The news: An international consortium of medical experts has introduced the first official standards for clinical trials that involve artificial intelligence. The move comes at a time when hype around medical AI is at a peak, with inflated and unverified claims about the effectiveness of certain tools threatening to undermine people's trust in AI overall. What it means: Announced in Nature Medicine, the British Medical Journal, and the Lancet, the new standards extend two sets of guidelines around how clinical trials are conducted and reported that are already used around the world for drug development, diagnostic tests, and other medical interventions. AI researchers will now have to describe the skills needed to use an AI tool, the setting in which the AI is evaluated, details about how humans interact with the AI, the analysis of error cases, and more. Why it matters: Randomized controlled trials are the most trustworthy way to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of a treatment or clinical technique.

COCIR welcomes the inception impact assessment by the European Commission on ethical and legal requirements for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the opportunity to provide feedback. Continuing our engagement in this area, and following the earlier consultation on the AI White Paper, COCIR is pleased to share its experience and expertise on the use of AI within healthcare. COCIR and its members have recently published a comprehensive in-depth analysis of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Device Legislation. The document provides a thorough analysis of the legal requirements applicable to AI-based medical devices. Based on this analysis COCIR sees no need for novel regulatory frameworks for AI-based medical devices, because the requirements of the EU Medical Device Regulation4 (MDR) in combination with provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are adequate to ensure excellence and trust in AI in line with European values.

For years, the lidar business has had a lot of hype but not a lot of hard numbers. Dozens of lidar startups have touted their impressive technology, but until recently it wasn't clear who, if anyone, was actually gaining traction with customers. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. This summer, three leading lidar makers have done major fundraising rounds that included releasing public data on their financial performance.

There are a number of plausible reasons why cheapfakes have outpaced deepfakes in the political domain. One is that, despite their crudeness, cheapfakes spread widely and can capture public debate and discourse. On pure cost-benefit grounds, fakers may opt to get more bang for their buck by using existing, proven techniques for editing and manipulating media. There are also technical reasons: a recent paper by one of us points out that sophisticated machine learning systems still require plenty of time for "training," which can slow the production of a faked video to the point where it is no longer relevant to the rapidly moving social media conversation.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit." These are the opening words of the short book On Bullshit, written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Fifteen years after the publication of this surprise bestseller, the rapid progress of research on artificial intelligence is forcing us to reconsider our conception of bullshit as a hallmark of human speech, with troubling implications. What do philosophical reflections on bullshit have to do with algorithms? As it turns out, quite a lot. In May this year the company OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, introduced a new language model called GPT-3 (for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3"). It took the tech world by storm. On the surface, GPT-3 is like a supercharged version of the autocomplete feature on your smartphone; it can generate coherent text based on an initial input. But GPT-3's text-generating abilities go far beyond anything your phone is capable of.

Chess has a reputation for cold logic, but Vladimir Kramnik loves the game for its beauty. "It's a kind of creation," he says. His passion for the artistry of minds clashing over the board, trading complex but elegant provocations and counters, helped him dethrone Garry Kasparov in 2000 and spend several years as world champion. Yet Kramnik, who retired from competitive chess last year, also believes his beloved game has grown less creative. He partly blames computers, whose soulless calculations have produced a vast library of openings and defenses that top flight players know by rote.

Robots that can hold simple conversations and learn people's interests are to be deployed in some UK care homes after an international trial found they boosted mental health and reduced loneliness. The wheeled robots, called "Pepper", move independently and gesture with robotic arms and hands and are designed to be "culturally competent", which means that after some initial programming they learn about the interests and backgrounds of care home residents. This allows them to initiate rudimentary conversations, play residents' favourite music, teach them languages, and offer practical help including medicine reminders. The researchers, led by Dr Chris Papadopoulos at the University of Bedfordshire, said the trial was not intended to explore the replacement of human carers with robots, but to help fill lonely periods when, because of a stretched social care system, staff do not have time to keep residents company. The trial, in the UK and Japan, found that older adults in care homes who interacted with the robots for up to 18 hours across two weeks had a significant improvement in their mental health.

HSBC is replacing more manual processes, with artificial intelligence (AI) being used to automate when ATMs need to be refilled. The technology, developed by HSBC's operations and technology teams, has been trialled in Hong Kong, where the bank has 1,200 ATMs. The iCash AI technology has reduced ATM refills, which are done by third parties, by 15% – saving $1m. To calculate how much money is needed and where, iCash uses live ATM data and predictive machine learning algorithms that factor in seasonality, holidays, public events, location and recent withdrawal trends. The bank said it was a challenge to predict how much cash each ATM might need.

In mid-July, a UPS subsidiary called Flight Forward and the drone company Matternet started a project with the Wake Forest Baptist Health system in North Carolina. The companies' aims are decidedly futuristic: to ferry specialty medicines and protective equipment between two of the system's facilities, less than a half-mile apart. Think of it: little flying machines, zipping about at speeds up to 43 mph, bearing the goods to heal. At this point, though, the drone operations are a little, well, human. The quadcopters must be operated by specialized drone pilots, who must pass a challenging aeronautical knowledge test to get their licenses.

Yandex is basically the Google of Russia. Russian technology company Yandex has been working on self-driving vehicles since 2017. Similarly, it partnered with American firm Uber to form a ridesharing and food-delivery joint-venture. On Friday, the two companies announced they're spinning the autonomous-vehicle portion of the business off as a separate entity. Once the financial dust settles, the unimaginatively named Yandex Self Driving Group, or SDG, will be directly owned by both businesses, with Yandex holding about 73% of SDG and Uber around 19%.