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A challenging advertising climate chilled the results for iHeartMedias first quarter of 2023. Company executives say continued advertising softness led to a downsizing of the companys revenue by 3.8% compared to the same period a year prior.

But a story with more long-term implications is the companys eager embrace of artificial intelligence. We plan to use it to its fullest, said Chairman/CEO Bob Pittman, without offering specifics. He said AI could fundamentally change the cost structure of the company.

First quarter consolidated revenue for the company was $811 million, iHeartMedia reported. Of its three reportable segments, the multiplatform group including 850 radio stations saw revenue fall 7% to $529 million compared to Q1 2022. iHeart says broadcast radio brought in revenue of $383 million in the first quarter, down from $415 million in the same period in 2022.

Pittman on Tuesday described an uncertain macroeconomic climate and advertising marketplace for the media company. However, he says there are signs of a recovery in the ad markets over the long term. Our expectation is that it will get better through the year. I think major advertisers were holding back trying to put away some money for the year in Q1. And in terms of categories, auto is doing better.

The first quarter data released by iHeartMedia reveals the challenges of operating a media group in an economy thats facing recessionary fears, Pittman said.

The companys Premiere Networks and Total Traffic and Weather Network (TTWN) saw revenue decline 8.2% in the first quarter compared to YoY, totaling $108 million.

Revenue for the digital audio group climbed 4.3% in the quarter YoY on revenue of $223 million. The focus of the companys digital audio division is podcasting and the iHeart streaming platform. Podcasting revenue was the biggest gainer with revenue of $77 million, a 12% increase from the same quarter a year ago. The audio and media services division reported revenue of $61 million for the quarter ending March 31, 2023. iHeartMedia says revenue for the division, which includes Katz Media Group and RCS, was flat compared to 2022.

iHeartMedias total consolidated revenues continue to shift away from broadcast radio to digital. In Q1 of 2020, the multiplatform group accounted for 81% of the companys revenue, but that divisions revenue has now dropped to 65% of total revenue in the most recent quarter, according to company.

Free cash flow dipped to a negative $133 million, according to the companys filing. The company paid down $20 million of debt during the first quarter of 2023, according to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but $5.4 billion of total debt remains.

iHeart says it continues aggressively managing the companys expense base, and will embrace artificial intelligence as part of its strategy.

We and every other company are looking at how to use AI. I think AI can fundamentally change the cost structure of the company. Thats the primary value for us. It will turn employees from doing, you know, lots of employees doing rote work, to our employees doing more editing and more of the higher level work, Pittman said on the investor call.

I think well do stuff faster and our costs will be lower. We think AI will be a major productivity enhancer for American businesses and we plan to use it to its fullest.

The company hasnt disclosed any plans to use the technology to create AI DJs, but did previously announce it would use AI to translate some of its podcasts into foreign languages. And this week it announced in a press release it would add Daily Dad Jokes, an AI-generated stand-up comedy show from Klassic Studios to its iHeart Podcast Network.

President, COO and CFO Rich Bressler pointed out the significant cost savings the broadcaster has carved out since the pandemic through its real estate consolidations and workforce reduction.

As a management team we constantly look for efficiencies in the company. We took out $250 million (on an annual basis) as we went to the fourth quarter in 2022. And we have announced another $75 million of cost savings to be realized in 2023, Bressler said. The company will continue to aggressively look to improve its overall capital structure.

The companys capital expenditures for Q1 were $39.2 million compared to $22.6 million in the three months ending March 31, 2022. Capital expenditures during the three months increased primarily due to the timing of real estate payments associated with the drastic reduction in our real estate footprint, iHeartMedia stated in its report.

Bressler says iHeartMedia expects its Q2 consolidated revenues to decline in the mid-single digits. Nonetheless, he believes the company is well positioned to withstand the economic downturn no matter how long it lasts.

In a press release ahead of its quarterly call, Bressler was quoted: While we cant predict when the advertising marketplace will fully recover, we believe that our multiplatform revenues will continue to recover and that our digital audio group revenues will continue to grow throughout 2023. With the benefit of what are expected to be record levels of political spend in 2024, and the annualized impact of the cost reductions we have made over the past six months, in 2024 we expect to resume our growth trajectory that was interrupted by this period of recent advertising softness.

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iHeartMedia Plans to Use Artificial Intelligence to the Fullest - Radio World

When William Shakespeare titled his play Twelfth Night, he also offered up the alternative title of What You Will. Perhaps the initial title appeared too opaque or confusing? Humanitys latest play has been given the title artificial intelligence, but I suggest that we clear up some of the confusion and call it What We Will.

With the appearance of this new technology and its rapidly expanding powers, we are rushing to try to understand what it is we are unleashing. We are well aware it could have a tremendous impact on our society, but this latest discovery does not come from a Michelangelo, Beethoven or an Einstein, the last of which would be able to summarize his new understanding of the universe in one short, simple phrase. Instead, this discovery has emerged from a collection of young perhaps brilliant minds, none of whom fully understand what it is we are dealing with or where we are being led.

I cannot help but dwell on this new phenomenon being labeled both intelligent and artificial, with each of these adjectives depending on the other in a somewhat confusing way. An intelligence that is artificial is essentially reliant on humans to spread it and, eventually, to hide or disguise its artificiality. To compete with our own minds and intelligence, it has to be fully released into the world but also adopted by humans, knowingly or unknowingly. It is a novel entry to an already complex world.

Having been derived from what we call deep machine learning, artificial intelligence is able to digest immense quantities of information and make connections we have not yet made. As such, it could offer us interesting new concepts, identifying patterns we may have missed, and could make a fine assistant for some of our tasks and decision-making. Artificial intelligence could exponentially accelerate research into cures for cancer and other such pioneering applications. It will also help us to automate tasks, while reducing human error, particularly when it comes to repetitive tasks.

This arms race is not unlike the nuclear arms race, and its consequences could be equally damaging

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

However, artificial intelligence has already started a new technological arms race between world powers, all scrambling to develop its most advanced potential military applications. It is not at all implausible that artificial intelligence could, in the relatively near future, direct wars by identifying targets and dispatching drones, and even developing strategy and rapid countermoves, just as computers today can beat the worlds greatest chess grandmasters with ease.

This arms race is not unlike the nuclear arms race, and its consequences could be equally damaging, leading to a new cold war of wits. What is most confusing about artificial intelligence today is that it is still a guessing game. We know that a massive wave is heading our way, but we do not yet know where, when or how big it will be. As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, wrote in The Economist last week, we urgently need to regulate AI and new technologies. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday, he wrote. Harari also contrasted new technologies such as AI with older technologies that revolutionized our world and our geopolitical realities by reminding us that nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, (but) AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.

We are entering a new field of technological wizardry that is creating a whole new set of challenges for human society, but we cannot let this allow us to forget the many tremendous challenges we are already facing. More than the confusion artificial intelligence has already created, it is also one of those shiny new things that we cannot take our eyes or our minds off. As is our habit, we are again ignoring the more pressing challenges of environmental degradation, poverty, war and hatred that every day reduce our chances of handing over a livable world to our children.

Unfortunately, we do not have much to show for decades of effort to tame our own worst instincts and intelligence

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

The environment is certainly not artificial; we are destroying it with every passing day, yet we know we cannot survive without it. It is not artificial to realize that we are killing our once-fertile agricultural lands, just as we are killing our oceans, but we know we cannot live only off polluted air and water. Ecosystems around the world are breaking down, as floods, wildfires and hurricanes retaliate to destroy our living spaces. I doubt that artificial intelligence will come to us with a sudden fix before it is too late.

It is warranted for us to wonder how we can regulate as diffuse and confusing a threat as artificial intelligence and other new technologies. Over the past century, we have tried to regulate warfare, we have tried to regulate weapons of mass destruction, but look at us today, embroiled in a new European war that every day threatens to turn into a nuclear-armed confrontation between world powers. Unfortunately, we do not have much to show for decades of effort to tame our own worst instincts and intelligence.

Human discoveries are key to our history and of course they have brought great advances and opportunities for us human beings. But very often they have also come with heavy price tags, as we have discovered with climate change and the destruction of our environment. Earth has unfortunately been exhausted by our greed, hatred and disregard. That is why we must make sure that we shape artificial intelligence as What We Will, because it is our responsibility to ensure that it provides us with real intelligence and not with artifice and even greater confusion.

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If artificial intelligence is intelligent, why is it artificial? - Arab News

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) With artificial intelligence systems increasing in popularity, a big question that still lingers is how these technological advances will impact the education system and society.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is described as software that can perform tasks that traditionally have been thought to require human intelligence.

Lynne Parker, the Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of the AI Tennessee Initiative at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, explained AI is popping up more in everyday headlines because theres more access to information than ever before and these systems can be more widely used by the public.

Parker said with systems like ChatGPT as an example, it can go out into the cyber universe and produce text that can answer almost any question or prompt.

ChatGPT is a massive AI software that has been trained by people using data thats available all across the world, so internet data, data thats from books, papers, Parker said of ChatGPT which was created by OpenAI.

She spoke about how AI is challenging the entire education system, including the professors at UT Knoxville, to reexamine how they look at assignments moving forward while still trying to reach their learning objectives.

Were having to rethink how we assess learning, how we achieve the kind of learning objectives that we want so that it cannot cause students to want to go use these tools and present that as their own materials, said Parker. Instead, perhaps they can use these tools as a starting point or critique text that has been generated.

When asked if there is any software that could detect whether a students work was produced using AI, Parker noted there is one created by the same company behind ChatGPT. However, she shares it is not 100% accurate.

Parker also shared she feels there will need to be a new level of transparency across society, stating anyone using an AI tool needs to disclose it.

Anyone who uses a tool like this for anything, it could be to generate a work of art, or a poem, or an essay, or a paper, they should declare that.

Parker took an art competition for example and said there may need to be new categories; a purely human created category and an AI assisted category. She also shared that publishers in the research world are allowing people to use AI, not to write an entire paper, but maybe parts of a paper as long as researchers disclose that information accordingly.

Parker described herself as an AI optimist, saying while changes may be ahead, early studies are showing AI can help productivity.

Early evidence is showing that people who are really good at generating ideas but who struggle to get those ideas down on paper are helped a lot by these kinds of tools because they can help get you started, Parker shared.

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UT expert breaks down the pros and cons of artificial intelligence - WATE 6 On Your Side

Photonic chips have revolutionized data-heavy technologies. On their own or in concert with traditional electronic circuits, these laser-powered devices send and process information at the speed of light, making them a promising solution for artificial intelligence's data-hungry applications.

In addition to their incomparable speed, photonic circuits use significantly less energy than electronic ones. Electrons move relatively slowly through hardware, colliding with other particles and generating heat, while photons flow without losing energy, generating no heat at all. Unburdened by the energy loss inherent in electronics, integrated photonics are poised to play a leading role in sustainable computing.

Photonics and electronics draw on separate areas of science and use distinct architectural structures. Both, however, rely on lithography to define their circuit elements and connect them sequentially. While photonic chips don't make use of the transistors that populate electronic chips' ever-shrinking and increasingly layered grooves, their complex lithographic patterning guides laser beams through a coherent circuit to form a photonic network that can perform computational algorithms.

But now, for the first time, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science have created a photonic device that provides programmable on-chip information processing without lithography, offering the speed of photonics augmented by superior accuracy and flexibility for AI applications.

Achieving unparalleled control of light, this device consists of spatially distributed optical gain and loss. Lasers cast light directly on a semiconductor wafer, without the need for defined lithographic pathways.

Liang Feng, Professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Electrical Systems and Engineering (ESE), along with Ph.D. student Tianwei Wu (MSE) and postdoctoral fellows Zihe Gao and Marco Menarini (ESE), introduced the microchip in a recent study published in Nature Photonics.

Silicon-based electronic systems have transformed the computational landscape. But they have clear limitations: they are slow in processing signal, they work through data serially and not in parallel, and they can only be miniaturized to a certain extent. Photonics is one of the most promising alternatives because it can overcome all these shortcomings.

"But photonic chips intended for machine learning applications face the obstacles of an intricate fabrication process where lithographic patterning is fixed, limited in reprogrammability, subject to error or damage and expensive," says Feng. "By removing the need for lithography, we are creating a new paradigm. Our chip overcomes those obstacles and offers improved accuracy and ultimate reconfigurability given the elimination of all kinds of constraints from predefined features."

Without lithography, these chips become adaptable data-processing powerhouses. Because patterns are not pre-defined and etched in, the device is intrinsically free of defects. Perhaps more impressively, the lack of lithography renders the microchip impressively reprogrammable, able to tailor its laser-cast patterns for optimal performance, be the task simple (few inputs, small datasets) or complex (many inputs, large datasets).

In other words, the intricacy or minimalism of the device is a sort of living thing, adaptable in ways no etched microchip could be.

"What we have here is something incredibly simple," says Wu. "We can build and use it very quickly. We can integrate it easily with classical electronics. And we can reprogram it, changing the laser patterns on the fly to achieve real-time reconfigurable computing for on-chip training of an AI network."

An unassuming slab of semiconductor, the device couldn't be simpler. It's the manipulation of this slab's material properties that is the key to research team's breakthrough in projecting lasers into dynamically programmable patterns to reconfigure the computing functions of the photonic information processor.

This ultimate reconfigurability is critical for real-time machine learning and AI.

"The interesting part," says Menarini, "is how we are controlling the light. Conventional photonic chips are technologies based on passive material, meaning its material scatters light, bouncing it back and forth. Our material is active. The beam of pumping light modifies the material such that when the signal beam arrives, it can release energy and increase the amplitude of signals."

"This active nature is the key to this science, and the solution required to achieve our lithography-free technology," adds Gao. "We can use it to reroute optical signals and program optical information processing on-chip."

Feng compares the technology to an artistic tool, a pen for drawing pictures on a blank page.

"What we have achieved is exactly the same: pumping light is our pen to draw the photonic computational network (the picture) on a piece of unpatterned semiconductor wafer (the blank page)."

But unlike indelible lines of ink, these beams of light can be drawn and redrawn, their patterns tracing innumerable paths to the future.

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Lithography-free photonic chip offers speed and accuracy for ... - Science Daily

The takeover of AI, or artificial intelligence, is a topic of concern for many people. With the rapid advancements in technology, there is a fear that AI could eventually become more intelligent than humans and take over many aspects of our lives.

One of the primary concerns with the takeover of AI is that it could lead to massive job loss. As AI becomes more advanced, it can replace many of the tasks that are currently performed by humans. For example, self-driving cars and trucks could replace the need for human drivers, and automated factories could replace human workers. This could lead to widespread unemployment and economic instability.

Another concern with the takeover of AI is that it could lead to a loss of control. As AI becomes more advanced, it may become more difficult for humans to understand or predict its behavior. This could lead to unintended consequences, such as the creation of autonomous weapons that could cause harm without human intervention. Additionally, there is a fear that AI could become so advanced that it could make decisions on its own, without human oversight.

There is also a concern that the takeover of AI could lead to a loss of privacy. As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, it will have access to a vast amount of data about us. This data could be used to create personalized advertising or to make decisions about our lives without our consent.

Despite these concerns, there are also potential benefits to the takeover of AI. For example, AI could be used to solve many of the world's most pressing problems, such as climate change or disease.

In conclusion, the takeover of AI is a complex and multifaceted issue that requires careful consideration. While there are certainly risks associated with the development of AI, there are also many potential benefits. It is important for us to continue to explore the possibilities of AI while also taking steps to mitigate the risks. By doing so, we can ensure that AI is used in a way that benefits humanity and does not pose a threat to our way of life.

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System Overl04d: The Takeover of Artificial Intelligence ... - The Southern Digest