Science fiction, when revisited years later, sometimes doesn't come across as all that fictional. Speculative novels have an impressive track record at prophesying what innovations are to come, and how they might upend the world: H. G. Wells wrote about an atomic bomb decades before World War II, and Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, features devices we'd describe today as Bluetooth earbuds. Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. A core element of one of his early novels, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a magical book that acts as a personal tutor and mentor for a young girl, adapting to her learning style--in essence, it is a personalized and ultra-advanced chatbot.

Meta plans to ramp up its labeling of AI-generated images across Facebook, Instagram and Threads to help make it clear that the visuals are artificial. It's part of a broader push to tamp down misinformation and disinformation, which is particularly significant as we wrangle with the ramifications of generative AI (GAI) in a major election year in the US and other countries. According to Meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, the company has been working with partners from across the industry to develop standards that include signifiers that an image, video or audio clip has been generated using AI. "Being able to detect these signals will make it possible for us to label AI-generated images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads," Clegg wrote in a Meta Newsroom post. "We're building this capability now, and in the coming months we'll start applying labels in all languages supported by each app."

Meta is working to detect and label AI-generated images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads as the company pushes to call out "people and organisations that actively want to deceive people". Photorealistic images created using Meta's AI imaging tool are already labelled as AI, but the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced in a blog post on Tuesday that the company would work to begin labelling AI-generated images developed on rival services. Meta's AI images already contain metadata and invisible watermarks that can tell other organisations that the image was developed by AI, and the company is developing tools to identify these types of markers when used by other companies, such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock in their AI image generators, Clegg said. "As the difference between human and synthetic content gets blurred, people want to know where the boundary lies," Clegg said. "People are often coming across AI-generated content for the first time and our users have told us they appreciate transparency around this new technology. So it's important that we help people know when photorealistic content they're seeing has been created using AI." Clegg said the capability was being built and the labels would be applied in all languages in the coming months.

Britain wants to lead the world in AI regulation. But AI regulation is a rapidly evolving, contested policy space in which there's little agreement over what a good outcome would look like, let alone the best methods to get there. And being the third most important hub of AI research in the world doesn't give you an awful lot of power when the first two are the US and China. How to slice through this Gordian knot? Simple: move swiftly and decisively to do … absolutely nothing.

When a devastating earthquake struck Turkey in the early hours of February 6, 2023, the five-storey building in Hatay where 13-year-old Mehmet Koc lived, collapsed, burying him in rubble and killing his older brother Emre, 14, and his mother Didem. But it took 76 hours before rescuers could pull him from the mound of concrete and twisted metal that remained of his home. Later in hospital, doctors determined that his legs were so badly crushed and injured, that both needed to be amputated just below the hip. Hearing of the earthquake in London where he lived and worked, Mehmet's father, Hasan, caught the next available flight to Turkey and travelled to Hatay, in the southeast, desperate for news of his family. The 58-year-old encountered a scene of utter destruction.

American warplanes destroyed or severely damaged most of the Iranian and militia targets they struck in Syria and Iraq on Friday, according to the Pentagon, the first major salvos in what President Biden and his aides have said will be a sustained campaign. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Monday that "more than 80" of some 85 targets in Syria and Iraq were destroyed or rendered inoperable. The targets, he said, included command hubs; intelligence centers; depots for rockets, missiles and attack drones; as well as logistics and ammunition bunkers. It was the first military assessment of the strikes carried out in response to a drone attack in Jordan by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq on Jan. 28 that killed three American soldiers and injured at least 40 more service members. "This is the start of our response, and there will be additional actions taken," General Ryder told reporters without elaborating.

The United Kingdom has unveiled plans to spend over 100 million pounds ( 125m) on research and training related to artificial intelligence (AI). Under the plans announced on Tuesday, the government will launch nine new AI research hubs across the UK, support research projects examining the responsible use of AI in education, policing and creative industries, and train regulators on managing the risks and benefits of the technology. Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan said AI had the potential to "transform our public services and the economy for the better" and produce treatments for diseases like cancer and dementia. "AI is moving fast, but we have shown that humans can move just as fast. By taking an agile, sector-specific approach, we have begun to grip the risks immediately, which in turn is paving the way for the UK to become one of the first countries in the world to reap the benefits of AI safely," Donelan said in a statement.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni agreed Monday to work together toward the success of the Group of Seven summit in June, with Italy taking over the presidency from Japan this year. During their talks in Tokyo, the two leaders discussed the achievements of the G7 summit that was held in Kishida's home constituency of Hiroshima in May 2023, including the establishment of rules to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence technology. Kishida and Meloni also reconfirmed their cooperation in supporting Ukraine, which has been under Russian invasion for the past two years, while exchanging views on how to tackle China's growing assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific region.

Amazon has begun rolling out a new artificial intelligence assistant that is meant to address shoppers product questions, but the feature raises as many questions as it answers. Rufus, as the software is known, will help users, according to Amazon, by guiding them to the toaster ovens or dinosaur toys that best fit their needs. Yet Amazon has a history of steering customers toward products that most benefit Amazon, either because they are more profitable or are backed by advertising dollars, according to the Federal Trade Commission's pending 2023 antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. The FTC accused Amazon of "biasing Amazon's search results to preference Amazon's own products over ones that Amazon knows are of better quality." Further, the FTC alleges the Seattle firm operates a "pay-to-play" system, giving top billing for the products on which marketers were willing to spend the most.

However, current inspection missions rely on predefined plans created offline, hampering the flexibility and autonomy of the inspection vehicle and the mission's success in case of unexpected events. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a framework encompassing the modeling and verification of mission plans through Behavior Trees (BTs). This framework leverages the modularity of BTs to model onboard reactive behaviors, thus enabling autonomous plan executions, and uses BehaVerify to verify the mission's safety. Moreover, as a use case of this framework, we present a novel AI-enabled algorithm that aims for efficient, autonomous pipeline camera data collection. In a simulated environment, we demonstrate the framework's application to our proposed pipeline inspection algorithm. Our framework marks a significant step forward in the field of autonomous underwater robotics, promising to enhance the safety and success of underwater missions in practical, real-world applications.