Scrutiny of Facebook intensified after a whistleblower leaked internal research showing the company has known that its ongoing drive to engage users has harmed individuals and society at large.

China moved toward a clamp down on recommendation algorithms.What’s new: China’s internet regulatory agency proposed rules that include banning algorithms that spread disinformation and threaten national security.

When every email, text, or call a company receives could mean a sale, reps need to figure out who to reply to first. Machine learning can help, but using it at scale requires a highly automated operation.

The European Union proposed sweeping restrictions on AI technologies and applications. The executive arm of the 27-nation EU published draft rules that aim to regulate, and in some cases ban, a range of AI systems.

Researchers at the University of Bristol led by Michael Wray propose a new benchmark, Semantic Similarity Video Retrieval (SVR), that evaluates video retrieval systems by their ability to rank many similar videos. They also built a system that performed well on it.

Facebook’s management obstructed the architect of its recommendation algorithms from mitigating their negative social impact. The social network focused on reining in algorithmic bias against particular groups of users at the expense of efforts to reduce disinformation.

A new database tracks failures of automated systems including machine learning models. The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit consortium of businesses and institutions, launched the AI Incident Database, a searchable collection of reports on the technology’s missteps.

Covid-19 wreaked havoc with models that predict retail sales — but China’s biggest annual e-commerce event showed that they’re back in business.

The world’s most sophisticated language model won’t replace your doctor anytime soon. Researchers at Nabla, an AI-enabled healthcare platform, found that GPT-3 lacks the logical reasoning skills to be a useful medical chatbot.

Facing a tsunami of user-generated disinformation, YouTube is scrambling to stop its recommendation algorithm from promoting videos that spread potentially dangerous falsehoods.

Need a wardrobe upgrade? You could ask the fashion mavens at Netflix’s Queer Eye — or you could use a new neural network. Researchers at Amazon propose Category-based Subspace Attention Network (CSA-Net) to predict and retrieve compatible garments and accessories that complement one another.

Machines took another step toward doing the work of journalists. Microsoft laid off dozens of human editors who select articles for the MSN news service and app. Going forward, AI will do the job.

Facebook’s leadership has thwarted changes in its algorithms aimed at making the site less polarizing, according to the Wall Street Journal. The social network’s own researchers determined that its AI software promotes divisive content.

The pandemic has radically altered online shopping behavior, throwing a wrench into many AI systems. AI inventory trackers, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection systems trained on pre-pandemic consumer behavior have been flummoxed by the different ways people now browse, binge, and buy.

Facebook’s AI can’t spot Covid-19 disinformation on its own. But with human help, it can slow the spread. Facebook uses a combination of humans and neural nets to crack down on messages that make false claims about Covid-19, which may have deadly consequences.