Broadcast TV Is a'Melting Ice Cube.' Kimmel Just Turned Up the Heat After Sinclair and Nexstar pulled Jimmy Kimmel off air, the old affiliate model looks shakier than ever. Even Disney might do better without broadcast. Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC this week. About a quarter of ABC's usual audience couldn't see the talk show host this week after two major owners of ABC affiliates, Sinclair and Nexstar, refused to carry the show. Those right-leaning companies apparently felt that Kimmel's joke--which included some disputed facts--was so unpardonable that they couldn't expose their viewers to the comedian.

In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, experts say the FCC commissioner's conduct is flatly unconstitutional. They also expect him to keep going. Brendan Carr speaks in Washington, DC, on September 9, 2025. In what has become an all-too-regular display from Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman used a podcast appearance Wednesday to flex his regulatory power. In this instance, he threatened action against broadcasters that refused to punish Jimmy Kimmel for remarks he made on his ABC show Monday night.

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion about A.I. companions. Last year, I found myself joining the debate, publishing a paper--co-written with two fellow psychology professors and a philosopher--called "In Praise of Empathic A.I." Our argument was that, in certain ways, the latest crop of A.I.s might make for better company than many real people do, and that, rather than recoiling in horror, we ought to consider what A.I. companions could offer to those who are lonely. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not go over especially well in my corner of academia. In the social sciences and the humanities, A.I. tends to be greeted less as a technological advance than as a harbinger of decline. There are the familiar worries about jobs--ours and our students'--and about the ease with which A.I. can be used for cheating.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said on Thursday it's creating a new Council for National Security within the agency. The FCC's announcement doesn't go into much detail about what the group will do, but a list of its broader goals focuses on US competition with China, including in AI and other tech sectors. The FCC's statement on the Council for National Security says its three-part agenda includes: "Ensure the US wins the strategic competition with China over critical technologies, such as 5G and 6G, AI, satellites and space, quantum computing, robotics and autonomous systems, and the Internet of Things" Although the statement mentions foreign adversaries several times, it only calls out China specifically. The Council will include representatives from eight Bureaus and Offices within the FCC, an arrangement the agency says will foster cross-agency collaboration and information sharing. Adam Chan, who serves as the FCC's security counsel, as the director of the Council on National Security.

At last year's Google I/O developer conference, the company introduced Project Gameface, a hands-free gaming "mouse" that allows users to control a computer's cursor with movements of their head and facial gestures. This year, Google has announced that it has open-sourced more code for Project Gameface, allowing developers to build Android applications that can use the technology. The tool relies on the phone's front camera to track facial expressions and head movements, which can be used to control a virtual cursor. A user could smile to "select" items onscreen, for instance, or raise their left eyebrow to go back to the home screen on an Android phone. In addition, users can set thresholds or gesture sizes for each expression, so that they can control how prominent their expressions should be to trigger a specific mouse action.

A few months ago, Alexa was declared dead. The company had pulled a plug on its'Amazon Alexa' voice-assisted feature succumbing to huge operating losses. But, now the tide is changing. It looks like the unfaltering wave of AI will revive the almost-lost virtual assistant technology. Recently announced partnership between HuggingFace and AWS gives further confidence that Amazon has something up its sleeve to boost users' conversational experience with Alexa.

Digital marketers still have a job of course. But it is not going to be quite the same job, as artificial intelligence begins its "second act". Yes, AI is still good at compiling, sorting and categorizing massive amounts of data. Only now it's increasingly able to assist in creating content in ways it could not before. All you need to do is give an AI app a specific input.

I may be many things, but I'm not a rapper. I discover this when I'm asked to freestyle a few verses on a visit to London's Abbey Road recording studios. Immediately lines from famous rappers flood into my head – some classic Biggie, a few Young Thug yelps, the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – but I've got to think up something original. Out of desperation, I decide to rap about my morning routine. Adopting a slow pace and simple rhyme scheme that even the Sugarhill Gang would disdain, I begin: "I wake up at seven and I brush my teeth."

In a new study, Florida State University researchers explore the challenges of recruiting and retaining older adults to participate in research. The study also marks the first step of a broad, interdisciplinary FSU effort to increasingly use artificial intelligence in research. In the study, published in The Gerontologist, Associate Professor of Sociology Dawn Carr identified core "motivation clusters" among older adults for research participation. Along with her 12 FSU-based co-authors, Carr suggests that identifying those clusters--"fun seekers" and "research helpers," for example--can guide recruitment and retention strategies. "There is a lack of representation of older adults in research that leads to findings that are skewed," Carr said.

In late April 2020, a company named OpenAI uploaded dozens of new tracks to SoundCloud, all of them matter-of-factly titled like "Hip-hop, in the style of Nas" or "Pop, in the style of Katy Perry." You'd be forgiven for initially thinking the songs were average YouTube covers. A few seconds spent listening to the gargled production, bizarre lyrics, and eerie vocals would definitely change your mind. The songs were all made using an artificial intelligence software called Jukebox, designed by OpenAI, a billion dollar research organization leading the field in AI research. Jukebox isn't your standard Elvis impersonator: After being trained on 1.2 million songs and other data about genres and artists, the neural net has learned to produce original music in the uncannily recognizable style of famous artists like Elton John and Rihanna.