Data accessed in the Electoral Commission hack could help state-backed actors target voters with AI-generated disinformation, experts have warned. The UK elections watchdog revealed on Tuesday that a hostile cyber-attack had been able to access the names and addresses of all voters registered between 2014 and 2022. It said the integrity of the UK's largely paper-based electoral system was not at risk, but experts said the data could still be used by rogue actors if deployed alongside powerful new artificial intelligence tools. Michael Veale, an associate professor in digital rights at University College London, said the electoral register data could be combined with other leaked datasets to help target disinformation. Veale cited the example of a vote suppression scandal in Canada in 2011, when automated phone calls impersonating election officials were made to voters, telling them falsely that their polling stations had been moved.

Artificial Intelligence-powered influencers are the new social media trend. But there could be negative impacts from the perfect influencers, a humane technologist warns. INFLUENCER TRAP: New social media trend could prompt mental health crises, suicide as users tune into'fake life': tech founder. WORK WORRIES: A new poll reveals what Americans fear about AI taking their jobs. Republican Wisconsin state Rep. David Steffen has proposed restrictions for minors across all social media platforms.

Our local and state level government systems are hacked and held ransom with disheartening regularity. At the Black Hat USA Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the Biden Administration revealed its plans to better defend the nation's critical digital infrastructure: It's launching a DARPA-led challenge competition to build AI systems capable of proactively identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities. The "AI Cyber Challenge" (AIxCC) is a two-year development program open to competitors throughout the US. It's being hosted by DARPA in collaboration with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Those companies are providing both their expertise in the field and access to their AI technologies.

The programme of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) featured an invited talk by Jennifer Doudna entitled "The future of ML in biology: CRISPR for health and climate". Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of a method for genome editing". The method in question is often referred to as CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using this technique, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. This technology has already had a huge impact on the biological sciences.

He wrote his thesis on using AI to manage the input of different sensors for a vehicle, which helped get him a visiting scientist position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs. There, he contributed to the Pathfinder mission to land the Sojourner rover on Mars. Next, he and his partner, the British-Nigerian novelist Sarah Ladipo Manyika, moved to Silicon Valley, where he became a consultant for McKinsey and had a front-row seat to the dot-com bubble and subsequent crash. He wrote extensively on how tech breakthroughs impacted the real world, publishing a book in 2011 about how the massive amount of data generated by the internet would become critical to business.

Yet government officials, journalists, and tech companies were unable to take action before the image had real impact. It not only caused confusion but led to a dip in financial markets. Manipulated and misleading content is not a new phenomenon. But AI enables increasingly accessible, sophisticated, and hyperrealistic content creation that--while it can be used for good, in artistic expression or accessibility improvements--can also be abused to cast doubt on political events, or to defame, harass, and exploit. Whether to promote election integrity, protect evidence, reduce misinformation, or preserve historical records, audiences could benefit from knowing when content has been manipulated or generated with AI.

The sparrows fled the courtyard. It was quiet amid the classics. John Szabo stepped out of the elevator and walked through the sunlit atrium of the Central Library. He passed a slumbering homeless man and, with the efficiency of a spy, disappeared into stacks of bound archives, hundreds of thousands of relevant and obscure pages -- including the 1991 "Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan." A tall man with sparks of gray in his goatee, Szabo, the city librarian, oversees 72 branches, a $241.8 million budget, 17,000 restaurant menus, 64 ukuleles, a Shakespeare volume from 1685, and lockers of puppets for a children's theater. He stopped at a shelf holding years of "Family Handyman" magazines. Founded in 1951 for those who grout tile and hang cabinets, the periodical was no match for Prince Harry's memoir or a Stephen King novel.

More than 70 countries are due to hold regional or national elections by the end of 2024. It will be a period of huge political significance across the globe, with more than 2 billion people (mostly from the global south) directly affected by the outcome of these elections. The stakes for the integrity of democracy have never been higher. As concerns mount about the influential role of information pollution, disseminated through the vast platforms of US and Chinese corporations, in shaping these elections, a new shadow looms: how artificial intelligence – more specifically, generative AI such as OpenAI's ChatGPT – has increasingly moved into the mainstream of technology. The recent wave of hype around AI has seen a fair share of doom-mongering.

Rishi Sunak will gather world leaders in London this autumn for a summit on safety in artificial intelligence, after expressing concern about the "existential risks" of the rapidly evolving technology. Apparently, even our wannabe tech bro prime minister – currently holidaying in California – is willing to acknowledge the potential need for state intervention to prevent AI going rogue. But away from the level of jet-setting diplomacy, his government has been notably less keen on scrutinising the dramatic transformation already being wrought in many people's working lives by digital technologies. A new report on "connected tech" published by the culture, media and sport select committee underlined the immense potential of the so-called "fourth Industrial Revolution" for a wide range of sectors. But it also pointed to the risks for individual workers, where aspects of their job are automated out of existence, or they find themselves so closely monitored that they lose any sense of autonomy.

Russian air defences have shot down two armed drones headed for Moscow, the city's mayor said, the latest in a surge of drone attacks on Russia's capital city. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Wednesday that one drone was downed in the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of the city, while the second was shot down in the Minsk highway area, west of the capital. "Two combat drones' attempt to fly into the city was recorded. Both were shot down by air defence," Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging channel, without naming an attacker. "At the moment, there is no information about victims of the fall of the wreckage," he said, adding that emergency services were on the ground.