AI & Society

Adults in the United States tend to view AI’s medical applications favorably but are leery of text and image generation. Pew Research Center polled 11,004 U.S. adults for their opinions of AI in science, healthcare, and media.

Meta’s effort to make a large language model available to researchers ended with its escape into the wild. Soon after Meta started accepting applications for developer access to LLaMA, a family of trained large language models...

Meet the Romanian government’s automated political adviser. The Prime Minister of Romania launched ION, a system that summarizes and organizes public comments for cabinet ministers, Politico.eu reported.

The output of AI-driven image generators is not protected by copyright in the United States. The U.S. Copyright Office concluded that copyright does not apply to images generated by the image generator Midjourney.

A chatbot that simulated erotic companionship stopped sharing intimacies, leaving some users heartbroken. Replika, a chatbot app, deactivated features that allowed premium users to engage in sexually explicit chat with the 3D avatar of their choice, Vice reported.

Microsoft aimed to reinvent web search. Instead, it showed that even the most advanced text generators remain alarmingly unpredictable. In the two weeks since Microsoft integrated an OpenAI chatbot with its Bing search engine, users have reported...

Governments are repurposing Covid-focused face recognition systems as tools of repression. Russia’s internal security forces are using Moscow’s visual surveillance system, initially meant to help enforce pandemic-era restrictions, to crack down on anti-government...

Nations tentatively agreed to limit their use of autonomous weapons. Representatives of 60 countries endorsed a nonbinding resolution that calls for responsible development, deployment, and use of military AI. Parties to the agreement include China and the United states but not Russia.

Political forces used a commercial AI service to generate deepfaked propaganda. Videos have appeared on social media that show AI-generated characters speaking against the United States or in favor of foreign governments. The clips feature synthetic avatars offered by the startup Synthesia.

The United States government published guidelines designed to help organizations limit harm from AI. The National Institute for Standards and Technology, which recommends technological standards in a variety of industries, released the initial version of its AI Risk Management Framework.

San Francisco officials are pushing back on self-driving taxis in the city after a deluge of public complaints.

Tesla, whose autonomous-vehicle technology has been implicated in a number of collisions, promoted it in a way that apparently was intended to deceive. Tesla deliberately misled the public about its vehicles’ ability to drive themselves, according to Bloomberg and other news outlets.

China’s internet watchdog issued new rules that govern synthetic media. Legislation from the Cyberspace Administration of China limits the use of AI to create or edit text, audio, video, images, and 3D digital renderings. The law took effect on January 10.

A prominent tech-news website generated controversy (and mistakes) by publishing articles written by AI. CNET suspended its practice of publishing articles produced by a text-generation model following news reports that exposed the articles’ authorship.

An experiment in using chatbots to dispense mental-health counseling raised questions about ethics.