The language that elected members of the US Congress use in debate increasingly includes words such as "phony" and "doubt" over words such as "proof" and "reason". This linguistic trend away from evidence in favour of intuition was revealed in an artificial intelligence analysis of millions of congressional speech transcripts. It also coincides with both greater political polarisation in Congress and a decline in the number of laws that get enacted through Congress, says Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol in the UK. How does ChatGPT work and do AI-powered chatbots "think" like us? "We can think that truth is something we can achieve based on analysis of evidence, or we can think of it as the result of intuition or'gut feeling'," says Lewandowsky. "Those notions of honesty and truth are expressed in how we use everyday language."

In this series of articles, we're publishing summaries with some of the key takeaways from a few of workshops held at the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025). The first ever workshop on "Open Source AI for Mainstream Use" was held on March 4, 2025 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. The goal of this workshop was to bring the researchers and practitioners into a single forum to discuss topics at the intersection of AI and open source and demonstrate relevant technology. Overall, the participants appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of this workshop and are looking forward to repeating it next year. This first edition of the FLUID workshop focused on the emerging challenges and opportunities in federated learning and intelligent decentralization, bringing together a growing international community of researchers working across optimization, privacy, scalability, and practical deployment of decentralized learning systems.

Black Mirror Season 7 takes some cues from Old Hollywood romance in "Hotel Reverie," an episode that combines classic films like Casablanca and Brief Encounter with fictional AI moviemaking tech. Issa Rae stars as A-list actor Brandy Friday, who's signed on to star in a remake of the vintage British film Hotel Reverie. There's just one catch: This isn't a normal movie shoot. Instead, thanks to a new system called Redream, Brandy's consciousness will be projected into Hotel Reverie. There, she'll replace the male lead, the dashing Dr. Alex Palmer, and act against AI constructs of the film's characters in real time.

The audience watched, heads nodding, as Wilson tapped out code line by line on the projected screen--tweaking sounds, looping beats, pulling a face when she messed up. Wilson is a live coder. Instead of using purpose-built software like most electronic music producers, live coders create music by writing the code to generate it on the fly. It's an improvised performance art known as algorave. "It's kind of boring when you go to watch a show and someone's just sitting there on their laptop," she says.

Samsung's Ballie, a ball-shaped robot that the company's been working on for five years, is finally coming to market. The company originally announced Ballie in 2020, and displayed a redesigned version during CES 2024. Now, the home AI companion robot – as Samsung calls it – is actually becoming a real product. It will be able to move around the house, and engage in "natural, conversational interactions" to help you out with stuff like setting reminders, greeting people at the door, and telling you you look beautiful (or recommend a different shirt). Ballie can hear and see you, as well as move around the house freely, though most technical details are absent from Samsung's announcement.

OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman have counter-sued its co-founder turned competitor Elon Musk, accusing the billionaire of unfair and fraudulent business practices. Specifically, ChatGPT's owners claim that Musk's 97.375 billion offer to buy it out in February was a "sham bid" deliberately intended to impede OpenAI's efforts to raise funding. "Through press attacks, malicious campaigns broadcast to Musk's more than 200 million followers on the social media platform he controls [X], a pretextual demand for corporate records, harassing legal claims, and a sham bid for OpenAI's assets, Musk has tried every tool available to harm OpenAI," read the lawsuit. Filed to a California district court on Wednesday, OpenAI's countersuit alleges that Musk's offer to purchase the AI organisation for 97.375 billion was not genuine, and was in fact orchestrated to gain an unfair business advantage. Though Musk was one of OpenAI's founders, he has since left and founded competitor xAI.

Plenty of TV dramas dive into twisted tales of murder, but none do it quite like Black Mirror. Killers in this sci-fi thriller anthology come in unexpected forms, like a ruthless architect on a rampage ("Crocodile"), a heartbroken ex on a holiday visit ("White Christmas"), or a swarm of electronic bees compelled by social media ("Hated in the Nation"). Now, following up on the true crime commentary in Season 6's "Loch Henry," Season 7 offers "Plaything," a story about a ranting gamer who is tied to a decades-old cold case. While the tech on display in this episode is so advanced it might well make contemporary gamers drool or shudder, the murder at the story's core is cryptically familiar. There are a couple of clues amid the mystery that suggest the episode's rambling protagonist, Cameron Paul Walker (Peter Capaldi), is inspired by the late convicted killer and star of The Jinx, Robert Durst.

A 2bn ( 1.6bn) British startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate realistic avatars has struck a licensing deal with the stock footage firm Shutterstock to help develop its technology. Synthesia will pay the US-based Shutterstock an undisclosed sum to use its library of corporate video footage to train its latest AI model. It expects that incorporating the clips into its model will produce even more realistic expressions, vocal tones and body language from the avatars. "Thanks to this partnership with Shutterstock, we hope to try out new approaches that will … increase the realism and expressiveness of our AI generated avatars, bringing them closer to human-like performances," said Synthesia. Synthesia uses human actors to generate digital avatars of people, which are then deployed by companies in corporate videos in a range of scenarios such as advising on cybersecurity, calculating water bills and how to communicate better at work.

Fujitsu and others have developed a device that uses artificial intelligence technology to judge the fat content of frozen albacore tuna, a widely used indicator to determine the quality of the fish. Without relying on trained human visual inspections, the automated inspection device makes it possible to quickly determine whether frozen tuna portions should be distributed and labeled as high-quality, fatty bintoro tuna or used to make processed products. It is thus expected to help expand the distribution of albacore tuna that can be eaten raw, the developers said Wednesday. The companies will launch the device in Japan in June, targeting seafood processing firms and others. They aim to broaden the scope of automatic judgments to also cover other fish species with high distribution volumes, such as yellowfin tuna and bonitos, enabling assessments of the freshness, texture and taste of the fish as well.

Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future. Each new innovation gets an allegory: smartphones as tools for a new age caste system, robot dogs as overzealous human hunters, drones as a murderous swarm, artificial intelligence as new age necromancy, virtual reality and brain chips as seizure-inducing nightmares, to name a few. It is a must-watch, but must we take it so seriously? Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit.