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After new feature tells people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce, company to restrict which searches return summaries Google announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary. Google has added several restrictions on the types of searches that would generate AI Overview results, the company’s head of search, Liz Reid, said, as well as “limited the inclusion of satire and humor content”. The company is also taking action against what it described as a small number of AI Overviews that violate its content policies, which it said occurred in fewer than 1 in 7m unique search queries where the feature appeared. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/HBTsJ...

Author of Anansi’s Gold, a nonfiction account of a notorious Ghanian conman ‘told with biting wit’, wins £1,000 award Yepoka Yeebo has won the 2024 Jhalak prize for her nonfiction book about a Ghanaian con artist. Anansi’s Gold is an “exhilarating journey” through the life and “almost unbelievable” adventures of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, “told with great panache and a biting wit,” said prize director Sunny Singh. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3dZucnP

I was shocked to learn of the brazenness of Israel’s intimidation effort. It is to the credit of the ICC prosecutors that it has failed I should not be surprised at the lawlessness of a government that bombs and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but I was still shocked by the brazenness of Israel’s efforts to subvert the international criminal court’s investigation of its war crimes. As exposed by the Guardian along with Israeli media outlets +972 and Local Call, the Israeli government over the course of nine years “deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries”. The effort was brazen. Mysterious men visited the former chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, outside her private home and handed her an envelope of cash, which the ICC believed “was likely [Israel] signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived,” the Guardian has reported . They allegedly threatened her ...

Rishi Sunak is so palpably convinced he can’t win he’s promising any old mad thing. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are falling off kayaks People say manufacturing has declined under the Conservatives, but the sheer volume of outrage manufactured by Rishi Sunak’s national service wingnuttery at the weekend was last night compounded by his decision to unveil a quadruple lock to the state pension. Truly the seven-blade razor of advanced pensions technology. It’s so innovative it might even spin off and manufacture another deranged Loose Women segment . I am still howling at the moment on the show a couple of weeks ago when Janet Street-Porter demanded of Sunak: “Why do you hate pensioners? WHY DO YOU HATE PENSIONERS? That is the only conclusion I can come to.” State of the art lunacy, made end-to-end in the UK. Let’s face it: this is what you call a joined-up manufacturing industry. But look, for whatever reason, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves preferred to spend their afternoon at a facility ...

Few of us have the money to take a long pause from work or caring responsibilities. But, as I found, even a day can make a difference You might imagine that escaping from your everyday life would involve relocating to a Hebridean croft or attending a series of rejuvenating retreats. But, according to Emma Gannon’s new book project, A Year of Nothing, it could be as simple as staying at home. “I did nothing,” writes Gannon. “I stopped replying to emails. I used my savings. I slept. I borrowed a friend’s dog. I ate bananas in bed. I bought miniature plants. I read magazines. I lay down. I did nothing. It felt totally alien to me.” For Gannon, the sabbatical was enforced after she experienced burnout, caused by chronic exhaustion from occupational stress. “All the while, I was keeping diaries,” she says. “Writing down the ‘nothingness’ of my days. I journalled all the things I noticed, the stuff I usually ignored, the people I met, the kindness of strangers, the magical coincidences – t...

This revealing memoir about the author’s 20 years in the City of Light identifies the complex codes of behaviour that newcomers are obliged to master In 1990 the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo published a short essay called Paris, Capital of the 21st Century. By the end of the 20th century, he had decided that Paris was exhausted. The city of avant gardes, ideas, revolutions and class struggle, which had defined so much of European and world history, was now no more than a museum. As almost a lifelong Parisian and a lover of the place, Goytisolo desperately wanted Paris in the 21st century to retake its place as a great metropolis. But this could only happen, he argued, if Paris reinvented itself by “de-Europeanising” itself. By this, he meant it had to look towards the world beyond Europe, welcoming its sometimes dissident non-French, non-European voices to make itself a truly global city. Only in this way could Paris be brought back to life. More than 30 years on from that essay, Si...

Dominant Pogacar wins by biggest margin since 1965 Tim Merlier outsprints Jonathan Milan to take final stage Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar emphatically won the Giro d’Italia on his debut when he retained his unassailable overall lead after the 21st and final stage in Rome on Sunday, winning by the biggest overall margin since 1965. The 25-year-old UAE Team Emirates rider had been in the leader’s pink jersey since winning stage two, the first of his six stage successes, and finished the ceremonial 125km flat run on Sunday safely in the bunch as Tim Merlier won the stage. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/jVsG3bO