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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.