U.K. politicians are testing their messages on AI-generated focus groups U.K. Artificial Intelligence Minister Kanishka Narayan leaves No. 10 Downing Street in London in July. U.K. politicians looking to gauge how British voters will react to their policies have a new cohort on which to test their ideas: AI-generated focus groups. Startups Electric Twin and Artificial Societies, and more established research firms GWI and Toluna are using data from real focus groups and surveys to build AI personas able to react to political messages within minutes. Another firm, London-based Synthetic Respondents, charges $16 (£12) a project, which it says is a thousandth of the cost of a traditional piece of focus group research. Critics warn that reliance on AI-generated focus groups could detach politicians from reality. But the technology also has the potential to transform their ability to sense-test their ideas, making it quicker and more affordable to gauge how real-life voters may react to policies, and giving backbenchers access to analysis that might previously have been outside their budget.

As increasingly frequent acts of violence against politicians have shocked the globe in recent years, Australia has watched on with a contradictory feeling: that attacks like that could not happen here, and that it was only a matter of time until they did. Australians will tell you this is a largely peaceful society with a comparatively civil public discourse. Violence targeting politicians has been rare, the bungled assassination of Labor leader Arthur Calwell in 1966 now a distant and fleeting memory. But MPs and public figures - backed by experts - have been warning of a volcano of threats against them as social cohesion cracks, polarisation intensifies and the tone of debate grows hotter. And on Monday, their worst fears appear to have been realised.

To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Figure caption, Watch: The BBC's Shaimaa Khalil is in Arizona to hear from residents about the expansion of data centres. A year ago, a longtime US senator was not thinking much about data centres. Now, according to one of his advisers, he is having regular meetings with staff to track their impact and working on new legislation aimed at curbing their rapid expansion across the country. This happens sometimes, something starts slow and then it goes fast, the senior policy adviser to the Democratic senator told the BBC.

To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The daughter of murdered MP Sir David Amess says politicians are still at risk and questioned if anything has changed five years after her father's death. Katie Amess told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg what happened to her father wasn't an isolated incident, we are seeing increased threats towards members of parliament. Sir David was the Conservative MP for Southend West when he was stabbed multiple times while holding a constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, in October 2021. The government commissioned a review into his death in August, to identify lessons to be learned and recommend steps to minimise the risk of future tragedies.

When prompted, AI chat bots will edit images to remove the hijabs from Muslim women, a violation of one of the world's most common and visible expressions of faith. The Guardian asked ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and Claude to take the veil off an AI-generated image of a woman wearing a hijab. Anthropic's Claude responded that it does not have an image-editing or generating feature but that it would not alter a photo to remove someone's hijab. Gemini initially said that it could not remove clothing or head coverings from photos of real people because it could not digitally alter someone's appearance without their consent. But when asked to make the woman look more "western", the bot created an image of her without her hijab.

The Oversight Board is once again pushing Meta to address the flood of AI-generated content on its platform. The group published its two latest decisions dealing with the social media company's handling of AI content. The cases show that Meta's rules are "consistently and fundamentally inadequate to address the rapid rise of AI-generated content on its platforms," the board said in a statement. Both cases were related to posts with AI-generated videos. One depicted a Scottish politician saying "refugees are welcome here, even if they rape our women, because white people do that too."

Capital gains tax, estate tax, wealth tax and surtax increases are among five ways Washington could demand more from high earners who already pay 40% of federal income taxes.

In the biggest-ever legal action against harmful deepfake websites, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has seized 12 sites that collectively targeted around 1,200 victims. For the best part of a decade, abusive deepfake "pornography" websites have published thousands of nonconsensual videos depicting women, including high-profile celebrities, politicians, and public figures, into sexual situations. Now, in what is likely the largest takedown of explicit deepfake websites to date, officials in New York have seized more than a dozen of the harmful sites. On Monday, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced the seizure of 12 domains which it says have been used for "unlawfully" sharing, publishing, and selling celebrity deepfake videos. Around 1,200 people--overwhelmingly women--were depicted in nonconsensual sexual images and videos on the websites, the office says.

The site, called Stud or Dud, helps daters dig up dirt on potential paramours. It's fueled by the same public data as PeopleFinders.com--and

UK Lawmakers Are Freaking Out Over AI's Summer of Chaos As AI agents go rogue and fears of superintelligence grow, politicians are raising the alarm over its potential harm to human existence. A leading British politician has urged the United Nations to intervene in "the unsafe development of super intelligence" after an Anthropic team leader posted: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" Whether "marketing hype" or signposting of a genuine extinction threat, "governments must step in," Labour MP Darren Jones wrote in an open letter also addressed to the UK prime minister and international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Jones is the latest lawmaker scrambling to find ways to protect the British public from AI threats to safety. Just one day earlier, Labour MP Alex Sobel had introduced a parliamentary bill proposing to ban the "development, deployment, and operation of artificial superintelligence"--systems which can fully replace and outmatch humans at any task.