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  • How to trust environmental news in the world of AI

    How to trust environmental news in the world of AI

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    The rise of artificial intelligence is making it harder for journalists to convey complicated science news about the environment, said panelists at the annual 2025 Society of Environmental Journalism conference in Tempe.

    And readers of that news stand to lose the most from AI, said Panayiotis Moutis, Assistant Professor of the City College of New York.

    As AI becomes more human-like, it’s becoming harder to differentiate the wording or images of a robot from those of a real person. AI programs lack the creative thinking of a human brain, leaving readers feeling they’ve read it all before. They click away.

    Who are the winners in the AI revolution?

    ASU Professor Punya Mishra said the winners of the AI revolution are software developers and powerful companies.

    Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein, senior research manager for the global Center for News, Technology and Innovation, agreed.

    Not only are the companies becoming wealthier as these systems are being invented, but they are also using the public input as a sort of “trial test-run” to constantly improve on these systems to be better, Barchas-Lichtenstein said.

    Can journalists use AI and is the public okay with it?

    Barchas-Lichtenstein conducted an international public survey in 2024 asking journalists if they use AI in their current work, and if so, for what.

    At least one in three of the public responders said they use AI technology and accept journalists doing the same.

    In 2024, two-thirds said they use AI to translate content from another language, and 60% said they use AI to summarize or analyze documents or data.

    But only 39% said they use AI to write story drafts.

    Over 70% of the public said they were okay with journalists using AI. The biggest issue was with image creation and editing. As 43% of journalists said they’ve used AI to edit an image, less than 50% of the public said they were comfortable with that.

    When can a journalist use AI effectively and ethically?

    Mishra said that AI should never be used as a substitute for their own research or in place of their original writing.

    “Use AI when accuracy doesn’t matter,” said Mishra.

    Serenity Reynolds is a junior studying journalism at Arizona State University and is part of a student newsroom led by The Arizona Republic.

    Coverage of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference is supported by Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, the University of Arizona and the Arizona Media Association.

    These stories are published open-source for other news outlets and organizations to share and republish, with credit and links to azcentral.com.

  • IDF used AI to kill Hamas terrorist, find hostages in Gaza – Defense News

    IDF used AI to kill Hamas terrorist, find hostages in Gaza – Defense News

    The IDF’s Unit 8200 used artificial intelligence to eliminate a Hamas official and locate hostages in the Gaza Strip, three Israeli and US officials told The New York Times on Friday.

    The New York Times reported that the military used AI tech to kill Ibrahim Biari, who was a Hamas commander based in northern Gaza. He assisted in planning the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Four Israeli officials said AI technology was immediately cleared for deployment after the attacks, the report added.

    The report said that finding Biari was difficult for the IDF in the first few weeks of the war. The technology used to eliminate him was developed a decade ago, but was only utilized when he was struck by the IDF, shortly after Unit 8200 engineers implemented AI into the tech used to locate and strike him, officials said.

    The AI technology was able to locate Biari by listening to his calls. The audio tool was also used by Israeli intelligence to locate hostages taken by the terrorist organization. Two Israeli officers quoted in the report said that the AI tool was refined over time to find hostages.

    IDF soldiers operate in the Morag Corridor, in the southern Gaza Strip. (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT)

    The attack that killed Biari also killed 50 other terrorists, the IDF said in November 2023. This came after the Pentagon asked the military for “detail the thinking and process behind the strike,”  to avoid more Gazan civilian casualties, an official told Politico.

    Regarding the AI technology, three people told The New York Times that many of these initiatives started as collaborations between Unit 8200 soldiers and IDF reservists who worked at tech companies such as Google and Microsoft. However, Google noted that “the work those employees do as reservists is not connected,” to the company. 

    Israel also used AI technology to monitor the reactions from the Arab world to then-Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah’s death.

    AI technology in warfare raises ethical concerns

    The report cited three US and Israeli officials who said that these AI technologies have sometimes led to the deaths of civilians as a result of mistaken identification. 

    Hadas Lorber, head of the Holon Institute of Technology’s Institute for Applied Research in Responsible AI, told the New York Times that the technology used “raises serious ethical questions.” Lorber was also a former senior director at the Israeli National Security Council.

    The report also quoted an IDF Spokeswoman who said that the military “is committed to the lawful and responsible use of data technology tools.”

    Reports of IDF using AI last year

    Further reports of the IDF using AI were covered by the Washington Post late last December, where the source said that the military used artificial intelligence to rapidly refill their “target bank,” a list of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists to be killed during military operations, along with details about their whereabouts and routines.

    Like in the recent New York Times report, there were also ethical concerns about using the technology. The December report noted that there was a debate within the IDF’s senior echelons about the quality of intelligence gathered by AI, and whether focusing on AI weakened the military’s intel capabilities.

    The military’s Unit 8200, also known as its Military Intelligence Directorate, supplies the army and the state with any warnings and alerts to protect the country from terrorist threats.



  • Wall Street’s Fear of an AI Slowdown Is ‘Laughable’: Morgan Stanley

    Wall Street’s Fear of an AI Slowdown Is ‘Laughable’: Morgan Stanley

    One of Wall Street’s top banks isn’t worried about the artificial intelligence trade even as it struggles amid fears of lower investment by companies in 2025.

    “The idea that we are in a digestion phase for AI is laughable given the obvious need for more inference chips which is driving a wave of very strong demand,” Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a note on Friday.

    Moore pointed to recent comments from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai as evidence that AI companies still can’t get enough GPU chips.

    “While Wall Street wrings its hands over a laundry list of very real concerns, Silicon Valley focus has shifted to a very different challenge – growth in tokens generated of more than 5x since the beginning of the year is very much stressing the ecosystem, and is driving a surge in investment to handle those workloads,” Moore explained.

    AI stocks have been particularly weak this year, a trend sparked by the late-January debut of DeepSeek’s efficient large language model. The model sparked fears that cloud hyperscalers might need fewer GPU chips from Nvidia to develop their AI capabilities.

    The AI bubble fears grew after President Donald Trump unleashed a wave of tariffs in early April.

    Shares of AI darling Nvidia have plunged 28% since late January, and mega-cap tech giants closely tied to the AI trade are down about 21% since their peak just a few months ago.

    Turning to Nvidia, Moore admitted that supply constraints and export restrictions on its H20 chips would likely limit the company’s revenue upside over the next few quarters. Still, once supply constraints are worked out, they should see a significant leg of growth in 2026.

    “NVIDIA had almost no revenue for Blackwell in October, did $11 bn in January, and likely well over $30 bn in the current quarter,” Moore said, adding that he doesn’t expect the growth to slow down. anytime soon.

    “Per our checks, this demand commentary has intensified in the last few days,” Moore said. “We have been highlighting this strong inference demand recently but it continues to get stronger.”

    Moore increased his calendar year 2026 revenue and earnings per share estimates for Nvidia by 10.7% and 11.9%, respectively, adding that the chip giant remains a “top pick.”

    The analyst reiterated his “Overweight” rating on Nvidia and set a $160 price target, representing potential upside of 45% from current levels.

  • MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s legal team accused of submitting inaccurate, AI-generated brief to Colorado court

    MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s legal team accused of submitting inaccurate, AI-generated brief to Colorado court

    MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s legal team accused of submitting inaccurate, AI-generated brief to Colorado court

    MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and his legal team have to explain themselves to a federal judge in Colorado after she discovered a recent brief they submitted pointed to fake court cases as evidence.
  • Mike Myers on Playing Elon Musk, Politics on ‘S.N.L.’ and Why He Filmed a Campaign Ad

    Mike Myers on Playing Elon Musk, Politics on ‘S.N.L.’ and Why He Filmed a Campaign Ad

    As he played a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on “Saturday Night Live” in March, the veteran Canadian comedian Mike Myers was not intending to make a personal political statement. But when he stood onstage for the closing credits of the show, he said, “I got angrier and angrier.”

    He thought about Mr. Musk’s remark that Canada is “not a real country,” and about how President Trump had called the former Canadian prime minister “Governor Trudeau” and rudely referred to Canada as “the 51st state.” He thought about tariffs, and about graffiti he’d seen in Winnipeg: “There’s no greater pain than being betrayed by a friend.”

    And he thought about the legendary Canadian hockey player Gordie Howe and his famous “elbows up” response to aggression on the ice.

    And so Mr. Myers, the 61-year-old star of the “Wayne’s World,” “Austin Powers” and “Shrek” films and a beloved figure on both sides of the Canadian-American border, boldly opened his down vest and flashed his “Canada Is Not for Sale” T-shirt on live television. “Elbows up,” he mouthed into the camera, twice.

    “What happened came from my ankles and from my brain and from my heart, and it was not about me — it was about my country,” he said. “I wanted to send a message home to say that I’m with you, you know.”

    As public acts of defiance on “S.N.L.” go, the unveiling of Mr. Myers’s T-shirt was less shocking than, say, the Irish singer Sinead’s O’Connor’s dramatic destruction of a photo of Pope John Paul II in 1992. But for the mild-mannered Mr. Myers, an expatriate who said that “no one is more Canadian than a person who no longer lives in Canada,” it was the moment the gloves came off.

    “What’s happened has really hurt our feelings,” he said in a recent telephone interview that began when, in what felt like a classically Canadian move, he apologized for having hay fever and perhaps sounding a bit snuffly. “We love America. We love you guys. We don’t understand what this madness is.”

    Mr. Myers moved to the United States in 1988 because “America is the entertainment capital of the world” and it was where his career took off, he said. Though he divides his time between New York and Vermont, he said he travels back home to Toronto often. He has an American wife, three American children and an American passport (alongside his Canadian one).

    “I am also an American citizen, and I took my oath very seriously,” he said. “That’s what’s so crazy. Americans are the last people you would think would ever be a threat to us.”

    In Canada, Mr. Myers has two streets named after him, appears on a postage stamp and in 2017 was named an officer of the Order of Canada for his work in comedy. He published “Canada,” a memoir-cum-Valentine to his native country, in 2016.

    Emboldened by how his “elbows up” defiance on “S.N.L.” caught on up north, Mr. Myers plotted an escalation of his political involvement.

    “I consulted with my brothers, who are both, obviously, Canadian, as well as being very savvy politically and smart and funny,” he said. The result was a television ad for the Liberal Party, featuring Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mr. Myers — wearing a “Never 51” jersey — chatting beside a hockey rink. Though the race has been tightening, the Liberals have been buoyed by a surge of anger at Mr. Trump’s bellicose behavior, and pollsters say they are favored to defeat the Conservatives in Monday’s federal elections.

    Inspired by “those World War II movies where they ask the fake Americans who won the World Series” as a way to unmask them, Mr. Myers said, he wanted the ad to be a reaffirmation of his own Canadianness as well as an endorsement of Mr. Carney.

    “I wanted it to be like, ‘I know I don’t live there anymore, and let’s talk about that,’” he said. “I thought it would be funny if the prime minister of Canada ran an identity test on me.” (The part in which Mr. Myers correctly identifies Toronto’s “two seasons” as “winter and construction” was contributed by Mr. Myers’s best friend since childhood, David Mackenzie, he said.)

    The ad shows that Mr. Carney, in addition to being a former governor of the Bank of England, has fine comic timing. “I think he’s very reasonable,” Mr. Myers said of Mr. Carney. “He’s taken a calm, resolute, articulate stance in defense of our sovereignty.”

    Mr. Myers was an “S.N.L.” cast member from 1989 to 1995. He’s now appeared three times this season as Mr. Musk, who is originally from South Africa but who was raised in Canada. (At one point, Mr. Myers had Mr. Musk make a classic Dr. Evil pinkie gesture.)

    “To the extent that Elon Musk is involved in our democratic government, it goes against how I feel as a Canadian,” he said of Mr. Musk’s slash-and-burn approach. “We don’t have a distrust of the government. We have a belief in good government.”

    And comedy is one way Mr. Myers can make that point, he believes.

    “Fascism doesn’t like to be ridiculed; it likes to be feared,” he said. “Satire is an important tool in the toolbox to say that this is not normal — that the cuts he’s making are not normal.”

    Mr. Myers said he had no ill will toward another prominent Canadian expatriate, the hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky, whose embrace of Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement has caused some Canadians to turn against him. Mr. Gretzky remains “a great Canadian,” Mr. Myers said.

    He mentioned the game Red Rover, which he played as a boy in Toronto, as a vehicle for inviting Mr. Gretzky to join his side.

    “Red Rover, Red Rover, we call Wayne over,” he said. “I hope he does. We would accept him with open arms.”

    In his book, Mr. Myers writes that his native country has often struggled to define its purpose, its residents asking not “Who are we?” but rather “Why are we?”

    It has an answer now, he said.

    “As the great Canadian poet Joni Mitchell said, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,’” he said. “The possibility of it all being gone has raised our consciousness of how great we are.”

  • Denver utilizes AI bot to streamline help for residents

    Denver utilizes AI bot to streamline help for residents



    Denver utilizes AI bot to streamline help for residents – CBS Colorado










































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    Denver has rolled out an artificial intelligence bot to help residents answer questions relating to city policy, regulations and rules.

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  • China's Xi calls for self sufficiency in AI development amid U.S. rivalry

    China's Xi calls for self sufficiency in AI development amid U.S. rivalry

    China's Xi calls for self sufficiency in AI development amid U.S. rivalry

    China’s President Xi Jinping pledged “self-reliance and self-strengthening” to develop AI in China, state media reported on Saturday, as the country vies with the U.S. for supremacy in artificial intelligence, a key strategic area.
  • It’s Becoming Less Taboo to Talk About AI Being ‘Conscious’

    It’s Becoming Less Taboo to Talk About AI Being ‘Conscious’

    Three years ago, suggesting AI was “sentient” was one way to get fired in the tech world. Now, tech companies are more open to having that conversation.

    This week, AI startup Anthropic launched a new research initiative to explore whether models might one day experience “consciousness,” while a scientist at Google DeepMind described today’s models as “exotic mind-like entities.”

    It’s a sign of how much AI has advanced since 2022, when Blake Lemoine was fired from his job as a Google engineer after claiming the company’s chatbot, LaMDA, had become sentient. Lemoine said the system feared being shut off and described itself as a person. Google called his claims “wholly unfounded,” and the AI community moved quickly to shut the conversation down.

    Neither Anthropic nor the Google scientist is going so far as Lemoine.

    Anthropic, the startup behind Claude, said in a Thursday blog post that it plans to investigate whether models might one day have experiences, preferences, or even distress.

    “Should we also be concerned about the potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves? Should we be concerned about model welfare, too?” the company asked.

    Kyle Fish, an alignment scientist at Anthropic who researches AI welfare, said in a video released Thursday that the lab isn’t claiming Claude is conscious, but the point is that it’s no longer responsible to assume the answer is definitely no.

    He said as AI systems become more sophisticated, companies should “take seriously the possibility” that they “may end up with some form of consciousness along the way.”

    He added: “There are staggeringly complex technical and philosophical questions, and we’re at the very early stages of trying to wrap our heads around them.”

    Fish said researchers at Anthropic estimate Claude 3.7 has between a 0.15% and 15% chance of being conscious. The lab is studying whether the model shows preferences or aversions, and testing opt-out mechanisms that could let it refuse certain tasks.

    In March, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei floated the idea of giving future AI systems an “I quit this job” button — not because they’re sentient, he said, but as a way to observe patterns of refusal that might signal discomfort or misalignment.

    Meanwhile, at Google DeepMind, principal scientist Murray Shanahan has proposed that we might need to rethink the concept of consciousness altogether.

    “Maybe we need to bend or break the vocabulary of consciousness to fit these new systems,” Shanahan said on a Deepmind podcast, published Thursday. “You can’t be in the world with them like you can with a dog or an octopus — but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.”

    Google appears to be taking the idea seriously. A recent job listing sought a “post-AGI” research scientist, with responsibilities that include studying machine consciousness.

    ‘We might as well give rights to calculators’

    Not everyone’s convinced, and many researchers acknowledge that AI systems are excellent mimics that could be trained to act conscious even if they aren’t.

    “We can reward them for saying they have no feelings,” said Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, in an interview with The New York Times this week.

    Kaplan cautioned that testing AI systems for consciousness is inherently difficult, precisely because they’re so good at imitation.

    Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and longtime critic of hype in the AI industry, told Business Insider he believes the focus on AI consciousness is more about branding than science.

    “What a company like Anthropic is really saying is ‘look how smart our models are — they’re so smart they deserve rights,’” he said. “We might as well give rights to calculators and spreadsheets — which (unlike language models) never make stuff up.”

    Still, Fish said the topic will only become more relevant as people interact with AI in more ways — at work, online, or even emotionally.

    “It’ll just become an increasingly salient question whether these models are having experiences of their own — and if so, what kinds,” he said.

    Anthropic and Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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  • Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings in talks to raise  billion

    Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings in talks to raise $20 billion

    The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

    Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

    Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

    The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.

    Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.

    The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.

    Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.

    Faber Report: Elon Musk held call with current xAI investors, sources say

    The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.

    “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”

    Read the full Bloomberg story here.

    — CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.