YouTube is a great place to learn about new ideas — including some that have been thoroughly discredited. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is helping spread misinformation about climate change, according to research by Avaaz, a self-funded activist group.

What if you could identify just about anyone from a photo? A controversial startup is making this possible. Hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies are using a face ID service that matches photos against a database of billions of images.

The Trump administration announced a hands-off policy for regulating artificial intelligence. The White House unveiled an executive order instructing federal agencies to minimize rule-making related to AI businesses.

Artificial intelligence was everywhere at the biggest, buzziest consumer-technology showcase in the U.S. AI ruled the convention floor at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, as numerous media outlets proclaimed.

AI is contributing to paintings, music, and now a whimsical fantasy video. The Squire is an amateur romp through a snowy realm of knights in armor and damsels in distress. The script was composed by AI Dungeon 2, an interactive text-adventure game based on the GPT-2 language model.

Computer scientists are struggling to purge bias from one of AI’s most important datasets. ImageNet’s 14 million photos are a go-to collection for training computer-vision systems, yet their descriptive labels have been rife with derogatory and stereotyped attitudes toward race, gender, and sex.

Facebook announced a ban on deepfake videos, on the heels of a crackdown on counterfeit profiles that used AI-generated faces. Facebook declared this week that it will remove deepfake videos it deems deliberately misleading.

Which countries are ahead in AI? Many, in one way or another, and not always the ones you might expect. The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence published its 2019 Artificial Intelligence Index, detailing when, where, and how AI is on the rise.

Earlier language models powered by Word2Vec and GloVe embeddings yielded confused chatbots, grammar tools with middle-school reading comprehension, and not-half-bad translations. The latest generation is so good, some people consider it dangerous.

An international wave of anti-surveillance sentiment pushed back against the proliferation of face recognition systems.

Makers of self-driving cars predicted a quick race to the finish line, but their vehicles are far from the homestretch. A few years ago, some car companies promised road-ready autonomous vehicles as early as 2017.

Society awakened to the delight, threat, and sheer weirdness of realistic images and other media dreamed up by computers.

The future of machine learning may depend less on amassing ground-truth data than simulating the environment in which a model will operate. Deep learning works like magic with enough high-quality data. When examples are scarce, though, researchers are using simulation to fill the gap.

A year-long Twitter feud breathed fresh life into a decades-old argument over AI’s direction. Gary Marcus, a standard bearer of logic-based AI, waged a tireless Twitter campaign to knock deep learning off its pedestal and promote other AI approaches.

Some politicians view international competition in AI as an arms race. That mindset could lead to escalating conflict, experts said.