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      AI Companies Have Pitched US Political Campaigns. The Campaigns Are Wary.

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      More than 30 tech companies have pitched A.I. tools to political campaigns for November’s election. The campaigns have been wary.Sam WoodMatthew Diemer, a Democrat running for election in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, was approached by the artificial intelligence company Civox in January with a pitch: A.I.-backed voice technology that could make tens of thousands of personalized phone calls to voters using Mr. Diemer’s talking points and sense of humor.His campaign agreed to try out the technology. But it turned out that the only thing voters hated more than a robocall was an A.I.-backed one.While Civox’s A.I. program made almost 1,000 calls to voters in five minutes, nearly all of them hung up in the first few seconds when they heard a voice that described itself as an A.I. volunteer, Mr. Diemer said.“People just didn’t want to be on the phone, and they especially didn’t want to be on the phone when they heard they were talking to an A.I. program,” said the entrepreneur, who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for the same seat he is seeking now. “Maybe people weren’t ready yet for this type of technology.”This was supposed to be the year of the A.I. election. Fueled by a proliferation of A.I. tools like chatbots and image generators, more than 30 tech companies have offered A.I. products to national, state and local U.S. political campaigns in recent months. The companies — mostly smaller firms such as BHuman, VoterVoice and Poll the People — make products that reorganize voter rolls and campaign emails, expand robocalls and create A.I.-generated likenesses of candidates that can meet and greet constituents virtually.But campaigns are largely not biting — and when they have, the technology has fallen flat. Only a handful of candidates are using A.I., and even fewer are willing to admit it, according to interviews with 23 tech companies and seven political campaigns. Three of the companies said campaigns agreed to buy their tech only if they could ensure that the public would never find out they had used A.I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump promueve imágenes falsas de IA para sugerir que Taylor Swift lo apoyó

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      El expresidente ha estado preocupado por la popularidad de la megaestrella de la música pop, quien apoyó a Joe Biden durante las elecciones de 2020.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El expresidente Donald Trump, quien le ha guardado un notorio rencor a la megaestrella de la música pop Taylor Swift, incendió internet el domingo cuando compartió mensajes en las redes sociales sugiriendo que Swift lo había apoyado y que sus fans podrían ayudarlo a ganar las elecciones de noviembre.En una publicación en su red social Truth Social, Trump llamó la atención sobre un grupo de imágenes creadas mediante inteligencia artificial. Una de ellas mostraba a Swift disfrazada del Tío Sam con el siguiente titular: “Taylor quiere que votes por Donald Trump”. Las otras mostraban a una multitud de mujeres jóvenes con camisetas a juego de “swifties for Trump”.Al menos una de las imágenes, que fueron compartidas por un influente de las redes sociales que simpatiza con Trump, fue etiquetada como “sátira”.“Acepto”, escribió Trump en una publicación, dando a entender que había recibido el apoyo de Swift.Un representante de la cantante, quien no ha hecho un respaldo este ciclo electoral después de apoyar a Joe Biden en 2020, no respondió inmediatamente a una solicitud de comentarios el lunes.Las burlas de los demócratas no se hicieron esperar.El representante por California, Eric Swalwell , quien apareció en CNN el lunes, dijo que la medida sería contraproducente para Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Personalized Brain Pacemaker for Parkinson’s

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      When Shawn Connolly was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease nine years ago, he was a 39-year-old daredevil on a skateboard, flipping and leaping from walls, benches and dumpsters through the streets of San Francisco. He appeared in videos and magazines, and had sponsorships from skateboard makers and shops.But gradually, he began to notice that “things weren’t really working right” with his body. He found that his right hand was cupping, and he began cradling his arm to hold it in place. His balance and alignment started to seem off.Over time, he developed a common Parkinson’s pattern, fluctuating between periods of rapid involuntary movements like “I’ve got ants in my pants” and periods of calcified slowness when, he said, “I could barely move.”A couple of years ago, Mr. Connolly volunteered for an experiment that summoned his daring and determination in a different way. He became a participant in a study exploring an innovative approach to deep brain stimulation.In the study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers transformed deep brain stimulation — an established treatment for Parkinson’s — into a personalized therapy that tailored the amount of electrical stimulation to each patient’s individual symptoms.The researchers found that for Mr. Connolly and the three other participants, the individualized approach, called adaptive deep brain stimulation, cut in half the time they experienced their most bothersome symptom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Piecing Together an Ancient Epic Was Slow Work. Until A.I. Got Involved.

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      Scholars have struggled to identify fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh — one of the world’s oldest literary texts. Now A.I. has brought an “extreme acceleration” to the field.In 1872, in a quiet second-floor room at the British Museum, George Smith, a museum employee, was studying a grime-encrusted clay tablet when he came across words that would change his life. In the ancient cuneiform script, he recognized references to a stranded ship and a bird sent in search of land. After he had the tablet cleaned, Smith was certain he’d found a prototype of the biblical flood story.“I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion,” Smith reportedly said in a frenzy of excitement.Smith realized that the tablet, which had been excavated in what is modern-day Iraq, was a small part of a much longer work — one that some then thought could help shed light on the Book of Genesis. The discovery made Smith, who came from a working-class family and had largely taught himself cuneiform, famous. He dedicated the rest of his life to searching for missing pieces of the poem, making multiple trips to the Middle East before dying of an illness on his final trip in 1876, at age 36.For 152 years since Smith’s discovery, successive generations of Assyriologists — experts in the study of cuneiform and the cultures that used it — have taken up his quest to piece together a complete version of the poem known now as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fragments of the epic, which was written more than 3,000 years ago and was based upon still earlier works, have re-emerged as tablets have been unearthed in archaeological digs, found in museum store rooms or surfaced on the black market.The researchers face a daunting task. There are as many as half a million clay tablets housed in the Mesopotamian collections of various world museums and universities, along with many more tablet fragments. But since there are so few experts in cuneiform, many of these writings are unread and many more are unpublished.So despite a generation-spanning effort, about 30 percent of Gilgamesh remains missing and there are gaps in modern understanding both of the poem and Mesopotamian writing in general.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Falsely Claims Harris’s Rally Crowds Are A.I.-Generated

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his new obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds.The crowds at Ms. Harris’s events, including one in Detroit outside an airplane hangar, were witnessed by thousands of people and news outlets, including The New York Times, and the number of attendees claimed by her campaign is in line with what was visible on the ground. Mr. Trump falsely wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it.”A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump has struggled to find his political footing in the weeks since President Biden decided to step aside and Ms. Harris replaced him atop the Democratic ticket: Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity at a conference for Black journalists, he later attacked Brian Kemp, the popular Republican governor in the key swing state of Georgia, and he has seen new polling that puts him behind Ms. Harris in several key states.The Harris campaign has begun to mock Mr. Trump for his frustration over her crowds, one of which, it said, topped 15,000 people at an event in the Phoenix area on Friday.“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate, said to the crowd, receiving a loud cheer.In his posts on Sunday, Mr. Trump drew parallels between his false claims of fake crowds and his false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My First Robot Massage

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      In many ways, the room looked familiar. As with past massages I had received, the lights were dim, the air smelled vaguely of aromatherapy and there was an inviting bed in the center of the space.But one thing was different: Attached to the bed were two large, white robotic arms, which were about to work on my body for a half-hour.The hulking machine was developed by Aescape, a start-up based in New York that claims to have created “the world’s most advanced massage.” The contraption includes infrared sensors, which scan the body to create a detailed map of its muscle structure. Using machine learning, it then analyzes the information and creates a personalized massage plan. The robot is currently available at a hotel and massage studio in New York City, and Aescape says it will be on offer at 10 Equinox locations this month.The company is betting that the parts of a traditional massage some people don’t enjoy — the oils, the nudity, the small talk — can be solved using artificial intelligence and robotics.I was at the Aescape offices in Manhattan to test the theory.Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesI changed into an outfit provided by the company (leggings and a tight, long-sleeved shirt). Once on the bed, I lay face down with my head in a doughnut pillow and my arms resting comfortably overhead on a bolster. On the other side of the pillow was a touch screen. I tapped a button to begin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Google, Microsoft and Amazon Shy Away From Buying A.I. Start-Ups

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      Google, Microsoft and Amazon have made deals with A.I. start-ups for their technology and top employees, but have shied from owning the firms. Here’s why.In 2022, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left their jobs developing artificial intelligence at Google. They said the tech giant moved too slowly. So they created Character.AI, a chatbot start-up, and raised nearly $200 million.Last week, Mr. Shazeer and Mr. De Freitas announced that they were returning to Google. They had struck a deal to rejoin its A.I. research arm, along with roughly 20 percent of Character.AI’s employees, and provide their start-up’s technology, they said.But even though Google was getting all that, it was not buying Character.AI.Instead, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license the technology, two people with knowledge of the deal said. About $2.5 billion of that sum will then be used to buy out Character.AI’s shareholders, including Mr. Shazeer, who owns 30 percent to 40 percent of the company and stands to net $750 million to $1 billion, the people said. What remains of Character.AI will continue operating without its founders and investors.The deal was one of several unusual transactions that have recently emerged in Silicon Valley. While big tech companies typically buy start-ups outright, they have turned to a more complicated deal structure for young A.I. companies. It involves licensing the technology and hiring the top employees — effectively swallowing the start-up and its main assets — without becoming the owner of the firm.These transactions are being driven by the big tech companies’ desire to sidestep regulatory scrutiny while trying to get ahead in A.I., said three people who have been involved in such agreements. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft are under a magnifying glass from agencies like the Federal Trade Commission over whether they are squashing competition, including by buying start-ups.“Large tech firms may clearly be trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny by not directly acquiring the targeted firms,” said Justin Johnson, a business economist who focuses on antitrust at Cornell University. But “these deals do indeed start to look a lot like regular acquisitions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nvidia Shares Tumble After Reports of a Chip Delay

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      Nvidia shares tumbled more than 10 percent in early trading on Monday after reports that the company would delay shipments of its newest artificial intelligence chip, but the stock later rebounded as investors’ concerns about the costs of the delay faded.The Information, a tech news outlet, reported on Friday that Nvidia would be shipping its latest graphics processing unit, or GPU, which make it possible to create A.I. systems, three months later than planned. Nvidia said in a statement that production for the chip, which is called Blackwell, was on track for later this year and added that customer orders and interest were high.Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with Bernstein who follows Nvidia, said there was no need to panic because cloud computing companies such as Microsoft and Amazon were continuing to increase their spending on A.I. data centers. That expansion means that Nvidia chips will be in demand, he said.“Nvidia’s competitive window is so large right now that we don’t think a three-month delay will cause significant share shifts,” Mr. Rasgon said.Nvidia has been one of the hottest stocks in technology, fueled by the frenzy over A.I. The company’s market value has increased to $2.43 trillion from $1 trillion a year ago, making it more valuable than Alphabet and Amazon. But its rise has been marked by volatility, as investors waffle between enthusiasm and skepticism about the potential for A.I. to generate new business. More