Example of a deepfake
AI & Society

. . . And I Approve of This Deepfake: How India's BJP used AI to create campaign videos

Deepfake tech reared its digitally altered head in Indian politics, but with a twist: Altered images of a politician were produced by his own campaign.
Rendering of simulated environment
AI & Society

OpenAI Under Fire: Critics claim OpenAI lost its founding ideals.

An icon of idealism in AI stands accused of letting its ambition eclipse its principles. Founded in 2015 to develop artificial general intelligence for the good of humankind, OpenAI swapped its ideals for cash.
Drone following a person riding an ATV
AI & Society

Imitation Learning in the Wild: How a drone's obstacle avoidance system works

Faster than a speeding skateboard! Able to dodge tall trees while chasing a dirt bike! It’s … an upgrade in the making from an innovative drone maker.
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in New York
AI & Society

Meeting of the Minds: Deep learning pioneers discuss the state of AI.

Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun presented their latest thinking about deep learning’s limitations and how to overcome them.
Automatic license plate reader
AI & Society

Glimpse My Ride: How Los Angeles police used license plate readers

Police in the U.S. routinely use AI to track cars with little accountability to the public. Documents obtained by Wired revealed just how intensively police in Los Angeles, California, have been using automatic license plate readers.
Autonomous vehicle detecting images projected on the street
AI & Society

Phantom Menace: Fake images can fool some self-driving cars.

Some self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a person in the roadway and an image projected on the street. A team of researchers used projectors to trick semiautonomous vehicles into detecting people, road signs, and lane markings that didn’t exist.
Covid-19 illustration
AI & Society

Tools For a Pandemic: Chinese tech giants provide resources for Covid research.

Chinese tech giants have opened their AI platforms to scientists fighting coronavirus. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu are offering a powerful weapon to life-science researchers working to stop the spread of the illness officially known as Covid-19: free access to their computing horsepower and tools.
Security camera next to the Big Ben in London
AI & Society

Nowhere to Hide: How police in London and Moscow use face recognition

Real-time face recognition has become standard operating procedure for cops in a few cities, in both authoritarian and democratic countries. After years of trials, police departments in Moscow and London are using face recognition to scan the streets for suspected criminals.
Capture of a chatbot telling jokes developed by Google Brain
AI & Society

Bot Comic: How Google's Meena chatbot developed a sense of humor

Androids may not dream of electric sheep, but some crack jokes about horses and cows. Meena, a 2.6-billion parameter chatbot developed by Google Brain, showed impressive conversational ability, discussing a variety of topics.
Person on an online job interview
AI & Society

Limits on AI Job Interviews: The AI video act sets limits on alorithmic hiring.

As employers turn to AI to evaluate job applicants, a U.S. state imposed limits on how such tools can be used. The Illinois legislature passed the AI Video Act, which gives candidates a measure of control over how hiring managers collect and store video interviews.
Three people wearing face masks on a plane
AI & Society

Stopping Coronavirus: How Bluedot identified Covid-19 before health authorities

A company that analyzes online information to predict epidemics spotted the upsurge in coronavirus at least a week ahead of public-health authorities. Canadian startup BlueDot alerted customers to the outbreak in he Chinese city of Wuhan on New Year’s Eve.
GitHub logo illustration
AI & Society

The Right Problem for Your Solution: GitHub's Good First Issues helps newbies get into open source.

A new tool connects novice programmers with projects that match their experience and interests. Github’s Good First Issues tool uses deep learning to find easy-to-fix issues among the collaborative software development platform’s multitude of open source projects.
Capture of an Instagram post related to drug dealing
AI & Society

Hunting Online Drug Dealers: AI identifies drug dealers on Instagram.

Can machine learning help address the scourge of opioid addiction? A public health researcher developed a neural network that spots sellers of opioids on social media, Recode reported.
Excerpt of a video showing how HireVue works
AI & Society

HR’s Robot Helper: Colleges prepare students for AI hiring interviews.

For some college graduates, landing a first job means making a good impression on a chatbot. University guidance counselors around the U.S. are preparing students for interviews with AI-powered screening algorithms.
Chart with top 100 related videos for YouTube search on "global warming"
AI & Society

Bad Recommendations: Activists say YouTube's algorithm spreads climate disinformation.

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.

Subscribe to The Batch

Stay updated with weekly AI News and Insights delivered to your inbox