For Jimmi Simpson, getting cast on Black Mirror back in Season 4 was a dream come true. The character actor who's won critics' praise on everything from the madcap sitcom It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia to the sci-fi Western WestWorld to David Fincher's masterful true crime thriller Zodiac was a big fan of Charlie Brooker's anthology series. "When I first was invited to come for ['USS Callister'], it was my favorite show," Simpson said of Black Mirror in a Zoom interview with Mashable ahead of the Season 7 debut. And I had the exact same feeling [coming back for'USS Callister: Into Infinity']." Simpson was awed by the storytelling Brooker displayed within Black Mirror. "It's reminiscent to me of my early loves of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Rod Serling [The Twilight Zone].

SAVE 300: As of April 15, the Google Pixel 9 Pro is on sale for 919 at Amazon. Amazon's Daily Deals are back at it with incredible discounts on the Google Pixel range. If you're looking to buy a smartphone outright, and one that has some really impressive features, you'll love the latest deal on the Google Pixel Pro. As of April 15, the Google Pixel Pro is reduced to 919 from 1,219. This deal is specific to the 512GB option but is available across all colorways, and each memory option has a discount. On top of the great memory storage, this is a super-smart smartphone with a 6.3-inch OLED display with vibrant colors.

SAVE 25: As of April 15, the Amazon Echo Show 5 is on sale for 64.99 at Amazon. Amazon's Echo Show 5 is a staple in its smart home lineup. A smart assistant with a screen, and available for under 100, you can't really go wrong. And as of April 15, there's a heavy discount on this model, making it the cheapest it has been so far this year. As of April 15, you can buy this device for 64.99, which is 5 cheaper than it was during Amazon's Big Spring Sale.

Tech expert Kurt Knutsson discusses how robots can milk, feed and clean cows on dairy farms, boosting efficiency and comfort. Picture this: A dairy barn full of cows being milked, fed and cleaned up after, but there's no farmer in sight. Sounds a bit unusual, right? Well, it's not as far-fetched as you might think. Thanks to cutting-edge agricultural robotics, this kind of scene is becoming more common.

In their work PROSAC: Provably Safe Certification for Machine Learning Models under Adversarial Attacks presented at AAAI 2025, Chen Feng, Ziquan Liu, Zhuo Zhi, Ilija Bogunovic, Carsten Gerner-Beuerle, and Miguel Rodrigues developed a new way to certify the performance of machine learning models in the presence of adversarial attacks with population-level risk guarantees. Here, Chen tells us more about their methodology, the main findings, and some of the implications of this work. This paper focuses on making machine learning models safer against adversarial attacks--those sneaky tweaks to data, like altering an image just enough to trick an AI into misclassifying it. We developed a new approach called PROSAC, which stands for PROvably SAfe Certification. It's a way to test and certify that a model can hold up under any kind of attack, not just a few specific ones.

As I also write in my story, this push raises alarms from some AI safety experts about whether large language models are fit to analyze subtle pieces of intelligence in situations with high geopolitical stakes. It also accelerates the US toward a world where AI is not just analyzing military data but suggesting actions--for example, generating lists of targets. Proponents say this promises greater accuracy and fewer civilian deaths, but many human rights groups argue the opposite. With that in mind, here are three open questions to keep your eye on as the US military, and others around the world, bring generative AI to more parts of the so-called "kill chain." Talk to as many defense-tech companies as I have and you'll hear one phrase repeated quite often: "human in the loop."

The chip designer Nvidia has said it will build 500bn ( 378bn) worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years, in a sign of manufacturers investing in operations on American soil amid Donald Trump's tariffs. The announcement comes after Trump reiterated threats on Sunday to impose imminent tariffs on the semiconductors that Nvidia makes mostly in Taiwan, and after the chipmaker's chief executive, Jensen Huang, dined at the president's Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this month. Nvidia, whose chips have helped drive the huge wave of artificial intelligence (AI) development in recent years, will work with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories so it can create "supercomputers" completely within the US. Production of its popular Blackwell graphics processing unit has already started at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's plant in Phoenix, Arizona, Nvidia said. Construction of new plants is also under way with the manufacturers Foxconn in Houston and Wistron in Dallas. Mass production at both plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12 to 15 months.

Men who have virtual "wives" and neurodiverse people using chatbots to help them navigate relationships are among a growing range of ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming human connection and intimacy. Dozens of readers shared their experiences of using personified AI chatbot apps, engineered to simulate human-like interactions by adaptive learning and personalised responses, in response to a Guardian callout. Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor".

Police have arrested four people for selling obscene images created using generative AI in the first crackdown of its kind, local media reports said Tuesday. The four, aged in their 20s to 50s, allegedly made posters featuring indecent images of women and sold them on internet auction sites, public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said, citing police sources. Police could not immediately confirm the reports. NHK said the suspects had used free AI software to create images of naked adult women, who do not exist in the real world, using prompts including terms such as "legs open". They reportedly sold the posters for several thousand yen (several multiples of 7) each.

As artists fight to protect their works from being used to train AI models, Jack Dorsey wants to eliminate intellectual property (IP) laws altogether. On Friday, the cofounder of X (then Twitter) and Block (then Square) posted on X, "delete all IP law." Elon Musk, the current leader of X, chimed in to comment, "I agree." Taken together, these two statements contain just six words, yet they could have big implications for the future of intellectual property in the AI era. Earlier that Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was interviewed by TED's Chris Anderson at its eponymous conference. Anderson showed Altman an AI-generated cartoon strip of Charlie Brown, saying, "it looks like IP theft."