Politico became one of the first newsrooms last year to win a union contract that included rules on how the media outlet can deploy artificial intelligence. The PEN Guild, which represents Politico and its sister publication, environment and energy site E&E News, is now gearing up for another first. The union's members allege that the AI provisions in their contract have been violated, and they're preparing for a groundbreaking legal dispute with management. The outcome could set a precedent for how much input journalists ultimately have over how AI is used in their newsrooms. Last year, Politico began publishing AI-generated live news summaries during big political events like the Democratic National Convention and the US vice presidential debates.

EXCLUSIVE: First lady Melania Trump is launching an audiobook of her memoir using artificial intelligence (AI) audio technology in multiple languages, Fox News Digital has learned. The first lady released her first memoir, "Melania," last year. This week, she is breaking new ground by releasing "Melania, the Audiobook," which has been "created entirely" with AI. "I am proud to be at the forefront of publishing's new frontier – the intersection of artificial intelligence technology and audio," Trump told Fox News Digital. The first lady said ElevenLabs AI developed "an AI-generated replica of my voice under strict supervision, which will establish an unforgettable connection with my personal story, in multiple languages for listeners worldwide." ElevenLabs AI CEO Mati Staniszewski told Fox News Digital that they are "excited that Melania Trump trusted our technology to power this first-of-its-kind audiobook project."

Good Job is Slate's advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? One of my dearest friends was recently squeezed into an unwanted early retirement by DOGE. The work she was doing at the government agency where she's spent most of her career is on the verge of being eliminated or slashed into oblivion, and it kills me to know that her life's work is about to be reversed. I want to support her through this.

Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, including 35 over the Moscow region, after the ministry said a day earlier that it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones. Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said one person was killed in a Russian artillery attack on the region. H said over the past day, 35 areas in Kherson, including Kherson city, came under artillery shelling and air attacks, wounding 11 people. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said the "most intense situation" is in the Donetsk region, and the army is continuing "active operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions". Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, including 35 over the Moscow region, after the ministry said a day earlier that it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for efficiently inferring optima of an expensive black-box function via a sequence of queries. Existing informationtheoretic BO procedures aim to make queries that most reduce the uncertainty about optima, where the uncertainty is captured by Shannon entropy. However, an optimal measure of uncertainty would, ideally, factor in how we intend to use the inferred quantity in some downstream procedure. In this paper, we instead consider a generalization of Shannon entropy from work in statistical decision theory [13, 39], which contains a broad class of uncertainty measures parameterized by a problem-specific loss function corresponding to a downstream task. We first show that special cases of this entropy lead to popular acquisition functions used in BO procedures such as knowledge gradient, expected improvement, and entropy search. We then show how alternative choices for the loss yield a flexible family of acquisition functions that can be customized for use in novel optimization settings.

In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of the same interest and in the minority of their respective districts; such a set of individuals have a justified complaint with how the redistricting plan was drawn. A redistricting plan with no deviating groups is called locally fair. We show that the problem of auditing a given plan for local fairness is NP-complete. We present an MCMC approach for auditing as well as ranking redistricting plans. We also present a dynamic programming based algorithm for the auditing problem that we use to demonstrate the efficacy of our MCMC approach. Using these tools, we test local fairness on real-world election data, showing that it is indeed possible to find plans that are almost or exactly locally fair. Further, we show that such plans can be generated while sacrificing very little in terms of compactness and existing fairness measures such as competitiveness of the districts or seat shares of the plans.

A routine training flight over Arizona in January 2023 took an unusual turn when a U.S. Air Force F-16D was struck by what was initially reported as an unidentified object, but now U.S. defense officials say was a small drone. Fox News confirmed that the incident, which occurred near Gila Bend, Arizona, on Jan. 19, 2023, was a routine training mission and was witnessed by the instructor pilot seated in the rear of the two-seat aircraft. According to a U.S. defense official, the pilot observed a "mostly white and orange object" collide with the left side of the aircraft canopy, the transparent covering over the cockpit. Initially, the object was thought to be a bird, a common hazard for aircraft. But after conducting checks during the flight and a detailed inspection upon landing at Tucson International Airport, the crew found "zero evidence" of a bird strike.

We present an approach to encode a speech signal into a fixed-size representation which minimizes the cosine loss with the existing massively multilingual LASER text embedding space. Sentences are close in this embedding space, independently of their language and modality, either text or audio. Using a similarity metric in that multimodal embedding space, we perform mining of audio in German, French, Spanish and English from Librivox against billions of sentences from Common Crawl. This yielded more than twenty thousand hours of aligned speech translations. To evaluate the automatically mined speech/text corpora, we train neural speech translation systems for several languages pairs.

Despite their remarkable successes, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including vision-and-language models (VLMs) and unimodal language models (ULMs), fail to understand precise semantics. For example, semantically equivalent sentences expressed using different lexical compositions elicit diverging representations. The degree of this divergence and its impact on encoded semantics is not very well understood.

CNN host Jake Tapper told Joe Scarborough during a Wednesday conversation on "Morning Joe" that former President Biden made an effort to convince the MSNBC host that he was fit to run for re-election. The Washington Post editorial board called for more oversight of the Oval Office on Wednesday to ensure a cover-up of the president's health doesn't happen again following revelations in a bombshell book alleging the White House hid former President Joe Biden's decline from the public. "It now seems that, for a considerable time, Biden might have lacked the stamina and cognitive capacity the job demands -- and that his family and closest aides concealed this from the public," the paper's editorial board wrote. "Their apparent decision to put personal loyalties ahead of their duty to the country must be reckoned with. A legal mechanism should be considered to ensure that this doesn't happen again," the board proposed.