On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a "previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking," and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot. The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday--this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced "4o" model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things.

This study examines the extent to which U.S. federal agencies responded to and implemented the principles outlined in the White House's October 2022 "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights." The Blueprint provided a framework for the ethical governance of artificial intelligence systems, organized around five core principles: safety and effectiveness, protection against algorithmic discrimination, data privacy, notice and explanation about AI systems, and human alternatives and fallback. Through an analysis of publicly available records across 15 federal departments, the authors found limited evidence that the Blueprint directly influenced agency actions after its release. Only five departments explicitly mentioned the Blueprint, while 12 took steps aligned with one or more of its principles. However, much of this work appeared to have precedents predating the Blueprint or motivations disconnected from it, such as compliance with prior executive orders on trustworthy AI. Departments' activities often emphasized priorities like safety, accountability and transparency that overlapped with Blueprint principles, but did not necessarily stem from it. The authors conclude that the non-binding Blueprint seems to have had minimal impact on shaping the U.S. government's approach to ethical AI governance in its first year. Factors like public concerns after high-profile AI releases and obligations to follow direct executive orders likely carried more influence over federal agencies. More rigorous study would be needed to definitively assess the Blueprint's effects within the federal bureaucracy and broader society.

In this paper, we present our submission to the SemEval-2024 Task 8 "Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection", focusing on the detection of machine-generated texts (MGTs) in English. Specifically, our approach relies on combining embeddings from the RoBERTa-base with diversity features and uses a resampled training set. We score 12th from 124 in the ranking for Subtask A (monolingual track), and our results show that our approach is generalizable across unseen models and domains, achieving an accuracy of 0.91.

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has produced many recent breakthroughs in game AI research, particularly in computer Go. In this paper we consider how MCTS can be applied to create engaging AI for a popular commercial mobile phone game: Spades by AI Factory, which has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times. In particular, we show how MCTS can be integrated with knowledge-based methods to create an interesting, fun and strong player which makes far fewer plays that could be perceived by human observers as blunders than MCTS without the injection of knowledge. These blunders are particularly noticeable for Spades, where a human player must co-operate with an AI partner. MCTS gives objectively stronger play than the knowledge-based approach used in previous versions of the game and offers the flexibility to customise behaviour whilst maintaining a reusable core, with a reduced development cycle compared to purely knowledge-based techniques.

Onit, a workflow software company based in Houston with a legal component, announced this week that it has acquired 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield alum McCarthyFinch. Onit intends to use the startup's AI skills to beef up its legal workflow software offerings. The companies did not share the purchase price. After evaluating a number of companies in the space, Onit focused on McCarthyFinch, which gives it an artificial intelligence component the company's legal workflow software had been lacking. "We evaluated about a dozen companies in the AI space and dug in deep on six of them. McCarthyFinch stood out from the pack. They had the strongest technology and the strongest team," Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit told TechCrunch.

In 1993, Sega made a Power Rangers-esque VR headset that the company hoped would bring VR to the masses. "It takes us into the future," said MTV's Alan Hunter on stage at that summer's Consumer Electronics Show. Sega never released the headset. It was discontinued shortly after the trade show, and then it vanished. Not even the video game archivists over at the Video Game History Foundation could track one down.

It seems almost preordained at this point: Thou Shalt Run Thy Data Science Environment On a Cloud-Native Kubernetes Platform. This is 2020, after all. How else could it possibly run? But Tyler Whitehouse, a data scientist who worked at DARPA and IARPA, and his associates from Johns Hopkins University have a very different view on how to manage and distribute resources for data scientists. It does feature containers, but it doesn't involve Kubernetes. To hear Whitehouse tell it, the whole data science community has zigged, without ever considering whether they should have zagged.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has given us a unique opportunity to perfectly understand the modern Democrats' belief in aristocratic superiority. The California Democrat's recent hypocrisy in going to her hair salon, which was supposed to be shut down due to San Francisco's stringent (and Pelosi-supported) COVID-19 rules, is just one more example of Democratic members of the political aristocracy believing they are superior to citizens (the opposite of the founding premise of America). The American people have long resented the hypocrisy and arrogance by which a political aristocracy believes one set of rules applies to the public and a totally different set of rules applies to its interests and its family members. We knew that this double standard deeply offended most Americans in 1994. That is why the first commitment of the Contract with America was to "require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress."

HPE has built intelligent storage into its composable infrastructure, enabling partners to deliver the cloud experience to their on-premises customers through a highly automated data center environment. The hardware powerhouse told attendees of VMworld Barcelona on Monday that it has integrated AI sourced from its Primera Storage platform into both its rack and blade composable solutions, Lauren Whitehouse told CRN. "We're taking that AI capability and having it really permeate our portfolio," Whitehouse said. Primera AI capabilities are based on the InfoSight data platform obtained through HPE's 2017 acquisition of Nimble Storage. HPE started by integrating that technology into ProLiant servers before launching Primera to extend operational intelligence across its data center portfolio. AI-powered composable solutions allow HPE's on-premises infrastructure to operate closer to a cloud model, delivering comprehensive automation, flexibility and scalability of the kind that is driving customers to the public cloud, Whitehouse said.

The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters--elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he's been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines--archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science--to construct a profile of religious practices. Whitehouse's fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.