In recent times, there have been two techno-religious awakenings. To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. Something that explains the unexplainable, someone to blame. No wonder, then, that in the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a new gospel of creation was being spread, some people started to see technology as a kind of religion. Startup founders and CEOs became messianic figures.

Survivors of sex abuse by members of the Catholic clergy have expressed hope after meeting Pope Leo at the Vatican for the first time. Gemma Hickey, board president of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA Global), told the BBC it spoke volumes he had met them so soon in his papacy. The group is pushing for a global zero-tolerance policy, already adopted in the US, of permanently removing a priest who admits or is proven to have sexually abused a child. The Pope acknowledged there was resistance in some parts of the world to this, Hickey said. The new Pope, who assumed the role in May, has inherited the issue, which has haunted the Catholic Church for decades and the Vatican has struggled to root out.

Fox News contributor Dan Hoffman joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss the latest on the fallout from Ukraine's bombing of a bridge connecting Russia and Crimea and the push for NATO defense spending. Pope Leo XIV has made a direct plea for peace with Ukraine to Russian President Vladimir Putin in their first call since the American pontiff took up the highest seat in the Catholic Church last month. Following the call on Wednesday, the Vatican said the pope emphasized the "importance of dialogue" though it is unclear if he encouraged Putin to engage in direct discussions with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which the Kremlin chief has so far refused to do. While the pair also discussed humanitarian issues, prisoner exchanges and aid, Putin also apparently accused Kyiv of "escalating" the war during the phone call. An explosion is seen Tuesday, June 3, along the Kerch Bridge linking Russia and Crimea.

OutKick writer Mary Katharine Ham and Democratic strategist Kevin Walling join'MediaBuzz' to discuss the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope in history, and the U.S. trade deal with the U.K. Pope Leo XIV wrapped up his first meeting with Vatican-accredited journalists Monday morning. More than 1,000 members of the media were assembled to hear his remarks, according to the New York Times. Some of them even took their children. The gathering took place in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall, Vatican Media reported. There, the pontiff "thanked reporters in Italian for their tireless work over these intense few weeks."

Pope Francis accused conservative bishops in the U.S. of holding a "suicidal attitude" in a new interview with CBS News that aired on Sunday. Pope Francis will meet with the leaders of the United States, Ukraine, France and India on the sidelines of the Group of 7 (G-7) summit in Italy's Borgo Egnazia, the Vatican said on Thursday. Francis, who in January warned against the "perverse" dangers of artificial intelligence, is due to take part in leaders' talks on the new technology on Friday. He is the first pope to take part in G-7 discussions. Pope Francis is seen at the weekly general audience at Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican on June 12, 2024.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Pope Francis is taking his call for artificial intelligence to be developed and used according to ethical lines to the Group of 7 industrialized nations. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced Friday that Francis had accepted her invitation to attend the G7 Summit in Puglia in June. The Vatican confirmed the news.

Before dawn, Father Paolo Benanti climbed to the bell tower of his 16th-century monastery, admired the sunrise over the ruins of the Roman forum and reflected on a world in flux. "It was a wonderful meditation on what is going on inside," he said, stepping onto the street in his friar robe. There is a lot is going on for Benanti, who, as both the Vatican's and the Italian government's go-to artificial intelligence ethicist, spends his days thinking about the Holy Ghost and the ghosts in the machines.

We investigate pre-training techniques for abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS), which is much less studied than summarizing single documents. Though recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of highlighting information salience for pre-training strategy design, it struggles to generate abstractive and reflective summaries, which are critical properties for MDS. To this end, we present PELMS, a pre-trained model that uses objectives based on semantic coherence heuristics and faithfulness constraints with un-labeled multi-document inputs, to promote the generation of concise, fluent, and faithful summaries. To support the training of PELMS, we compile MultiPT, a multi-document pre-training corpus containing over 93 million documents to form more than 3 million unlabeled topic-centric document clusters, covering diverse genres such as product reviews, news, and general knowledge. We perform extensive evaluation of PELMS in low-shot settings on a wide range of MDS datasets. Our approach consistently outperforms competitive comparisons with respect to overall informativeness, abstractiveness, coherence, and faithfulness.

As enterprises increasingly look to artificial intelligence (AI) to support, speed up, or even supplant human decision-making, calls have rung out for AI's use and development to be subject to a higher power: our collective sense of right and wrong. One such entity weighing in on the need for AI ethics is the Vatican, which exactly three years ago, on Feb. 28, 2020, brought together representatives from Microsoft and IBM to first sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a commitment to develop AI that serves humanity as a whole. This ethical commitment, which brings together high-tech and religious leadership, as well as universities and government entities, was renewed in January 2023, with representatives of the Muslim and Jewish faiths joining alongside the Vatican. In many ways, the Rome Call is symbolic, enforcing principles that many IT vendors and enterprises are already undertaking around AI's use and development. But it also raises the profile of an emerging issue that has real impact on people around the globe -- something CIOs must consider in their approaches to AI.

Universities around the world are taking steps alongside major technology companies to explore ways to bolster ethics education in the artificial intelligence field in line with an initiative supported by the Vatican. The effort seeks to help those already working or aspiring to work in the tech fields understand that the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, should benefit humanity rather than pose uncontrollable challenges to human life. Participants at a global summit at the University of Notre Dame Oct. 25-26 explored ways to encompass ethics education in coursework with speakers calling for widespread integration in both technical and nontechnical curricula. Casey Fiesler, associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado, told in person and online attendees in a session that the long-held view that ethical topics are a "specialization" within technology education must be put aside. "We should not be teaching ethics in the context of computing so that it is completely separate from everything else that we are doing," Fiesler said in calling for a culture shift in higher education that can reach across society.