First lady Melania Trump is hosting an artificial intelligence meeting with top industry leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Thursday, as she stresses the importance of managing AI's growth "responsibly." The White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education will meet for the second time in the East Room of the White House Thursday afternoon. The first lady will host the meeting alongside members of the task force and private sector leaders. "I predict AI will represent the single largest growth category in our nation during the Trump Administration -- and I won't be surprised if AI becomes known as the greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America," the first lady said. First lady Melania Trump is hosting an artificial intelligence meeting with top industry leaders, as she stresses the importance of managing AI's growth "responsibly."

America's founding fathers depicted as Black women and Ancient Greek warriors as Asian women and men – this was the world reimagined by Google's generative AI tool, Gemini, in late February. The launch of the new image generation feature sent social media platforms into a flurry of intrigue and confusion. When users entered any prompts to create AI-generated images of people, Gemini was largely showing them results featuring people of colour – whether appropriate or not. X users shared laughs while repeatedly trying to generate images of white people on Gemini and failing to do so. While some instances were deemed humorous online, others, such as images of brown people wearing World War II Nazi uniforms with swastikas on them, prompted outrage, prompting Google to temporarily disable the tool.

Google executives hosted the company's I/O developer conference this week, an annual ritual that has in recent years centered on artificial intelligence. With OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot seen as challenging Google's search domination, Google CEO Sundar Pichai seemed intent on projecting the message that his company is still the leader in AI--and is speeding up deployment of the technology. Google's own chatty large language model, Bard, was the headliner, and it is now publicly available in 180 countries. Following along behind came about a dozen generative AI product features and experiments that can do things like help programmers write code, draft emails, or generate speaker notes for Google Slides presentations. But hardly a word was said about Google Assistant, the clunkily named and voice-centric AI assistant that was the company's previous AI champion.

A group of more than 30 democratic lawmakers led by Representatives Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) are calling on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to make substantive changes to their recommendation algorithms. In three separate letters addressed to the CEOs of those companies, the group makes a direct link to the January 6th US Capitol attack and the part those platforms played in radicalizing the individuals who took part in the uprising. "On Wednesday, January 6th the United States Capitol was attacked by a violent, insurrectionist mob radicalized in part in a digital echo chamber that your company designed, built and maintained," the letter addressed to Google and YouTube CEOs Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki says. A letter from some Congress members to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki flexes research on how YouTube's algorithms have promoted conspiracy theories and political extremism. Citing the Capitol attacks, they request changes to its recommendations systems.

On Wednesday, members of the company's prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. On Wednesday, members of the company's prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated. Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the only Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant. In a letter sent on Wednesday by members of Google's Ethical AI team to CEO Sundar Pichai, Gebru's former colleagues ask that she be re-hired and promoted, among a host of other demands, according to a copy of the note obtained by NPR that was first reported by Bloomberg.

Google will not seek another contract for Project Maven, a controversial military program that uses artificial intelligence to improve drone targeting. A decorated Marine Corps infantry officer is pleading with Google to not turn its back on the Department of Defense months after the tech giant decided to end its involvement in Project Maven, a U.S. military artificial intelligence program. In an op-ed for Defense News, First Lt. Walker D. Mills writes that he attended a symposium on innovation sponsored by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory last summer, but was disappointed that a representative from Google did not attend the event, which did feature leaders from Amazon and IBM. Mills also calls out Google's proposal for a censored Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly: "The company that Americans and people all over the world associate with innovation and information technology had spurned the U.S. military, yet continues to work with one of our chief competitors." FACEBOOK SLAMS REPORT FROM ZUCKERBERG'S OLD HARVARD CLASSMATE CLAIMING HALF ITS USERS ARE FAKE Although Google said Project Dragonfly has been "effectively ended," the company is still being slammed by human rights groups and critics for considering a censored Chinese search engine.

Google has been forced to abandon its specialist Chinese search engine that censors results in line with the strict government, reports have claimed. The firm is believed to have shut down an internal data analysis system which was being used to develop the search engine, known as Dragonfly. According to a report from The Intercept, this has'effectively ended' the entire project. Members of Google's privacy team raised concerns about the project back in August and it is now extremely unlikely the search engine can be built without the system, according to sources close to the project. Google has been forced to abandon its plan to launch a specialist Chinese search engine that censors results in line with the strict government.

Just weeks after Google employees walked out of offices to protest the way the company dealt with claims of sexual misconduct, Google is bracing itself for another worldwide protest. This time, it's over Google's ominous Project Dragonfly, and human rights organization Amnesty International is throwing its whole weight behind it. Project Dragonfly has already received global backlash, with Google employees themselves calling publicly for an ethics review into the proposed censored Chinese search engine. According to leaked documents, the search app will automatically identify websites blocked by China's so-called Great Firewall. This includes information on free speech, current affairs and political opposition, plus historical references to specific events (such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) and books that negatively feature authoritarian governments.

Google has released its artificial intelligence chat agent, Duplex into the wider world despite initial criticism over the technology. Google has expanded the remit of the chat agent, which can arrange appointments over the phone from a'small set of trusted users', to a'small group' of Google Pixel phone owners, who are able to use the service in order to secure restaurant reservations in'select cities'. Other users can still access the app, but only'trusted' testers are able to use the full system. If you're not in the group it is likely you will get an error message which says: 'Sorry, I can't call to make reservations for you yet, but here's their phone number.' A spokesperson from Google had confirmed the update to VentureBeat, but clarified that the technology is not what was debuted at the company's conference in May. Google Assistant can only place calls in English, however it is no longer limited to businesses with which Google has explicitly partnered.

SAN FRANCISCO: Google's voice-calling "Duplex" - which lets Artificial Intelligence (AI) mimic a human voice to make appointments and book tables through phone calls - may soon enter call centres assisting humans with customer queries. According to a report in The Information late on Thursday, an unnamed insurance company has shown interest in "Duplex" which could "handle simple and repetitive customer calls" before taking help from a human if the conversation gets complicated. Google, however, said in a statement that the company is not testing "Duplex" with any enterprise clients. "We're currently focused on consumer use cases for the'Duplex' technology and we aren't testing'Duplex' with any enterprise clients," a Google spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. "'Duplex' is designed to operate in very specific use cases, and currently we're focused on testing with restaurant reservations, hair salon booking and holiday hours with a limited set of trusted testers," the company added.