With his professed concern about fake accounts on Twitter, Elon Musk appears to be grasping at legal straws in an attempt to back out of his commitment to buy the social networking company for $54.20 a share, or at least to pay less for it. But his gambit has shined a light on a real scourge of online companies and their users. Counting the autonomous accounts that mimic real people is just as slippery as valuing companies. A 2020 study by Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser looking at thousands of Twitter accounts, including hundreds of verified politicians as well as "obvious" bots, found Botometer, the industry-standard learning algorithm trained to calculate the likelihood an account is a bot, yields imprecise scores leading to both false negatives and false positives.

'Special Report' All-Star Panel reacts to the Senate voting to block a bill that would'codify' abortion nationwide. The Washington Post is facing accusations of activism over a report urging video game companies to take a stand on Roe v. Wade as the Supreme Court mulls overturning the decades-long precedent protecting the legalization of abortions on a federal level. On Wednesday, video game reporters Nathan Grayson and Shannon Liao penned a piece with the headline, "As Roe v. Wade repeal looms, video game industry stays mostly silent," documenting how giants in the gaming world are largely staying out of the abortion debate. The article began by citing Bungie, the "Destiny 2" studio owned by Sony that published a statement "in support of reproductive rights" that decried the overturning of Roe v. Wade among other studios and indie developers. The reporters appeared to side with the company as it faced viral backlash from critics, writing, "Bungie, for its part, stood firm."

We are presently living in an age of "artificial intelligence" -- but not how the companies selling "AI" would have you believe. According to Silicon Valley, machines are rapidly surpassing human performance on a variety of tasks from mundane, but well-defined and useful ones like automatic transcription to much vaguer skills like "reading comprehension" and "visual understanding." According to some, these skills even represent rapid progress toward "Artificial General Intelligence," or systems which are capable of learning new skills on their own. Given these grand and ultimately false claims, we need media coverage that holds tech companies to account. Far too often, what we get instead is breathless "gee whiz" reporting, even in venerable publications like The New York Times.

Jack Clark, co-chair of the 2022 AI Index Report published by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), has declared that "2021 was the year that AI went from an emerging technology to a mature technology--we're no longer dealing with a speculative part of scientific research, but instead something that has real-world impact, both positive and negative". The report highlights that private sector investment in AI doubled in that year. Is it adopting AI at a similar pace? And what impact is AI having? JournalismAI gathered a group of news media executives from around the world in a private seminar at the International Journalism Festival to discuss their AI hopes and fears and strategies.

Since completing a degree in journalism, Aimee has had her fair share of covering various topics, including business, retail, manufacturing, and travel. She continues to expand her repertoire as a tech journalist with ZDNet. Google Cloud has announced the general availability of TPU virtual machines (VMs) for artificial intelligence workloads. Google Cloud said embedding acceleration with Cloud TPU can help businesses lower cost associated with ranking and recommendation use-cases which commonly rely on deeply neural network-based algorithms that can be costly to run. "They tend to use large amounts of data and can be difficult and expensive to train and deploy with traditional ML infrastructure," Google Cloud said in a blog post.

The panel on'The Five' sounds off on DHS chief's defense of new bureaucracy The Biden administration announced the establishment of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) last week to be created within the Homeland Security Department (DHS), aiming to counter "misinformation related to homeland security." There are many unknowns about DGB. For example, we don't know how the members of DGB will be selected, what kind of power it will have, and how it defines misinformation. But the early signs are not promising. The vaguely defined roles and authorities of DGB have alarmed Americans, and many see the agency as the "Ministry of Truth" that George Orwell warned us about in his dystopian novel "1984."

Sonam is a globally recognized researcher in the field of machine learning in finance & quantitative investing. She has worked with HSBC Edelweiss & Qplum where she has built and handled large-scale portfolios & trading algorithms in US & India. Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.

New research* has found that one in three (37%) employees consider their current job to be at risk from automation and digital transformation. Around a third of women (33%) and over two-fifths (43%) of men consider it likely or very likely that automation could replace their jobs. While over half (54%) of those aged 18-to-24-years-old, compared to around a quarter (27%) of over-45s, believe that their job might not exist one day. Just because an occupation could become fully automated, however, doesn't mean it necessarily will. A more widely accepted view is that many roles will adapt and evolve and that new roles will be created, as even more work tasks and business processes – particularly those that are more routine or repetitive – can be done efficiently by machines.

Disinformation has become a global problem affecting citizens, governments and businesses. Identifying and isolating so-called "fake news" poses a major challenge across today's growing digital information ecosystem. But advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could increasingly help online information users sort out fact from fiction. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) collects data on how misinformation – or disinformation, when deliberate – travels and spreads. The index, put out by a US-based non-profit organization, can help governments, media professionals, and other web users assess the trustworthiness of online content.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Researchers in Texas have created an enzyme variant that can break down plastics that would typically take hundreds of years to dissolve in a matter of hours or days. The creation by officials at The University of Texas at Austin could solve the problem of how to rid the world of billions of tons of plastic piling up in landfills and polluting natural lands and water. "The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process," Hal Alper, professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin said in a statement.