The first lady has taken it upon herself to help children navigate AI. If she really wants to help, then she should ask her husband to stop gutting public education

“The robots are here,” proclaimed Melania Trump during an AI event at the White House on Thursday. It can be hard to parse the first lady’s poker face and expressionless voice, but this certainly wasn’t a statement of regret. Rather Trump, reading from a script encased in a very analogue binder, was taking it upon herself to help America’s children navigate AI, which she touted as the “greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America”.

Media sites are taking action on several fronts as traffic referrals dry up and AI companies plunder their content

When the chief executive of the Financial Times suggested at a media conference this summer that rival publishers might consider a “Nato for news” alliance to strengthen negotiations with artificial intelligence companies there was a ripple of chuckles from attendees.

Yet Jon Slade’s revelation that his website had seen a “pretty sudden and sustained” decline of 25% to 30% in traffic to its articles from readers arriving via internet search engines quickly made clear the serious nature of the threat the AI revolution poses.

Models for reconnaissance, rescue, interception and attack are changing the way both sides operate

“It’s more exhausting,” says Afer, a deputy commander of the “Da Vinci Wolves”, describing how one of the best-known battalions in Ukraine has to defend against constant Russian attacks. Where once the invaders might have tried small group assaults with armoured vehicles, now the tactic is to try and sneak through on foot one by one, evading frontline Ukrainian drones, and find somewhere to hide.

Under what little cover remains, survivors then try to gather a group of 10 or so and attack Ukrainian positions. It is costly – “in the last 24 hours we killed 11,” Afer says – but the assaults that previously might have happened once or twice a day are now relentless. To the Da Vinci commander it seems that the Russians are terrified of their own officers, which is why they follow near suicidal orders.

Settlement could be pivotal after authors claimed company took pirated copies of their work to train chatbots

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.

Regulators ordered the tech giant to end ‘self-preferencing practices’ in advertising services but declined to force sale

European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a €2.95bn ($3.5bn) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.

The European Commission , the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.

Film-making studio Fable has announced it will attempt to recreate the 43 minutes cut from the auteur’s 1942 film using AI

An AI company is to reconstruct the missing portions of Orson Welles’ legendary mutilated masterwork The Magnificent Ambersons, it has been announced.

According to the Hollywood Reporter , the Showrunner platform is planning to use its AI tools to assist in a recreation of the lost 43 minutes of Welles’ 1942 film, removed and subsequently destroyed by Hollywood studio RKO.

CEO will have to increase the value of his electric car company from just over $1tn to $8.5tn over 10 years

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Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire if he hits targets set by Tesla, under a scheme disclosed by the electric car company he runs and in which he is the largest shareholder.

Tesla outlined the terms of the incentive package, unprecedented in corporate history, in a section of its latest stock market update that began: “Yes, you read that correctly.”

A flourishing lineup of immersive storytelling experiments are taking visitors into novels, nightclubs and outer space

In the largest cinema at the Venice film festival, guests gather for the premiere of Frankenstein , Guillermo del Toro’s lavish account of a man who dared to play God and created a monster. When the young scientist reanimates a dead body for his colleagues, some see it as a trick while others are outraged. “It’s an abomination, an obscenity,” shouts one hide-bound old timer, and his alarm is partly justified. Every technological breakthrough opens Pandora’s box. You don’t know what’s going to crawl out or where it will then choose to go.

Behind the main festival venue sits the small ruined island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Since 2017, it’s been home to Venice Immersive, the event’s groundbreaking section dedicated to showcasing and supporting XR (extended reality) storytelling. Before that it was a storage facility, before that a plague quarantine zone. Eliza McNitt, this year’s jury president, remembers the time when work on the exhibits had to be paused because the builders had uncovered human bones in the ground. “There’s something haunting about the fact that we come to the oldest film festival in the world to present this new form of cinema,” she says. “We’re exploring the medium of the future, but we’re also in conversation with ghosts.”