By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --The family for John Singleton said the Oscar-nominated filmmaker will be taken off life support Monday after suffering a stroke almost two weeks ago.
"It is with heavy hearts we announce that our beloved son, father and friend, John Daniel Singleton will be taken off of life support today," read the statement. "This was an agonizing decision, one that our family made, over a number of days, with the careful counsel of John's doctors."
The 51-year-old director of "Boyz n the Hood," ''Poetic Justice" and other films has been in intensive care in a Los Angeles hospital since he had a stroke on April 17. A court filing last week by his mother, Shelia Ward, requested that she be appointed Singleton's temporary conservator in order to make medical and financial decisions while he is incapacitated.
Ward's filing said that Singleton was in a coma. But on Friday, Singleton's daughter Cleopatra Singleton, 19, filed a declaration disputing that account. She maintained that her father was not in a coma and that doctors did not "have a concrete diagnosis." She opposed her grandmother becoming conservator, or guardian.
John Singleton was nominated for an Oscar for 1991's "Boyz N the Hood." His recent projects include the TV series "Snowfall."
As news that Singleton would be taken off life support circulated, many paid tribute to the director. Jordan Peele, the "Get Out" and "Us" director called him "a brave artist and a true inspiration."
"His vision changed everything," said Peele.
Google’s AI model faces European Union scrutiny from privacy watchdog
European Union regulators said Thursday they're looking into one of Google's artificial intelligence models over concerns about its compliance with the bloc's strict data privacy rules.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it has opened an inquiry into Google's Pathways Language Model 2, also known as PaLM2. It's part of wider efforts, including by other national watchdogs across the 27-nation bloc, to scrutinize how AI systems handle personal data.
Google's European headquarters are based in Dublin, so the Irish watchdog acts as the company's lead regulator for the bloc's privacy rulebook, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
The commission said its inquiry is examining whether Google has assessed whether PaLM2's data processing would likely result in a "high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals" in the EU.
Large language models like PaLM2 are vast troves of data that act as building blocks for artificial intelligence systems. Google uses PaLM2 to power a range of generative AI services including email summarizing. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The Irish watchdog said earlier this month that Elon Musk's social media platform X has agreed to permanently stop processing user data for its AI chatbot Grok. The platform did so only after the watchdog took it to court the month before, filing an urgent High Court application to get X to "suspend, restrict or prohibit" processing of personal data contained in public posts by its users.
Meta Platforms paused its plans to use content posted by European users to train the latest version of its large language model after apparent pressure from the Irish regulators. The decision "followed intensive engagement" between the... Read More