Letters
How Price Optimization Leads to Better Products and Worse Transparency
In addition to creating tremendous value, AI is creating tremendous concentrations of power. Our community is wrestling with what constitutes fair use of that power.
Tech & Society
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & 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.
Tech & Society
Limits on AI Job Interviews: The AI video act sets limits on algorithmic 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.
Tech & 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.