A European Union plan to regulate artificial intelligence could see companies that break proposed rules on mass surveillance and discrimination fined millions of euros. Draft legislation, leaked ahead of its official release later this month, suggests the EU is attempting to find a “third way” on AI regulation, between the free market US and authoritarian China. As presently worded, the rules would ban AI designed to manipulate people “to their detriment”, carry out indiscriminate surveillance or calculate “social scores”. Much of the language is vague enough that the regulations could cover the entire advertising industry or nothing at all. In…

Another week, another artificial intelligence going decidedly off-piste. We recently mentioned the autonomous video-interviewing system that appeared to be grading candidates on the strength of the bookcase behind them (27 February). Now a paper published on the website of the company OpenAI reveals how CLIP, a neural network system that learns to recognise visual concepts through being fed verbal descriptions of them, can be spoofed simply by overlaying an image with text declaring it to be something else. Stick a sticker on an apple declaring it to be a different apple product, an iPod, and the AI says it is…

Following claims that an AI has shown "sparks of artificial general intelligence", what are we to make of the hype surrounding this technology? AI expert Melanie Mitchell is your guide ARTIFICIAL intelligence has been all over the news in the past few years. Even so, in recent months the drumbeat has reached a crescendo, largely because an AI-powered chatbot called ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its ability to generate fluent text and confidently answer all manner of questions. All of which has people wondering whether AIs have reached a turning point. The current system behind ChatGPT is…

Biologists are finally beginning to corral molecules, cells and whole organisms to carry out complex computations. These living processors could find use in everything from smart materials to new kinds of artificial intelligence

Augmenting the artificial intelligence GPT-4 with extra chemistry knowledge made it much better at planning chemistry experiments, but it refused to make heroin or sarin gas

Essays in English written by people from China were branded by text-analysis tools as being generated by artificial intelligence 61 per cent of the time

Generative artificial intelligence applications have become accessible to the public in the past year, opening up vast opportunities for creativity as well as confusion. Just recently, presidential candidate Ron Desantis's campaign shared apparently faked images of Donald Trump and Antony Fauci made with artificial intelligence. A few weeks earlier, a likely AI-generated image of the Pentagon being bombed caused brief stock market dips and a statement from the Department of Defense. With campaigning already underway for the 2024 election, what impact will these technologies have on the race? Will domestic campaigns and foreign countries use these tools to sway public…

Researchers have put together a 30-second movie clip based on a group of mice's brain activity data that was recorded while they watched the footage

AI tools can explore the ethics of AI itself, says Lavie Tidhar.  His new dystopian film uses AI image-generation program Midjourney to tell the story of a well-meaning artificial intelligence trying to help the last surviving human Award-winning science fiction author Lavie Tidhar is a busy man. Between his own writing and editing projects, including The Best of World SF anthologies, he works with animator Nir Yaniv on sci-fi film series via their company Positronish, including Mars Machines, about “a toaster and a coffee pot on Mars”, and film noir Loontown. But when Yaniv approached him about yet another project,…

Protein shells designed using AI can work as carriers for immunity-inducing molecules, generating more antibodies in mice than some competing vaccine approaches Structure of the protein molecule. Molecular model of human enzyme on a black background. Protein shells designed using AI had no imperfections AI can design extremely dense protein shells that could one day lead to more potent vaccines. The genetic material of viruses is housed in protein shells. Similar shells made in the lab are used in vaccines, encapsulating molecules that induce an immune response in the body. The chemical and biological properties of these artificially made shells…