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What Iranians are being told about the war

BBC News

The first reports appeared on foreign screens, beyond the reach of most Iranians. On 28 February Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were signs that the tyrant is no more, suggesting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in a joint US-Israeli strike. Iranians watching state television, however, encountered silence. Government officials would neither confirm nor deny Khamenei's death. On one of the state broadcaster's channels, IRTV3, one news presenter urged viewers to trust him and the latest information the government had.


What we've been getting wrong about AI's truth crisis

MIT Technology Review

What we've been getting wrong about AI's truth crisis Even when content is revealed to be manipulated, it still shapes our beliefs. The defenders of truth are hopelessly behind. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about--where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie, and erodes societal trust in the process--is now here? A story I published last week pushed me over the edge. It also made me realize that the tools we were sold as a cure for this crisis are failing miserably. On Thursday, I reported the first confirmation that the US Department of Homeland Security, which houses immigration agencies, is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make content that it shares with the public.


Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk's Grokipedia as source, tests reveal

The Guardian

ChatGPT cited Grokipedia when repeating information that the Guardian has debunked. ChatGPT cited Grokipedia when repeating information that the Guardian has debunked. Guardian found OpenAI's platform cited Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk's Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on the platform. In tests done by the Guardian, GPT-5.2 cited Grokipedia nine times in response to more than a dozen different questions. These included queries on political structures in Iran, such as salaries of the Basij paramilitary force and the ownership of the Mostazafan Foundation, and questions on the biography of Sir Richard Evans, a British historian and expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving in his libel trial.


Waymo killed KitKat. California neighborhood mourns a corner-store cat

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. KitKat was friendly with many customers of Randa's Market in San Francisco's Mission District. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . San Francisco has been mourning the death of KitKat, a beloved corner-store cat who died after being struck by a Waymo robotaxi last week.


Truth Social's New AI Chatbot Is Donald Trump's Media Diet Incarnate

WIRED

When I ask the new Truth Social AI chatbot about navigating bias in the media ecosystem, it gives what I view as pretty reasonable advice. "Diversify your sources," it responds. This is advice that the AI itself may not be taking to heart. For instance, to come to the above answer it cites five sources, four of which are Fox News articles. The fifth, inexplicably, is a 400-page report from US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr's Health and Human Services Department titled "Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria."


Disney and Universal sue AI image creator Midjourney, alleging copyright infringement

The Guardian

In their lawsuit, the entertainment giants called Midjourney's popular AI-powered image generator a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" for its alleged reproductions of the studios' best-known characters. The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios, making and distributing without permission "innumerable" copies of their marquee characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Horacio Gutierrez, Disney's chief legal officer, said in a statement: "We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing." NBCUniversal's executive vice-president and general counsel, Kim Harris, said the company was suing to "protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content". Instead, the studios argue, Midjourney continued to release new versions of its AI image service that boast higher-quality infringing images.


Semantic-based Unsupervised Framing Analysis (SUFA): A Novel Approach for Computational Framing Analysis

Ali, Mohammad, Hassan, Naeemul

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This research presents a novel approach to computational framing analysis, called Semantic Relations-based Unsupervised Framing Analysis (SUFA). SUFA leverages semantic relations and dependency parsing algorithms to identify and assess entity-centric emphasis frames in news media reports. This innovative method is derived from two studies -- qualitative and computational -- using a dataset related to gun violence, demonstrating its potential for analyzing entity-centric emphasis frames. This article discusses SUFA's strengths, limitations, and application procedures. Overall, the SUFA approach offers a significant methodological advancement in computational framing analysis, with its broad applicability across both the social sciences and computational domains.


US authors' copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft combined in New York with newspaper actions

The Guardian

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will "allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings". Cases brought in California by prominent authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman will be transferred to New York and joined with cases brought by news outlets, including the New York Times, and other authors including John Grisham, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult. Most of the plaintiffs opposed consolidation, arguing that their cases were too different to be combined. OpenAI had proposed consolidating the cases in northern California. The judicial panel ultimately transferred the cases to the southern district of New York, stating that centralisation would "serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses" and "promote the just and efficient conduct of this litigation".


Visual Polarization Measurement Using Counterfactual Image Generation

Mosaffa, Mohammad, Rafieian, Omid, Yoganarasimhan, Hema

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Political polarization is a significant issue in American politics, influencing public discourse, policy, and consumer behavior. While studies on polarization in news media have extensively focused on verbal content, non-verbal elements, particularly visual content, have received less attention due to the complexity and high dimensionality of image data. Traditional descriptive approaches often rely on feature extraction from images, leading to biased polarization estimates due to information loss. In this paper, we introduce the Polarization Measurement using Counterfactual Image Generation (PMCIG) method, which combines economic theory with generative models and multi-modal deep learning to fully utilize the richness of image data and provide a theoretically grounded measure of polarization in visual content. Applying this framework to a decade-long dataset featuring 30 prominent politicians across 20 major news outlets, we identify significant polarization in visual content, with notable variations across outlets and politicians. At the news outlet level, we observe significant heterogeneity in visual slant. Outlets such as Daily Mail, Fox News, and Newsmax tend to favor Republican politicians in their visual content, while The Washington Post, USA Today, and The New York Times exhibit a slant in favor of Democratic politicians. At the politician level, our results reveal substantial variation in polarized coverage, with Donald Trump and Barack Obama among the most polarizing figures, while Joe Manchin and Susan Collins are among the least. Finally, we conduct a series of validation tests demonstrating the consistency of our proposed measures with external measures of media slant that rely on non-image-based sources.


Generative AI is already being used in journalism – here's how people feel about it

AIHub

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken off at lightning speed in the past couple of years, creating disruption in many industries. A new report published this week finds that news audiences and journalists alike are concerned about how news organisations are – and could be – using generative AI such as chatbots, image, audio and video generators, and similar tools. The report draws on three years of interviews and focus group research into generative AI and journalism in Australia and six other countries (United States, United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and France). Only 25% of our news audience participants were confident they had encountered generative AI in journalism. About 50% were unsure or suspected they had.