Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night. The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural networks write the books, create the cover art, price the merchandise, even write the reviews.

Could humanity be destroyed by its own creation? If binary code running on a computer awakens into sentience, it will be able to think better than humans. It may even be able to improve its own software and hardware.

Will AI fakery erode public trust in the key social institutions? Generative models will flood media outlets with convincing but false photos, videos, ads, and news stories. The ensuing crisis of authority will lead to widespread distrust in everything from the financial system to democracy itself.

What does freedom mean when computers know your face and track your movements? Artificial intelligence will boost the power of surveillance, effectively making privacy obsolete and opening the door to a wide range of abuses.

Will biases in training data unwittingly turn AI into a tool for persecution? Bias encoded in software used by nominally objective institutions like, say, the justice or education systems will become impossible to root out.

From blue collar laborers to lab coated professionals, is any job safe from AI? AI will exceed human performance at a wide range of activities. Huge populations will become jobless.

Could the flood of hype for artificial intelligence lead to a catastrophic collapse in funding? AI will fail to deliver on promises inflated by businesses and researchers. Investors will migrate to greener pastures, and AI Winter will descend.

One of the largest open datasets for training face recognition systems has its roots in a popular photo-sharing service. Companies that have used this data could find themselves liable for millions in legal recompense.

A new generation of battlebots is gaining momentum.What’s new: The Army is at least two years ahead of schedule in its plan to deploy self-driving (and self-aiming) transports, jeeps, and tanks.

OpenAI trained a five-fingered robotic hand to unscramble the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, bringing both acclaim and criticism. The AI research lab OpenAI trained a mechanical hand to balance, twist, and turn the cube.

Pilots in drone races fly souped-up quadcopters around an obstacle course at 120 miles per hour. But soon they may be out of a job, as race organizers try to spice things up with drones controlled by AI.

More than 900 indigenous languages are spoken across the Americas, nearly half of all tongues in use worldwide. A website tracks the growing number of resources available for natural language processing researchers interested in studying, learning from, and saving these fading languages.

Most deep learning applications run on TensorFlow or PyTorch. A new analysis found that they have very different audiences. A researcher at Cornell University compared references to TensorFlow and PyTorch in public sources over the past year.

The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.

Basketball coaches sketch plays on a whiteboard to help players get the ball through the net. A new AI model predicts how opponents would respond to these tactics. A team of researchers in Taiwan trained a conditional generative adversarial network on data from National Basketball Association games.