We cannot say for sure if machines will take over the world, but they appear to have already conquered our conversations. 'AI' has officially been crowned Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary. Meaning'the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs', the term is an abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence. In the shortlist for word of the year, Collins ranked AI just above'greedflation', 'Nepo Baby' and'ULEZ'. 'Use of the word as monitored through our Collins Corpus is always interesting and there was no question that this has also been the talking point of 2023,' said Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins.

FOX News' Greg Palkot reports the latest from the Israel-Lebanon border. A drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria was thwarted on Wednesday, according to a report. Two drones targeting Syria's al-Tanf region were disabled or destroyed by the base defense system, an Iraqi government source told Reuters. The thwarted attack comes as U.S. and Coalition Forces at Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) installations in Iraq and Syria have been attacked at least 27 times between Oct. 17-31. Of these attacks, 16 happened in Iraq and 11 took place in Syria.

Short-term threats posed by artificial intelligence to democracy and privacy need to be addressed as urgently as longer term existential threats, Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, is expected to say in a speech setting out the Biden administration's vision before the UK's Bletchley Park summit on AI. In a speech in London on Wednesday before attending the conference, she will say: "We reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation. We can – and we must – do both. And we must do so swiftly, as this technology rapidly advances." Harris wants to advance beyond the debates about the future potential, sometimes speculative, existential threats posed by AI in the future to examine harms that are already happening, including those associated with discrimination and disinformation.

AI expert Marva Bailer explains how, even though there are currently laws in place, the average person has more access than ever to create deepfakes of celebrities. President Biden signed what he called a "landmark" executive order (EO) on artificial intelligence, drawing mixed reviews from experts in the rapidly developing technology. "One key area the Biden AI [executive order] is focused on includes the provision of'testing data' for review by the federal government. If this provision allows the federal government a way to examine the'black box' algorithms that could lead to a biased AI algorithm, it could be helpful," Christopher Alexander, chief analytics officer of Pioneer Development Group, told Fox News Digital. "Since core algorithms are proprietary, there really is no other way to provide oversight and commercial protections," Alexander added.

The Biden administration is taking a raft of AI-related actions as global leaders and top tech executives travel to Britain's Bletchley Park for a summit on safety concerns about artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on catastrophic scenarios of ways AI could be abused. As others -- especially the European Union -- race to regulate artificial intelligence, the Biden administration is attempting to signal that the United States leads not only in industry innovation, but also policy.

Who is the more trustworthy custodian of machines capable of diverting the course of human civilisation: Elon Musk or the Chinese Communist party? Will it be the billionaire megalomaniac tycoon who meddles in international crises as if they were video games loaded on to his personal propaganda console? Or the authoritarian superpower that likes digital technology best when it enables more efficient and ruthless social engineering and political repression? Neither is the answer – and thankfully, other options are available. But asking the question in starkly polarised terms illuminates the challenge posed by artificial intelligence that is evolving faster than any effort to bring it under responsible supervision. Everyone can agree that there should be rules because nobody wants awesome computational capability to fall into the wrong hands.

Just days after President Joe Biden unveiled a sweeping executive order retasking the federal government with regards to AI development, Vice President Kamala Harris announced at the UK AI Safety Summit on Tuesday a half dozen more machine learning initiatives that the administration is undertaking. "President Biden and I believe that all leaders, from government, civil society, and the private sector have a moral, ethical, and societal duty to make sure AI is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm and ensures that everyone is able to enjoy its benefits," Harris said in her prepared remarks. "Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm, from AI-enabled cyber-attacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bioweapons that could endanger the lives of millions," she said. The existential threats that generative AI systems present was a central theme of the summit. "To define AI safety we must consider and address the full spectrum of AI risk -- threats to humanity as a whole, threats to individuals, to our communities and to our institutions, and threats to our most vulnerable populations," she continued.

Artificial intelligence image tools have a tendency to spin up disturbing clichés: Asian women are hypersexual. These stereotypes don't reflect the real world; they stem from the data that trains the technology. Grabbed from the internet, these troves can be toxic -- rife with pornography, misogyny, violence and bigotry. Every image in this story shows something that doesn't exist in the physical world and was generated using Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image artificial intelligence model. Stability AI, maker of the popular image generator Stable Diffusion XL, told The Washington Post it had made a significant investment in reducing bias in its latest model, which was released in July.

What U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak couldn't get from his fellow world leaders, he might get from Elon Musk. The American tech billionaire will bring some star power to Sunak's summit on AI safety this week, including a conversation between the two men live-streamed on Musk's social media platform, X. Sunak organized the international gathering to reassert Britain's influence in the wake of Brexit and gain an early advantage in a potentially era-defining technology. While the event at Bletchley Park, the home of Britain's World War II code-breakers, has attracted numerous top tech executives, state leaders have been harder to come by, as many focus on the threat of an expanding conflict in the Middle East. Italian premier Giorgia Meloni is expected to be the only leader of a Group of Seven nation to attend, with Vice President Kamala Harris representing the U.S.

Nick Clegg has compared the clamour over artificial intelligence to the 80s-era "moral panic" over video games, firing a warning shot to international politicians and regulators as they gather for a two-day summit on AI safety. The former UK deputy prime minister who is now president of global affairs at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta said AI was caught in a "great hype cycle" but warned that new technologies inspired a mixture of excessive zeal and excessive pessimism. British officials are hoping to use the summit, which starts on Wednesday at Bletchley Park, to kickstart a regulatory process that could mirror international attempts to combat the climate crisis. But Clegg's comments show they are likely to encounter resistance from some of the industry's most powerful companies. "New technologies always lead to hype," he said.