Imagining a future where smart glasses allow'AI slop' to be avoided "Wearing the unsmart glasses created an entirely un-augmented reality " By the mid-2020s, the world was becoming swamped with "AI slop". Whether images, video, music, emails, ads, speeches or TV shows, many people's interactions were with asinine content generated by artificial intelligence. Sometimes the experience was fun and relatively harmless, but often it was tedious and brain-sapping . At worst, it could be dangerously misleading . Even engagements with other people became suspect - who knew if the person on the phone was real or not?

Adapting to new and emerging technologies like agentic AI is essential for an organization's survival, says Murli Buluswar, head of US personal banking analytics at Citi. "A company's ability to adopt new technical capabilities and rearchitect how their firm operates is going to make the difference between the firms that succeed and those that get left behind," says Buluswar. "Your people and your firm must recognize that how they go about their work is going to be meaningfully different." Agentic AI is already being rapidly adopted in the banking sector. A 2025 survey of 250 banking executives by MIT Technology Review Insights found that 70% of leaders say their firm uses agentic AI to some degree, either through existing deployments (16%) or pilot projects (52%). And it is already proving effective in a range of different functions.

The sun beat down on Zelu as she waited on the curb in front of the house for the robot to arrive. It was mid-July, and it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit and what felt like 100 percent humidity. As uncomfortable as she was, Zelu was used to it. She was a Chicagoan, which meant she was used to every weather extreme except hurricanes. The problem was that sometimes she just wasn't prepared for it.

A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex sequences of past and future events from a static snapshot of a dynamic scene, even in situations they have never seen before.In this paper, we model how humans make such rapid and flexible inferences. Building on a long line of work in cognitive science, we offer a Monte Carlo algorithm whose inferences correlate well with human intuitions in a wide variety of domains, while only using a small, cognitively-plausible number of samples. Our key technical insight is a surprising connection between our inference problem and Monte Carlo path tracing, which allows us to apply decades of ideas from the computer graphics community to this seemingly-unrelated theory of mind task.

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where unsafe states can be avoided by planning ahead a short time into the future. In this setting, a model-based agent with a sufficiently accurate model can avoid unsafe states.We devise a model-based algorithm that heavily penalizes unsafe trajectories, and derive guarantees that our algorithm can avoid unsafe states under certain assumptions. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve competitive rewards with fewer safety violations in several continuous control tasks.

A method for generating narratives by analyzing single images or image sequences is presented, inspired by the time immemorial tradition of Narrative Art. The proposed method explores the multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o to interpret visual content and create engaging stories, which are illustrated by a Stable Diffusion XL model. The method is supported by a fully implemented tool, called ImageTeller, which accepts images from diverse sources as input. Users can guide the narrative's development according to the conventions of fundamental genres - such as Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, Satire or Mystery -, opt to generate data-driven stories, or to leave the prototype free to decide how to handle the narrative structure. User interaction is provided along the generation process, allowing the user to request alternative chapters or illustrations, and even reject and restart the story generation based on the same input. Additionally, users can attach captions to the input images, influencing the system's interpretation of the visual content. Examples of generated stories are provided, along with details on how to access the prototype.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. AI-generated media has reached an explosive tipping point. Even before the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT electrified the internet, the research laboratory captured the attention of the art and design world for its generative AI system, DALL-E, allowing anyone to create images of anything their heart desires by simply entering a few words or phrases. Over the past months, more than a million users have signed up to use DALL-E beta, and the company is further expanding its reach by offering an API so that creators, developers and businesses can integrate this powerful technology and further explore its creative potential. Meanwhile, AI-generated work continues to disrupt other corners of the cultural landscape, from the six-figure sale of the generative portrait at Christie's in 2018 to this year's controversial awarding of a top prize to an AI artwork in a contest for emerging artists. Follow VentureBeat's ongoing generative AI coverage The arrival of AI creations in the highest echelons of the art world and the proliferation of user-friendly AI software like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Lensa have renewed debate over creative production and ownership, and prompted attempts to provide practical answers to questions previously relegated to the realm of theory: What differentiates a machine-made painting from a work of art?

The tension between technology and work is at least as old as the economics profession itself. A question some people are asking now is: if computers run by artificial intelligence can do the job of humans, will work disappear someday? Two economists are proposing a couple different scenarios in a new paper that is part science fiction and part mathematical models. In one scenario, lower-paid workers who are not highly valued by society – say, McDonald's hamburger flippers – are more readily replaced by computers than a scientist searching for a cure for Alzheimer's disease. This will drive down wages for a larger and larger segment of the lower-paid labor force.

Artificial intelligence promises to streamline many industries and will play a big role in healthcare and bioscience research, two areas where Pasadena organizations are at the forefront nationwide. AI Healthcare is the subject of the Life Summit Panel at Caltech Thursday night, where some of the smartest minds in the industry will gather and discuss the possibilities of AI in the science fields. Nonprofit AI LA Community hosts the event. AI promises to play an important role to eliminate repetitive tasks, creating more precision with researching and analyzing data and generally freeing up smart minds to perform more critical tasks. "Pasadena is soon to be a powerful healthcare and biotech hub," said Todd Terrazas, executive director of AI LA Community.

In recent months the science fiction world has grown increasingly political, with dozens of writers contributing stories to anthologies such as Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against and If This Goes On. Another prominent example is A People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. "I wanted to use my position as an editor to try to help magnify the voices of the people that we invited to participate in this anthology," Adams says in Episode 354 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "To sort of shout back at the Trump administration, and also to try to imagine some new futures that might help us figure out how to get back to normal from here." The book draws inspiration (and its title) from Howard Zinn's counterculture classic A People's History of the United States, and like that earlier work, A People's Future of the United States tries to present a wide variety of marginalized perspectives.