How a 1993 plan to launch ads into space turned into a national freakout. In the 1990s, space was for sale. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 1993, Mike Lawson, an aerospace entrepreneur based in Roswell, Georgia, unveiled his vision for a brave new future of advertising: space billboards. This wasn't a half-baked scheme: Lawson had meticulous plans for a proposed 1996 launch: His team of engineers would shoot a package of tightly-wound mylar into orbit about 180 miles above the Earth.

No, That AI-Generated Country Song Isn't a No. 1 Hit Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? This week, many headlines declared that an AI-generated song, "Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust, had become the biggest country song in America. This is unequivocally not true. "Walk My Walk," a laughably generic country song about independence and defiance, had middling organic momentum on streaming and search before it topped Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart last week.

Avi Schiffmann says he's enjoying the angry reaction to the Friend AI pendant. I f you haven't already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion--a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace--you probably also have not seen Friend's recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I'll binge the entire series with you . Across the city, the ads are covered in graffiti criticizing the pendant ( it doesn't have eyes, bruh; CRINGE) as well as the idea of AI altogether ( AI wouldn't care if you lived or died); some vandals invite you to befriend a senior citizen instead of a chatbot, or volunteer with a community garden--you will meet cool people! Many of the ads have been ripped and torn.

WIRED's Politics Issue Cover Is Coming to a City Near You We're turning our latest cover into posters, billboards, and even a mural in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Here's how to find it. Here at WIRED, we tend to stick to journalism. We talk about our work to anyone who will listen--during podcasts, on social media, over dinner with our politely listening friends--but we tend to confine our bragging to the scoops we get, the stories we write. For our new politics issue, though, we decided to do something different and bring WIRED's work to outside, to you, directly.

The arrival of AI coding assistants in educational settings presents a paradigm shift, introducing a "new kid in the classroom" for both students and instructors. Thus, understanding the perceptions of these key actors about this new dynamic is critical. This exploratory study contributes to this area by investigating how these tools are shaping the experiences of novice programmers in an introductory programming course. Through a two-part exam, we investigated student perceptions by first providing access to AI support for a programming task and then requiring an extension of the solution without it. We collected Likert-scale and open-ended responses from 20 students to understand their perceptions on the challenges they faced. Our findings reveal that students perceived AI tools as helpful for grasping code concepts and boosting their confidence during the initial development phase. However, a noticeable difficulty emerged when students were asked to work unaided, pointing to potential overreliance and gaps in foundational knowledge transfer. These insights highlight a critical need for new pedagogical approaches that integrate AI effectively while effectively enhancing core programming skills, rather than impersonating them.

One of the challenging problems in Music Information Retrieval is the acquisition of enough non-copyrighted audio recordings for model training and evaluation. This study compares two Transformer-based neural network models for chord sequence recognition in audio recordings and examines the effectiveness of using an artificially generated dataset for this purpose. The models are trained on various combinations of Artificial Audio Multitracks (AAM), Schubert's Winterreise Dataset, and the McGill Billboard Dataset and evaluated with three metrics: Root, MajMin and Chord Content Metric (CCM). The experiments prove that even though there are certainly differences in complexity and structure between artificially generated and human-composed music, the former can be useful in certain scenarios. Specifically, AAM can enrich a smaller training dataset of music composed by a human or can even be used as a standalone training set for a model that predicts chord sequences in pop music, if no other data is available.

EXCLUSIVE: First lady Melania Trump is launching an audiobook of her memoir using artificial intelligence (AI) audio technology in multiple languages, Fox News Digital has learned. The first lady released her first memoir, "Melania," last year. This week, she is breaking new ground by releasing "Melania, the Audiobook," which has been "created entirely" with AI. "I am proud to be at the forefront of publishing's new frontier – the intersection of artificial intelligence technology and audio," Trump told Fox News Digital. The first lady said ElevenLabs AI developed "an AI-generated replica of my voice under strict supervision, which will establish an unforgettable connection with my personal story, in multiple languages for listeners worldwide." ElevenLabs AI CEO Mati Staniszewski told Fox News Digital that they are "excited that Melania Trump trusted our technology to power this first-of-its-kind audiobook project."

During the height of the Kendrick Lamar–Drake beef earlier this year, disses and responses were flying thick and fast across social media. In the midst of it all, comedian and creator Will Hatcher helped make history when legendary hip-hop producer Metro Boomin sampled Hatcher's song "BBL Drizzy" for his diss track instrumental of the same name. Everyone wanting to take shots at Drake rapped on the beat; Metro Boomin gained notoriety for, according to Billboard, becoming "the first major producer to use an AI-generated sample." Under his alias King Willonius, Hatcher had released "BBL Drizzy" in April, riffing on a Rick Ross post on X that had joked about Drake getting a Brazilian butt lift. The song did well on X as Ross' diss trended, but the viral hype inevitably died down and Hatcher moved along to the next meme.

Neural networks build the foundation of several intelligent systems, which, however, are known to be easily fooled by adversarial examples. Recent advances made these attacks possible even in air-gapped scenarios, where the autonomous system observes its surroundings by, e.g., a camera. We extend these ideas in our research and evaluate the robustness of multi-camera setups against such physical adversarial examples. This scenario becomes ever more important with the rise in popularity of autonomous vehicles, which fuse the information of several cameras for their driving decision. While we find that multi-camera setups provide some robustness towards past attack methods, we see that this advantage reduces when optimizing on multiple perspectives at once. We propose a novel attack method that we call Transcender-MC, where we incorporate online 3D renderings and perspective projections in the training process. Moreover, we motivate that certain data augmentation techniques can facilitate the generation of successful adversarial examples even further. Transcender-MC is 11% more effective in successfully attacking multi-camera setups than state-of-the-art methods. Our findings offer valuable insights regarding the resilience of object detection in a setup with multiple cameras and motivate the need of developing adequate defense mechanisms against them.