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FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez Will Fight for Press Freedom--Until Trump Fires Her

WIRED

President Trump probably can't get rid of her yet, but FCC commissioner Anna Gomez still checks her email every day to see if he has. Until then, she wants to stand up for the First Amendment. If you've given much thought to the Federal Communications Commission in recent years, it probably had something to do with Brendan Carr . The group's chairman since 2025, Carr has been on an ongoing, public rampage against freedom of speech: he's gone after late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, and targeted networks for their DEI policies. Disturbing as Carr's rhetoric and actions have been, he does count at least one opponent within the agency: Commissioner Anna Gomez, currently the lone Democrat among three FCC commissioners, has been vocal about the damage she thinks the agency is doing to American press freedom--and has repeatedly urged the public and the press, namely major networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC, to fight back. In May, Commissioner Gomez penned a stunning public letter to Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro, wherein she warned that the company--which owns ABC--was being subjected to "a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC's authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press." Gomez urged D'Amaro to fight the actions her own agency was taking, adding that "this is a fight worth having, and one that I am confident you will win." I wanted to talk to Commissioner Gomez about that bold letter, the risks she sees for the media and the American public under the Trump administration, and how she works alongside a chairman with whom she disagrees so fiercely. Gomez, whose FCC term ends this month, was generous enough to sit down and talk about all of it. You can read our conversation below, or listen to it on the podcast platform of your choice. KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Commissioner Gomez. Thank you for being here. It's great to be here. I want to start, before we talk more about Disney and your letter and all the rest of it, with a very basic question for our listeners. What is your agency's basic role?


FCC Enforcement Chief Offered to Help Brendan Carr Target Disney, Records Show

WIRED

Last year, as FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, a civil servant overseeing West Coast stations privately pledged support, according to emails obtained by WIRED. A senior Federal Communications Commission official overseeing ABC-owned California stations privately offered to assist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's campaign last year against the Walt Disney Co. and, according to internal emails obtained by WIRED. On September 17, Carr threatened Disney with regulatory action regarding the Jimmy Kimmel monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, prompting major station affiliates to drop the broadcast and forcing ABC to temporarily suspend the show. The email, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, was titled "personal note of support re Charlie Kirk ABC/Disney issue" and quoted Carr's remarks from an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson: "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Carr said during the interview.


DiM-Gestor: Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Adaptive Layer Normalization Mamba-2

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Speech-driven gesture generation using transformer-based generative models represents a rapidly advancing area within virtual human creation. However, existing models face significant challenges due to their quadratic time and space complexities, limiting scalability and efficiency. To address these limitations, we introduce DiM-Gestor, an innovative end-to-end generative model leveraging the Mamba-2 architecture. DiM-Gestor features a dual-component framework: (1) a fuzzy feature extractor and (2) a speech-to-gesture mapping module, both built on the Mamba-2. The fuzzy feature extractor, integrated with a Chinese Pre-trained Model and Mamba-2, autonomously extracts implicit, continuous speech features. These features are synthesized into a unified latent representation and then processed by the speech-to-gesture mapping module. This module employs an Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN)-enhanced Mamba-2 mechanism to uniformly apply transformations across all sequence tokens. This enables precise modeling of the nuanced interplay between speech features and gesture dynamics. We utilize a diffusion model to train and infer diverse gesture outputs. Extensive subjective and objective evaluations conducted on the newly released Chinese Co-Speech Gestures dataset corroborate the efficacy of our proposed model. Compared with Transformer-based architecture, the assessments reveal that our approach delivers competitive results and significantly reduces memory usage, approximately 2.4 times, and enhances inference speeds by 2 to 4 times. Additionally, we released the CCG dataset, a Chinese Co-Speech Gestures dataset, comprising 15.97 hours (six styles across five scenarios) of 3D full-body skeleton gesture motion performed by professional Chinese TV broadcasters.


Analyzing Transformers in Embedding Space

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding Transformer-based models has attracted significant attention, as they lie at the heart of recent technological advances across machine learning. While most interpretability methods rely on running models over inputs, recent work has shown that a zero-pass approach, where parameters are interpreted directly without a forward/backward pass is feasible for some Transformer parameters, and for two-layer attention networks. In this work, we present a theoretical analysis where all parameters of a trained Transformer are interpreted by projecting them into the embedding space, that is, the space of vocabulary items they operate on. We derive a simple theoretical framework to support our arguments and provide ample evidence for its validity. First, an empirical analysis showing that parameters of both pretrained and fine-tuned models can be interpreted in embedding space. Second, we present two applications of our framework: (a) aligning the parameters of different models that share a vocabulary, and (b) constructing a classifier without training by ``translating'' the parameters of a fine-tuned classifier to parameters of a different model that was only pretrained. Overall, our findings open the door to interpretation methods that, at least in part, abstract away from model specifics and operate in the embedding space only.


Wimbledon's AI Announcer Was Inevitable

The Atlantic - Technology

The Wimbledon announcer sounds a little like Helen Mirren if she'd just been hit with a polo mallet. I'm watching match highlights between Ons Jabeur and Magdalena Frฤ™ch on the tournament's website when a voice says, "Jabeur, from Tunisia, will play Frฤ™ch, from Poland, on the renowned No. 1 court in the first round." Frฤ™ch is mispronounced, as is Tunisia, and the word renowned is used oddly dispassionately, as if it were being repeated for a competitor at a spelling bee. This is a commentary chatbot, introduced with considerable fanfare at the All England Club this year. Another version, a "male" voice, sounds like your uncle from Queens trying to do a Hugh Grant impression.


World's first AI news anchor unveiled in China

#artificialintelligence

China's state news agency Xinhua this week introduced the newest members of its newsroom: AI anchors who will report "tirelessly" all day every day, from anywhere in the country. Chinese viewers were greeted with a digital version of a regular Xinhua news anchor named Qiu Hao. The anchor, wearing a red tie and pin-striped suit, nods his head in emphasis, blinking and raising his eyebrows slightly. "Not only can I accompany you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can be endlessly copied and present at different scenes to bring you the news," he says.


John Madden returning to cover of Madden NFL 23 video game

FOX News

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. For the first time in two decades, late football legend John Madden will grace the cover of a Madden NFL video game. EA Sports on Wednesday announced that the Hall of Fame coach, who died in December, will appear on the cover of all three editions of this year's Madden NFL 23 video game. The covers will include him in different parts of his life, including as a coach and as a broadcaster.


The Future of Robot Nannies

WIRED

Childcare is the most intimate of activities. Evolution has generated drives so powerful that we will risk our lives to protect not only our own children, but quite often any child, and even the young of other species. Robots, by contrast, are products created by commercial entities with commercial goals, which may--and should--include the well-being of their customers, but will never be limited to such. Robots, corporations, and other legal or non-legal entities do not possess the instinctual nature of humans to care for the young--even if our anthropomorphic tendencies may prompt some children and adults to overlook this fact. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.


Five Leading Sports Analytics Software Programs

#artificialintelligence

Sports analytics is one of the biggest sectors booming in the sports world. Though sports have captured the attention of the public and investors alike, analytics is a behind-the-scenes industry that combines the latest in machine-learning algorithms and data crunching. Some programs, like those that rely on AI, are designed to make predictions by studying huge amounts of historical data. Others, such as analytics software, are designed to make immediate conclusions from live data points. Teams rely on sports analytics to make leaner decisions related to recruitment, training regimens, and more.


'Deepfake' Queen delivers alternative Christmas speech in warning about misinformation

#artificialintelligence

London (CNN)A fake Queen Elizabeth danced across TV screens on Christmas as part of a "deepfake" speech aired by a British broadcaster. The real British monarch traditionally delivers a Christmas Day speech aired around the world. But her speech on Friday at 3 p.m. was followed by a digitally-created fake of the Queen, aired on Channel 4 and voiced by an actor, warning viewers to question "whether what we see and hear is always what it seems." Channel 4 said the video was created as a "stark warning" about technology and the proliferation of fake news. The broadcaster said the video was supposed to offer "a stark warning about the advanced technology that is enabling the proliferation of misinformation and fake news in a digital age."