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Piaggio turned its cute follow robot into a Star Wars droid

Engadget

Since 2017, the Vespa-maker Piaggio's Fast Forward division has been exploring a unique way to cut down on car trips: Building robots that can follow you around and carry your stuff. We called its original Gita (pronounced "jee-tah," Italian for "trip") robot an attractive rolling porter, but its size and initial 3,250 price made it more of a robo-curio than something you'd actually want to buy. The company followed that up with the Gitamini, a smaller and slightly cheaper 1,850 model, but even that remains niche. Most people just don't have thousands of dollars to spend on a cute follow bot -- but the calculation may be different for Star Wars fans. So it's not a huge surprise to see Piaggio Fast Forward debut a special Star Wars edition robot: the G1T4-M1N1. It's basically just a 2,875 version of the Gitamini (which now sells for 2,475) with Star Wars decals and sound effects.


5 digital cleanup hacks you didn't know you needed

FOX News

'The CyberGuy' Kurt Knutsson discusses the creation of a robot in China that can reportedly build cars and do everyday tasks on'Fox & Friends Weekend.' Let's face it, our digital lives get messy. Whether it's thousands of unread emails, random screenshots cluttering your desktop or a downloads folder that's basically a graveyard, the digital gunk adds up fast. But cleaning it all up doesn't have to be overwhelming. With a few smart automations and tools, you can tidy up your tech and keep things running smoothly, without lifting a finger every week. Join the FREE "CyberGuy Report": Get my expert tech tips, critical security alerts and exclusive deals, plus instant access to my free "Ultimate Scam Survival Guide" when you sign up!


'Jeopardy' host Ken Jennings 'deeply skeptical' of AI, years after losing to supercomputer

FOX News

"Jeopardy!" host Ken Jennings tells Fox News Digital he wants to know a human is behind any creative projects, not AI. "I'm deeply skeptical of AI," Jennings told Fox News Digital at the TCM Classic Film Festival. "Obviously, these current iterations of LLMs [Large Language Models] would clean Watson's clock at'Jeopardy!' The technology has moved on. I've played with chatbots and'Jeopardy!' clues, and they're very hard to stump," he said.


Linguistic Complexity and Socio-cultural Patterns in Hip-Hop Lyrics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a comprehensive computational framework for analyzing linguistic complexity and socio-cultural trends in hip-hop lyrics. Using a dataset of 3,814 songs from 146 influential artists spanning four decades (1980-2020), we employ natural language processing techniques to quantify multiple dimensions of lyrical complexity. Our analysis reveals a 23.7% increase in vocabulary diversity over the study period, with East Coast artists demonstrating 17.3% higher lexical variation than other regions. Rhyme density increased by 34.2% across all regions, with Midwest artists exhibiting the highest technical complexity (3.04 rhymes per line). Topic modeling identified significant shifts in thematic content, with social justice themes decreasing from 28.5% to 13.8% of content while introspective themes increased from 7.6% to 26.3%. Sentiment analysis demon- strated that lyrics became significantly more negative during sociopolitical crises, with polarity decreasing by 0.31 following major social unrest. Multi-dimensional analysis revealed four dis- tinct stylistic approaches that correlate strongly with geographic origin (r=0.68, p!0.001) and time period (r=0.59, p<0.001). These findings establish quantitative evidence for the evolution of hip- hop as both an art form and a reflection of societal dynamics, providing insights into the interplay between linguistic innovation and cultural context in popular music.


CORG: Generating Answers from Complex, Interrelated Contexts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In a real-world corpus, knowledge frequently recurs across documents but often contains inconsistencies due to ambiguous naming, outdated information, or errors, leading to complex interrelationships between contexts. Previous research has shown that language models struggle with these complexities, typically focusing on single factors in isolation. We classify these relationships into four types: distracting, ambiguous, counterfactual, and duplicated. Our analysis reveals that no single approach effectively addresses all these interrelationships simultaneously. Therefore, we introduce Context Organizer (CORG), a framework that organizes multiple contexts into independently processed groups. This design allows the model to efficiently find all relevant answers while ensuring disambiguation. CORG consists of three key components: a graph constructor, a reranker, and an aggregator. Our results demonstrate that CORG balances performance and efficiency effectively, outperforming existing grouping methods and achieving comparable results to more computationally intensive, single-context approaches.


Beyond Public Access in LLM Pre-Training Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Our AU-ROC scores show that GPT-4o, OpenAI's more recent and capable model, demonstrates strong recognition of paywalled O'Reilly book content (AUROC = 82%), compared to OpenAI's earlier model GPT-3.5 Turbo. In contrast, GPT-3.5 Turbo shows greater relative recognition of publicly accessible O'Reilly book samples. GPT-4o Mini, as a much smaller model, shows no knowledge of public or non-public O'Reilly Media content when tested (AUROC 50%). Testing multiple models, with the same cutoff date, helps us account for potential language shifts over time that might bias our findings. These results highlight the urgent need for increased corporate transparency regarding pre-training data sources as a means to develop formal licensing frameworks for AI content training.


TRIED: Truly Innovative and Effective AI Detection Benchmark, developed by WITNESS

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The proliferation of generative AI and deceptive synthetic media threatens the global information ecosystem, especially across the Global Majority. This report from WITNESS highlights the limitations of current AI detection tools, which often underperform in real-world scenarios due to challenges related to explainability, fairness, accessibility, and contextual relevance. In response, WITNESS introduces the Truly Innovative and Effective AI Detection (TRIED) Benchmark, a new framework for evaluating detection tools based on their real-world impact and capacity for innovation. Drawing on frontline experiences, deceptive AI cases, and global consultations, the report outlines how detection tools must evolve to become truly innovative and relevant by meeting diverse linguistic, cultural, and technological contexts. It offers practical guidance for developers, policy actors, and standards bodies to design accountable, transparent, and user-centered detection solutions, and incorporate sociotechnical considerations into future AI standards, procedures and evaluation frameworks. By adopting the TRIED Benchmark, stakeholders can drive innovation, safeguard public trust, strengthen AI literacy, and contribute to a more resilient global information credibility.


Think Twice Before Creating That ChatGPT Action Figure

WIRED

At the start of April, an influx of action figure started appearing on social media sites including LinkedIn and X. Each figure depicted the person who had created it with uncanny accuracy, complete with personalized accessories such as reusable coffee cups, yoga mats, and headphones. All this is possible because of OpenAI's new GPT-4o-powered image generator, which supercharges ChatGPT's ability to edit pictures, render text, and more. OpenAI's ChatGPT image generator can also create pictures in the style of Japanese animated film company Studio Ghibli--a trend that quickly went viral, too. The images are fun and easy to make--all you need is a free ChatGPT account and a photo.


Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The expansion of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models has raised growing concerns about their potential to generate undesirable or harmful content, ranging from fabricated depictions of public figures to sexually explicit images. To mitigate these risks, prior work has devised machine unlearning techniques that attempt to erase unwanted concepts through fine-tuning. However, in this paper, we introduce a new threat model, Toxic Erasure (ToxE), and demonstrate how recent unlearning algorithms, including those explicitly designed for robustness, can be circumvented through targeted backdoor attacks. The threat is realized by establishing a link between a trigger and the undesired content. Subsequent unlearning attempts fail to erase this link, allowing adversaries to produce harmful content. We instantiate ToxE via two established backdoor attacks: one targeting the text encoder and another manipulating the cross-attention layers. Further, we introduce Deep Intervention Score-based Attack (DISA), a novel, deeper backdoor attack that optimizes the entire U-Net using a score-based objective, improving the attack's persistence across different erasure methods. We evaluate five recent concept erasure methods against our threat model. For celebrity identity erasure, our deep attack circumvents erasure with up to 82% success, averaging 57% across all erasure methods. For explicit content erasure, ToxE attacks can elicit up to 9 times more exposed body parts, with DISA yielding an average increase by a factor of 2.9. These results highlight a critical security gap in current unlearning strategies.


20min-XD: A Comparable Corpus of Swiss News Articles

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present 20min-XD (20 Minuten cross-lingual document-level), a French-German, document-level comparable corpus of news articles, sourced from the Swiss online news outlet 20 Minuten/20 minutes. Our dataset comprises around 15,000 article pairs spanning 2015 to 2024, automatically aligned based on semantic similarity. We detail the data collection process and alignment methodology. Furthermore, we provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus. The resulting dataset exhibits a broad spectrum of cross-lingual similarity, ranging from near-translations to loosely related articles, making it valuable for various NLP applications and broad linguistically motivated studies. We publicly release the dataset in document- and sentence-aligned versions and code for the described experiments.