Artists including Paul McCartney and Tom Stoppard have thrown their weight behind a campaign against the changes in a series of high-level interventions. The government's commitments will be made in amendments to the data bill, which has become a vehicle for campaigners against the changes and is due to return to the Commons on Wednesday next week. The move has already been dismissed by critics. Ed Newton-Rex, a the British composer and prominent campaigner against the government proposals, said there was a "ton of evidence" showing the mooted changes were "terrible for creators". He added: "We don't need an impact assessment to tell us this."

AI has transformed everyday tasks such as writing, coding -- even shopping. Now, Visa is introducing an initiative to prepare its payment network for a new era of agentic AI shopping experiences. On Wednesday, the company unveiled Visa Intelligent Commerce at the Visa Global Product Drop. According to the release, this initiative opens Visa's payment network to developers and engineers who are building agentic AI shopping experiences that find and buy products for users. Moreover, Visa Intelligent Commerce is a commercial partner program for AI platforms that includes a suite of integrated APIs developers can use to deploy Visa's AI commerce capabilities.

Meta is set to report its first quarter earnings on Wednesday after the bell, and investors will be looking for news on whether the company met its quarterly revenue goals of somewhere between 39.5bn and 41.8bn. Wall Street is projecting the company will post 41.36bn in revenue on 5.21 in earnings per share. While Meta has repeatedly beaten Wall Street expectations in the past few quarters, analysts were disappointed by the first quarter revenue outlook Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg shared at the end of 2024. The company is also planning on spending up to 65bn on AI infrastructure by the end of 2025. Uncertainty over Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs may yet roil ad markets, clouding the company's financial outlook for near future quarters.

Over a decade ago, I sat in my living room with a bunch of nerds, tears pricking my eyes, as I saw the Curiosity rover's first blurry selfie taken on Mars. The NASA livestream had just confirmed the wheeled robot was alive and well and ready to start doing science! We cheered and hugged and imagined a future where our solar system would be full of robotic explorers, gathering all the data we would need to safely send humans in their wake.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com The past few years have seen the emergence of a great many AI companies. This is extremely exciting/alarming (delete according to whether you bought shares early), but it has also had a secondary consequence. Along with the proliferation of AI companies has come a proliferation of AI company logos.

Pinterest has long been a great platform for getting inspiration from crowdsourced images for everything from outfits to home decor to wedding planning. However, AI-generated images have slowly trickled into Pinterest's results, leaving users dissatisfied. To address the issue, on Wednesday, Pinterest announced it will display a label on image Pins that it detects were either generated or modified using generative AI. The "AI Modified" label will appear in the bottom left corner of images when viewing them up close, and the feature is being rolled out globally. Also: AI is ruining Pinterest.

The world's most popular language-learning app is becoming a lot more multilingual. In an announcement today, Duolingo said it is adding 148 new language courses, more than doubling the current number of offerings. Seven of the world's most popular languages -- Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin -- are now available in the app's 28 supported language interfaces. Also: Google's viral AI podcast tool can chat in over 50 languages now and it aced my Spanish test The new courses are primarily for beginning-level speakers and include immersive stories and DuoRadio to help with comprehension. More advanced-level courses will be rolled out over the next few months.

President Trump's tariff standoff with China has caused chaos, confusion, and major delays for companies of all shapes and sizes. As everyone waits to see what happens next, some businesses that depend on international trade are already feeling major impacts, saying that they might not meet their production deadlines. And one of those deadlines is pretty important: Christmas. Today on the show, we're joined by WIRED's senior business editor Louise Matsakis to talk through the latest on tariffs. Mentioned in this episode: Donald Trump Is Already Ruining Christmas by Zeyi Yang OpenAI Adds Shopping to ChatGPT in a Challenge to Google by Reece Rogers The Agonizing Task of Turning Europe's Power Back On by Natasha Bernal Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

Where does consciousness come from? Supporters and detractors of a leading theory of how consciousness arises are stuck in an increasingly bitter debate. Opponents suggest that integrated information theory (IIT), which claims that consciousness can be defined on a mathematical spectrum, is pseudoscience that could be misused to influence sensitive debates around abortion and the sentience of artificial intelligences – while supporters say the detractors are just jealous. Scientists have long sought to explain how the brain gives rise to conscious experience, but two prominent ideas have recently come to the fore: IIT and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT).…

Researchers have trained a new kind of large language model (LLM) using GPUs dotted across the world and fed private as well as public data--a move that suggests that the dominant way of building artificial intelligence could be disrupted. Flower AI and Vana, two startups pursuing unconventional approaches to building AI, worked together to create the new model, called Collective-1. Flower created techniques that allow training to be spread across hundreds of computers connected over the internet. The company's technology is already used by some firms to train AI models without needing to pool compute resources or data. Vana provided sources of data including private messages from X, Reddit, and Telegram.