The United Nations secretary-general has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to spread disinformation and hate, as he backed a proposal for the creation of an international watchdog to monitor the technology. Speaking at the launch of a new policy on disinformation on Monday, Antonio Guterres said that while technological advancement has been used for some good, the risks posed by AI threatens democracy and human rights. Guterres said he backs a proposal by some artificial intelligence executives for the creation of a watchdog body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Generative AI technology – which can perform natural language processing tasks such as answering questions, summarising text and even generating lines of code – has captivated the public since ChatGPT launched six months ago. AI has also become a focus of concern over its ability to create misinformation and deep fakes, which are AI-generated images and videos that mimic people.

The following are the report's key findings: Businesses buy into AI/ML, but struggle to scale across the organization. The vast majority (93%) of respondents have several experimental or in-use AI/ML projects, with larger companies likely to have greater deployment. A majority (82%) say ML investment will increase during the next 18 months, and closely tie AI and ML to revenue goals. Yet scaling is a major challenge, as is hiring skilled workers, finding appropriate use cases, and showing value. Deployment success requires a talent and skills strategy.

An automated robot gardener has shown its nurturing side by matching humans in trials of growing vegetables – and it did it with more efficient use of water. Simeon Adebola at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have developed an automated plot, called AlphaGarden, that contains a mix of plant types and tested whether it can perform as well as a team of six expert human horticulturalists, each with 10 years of gardening experience, on average. The robot and human-run plots both contained pairs of eight different common edible vegetables, such as kale, chard and radicchio.

Despite the wild success of ChatGPT and other large language models, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) that underpin these systems might be on the wrong track. For one, ANNs are "super power-hungry," said Cornelia Fermüller, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. "And the other issue is [their] lack of transparency." Such systems are so complicated that no one truly understands what they're doing, or why they work so well. This, in turn, makes it almost impossible to get them to reason by analogy, which is what humans do--using symbols for objects, ideas, and the relationships between them.

For decades, Silicon Valley anticipated the moment when a new technology would come along and change everything. It would unite human and machine, probably for the better but possibly for the worse, and split history into before and after. It could happen in several ways. One possibility is that people would add a computer's processing power to their own innate intelligence, becoming supercharged versions of themselves. Or maybe computers would grow so complex that they could truly think, creating a global brain.

AI technology has been catapulted into popular discourse in recent months with the rise of natural language processing like ChatGPT. Computer vision, though, is even older. It is used in Roomba vacuums and surgical settings, according to Kris Hauser, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose research specializes in open-world robotics. But this is one of the first AI robots to be used in the consumer beauty space, Hauser said.

"Ducking" had become such a recognizable error caused by the iPhone's autocorrect function that The Wall Street Journal conducted an interview with the feature's creator, Ken Kocienda, at a duck farm. That system drew upon both a "static dictionary" of common words and proper nouns as well as a "dynamic dictionary" of words that each user typed often, Mr. Kocienda said. But it also did not correct close misspellings of curse words, he said, with the goal of preventing users from accidentally inserting vulgarity into their messages. The update will allow iMessage corrections to better consider a word's context in a sentence, said Yulan He, a professor of natural language processing at King's College London whose given name is usually changed by iMessage to "Tulane." Previously, autocorrect matched the spelling of each word, in isolation, against the words in its dictionaries. "Now, when they replace a word, they would ensure the replaced word will still maintain the original meaning of the sentence," Professor He said.

The California department of motor vehicles has approved Mercedes-Benz's automated driving system on designated highways under certain conditions without the active control of a driver. California is one of Tesla's largest markets, accounting for 16% of the carmaker's global deliveries last year, according to Reuters calculations. But the German carmaker beat Tesla to become the first carmaker to receive authorization to sell or lease cars with an automated driving system to the public in California. The approval was granted to Level 3 Mercedes-Benz "Drive Pilot" system that allows a driver to legally take their eyes off the wheel but must be available to resume control in need. The "Drive Pilot" system can only operate on highways during daylight at speeds not exceeding 40mph, the DMV said.

Robotic dogs can spot invasive fire ant nests more efficiently than human searchers – and they can safely stir up a swarm of aggressive ants by poking their nests, which can help researchers identify the notorious pests. The red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) packs a venomous sting, and causes billions of dollars in ecological and agricultural damage across the world each year. To combat the threat, researchers have been testing how a robotic dog combined with artificial intelligence can help detect the ants' …