Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Do AI chatbots packaged inside plush animals really help children, or do they threaten vital developmental milestones? Companies market them as "screen-free playmates" for toddlers, but pediatric experts warn these toys could trade human connection for machine conversation. Toys like Grem, Grok and Rudi are designed to bond with kids through voice and conversation.

Grading handwritten, open-ended responses remains a major bottleneck in large university STEM courses. We introduce Pensieve (https://www.pensieve.co), an AI-assisted grading platform that leverages large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and evaluate student work, providing instructors with rubric-aligned scores, transcriptions, and confidence ratings. Unlike prior tools that focus narrowly on specific tasks like transcription or rubric generation, Pensieve supports the entire grading pipeline-from scanned student submissions to final feedback-within a human-in-the-loop interface. Pensieve has been deployed in real-world courses at over 20 institutions and has graded more than 300,000 student responses. We present system details and empirical results across four core STEM disciplines: Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. Our findings show that Pensieve reduces grading time by an average of 65%, while maintaining a 95.4% agreement rate with instructor-assigned grades for high-confidence predictions.

Microsoft announced a series of upcoming new features for Copilot PCs and Windows 11. One of the most compelling updates for Copilot PCs is agent, which provides on-device AI assistance for adjusting a PC's settings. Some of the example tweaks Microsoft gave for this application are issues such as "how to control my PC by voice" and "my mouse pointer is too small." Not only can the agent answer these types of queries, but if the necessary permissions are granted, the AI can also make the requested changes for a user. The blog post specifies that only questions in English are "initially" supported, which hints that more languages will be added at a later date.

If you could find out exactly how and when you'll die, would you want to know? A new AI-powered death clock claims to be able to do just that, predicting the method and age at which you will die, right down to the second. The free website, called the Death Clock, uses AI to analyze age, weight, and general outlook on life to'accurately' predict how long you have left to live. It also asks users to input information on lifestyle habits like drinking, smoking, diet, and exercise. Users can also reveal their alleged cause of death and see how their life expectancy compares to other people of the same sex and body mass index (BMI).

The connected fitness boom of pandemic-era lockdowns is long behind us (hopefully), but Growl, a new startup, is still looking to bolt a workout to the wall of your home. Think of Tonal, except instead of resistance training, it's a boxing-inspired heavy bag session. The wall-mounted Growl is, according to the company, powered by AI and Unreal Engine and appears to have overhead projectors, which beam the image of a life-sized coach onto the convex punching surface. Besides the projection, the bag has an interactive coaching system to help motivate users. It also supposedly supports side-by-side training, which works great for training partners.

A vishing attack is a form of social engineering where attackers use phone calls to deceive individuals into disclosing sensitive information, such as personal data, financial information, or security credentials. Attackers exploit the perceived urgency and authenticity of voice communication to manipulate victims, often posing as legitimate entities like banks or tech support. Vishing is a particularly serious threat as it bypasses security controls designed to protect information. In this work, we study the potential for vishing attacks to escalate with the advent of AI. In theory, AI-powered software bots may have the ability to automate these attacks by initiating conversations with potential victims via phone calls and deceiving them into disclosing sensitive information. To validate this thesis, we introduce ViKing, an AI-powered vishing system developed using publicly available AI technology. It relies on a Large Language Model (LLM) as its core cognitive processor to steer conversations with victims, complemented by a pipeline of speech-to-text and text-to-speech modules that facilitate audio-text conversion in phone calls. Through a controlled social experiment involving 240 participants, we discovered that ViKing has successfully persuaded many participants to reveal sensitive information, even those who had been explicitly warned about the risk of vishing campaigns. Interactions with ViKing's bots were generally considered realistic. From these findings, we conclude that tools like ViKing may already be accessible to potential malicious actors, while also serving as an invaluable resource for cyber awareness programs.

As Apple did several years ago, Google has caught on that running is one of the most accessible and nerdiest sports. Assuming you don't have mobility issues, all you need is a good pair of running shoes and a pair of shorts. It's easy to see improvement quickly, especially if you're just getting started. Among the new touted features for the Pixel Watch 3 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is holistic running guidance, under an umbrella Google calls Plan, Run, Reflect, found in the Fitbit app. You can build custom runs on the app on your Pixel phone or watch; get real-time interval guidance as you're running; look up your stats and advanced running analysis on a specialized running dashboard; and get daily AI-powered run recommendations.

The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature--what happens in the OR stays in the OR--because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. Grantcharov jokes that when you ask "Who are the top three surgeons in the world?" a typical surgeon "always has a challenge identifying who the other two are." But after the initial humiliation over watching himself work, Grantcharov started to see the value in recording his operations. "There are so many small details that normally take years and years of practice to realize--that some surgeons never get to that point," he says. "Suddenly, I could see all these insights and opportunities overnight."

Burger fans in Pasadena, California will soon get to taste the future of fast food: a patented, AI-powered, short-order-cooking robot named Flippy. Flippy's makers said the new dining spot will be'the world's first operating restaurant where both ordering and every single cooking process are fully automated.' In addition to Flippy, responsible for deep frying chicken nuggets and French fries, a fellow'BurgerBot' will be grilling up patties, and a biometric payment system, PopID, will take customers' orders. While Flippy got its first job in the fast food industry back in 2017, serving at 50 CaliBurger restaurants after training, the new'CaliExpress by Flippy' will be the first time the rail-mounted mechanical arm will get to work with more of its own kind. Holding company Cali Group -- which owns Miso Robotics, the firm behind Flippy -- said it hoped the new CaliExpress will'inspire the next generation of kitchen AI and automation entrepreneurs' by offering educational tours and robotics exhibits.

'Accountability can't be transferred to any software system,' software engineer Laura Nolan unpacks use of AI in war.