Tech & Society
Want Your Pension? Send a Selfie
The French government plans to roll out a national identification service based on face recognition. Critics warn that the new system violates citizens’ privacy.
Tech & Society
Letters
How Should We Manage AI threats?
Last week, I saw a lot of social media discussion about a paper using deep learning to generate artificial comments on news articles. I’m not sure why anyone thinks this is a good idea. At best, it adds noise to the media environment. At worst, it’s a tool for con artists and propagandists.
Tech & Society
Amazon Prepares for a Crackdown
Amazon is writing what it hopes will become U.S. law governing use of face recognition technology. At a press event, Jeff Bezos told that his company’s lawyers are drafting a statutory framework to guide what he views as an inevitable federal crackdown on face recognition.
Tech & Society
Nothing but (Neural) Net
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.
Tech & Society
Watching the Watchers
A growing number of nations use AI to track their citizens. A new report sheds light on who’s watching and how. “The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance” details which countries are buying surveillance gear, which companies are supplying it, and what technologies are most in-demand.
Tech & Society
Are Those Results Reproducible?
As deep learning becomes more resource-intensive, labs with better funding tend to achieve better results. One consequence is that less wealthy organizations often can’t replicate state-of-the-art successes. Some observers are calling it a crisis.
Tech & Society
Ready or Not
Independent research lab OpenAI designed virtual agents to play hide-and-seek. They evolved increasingly clever strategies, eventually hacking the game world’s physics to gain advantage.
Tech & Society
Easing Cross-Border Collaboration
Tighter national borders impede progress in AI. So industry leaders are calling for a different kind of immigration reform. The Partnership on AI published a report calling out the corrosive effect of restrictive immigration policies and suggesting alternatives.
Tech & Society
Generative Models Rock
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.
Tech & Society
Facing Down Deepfakes
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.
Tech & Society
Can AI Wage War? Should It?
The U.S. military is developing a new generation of automated weaponry. Some people are calling for automated generals as well.
Tech & Society
How to Share Dangerous AI
OpenAI raised eyebrows in February when it announced — and withheld — the full version of its groundbreaking language model, GPT-2. Six months later, the company has re-examined the decision.