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.

A Chinese naval ship navigates autonomously and controls a swarm of onboard drones. The Zhuhaiyun, billed as the first autonomous drone carrier, officially entered service after 12 hours of trials on open water, the South China Morning Post reported.

Tools that automatically write computer code may make their human users overconfident that the programs are bug-free. Stanford University researchers found that programmers who used OpenAI’s Codex, a model that generates computer code, were more likely...

The Batch - AI News & Insights. The breakout text generator faces resistance — even within the AI community. Organizations including the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the New York Department of Education banned OpenAI's ChatGPT...

Amazon published a series of web pages designed to help people use AI responsibly. Amazon Web Services introduced so-called AI service cards that describe the uses and limitations of some models it serves.

The world’s supply of data soon may fail to meet the demands of increasingly hungry machine learning models. Researchers at Epoch AI found that a shortage of text data could cause trouble as early as this year. Vision data may fall short within a decade.

Individual deep learning models proved their mettle in hundreds of tasks. The scope of multi-task models expanded dramatically in the past year.