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.

AI’s ability to transfer a person’s face from a source photo onto someone in a target photo doesn’t work so well when the target face is partially obscured by, say, eyeglasses, a veil, or a hand. A new technique handles such occlusions.

Neural audio synthesizers like WaveRNN or GANSynth produce impressive sounds, but they require large, data-hungry neural networks. A new code library beefs up the neural music studio with efficient sound modules based on traditional synthesizer designs.

A new system marks a step forward in converting text to speech: It’s fast at inference, reduces word errors, and provides some control over the speed and inflection of generated speech.What’s new: Yi Ren, Yangjun Ruan, and their co-authors at Zhejiang

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.

In tasks that involve generating natural language, neural networks often map an input sequence of words to an output sequence of words. Facebook researchers used a similar technique on sequences of mathematical symbols, training a model to map math problems to math solutions.

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.

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.

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

Generative networks can embroider sentences into stories and melodies into full-fledged arrangements. A new model does something similar with drawings.

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.

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.

Not long ago, text-to-speech systems could read only a sentence at a time, and they were ranked according to their ability to accomplish that limited task. Now that they can orate entire books, we need new benchmarks.

AI’s creative potential is becoming established in the visual arts. Now musicians are tapping neural networks for funkier grooves, tastier licks, and novel subject matter.

Deepfakes threaten to undermine law and order, perhaps democracy itself. A coalition of tech companies, nonprofits, and academics joined forces to counter potential adverse impacts.