New submitter haroldbasset writes: Canada's Immigration Department rejected an applicant because the duties of her current job did not match the Canadian work experience she had claimed, but the Department's AI assistant had invented that work experience. She has been working in Canada as a health scientist -- she has a Ph.D. in the immunology of aging -- but the AI genius instead described her as "wiring and assembling control circuits, building control and robot panels, programming and troubleshooting." "It's believed to be the first time that the department explicitly referred to the use of generative AI to support application processing in immigration refusals," reports the Toronto Star. "The disclaimer also noted that all generated content was verified by an officer and that generative AI was not used to make or recommend a decision."

The applicant's lawyer was shocked "how any human being could make this decision." "Somehow, it hallucinated my client's job description," he said. "I would love to see what the officer saw. Something seriously went wrong here."

The applicant's refusal came just as Canada's Immigration Department released its first AI strategy, which frames artificial intelligence as a way to improve efficiency, service delivery, and program integrity. The department says it has long used digital tools like analytics and automation to flag fraud risks and triage applications, and is now also experimenting with generative AI for tasks such as research, summarizing, and analysis. In this case, however, the department insisted the decision was made by a human officer and that generative AI was not involved in the final decision.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple reportedly has full access to customize Google's Gemini model, allowing it to distill smaller on-device AI models for Siri and other features that can run locally without an internet connection. MacRumors reports: The Information explains that Apple can ask the main Gemini model to perform a series of tasks that provide high-quality results, with a rundown of the reasoning process. Apple can feed the answers and reasoning information that it gets from Gemini to train smaller, cheaper models. With this process, the smaller models are able to learn the internal computations used by Gemini, producing efficient models that have Gemini-like performance but require less computing power.

Apple is also able to edit Gemini as needed to make sure that it responds to queries in a way that Apple wants, but Apple has been running into some issues because Gemini has been tuned for chatbot and coding applications, which doesn't always meet Apple's needs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Latest strike brings number of deaths to at least 163 since attacks on alleged ‘narco-terrorists’ began in September

The US has launched another strike on a vessel in the Caribbean, killing four people, the US Southern Command said.

The command which oversees combatant operations in Latin America and the Caribbean announced on X that it had conducted a “lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations”.

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Centre-back opens up on his renaissance at Old Trafford and his burning World Cup desire for England

Harry Maguire was injured again and Manchester United were stuck in a loop under Ruben Amorim, offering their own take on the definition of insanity. As Albert Einstein almost said, it is playing 3-4-2-1 with Bruno Fernandes deep and Casemiro exposed over and over again – but expecting different results.

It was the start of January and, at that point, Maguire simply wanted a return to fitness after two months on the sidelines, regular minutes, a bit of rhythm in his game after an in-and-out season. The notion of an England recall was fanciful. Not to mention the World Cup. Maguire was set to remain on 64 caps, the last of which he won against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin in September 2024.

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Prime minister approves tougher action against shadow fleet of oil vessels attempting to evade sanctions

UK armed forces have been authorised to board Russian oil tankers in British waters, Downing Street has said, in an escalation against Moscow’s sanction-evading shadow fleet.

The Royal Navy has previously joined allies in action against the vessels. Last week it helped track a sanctioned Russian oil tanker in the Mediterranean which was then boarded by the French navy.

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Manchester United have it all to do in Germany next week after succumbing to a 3-2 first leg loss to a Bayern Munich team inspired by Pernille Harder, who scored twice.

The away supporters were singing ‘football’s coming home’ by the end, with their team now strong favourites for a semi-final spot after a night when the home side never quite showed their full potential.

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Another Day - The release of the video Thriller by Michael Jackson is now closer to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima than to today. The release of Jurassic Park is now closer to MLK Jr's I have a Dream Speech than to today. The first McDonald's Happy Meal is now closer to the release of the Wizard of Oz (movie) than to today.

Thanks, I hate it.

Nu steeds duidelijker wordt dat de Nederlandse economie ook geraakt wordt door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten, neemt de druk op het kabinet toe. Het kiest vooralsnog niet voor maatregelen die de hoge energiekosten dempen, bleek woensdagavond in de Tweede Kamer.