Opposition parties in Italy have complained to the communications watchdog about a series of AI-generated images published on social media by deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini's far-right party, calling them "racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic", the Guardian has learned. The centre-left Democratic party (PD), with the Greens and Left Alliance, filed a complaint on Thursday with Agcom, the Italian communications regulatory authority, alleging the fake images used by the League contained "almost all categories of hate speech". Over the past month, dozens of apparently AI‑generated photos have appeared on the League's social channels, including on Facebook, Instagram and X. The images frequently depict men of colour, often armed with knives, attacking women or police officers. Antonio Nicita, a PD senator, said: "In the images published by Salvini's party and generated by AI there are almost all categories of hate speech, from racism and xenophobia to Islamophobia. They are using AI to target specific categories of people – immigrants, Arabs – who are portrayed as potential criminals, thieves and rapists. "These images are not only violent but also deceptive: by blurring the faces of the victims it is as if they want to protect the identity of the person attacked, misleading users into believing the photo is real.

LG TVs will soon leverage an artificial intelligence model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. The company plans to incorporate a partner company's AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them.

Reachy 2 is touted as a "lab partner for the AI era." The folks at Hugging Face, the open-source artificial intelligence gurus, just jumped into the world of robotics by acquiring Pollen Robotics. And right out of the gate, they are offering the Reachy 2, a super-interesting humanoid robot designed as a "lab partner for the AI era." Ready to dive in and see what all the buzz is about? GET SECURITY ALERTS & EXPERT TECH TIPS – SIGN UP FOR KURT'S'THE CYBERGUY REPORT' NOW So, what makes Reachy 2 stand out?

Microbes living beneath Antarctica's ice sheet may survive on methane generated by geothermal heat rising from deep below Earth's surface. The discovery could have implications for assessing the potential for life to survive on icy worlds beyond Earth. "These could be hotspots for microbes that are adapted to live in these areas," says Gavin Piccione at Brown University in Rhode Island. We already know that there is methane beneath Antarctica's ice sheet.

For the second time in the last month, Microsoft employees disrupted high-level executives speaking at an event celebrating the company's 50th anniversary on 4 April, in protest against the company's role in Israel's ongoing siege on Gaza. The two were fired within days. The Microsoft president Brad Smith and the former CEO Steve Ballmer were shouted down at Seattle's Great Hall on 20 March by a current and former employee. The April event was preceded by a rally outside that also included current and former employees of the tech giant. Protesters projected a sign onto the hall's wall saying, "Microsoft powers genocide" – a reference to Israel's extensive use of the company's AI and cloud computing services since 7 October 2023, as "the IDF's insatiable demand for bombs was matched by its need for greater access to cloud computing services," the Guardian reported.

The world of artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been preoccupied with advancing generative AI beyond simple tests that AI models easily pass. The famed Turing Test has been "beaten" in some sense, and controversy rages over whether the newest models are being built to game the benchmark tests that measure performance. The problem, say scholars at Google's DeepMind unit, is not the tests themselves but the limited way AI models are developed. The data used to train AI is too restricted and static, and will never propel AI to new and better abilities. In a paper posted by DeepMind last week, part of a forthcoming book by MIT Press, researchers propose that AI must be allowed to have "experiences" of a sort, interacting with the world to formulate goals based on signals from the environment.

The most accurate clock in space launches within days and will begin building a highly synchronised network out of the best clocks on Earth. But the project, decades in preparation, will only operate for a few years before it burns up as the International Space Station deorbits at the end of the decade. NASA's most accurate atomic clock will be tested on a mission to Venus The Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will generate a time signal with unprecedented accuracy and then transmit it via laser to nine ground stations as it passes overhead at 27,000 kilometres per hour. This network of clocks will be in extremely close synchronisation and provide highly accurate timekeeping around the world. The result is that ACES will be able to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that the passing of time is affected by the strength of gravity, with great accuracy.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. James Cameron's stance on artificial intelligence has evolved over the past few years, and he feels Hollywood needs to embrace it in a few different ways. Cameron joined the board of directors for Stability AI last year, explaining his decision on the "Boz to the Future" podcast last week. "The goal was to understand the space, to understand what's on the minds of the developers," he said. How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow." He continued by saying the shift to AI is a necessary one. James Cameron wants Hollywood to implement AI more for big-budget films. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I've always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see – 'Dune,' 'Dune: Part Two' or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films – we've got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half. That's about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? Cameron doesn't think films are ultimately "a big target" for companies like OpenAI. "Their goal is not to make GenAI movies.

Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, its hybrid reasoning model, is now available in preview for the standalone Gemini app. On Thursday, the company rolled out an "early version" of the model with updated reasoning capabilities. It can also better determine how much processing power or "thinking" to apply to each request. The Gemini 2.5 Flash model is also available on Google AI Studio and Vertex AI with controls for developers to manually turn off its reasoning compute and budget the amount of compute applied to tasks, therefore having more control over the amount of tokens they spend. Gemini 2.5 Flash is part of the Gemini 2.5 family of models launched earlier this month and also includes Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Just weeks after unveiling Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google is on to its next top-performing model. On Thursday, the company released an "early version" of Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview in the Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. The model has a knowledge cutoff of January 2025. It can take text, images, video, and audio prompts, and has a one-million-token context window. Also: Gemini Pro 2.5 is a stunningly capable coding assistant - and a big threat to ChatGPT Google says the new version expands on Flash 2.0 with improved reasoning, but "without compromising its renowned speed or cost."