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US warships came under sustained missile and drone attack from Houthi fighters as they sailed off the coast of Yemen, the Pentagon has confirmed, with the armed group claiming it attacked the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and two US destroyers. Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder said on Tuesday that the United States military's Central Command (CENTCOM) forces "successfully repelled multiple Iranian backed Houthi attacks during a transit of the Bab al-Mandeb strait", which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Ryder told reporters at a news conference that two US-guided missile destroyers – the USS Stockdale and USS Spruance – were attacked by at least eight one-way attack drones, five antiship ballistic missiles and three antiship cruise missiles. All the Houthi drones and missiles "were successfully engaged and defeated", and neither of the US Navy ships were damaged or personnel hurt, he said. Ryder added that he was not aware of any attacks against the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

Meta is preparing to launch AI-enabled chatbots with unique personalities, according to a report by Financial Times. It looks like the first chatbot released will be none other than Abraham Lincoln, so you'll be able to ask good ole Honest Abe his thoughts on Barbenheimer or whatever. The company is also reportedly creating a surfer personality expressly for making travel plans. This is an attempt to boost engagement across Meta's social media platforms, as human-like discussions tend to be more interesting than droll robotic responses. The company hasn't announced which of these platforms would host Abe Lincoln and his pals, though previous reports indicated Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp would be recipients of this new technology.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, is developing a range of artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots with distinct personalities, including the persona of Abraham Lincoln, the Financial Times has reported. The tech giant is considering the launch of the Lincoln chatbot and a surfer chatbot that offers travel recommendations as soon as September, the newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing an unnamed person familiar with the plans. Like rivals such as Apple and Microsoft, Meta is focusing aggressively on AI. The social media giant last month made waves across the sector when it announced it would give away the code behind its AI large language model Llama 2 for free, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg arguing that "open source" AI is safer and more secure. Meta's reported plans come as the California-based social media company is struggling to retain users of Threads, its new Twitter-like platform, which has lost more than half of its users after record signups following its launch last month.

Attempts to ban generative AI such as ChatGPT are not all they are cracked up to be. To ban, or not to ban, that is the question. I would guess that if Shakespeare were around nowadays, he might have said something like that about the recent efforts to ban the use of a type of AI known as Generative AI, which is especially exemplified and popularized due to an AI app called ChatGPT. Some high-profile entities have been attempting to ban the use of ChatGPT. For example, the New York City (NYC) Department of Education recently announced that they were proceeding to block access to ChatGPT on its various networks and connected devices. The reported rationale for the ban consisted of indications that this AI app and the overall use of generative AI seemingly portend negative consequences for student learning. Students that opt to use ChatGPT are said to be undercutting the development of their crucial critical-thinking skills and undermining the growth of their problem-solving abilities. On top of those rather stoutly worrisome qualms, there is the undisputed fact that such AI can produce inaccurate outputs that contain errors and other factual maladies. The dangerous icing on the cake is the imagined possibility that the outputs could potentially be used in an unsafe manner by students that unknowingly rely upon said falsehoods. No such documented harms have yet surfaced that I've seen, so we'll need to just take at face value that this could potentially happen (I have discussed the range of possibilities in my postings; for example, some have posited that generative AI essays could tell someone to take medicines that they should not be taking or provide mental health advice that ought to be proffered by human mental health professionals, etc.).

What if Abraham Lincoln could address Congress today? Or your great grandmother could help run the family business? Researchers and entrepreneurs are starting to ponder how artificial intelligence could create versions of people after their deaths--not only as static replicas for the benefit of their loved ones but as evolving digital entities that may steer companies or influence world events. Numerous startups are already anticipating growing demand for digital personas, including Replika, an app that learns to replicate a person in the form of a chatbot, and HereAfter AI, which records people's life stories and uses them to create a replica embedded in a smart speaker. Even Big Tech seems to acknowledge the potential: Microsoft Corp. recently patented a method of using chatbots to preserve historical figures and living people.

US researchers have created a photo colourising tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create eerily lifelike images of deceased historical figures.

Artificial intelligence is turning old pictures of people into short, animated clips that show them moving and blinking. The feature, called Deep Nostalgia, comes from genealogy company MyHeritage. It uses machine learning to create facial expressions and movements that look super realistic, Tom's Guide reported Tuesday. In a blog post, MyHeritage shared social media posts from users who were thrilled to see their loved ones who'd passed come to life, if only for a few moments. The clips show the people in black-and-white or faded photos tilting their heads and looking around.

Walter Bradley Center's director Robert J. Marks was joined for this week's podcast by economics professor Gary Smith. This episode, When I Nod My Head, Hit It! And Other Commands that Confuse AI, explores the fact that computers don't have common sense. Which means that as data gets larger and larger, nonsensical coincidences become more probable, not less. Smith, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College, is the author of The AI Delusion (Oxford University Press, 2018).

GPT-2 generates text that is far more realistic than any text generation system before it. OpenAI was so shocked by the quality of the output that they decided that the full GPT-2 model was too dangerous to release because it could be used to create endless amounts of fake news that could fool the public or clog up search engines like Google. How easy it is for an average person to generate fake news that could trick a real person and how good are the results? Let's explore how a system like this could work and how much of a threat it is. Let's try to build a newspaper populated with fake, computer generated news: To populate News You Can't Use, we'll create a Python script that can'clone' a news site like the New York Times and generate artificial news stories on the same topics.