This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley commuted in a car that wasn't made by his own company. In an effort to scope out the competition, Farley spent six months driving around in a Xiaomi SU7. The Chinese-made electric sedan is one of the world's most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant--all for roughly 30,000 in China. "It's fantastic," Farley said about the Xiaomi SU7 on a podcast last fall.

The colonization of Mars presents extraordinary challenges, including radiation exposure, low atmospheric pressure, and toxic regolith. Recent advancements in synthetic biology and genetic engineering offer unprecedented opportunities to address these obstacles by utilizing terrestrial extremophiles and engineered organisms. This paper examines the potential for creating symbiotic relationships between terrestrial microbes and hypothetical Martian life forms, should they exist, to support a sustainable human presence on Mars. Inspired by natural examples of endosymbiosis, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, we propose methods to engineer life forms capable of enduring Martian conditions. Key components include experimental designs, laboratory simulations, and bioengineering approaches essential to this endeavor. The ethical, political, and technological challenges of introducing engineered life to Mars are critically evaluated, with an emphasis on international collaboration and robust planetary protection policies. This research underscores engineered symbiosis as a transformative strategy for enabling life to adapt and thrive on Mars while advancing humanity's aspirations for interplanetary habitation and exploration. By addressing these challenges, this work highlights a path toward sustainable life on Mars, reflecting both scientific ingenuity and ethical stewardship.

E. Allen Emerson was the first graduate student of Edmund M. Clarke at Harvard University. After discussing several ideas for Allen's dissertation, they identified a promising candidate: verifying a finite-state system against a formal specification. According to Martha Clarke, Edmund's widow, it was during a walk across Harvard Yard that they decided to call it "model checking." Emerson received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics for this work in 1981. Twenty-five years later, he and Clarke (along with Joseph Sifakis) shared the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2007 for this and related work.

The Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda said on Sunday that its leader, Khaled Batarfi, had died. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as A.Q.A.P., released a video announcing Mr. Batarfi's death, showing images of him wrapped in a white funeral shroud overlaid with a black Al Qaeda flag. It did not explain how he had died. The United States government once considered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. The group tried and failed at least three times to blow up American airliners, and has been targeted by American drone strikes for two decades.

Thematic analysis (TA) has been widely used for analyzing qualitative data in many disciplines and fields. To ensure reliable analysis, the same piece of data is typically assigned to at least two human coders. Moreover, to produce meaningful and useful analysis, human coders develop and deepen their data interpretation and coding over multiple iterations, making TA labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recently the emerging field of large language models (LLMs) research has shown that LLMs have the potential replicate human-like behavior in various tasks: in particular, LLMs outperform crowd workers on text-annotation tasks, suggesting an opportunity to leverage LLMs on TA. We propose a human-LLM collaboration framework (i.e., LLM-in-the-loop) to conduct TA with in-context learning (ICL). This framework provides the prompt to frame discussions with a LLM (e.g., GPT-3.5) to generate the final codebook for TA. We demonstrate the utility of this framework using survey datasets on the aspects of the music listening experience and the usage of a password manager. Results of the two case studies show that the proposed framework yields similar coding quality to that of human coders but reduces TA's labor and time demands.

It's a jarring political advertisement: Images of a Chinese attack on Taiwan lead into scenes of looted banks and armed soldiers enforcing martial law in San Francisco. Those visuals in the Republican National Committee's ad aren't real, and the scenarios are pretty obviously fictional. But thanks to the handiwork of artificial intelligence, the images look like real life. Within days of the ad appearing online in April, Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, introduced legislation to require disclosure of AI-produced content in political advertisements. "This is going too far," she said in an interview.

PsychoGenics CEO Emer Leahy of Paramus, New Jersey, explains how the first potential AI-discovered treatment for schizophrenia was developed through machine learning. Fox News Digital spoke with her. AI experts and tech-inclined political scientists are sounding the alarm on the unregulated use of AI tools going into an election season. Generative AI can not only rapidly produce targeted campaign emails, texts or videos, it also could be used to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen. A booth is ready for a voter, Feb. 24, 2020, at City Hall in Cambridge, Mass., on the first morning of early voting in the state.

Tom Newhouse, vice president of Convergence Media, discusses the potential impact of artificial intelligence on elections after an RNC AI ad garnered attention. A House Democrat proposed legislation this week that would require political campaign ads to make it clear to viewers when generative artificial intelligence is used to produce video or images in those ads, an idea that is a response to an AI-generated ad against President Biden that was released last week. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., said in a statement introducing her bill that AI has become a factor in the upcoming campaign and needs to be regulated so people can understand what they hear and see on television. "The upcoming 2024 election cycle will be the first time in U.S. history where AI generated content will be used in political ads by campaigns, parties, and Super PACs," she said. "Unfortunately, our current laws have not kept pace with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies."

The Republican National Committee fired off an attack ad as soon as President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign last week. The 30-second spot which used fake visuals of China invading Taiwan, financial markets crashing and immigrants overrunning the border sported a disclaimer: "Built entirely with AI imagery." The ad – which the GOP called "an AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024" – is a sign of what's to come in the 2024 presidential election, experts say. AI crack down?Senate leader Schumer unveils plans to crack down on AI Fake Twitter accountsIs that Twitter account real? 4 ways to help you spot a fake account. Even as the technology grows more sophisticated and powerful, spreading into all aspects of American life, there are still very few rules governing its use.

At least one politician wants more transparency in the wake of an AI-generated attack ad. New York Democrat House Representative Yvette Clarke has introduced a bill, the REAL Political Ads Act, that would require political ads to disclose the use of generative AI through conspicuous audio or text. The amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act would also have the Federal Election Commission (FEC) create regulations to enforce this, although the measure would take effect January 1st, 2024 regardless of whether or not rules are in place. The proposed law would help fight misinformation. Clarke characterizes this as an urgent matter ahead of the 2024 election -- generative AI can "manipulate and deceive people on a large scale," the representative says.