“It’s in tremendous disrepair, as is a lot of the rest of our country, most of it because of bad management,” Trump told reporters Monday after he toured the Kennedy Center and met for the first time as chair of its board. - The Hill
“If the federal government can show up and demand a university department be shut down or restructured, then we don’t have universities in this country.” - The Hill
"If the PRC's developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over," the company wrote in its policy proposal. "America loses, as does the success of democratic AI." - Futurism
One order signed Friday night calls for the agencies — some of which are focused on minority business enterprises, museum and library services, and homelessness prevention — to “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” - Washington Post
Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly create images depicting celebrities and copyrighted characters, and — as alluded to earlier — remove watermarks from existing photos. - TechCrunch
“Throughout the years, we've certainly had vocal audience members or community members who've questioned some programming choices. … But what we have never encountered is elected officials trying to dictate what we should and should not be showing.” - NPR
Translators, photographers, illustrators: all are suffering, thoroughly. But some still say they use ChatGPT to help with work - and to help with personal tasks as well. - The Observer (UK)
“Amazon is forcing Echo users to make a couple of tough decisions: Grant Amazon access to recordings of everything you say to Alexa or stop using an Echo; let Amazon save voice recordings and have employees listen to them or lose a feature set to become more advanced.” - ArsTechnica
The Board, which has been purged and replaced by Trump loyalists, will take up a resolution that says, "The committee will recommend a slate of honorees to the Kennedy Center’s president for approval.” And we know who that is. - The New York Times
“Steven Meiner, the mayor of Miami Beach, has issued a draft resolution calling for the termination of the city’s lease agreement with O Cinema, and withdrawing $40,000 in promised grant funding for the nonprofit that runs the independent cinema.” - The Guardian (UK)
That’s what Bruce Willis’s wife says as she cares for her own husband, who has dementia. “Caregivers need care, too. ... They are vital, and that it is so important that we show up for them so that they can continue to show up for their person.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Behind-the-scenes workers need to feed our families and have neither participated in any decisions relating to booked content, nor have we considered social issues as a matter of whether we service a production in the history of our relationship at the Kennedy Center.” - Deadline
In its proposal, OpenAI urged the federal government to enact a series of “freedom-focused” policy ideas, including an approach that would no longer compel American AI developers to “comply with overly burdensome state laws.” Copyright in particular is an issue that has plagued AI developers. - NBC News
“You need only look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade to realise popular culture from the late 2010s had a love affair with trauma. … It was the use of trauma as a ballast for plot, not just as a technique to illustrate character, that was so striking." - The Guardian