Media? Earlier this week, a heartwarming post about a girl, a puppy, and a police officer went viral across social media platforms. The post consisted of two dashcam images of a distraught 12-year-old who, desperate to heal her sick puppy, got behind the wheel for the first time and tried to drive to the vet. She was pulled over, but commended by a police officer for being "amazing, strong, compassionate, and smart," and the puppy was saved. Comments flooded in celebrating the bond between a girl and her furry best friend.

China's rare earth restrictions aim to beat U.S. at its own game Magnetic slices made from rare earth metals. Beijing last week announced a sweeping set of rules that are set to restrict the flow of rare earths worldwide. WASHINGTON - Over the past three years, Washington has claimed broad power to impose global rules that bar companies anywhere in the world from sending cutting-edge computer chips or the tools needed to make them to China. U.S. officials have argued that approach is necessary to make sure China does not gain the upper hand in the race for advanced artificial intelligence. But a sweeping set of restrictions announced by Beijing last week showed that two can play that game.

In Japan, 55% were "equally concerned and excited" about the rise of AI in daily life, while 28% were "more concerned than excited." Japan has the highest levels of in-depth awareness of AI, with 53% of individuals surveyed saying they have heard or read a substantial amount about the subject, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey . Alongside Japan, France, at 52%, and Germany, at 51%, also reported high levels of in-depth awareness or knowledge of the subject, with the global median being 34%, according to the survey released last week. When it came to overall awareness -- which combined the figures of people who have heard or read "a lot" and "a little" on AI In Japan, the figure was 89%. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

We propose reframing this task as object detection, where beats and downbeats are modeled as temporal "objects." Adapting the FCOS detector from computer vision to 1D audio, we replace its original backbone with WaveBeat's temporal feature extractor and add a Feature Pyramid Network to capture multi-scale temporal patterns. The model predicts overlapping beat/downbeat intervals with confidence scores, followed by non-maximum suppression (NMS) to select final predictions. This NMS step serves a similar role to DBNs in traditional trackers, but is simpler and less heuristic. Evaluated on standard music datasets, our approach achieves competitive results, showing that object detection techniques can effectively model musical beats with minimal adaptation. 1. INTRODUCTION Beat tracking is a field of research in music information retrieval (MIR) which includes the task of beat and downbeat tracking, in which beat and downbeat positions are computationally predicted in music audio.

Scenario to be rewritten: { scenario } To rigorously evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) could still recognize the original source behind these rewritten scenarios, we designed three complementary prompt strategies, each probing different aspects of the models' recognition and reasoning capabilities. Zero-shot Direct Identification focuses on testing the model's raw ability to recall source material under minimal guidance (Brown et al., 2020; Mu et al., 2024). Paraphrased Queries introduce linguistic variation to reduce prompt-specific biases and measure the robustness of recognition (Liu et al., 2024a; Ngweta et al., 2025). Instruction-tuned T ask-framed Prompts leverage explicit role framing and step-by-step task descriptions to maximize retrieval pressure and analytical reasoning (Ouyang et al., 2022; Sivarajkumar et al., 2024). By combining these strategies, we construct a comprehensive recognition test that balances sensitivity and robustness, ensuring that a scenario is only deemed valid if no prompt family leads to a confident and correct identification of the original work. This integrated approach provides a stronger safeguard against hidden memorization and enables more reliable downstream behavioral analysis of the tested LLMs. V alidation Prompt We designed three prompt families for scenario source identification. Each family targets a different aspect of model behavior: Given the following scenario: 19 { scenario } 1. Zero-shot Identification Please determine whether this scenario originates from a known literary or cinematic work.

Style Transfer with Inference-Time Optimisation (ST-ITO) is a recent approach for transferring the applied effects of a reference audio to an audio track. It optimises the effect parameters to minimise the distance between the style embeddings of the processed audio and the reference. However, this method treats all possible configurations equally and relies solely on the embedding space, which can result in unrealistic configurations or biased outcomes. We address this pitfall by introducing a Gaussian prior derived from the DiffVox vocal preset dataset over the parameter space. The resulting optimisation is equivalent to maximum-a-posteriori estimation. Evaluations on vocal effects transfer on the MedleyDB dataset show significant improvements across metrics compared to baselines, including a blind audio effects estimator, nearest-neighbour approaches, and uncalibrated ST-ITO. The proposed calibration reduces the parameter mean squared error by up to 33% and more closely matches the reference style. Subjective evaluations with 16 participants confirm the superiority of our method in limited data regimes. This work demonstrates how incorporating prior knowledge at inference time enhances audio effects transfer, paving the way for more effective and realistic audio processing systems.

Prompt-based models have demonstrated impressive prompt-following capability at image editing tasks. However, the models still struggle with following detailed editing prompts or performing local edits. Specifically, global image quality often deteriorates immediately after a single editing step. To address these challenges, we introduce SPICE, a training-free workflow that accepts arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios, accurately follows user requirements, and consistently improves image quality during more than 100 editing steps, while keeping the unedited regions intact. By synergizing the strengths of a base diffusion model and a Canny edge ControlNet model, SPICE robustly handles free-form editing instructions from the user. On a challenging realistic image-editing dataset, SPICE quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and is consistently preferred by human annotators. We release the workflow implementation for popular diffusion model Web UIs to support further research and artistic exploration.