Plus: Cisco discloses a zero-day with no available patch, Venezuela accuses the US of a cyberattack, and more. Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED this week show that United States Customs and Border Protection is transitioning from testing small drones to using them as standard surveillance tools, a move that will further expand CBP's already extensive dragnet that in some cases extends far beyond US land borders. Meanwhile, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning to incorporate a broad cybersecurity contract that will include expanding employee surveillance and monitoring . The move comes as the US government is escalating leak investigations and condemning internal dissent. The Chinese-language artificial intelligence app Haotian can be used to create "nearly perfect" face swaps during live video chats, and it is a favorite tool of Southeast Asian scammers.

The filmmaker, who died in January, showed us what our world was becoming, and how we should respond. In the summer, the actress Natasha Lyonne relayed an anecdote about the late director David Lynch, in which he told her that A.I. in the creative arts would soon be as ubiquitous and indispensable as the pencil. Lyonne, who happens to be the co-founder of an A.I. studio, seemed to be implying that the revered filmmaker had offered his approval to the same nihilistic and destructive technology that recently enabled President Donald Trump to imagine himself as a king in a fighter jet dropping payloads of diarrhea on the people he's sworn to serve. In an interview with magazine in November, 2024, he said that, on the one hand, "the good side" of A.I. could be "important for moving forward in a beautiful way," and, on the other, "if money is the bottom line, there'd be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror." He added, "I'm hoping better times are coming." In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema.

U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall took a history-making flight in an AI-controlled F-16 on May 3, 2024. U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall rode in the cockpit of a fighter jet on Friday, which flew over the desert in California and was controlled by artificial intelligence. Last month, Kendall announced his plans to fly in an AI-controlled F-16 to the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee's defense panel, while speaking about the future of air warfare being dependent on autonomously operated drones. On Friday, the senior Air Force leader followed through with his plans, making what could be one of the biggest advances in military aviation since stealth planes were introduced in the early 1990s. Kendall flew to Edwards Air Force Base – the same desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier – to watch and experience AI flight in real time. US MILITARY'OUT OF TIME' IN PUSH AGAINST ADVERSARIES' MODERNIZATION, AIR FORCE SECRETARY SAYS The X-62A VISTA aircraft, an experimental AI-enabled Air Force F-16 fighter jet, takes off on Thursday, May 2, 2024, at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited memorable strategic behaviors in social deductive games. However, the significance of opinion leadership exhibited by LLM-based agents has been overlooked, which is crucial for practical applications in multi-agent and human-AI interaction settings. Opinion leaders are individuals who have a noticeable impact on the beliefs and behaviors of others within a social group. In this work, we employ the Werewolf game as a simulation platform to assess the opinion leadership of LLMs. The game features the role of the Sheriff, tasked with summarizing arguments and recommending decision options, and therefore serves as a credible proxy for an opinion leader. We develop a framework integrating the Sheriff role and devise two novel metrics for evaluation based on the critical characteristics of opinion leaders. The first metric measures the reliability of the opinion leader, and the second assesses the influence of the opinion leader on other players' decisions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate LLMs of different scales. In addition, we collect a Werewolf question-answering dataset (WWQA) to assess and enhance LLM's grasp of the game rules, and we also incorporate human participants for further analysis. The results suggest that the Werewolf game is a suitable test bed to evaluate the opinion leadership of LLMs and few LLMs possess the capacity for opinion leadership.

The study deployed four AI-detection tools to uncover possible evidence of hastily crafted, insincere apologies penned by an AI chatbot: ChatGPTZero, Undetectable.ai, The team collected apologies from posts and videos and transcribed the content, which was scanned through the four systems and then analyzed for the likelihood of AI generation. Overall percentages were then calculated, finding averages of each percentage found on different AI detector tools for that celebrity. Viral TikTok sensation Tiffany Gomas, whose unhinged reaction to another airline passenger spanned the internet, scored a combined 72 percent likelihood that AI-generated her video-taped Instagram apology. The transcribed text of the content was found to be 99 percent likely AI on Sapling and 45 percent likely AI on ChatGPTZero.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Team Meat, creator of classic platformer Super Meat Boy, had one thing to say: "The Supreme Court can go fuck itself." It's been little more than a week since the court handed down its landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, ending the legal right to abortion in the United States. A person's ability to get the healthcare they need will now be determined by a patchwork of state-by-state laws and policies. Team Meat's tweet, composed by the company's social media manager, is the organization's official stance on the matter. "Everyone at Team Meat stands by this fully," cofounder Tommy Refenes tells WIRED.

Between 1977 and 2014, 80 percent of ExxonMobil's internal research supported the idea that human activity was a contributor to climate change. But during that same period, 80 percent of the oil and gas provider's public statements instead expressed doubt whether climate change was caused by humans--or even real in the first place. To draw this conclusion, Harvard researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes used machine learning to review more than 200 internal documents, peer-reviewed research, and public statements from Exxon Mobil. The newly released paper, "Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil's climate change communications," exposes a decades-long pattern of public statements that sanitize the company's role in contributing to CO2 emissions. Oreskes and Supran used machine learning analysis to support two claims.

The developers of a speech recognition bot assigned to analyze the public statements of politicians hit a major stumbling block when it tried to make sense of Donald Trump. Built by a tech startup called FactSquared, the bot AI was assigned to go through more than 11 million words Trump has spoken or tweeted since 1976--in interviews, campaign speeches, media appearances, and social media posts. According to FactSquared's CEO Bill Frischling, the bot failed to understand Trump's speeches until he brought in a specialist to strip out all of the bot's grammar and syntax coding. The tech startup FactSquared created an AI bot to try and catalog and analyze Donald Trump's public appearances and interviews, but they were so incoherent and rambling the bot actually crashed. 'It was still trying to punctuate it like it was English, versus trying to punctuate it like it was Trump,' Frischling told The LA Times.

Kerrie Holley has had a storied career in the technology industry spending nearly three decades at IBM before moving to Cisco as a chief technology officer focused on advancing the company's analytics and automation software platform In 2016, he became the first Technical Fellow for UnitedHealthcare Group's Optum division, responsible for steering strategy in emerging technologies like AI and machine learning, genomics and blockchain. MedCity News met with Holley during a recent trip to San Francico to discuss the potential of big data in healthcare, some of the barriers to adoption what can be done to win back the trust of patients. This exchange has been lightly edited for content and clarity. MedCity: What was the transition like moving from the traditional tech industry into healthcare? Holley: It's interesting because I'm working at a level that sees the shortfalls, sees the gaps and believes very strongly that we can make a difference with technology.

Mobileye and Tesla have begun trading barbs illuminating the real reason behind their split. "[Tesla's Autopilot] is not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner," said Amnon Shashua, Chairman and CTO of Mobileye, the Israel-based maker of collision detection and driver assistance systems. "[Telsa] was pushing the envelope in terms of safety." "When Tesla refused to cancel its own vision development activities and plans for deployment, Mobileye discontinued hardware support for future platforms and released public statements implying that this discontinuance was motivated by safety concerns." Mobileye--the company whose technology underlies the majority of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and semi-autonomous driving suites on the market, may not be at the cutting edge of the technology on which they've built their reputation.