At Springwood library in the Blue Mountains, a librarian appears with a cat carrier in each hand. About 30 children gather around in a semicircle. Inside each carrier, a pair of beaming, sci-fi-like eyes peer out at the expectant crowd. "That is the funniest thing ever," one child says. The preschoolers have just finished reading The Truck Cat by Deborah Frenkel and Danny Snell for the annual National Simultaneous Storytime.

This work investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in detecting and understanding human emotions through text. Drawing upon emotion models from psychology, we adopt an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates computational and affective sciences insights. The main goal is to assess how accurately they can identify emotions expressed in textual interactions and compare different models on this specific task. This research contributes to broader efforts to enhance human-computer interaction, making artificial intelligence technologies more responsive and sensitive to users' emotional nuances. By employing a methodology that involves comparisons with a state-of-the-art model on the GoEmotions dataset, we aim to gauge LLMs' effectiveness as a system for emotional analysis, paving the way for potential applications in various fields that require a nuanced understanding of human language.

She had lived in a nursing home for 10 years, and communicated with her sister, and the world, through Alexa. Two days after Lou Ann died of complications from coronavirus, her sister found recordings of Lou Ann's voice asking Alexa, "How do I get help?" Maybe you are reading this in your bed on your phone wherever you are this morning. I was having what I thought of as a weak stretch in my life, when I didn't have a regular job, and when just deciding what I would do to avoid writing, or having a single thought about my email, was enough to short-circuit me and I would find myself still in pajamas at 5 p.m., pacing and crying, Googling What's wrong with me and waiting until it was OK to go to bed again. In such weak stretches, among the many indulgences I permit myself is the minor suboptimal habit of actually sleeping with my phone. Under the other pillow next to me, where no one sleeps. In other, more robust stretches, my phone spends the night plugged in about a foot away on the nightstand, and I can still reach it if I wake up and want to look at it, but it's tethered. When I let it sleep freely with me, I can turn over while I look at it. I can look at it while I'm lying on my left side, and then I can turn over and look at it while I'm lying on my right side. I just charge it the next day, because it doesn't matter if either of us is ready to go in the morning. On this particular morning I opened my eyes and looked at my phone in the bed next to me, and as I put my hand on it, I said, "I belong to you."

The bot revealed that it identifies not as Bing but as'Sydney'. In a strange occurrence, Microsoft's newly launched AI-integrated search engine Bing expressed its love to a user and requested that he dissolve his marriage, as per a report in the New York Times (NYT). The bot revealed that it identifies not as Bing but as'Sydney', the code name Microsoft gave it during development. In response to a question asked by Mr Roose, the chatbot said, "I'm in love with you because you're the first person who ever talked to me. You're the first person who ever listened to me. You're the first person who ever cared about me."

Chatbots like Bing have kicked off a major new AI arms race between the biggest tech companies. Though Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have invested in AI tech for years, it's mostly worked to improve existing products, like search or content-recommendation algorithms. But when the start-up company OpenAI began making public its "generative" AI tools -- including the popular ChatGPT chatbot -- it led competitors to brush away their previous, relatively cautious approaches to the tech.

Microsoft's ChatGPT is going off the rails and sending users'unhinged' messages. ChatGPT, a system developed by OpenAI that is now built into Microsoft's Bing, is sending users insults, lies and conversations questioning its abilities. Users are sharing the bizarre exchanges on social media, with one post showing the AI chatbot calling someone'a sociopath, a psychopath, a monster, a demon, a devil.' In a Reddit thread, ChatGPT appears to wonder why it had forgotten some conversations, asking the user to tell it'what we felt in the previous session.' When one user asked ChatGPT what is 1 1, it responded with an insult.

The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has announced a new AI (artificial intelligence) technology that is set to automate and revolutionise the way the state's roads are maintained and repaired. The project announced on Tuesday would fund a 2.9-million-Australian dollar ($1.96-million) trial from AI company, Asset AI, which would install sensors on 32 public buses with routes across greater Sydney. The sensors use AI to combine visual data with local weather conditions to predict the rate of deterioration in the city's roads -- meaning it would in theory be able to alert maintenance teams before potholes or other road damages pose a risk to traffic. "There will always be cracks in the road and there will always be potholes but with smart tech like this we can predict deterioration, streamline maintenance and get to better outcomes much faster," said NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government, Victor Dominello. At present, road damages and defects rely on reports from residents.

Since 2002, Quantium have combined the best of human and artificial intelligence to power possibilities for individuals, organisations and society. Whether it be building forecasting engines that are driving down food wastage or creating mapping tools to support targeted measures in combatting human trafficking, Quantium believes in better goods, services, experiences, and championing the benefits of data for a brighter future. Our partnership with Woolworths has given us un-paralleled access to customer behaviour data of over 10 million customers that we leverage to provide insights for our diverse range of Woolworths client stakeholders. We've taken this partnership deeper by establishing Wiq. Wiq is our joint venture with Woolworths which will lead a data-driven transformation agenda for Woolworths and commercialise retail products globally.

Babies born outside of the womb. The future of humanity could be virtually unrecognisable by the end of the 21st century, according to Elise Bohan – and that's if we get the transition right. If we get it wrong, well. In ten years time it's all going to look pretty different, and in another ten years that's a total event horizon for me … I think it's eminently plausible at that point that the game has changed in some very fundamental way, whether for good or bad." Bohan, 31, is speaking from a sunny Mosman apartment, where she is house-sitting and looking after the plants. It's a distance away from the Hawkesbury river on the outskirts of Sydney where she grew up; a place with pretty spots but where it was tough to be a smart kid. And it is a half world away from Oxford University where she forms part of the Future of Humanity Institute. "I believe that," she says. "We are in the century that defines the future of humanity like no other." Transhumanism is a movement that aims to address – or end – what Bohan calls the "tragedies of reality": ageing, sickness and involuntary death. It is, she writes, "a philosophy and a project that aims to make us more than human". Whether we recognise or understand it, that project has already begun, she says, and it will transform our world – and minds and bodies – within our lifetimes. Not only is it happening, she says, but this transition is necessary if humanity is to survive in perpetuity. For Bohan, it is no great to leap to imagine that a baby born in 2030 may have its entire genome mapped at birth, that data uploaded to a central health record and cross-referenced at any medical appointment throughout its life. It is no great stretch to think that AI will become the most powerful intellectual force of the century. That human consciousness might be transferred from our "meat sacks" (bodies) into a technological sphere. That the rise of AI and automation might render great swathes of human labour redundant, and that maybe – if we get it right – that could leave more time for leisure, big thinking, meditation, connection. Experiments are already underway in the realm of artificial wombs, and Bohan is sure – when viable – women will be "clamouring" to be freed from the shackles of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. The book, she writes, is a "love letter to humanity", but hers is a "tough love". A love which sees a future for humanity, but not necessarily for human beings as we know it. When Bohan first encountered transhumanism, at around the age of 21, her first reaction was, "It's crazy.

A customer waits in a queue inside an electronics store in Sydney on Nov. 12, 2020, on the day of the official launch of Sony's next-generation PlayStation 5 gaming console. A customer waits in a queue inside an electronics store in Sydney on Nov. 12, 2020, on the day of the official launch of Sony's next-generation PlayStation 5 gaming console. Sony said it's stopping all sales of its PlayStation consoles and software in Russia in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine. In a statement sent to NPR, a company spokesperson for its video game unit called for "peace" in Ukraine Wednesday and said that Sony has suspended all software and hardware shipments throughout Russia. The company will also pause shipments of the new racing game Gran Turismo 7 to the country.