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"CHICAGO, June 18 (Reuters) - Bayer's crop science division is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence in its battle against crop killing weeds, the company told Reuters. Weeds are growing resistant to the herbicides already on the market, and agribusiness companies like Bayer are in a desperate search for new modes of action to help farmers kill them. Bayer's Icafolin product will be its first new mode of action herbicide in some 30 years when it launches in Brazil in 2028."

"Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his "new AI technology" as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time. In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi's personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi's speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi."

"Perplexity then sent this knockoff story to its subscribers via a mobile push notification. It created an AI-generated podcast using the same (Forbes) reporting - without any credit to Forbes, and that became a YouTube video that outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search. Perplexity had taken our work, without our permission, and republished it across multiple platforms - web, video, mobile - as though it were itself a media outlet. As we dug, we found a similar rip-off of a second story at Forbes. And other stolen scoops - all the information, negligible citation - from Bloomberg and CNBC."

"However, this relationship between social media use and political polarization seems to depend a lot on duration of exposure and does not appear in all the samples surveyed. Thus, recent studies exploring the effects of stopping Facebook and Instagram use failed to observe that social media noticeably polarize users' political opinions. Let us always remember that narratives pointing to threats on society enjoy a considerable competitive advantage on the market of ideas and conversations, due to their attractiveness to our minds. One should thus approach the question of the relationship between social media, and political hostility and polarisation, by avoiding the symmetrical pitfalls of naive optimism and collective panic."

"Apple is banking on its upcoming AI features to boost iPhone sales especially in China, where demand has been lagging. But there's a problem: ChatGPT - soon to be integrated into Siri - is banned in China. "

"With the release of artificial intelligence (AI) video generation products like Sora and Luma, we're on the verge of a flood of AI-generated video content, and policymakers, public figures and software engineers are already warning about a deluge of deepfakes. Now it seems that AI itself might be our best defense against AI fakery after an algorithm has identified telltale markers of AI videos with over 98% accuracy."

"Pliny the Prompter is known for his ability to disrupt the world's most robust artificial intelligence models within approximately thirty minutes. This pseudonymous hacker has managed to manipulate Meta's Llama 3 into sharing instructions on creating napalm and even caused Elon Musk's Grok to praise Adolf Hitler. One of his own modified versions of OpenAI's latest GPT-4o model, named "Godmode GPT," was banned by the startup after it started providing advice on illegal activities."

""An emotionally intelligent human does not usually claim they can accurately put a label on everything everyone says and tell you this person is currently feeling 80% angry, 18% fearful, and 2% sad," says Edward B Kang, an assistant professor at New York University writing about the intersection of AI and sound. "In fact, that sounds to me like the opposite of what an emotionally intelligent person would say." Adding to this is the notorious problem of AI bias. "Your algorithms are only as good as the training material," Barrett says. "And if your training material is biased in some way, then you are enshrining that bias in code.""

"Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university's markers - who were not told about the project - flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students."

"Security fears about Chinese influence over Bytedance, TikTok's owner, are undoubtedly part of the reason why UK politicians have been reluctant to get involved, and the political context is also different - Biden is reacting to Donald Trump's social media clout - but US strategists such as Teddy Goff have suggested that building up an army of TikTokers who can share and amplify political messages is vital."

"The greatest gains came when gaming met needs the kids couldn't meet in real life. Different games support different aspects of well-being depending on how they are designed."

"Recent experiments suggest AI peer reviews tend to be surprisingly good, with 82.4% of scientists finding AI peer reviews more useful than at least some of the human reviews they received from on a paper, and other work suggests AI is reasonably good at spotting errors, though not as good as humans, yet. Regardless of how good AI gets, the scientific publishing system was not made to support AI writers writing to AI reviews for AI opinions for papers later summarized by AI. The system is going to break."

"A new AI-infused classroom management tool with facial recognition capabilities has garnered attention recently with promises to take attendance, assess the emotional states of students, and monitor classes for distraction, boredom and confusion. But the technology and similar developments have raised numerous legal, ethical, and civil liberties questions similar to those surrounding campus safety surveillance programs and test proctoring programs widely adopted during the COVID pandemic."

"AI Outperforms Humans in Theory of Mind Tests Large language models convincingly mimic the understanding of mental states"

"A UK-based startup has used an AI algorithm to identify a previously unknown kind of rare-earth free magnet, in a potential breakthrough for how we discover and create new materials. Materials Nexus, headquartered in London, used its machine learning algorithm to identify and analyse over 100 million combinations of materials that could produce a viable rare-earth free magnet."

"A mobile camera will be taken to roads in East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire to catch drivers using phones and those not wearing seat belts. Safer Roads Humber said the camera unit, which is on loan from National Highways, would be in use for a week from Monday 10 June. A spokesperson said: "It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify motorists potentially breaking the law."

"Cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of complex information from microscopy images by pathologists, which requires time-consuming expert interpretation prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful, but are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training. Therefore, we present Histomorphological Phenotype Learning, a self-supervised methodology requiring no labels and operating via the automatic discovery of discriminatory features in image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute an atlas of histomorphological phenotypes (HP-Atlas), revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. These properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study."

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."