The Mohajer-6 has the capability to carry out surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and the Shahed series is considered among the most capable of Iran's military drones, according to comments made by the Iranian military to local news media. Iran is a pioneer in drone technology, with at least four decades of design and manufacturing experience, and it has been providing combat drones to military groups and proxy militia in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Officials in Israel, the United States and some Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia have said they are increasingly concerned that Iran's advancing drone technology could destabilize the region and empower militias backed by Iran. In the shadow war between Iran and Israel, Iranian drones have been involved in attacks on ships and have targeted U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria. Israel has also attacked a secret facility in western Iran where hundreds of drones were believed to have been stored.

France experienced its worst drought on record last month, and officials have since been cracking down on conserving water. Now a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology could be added to their arsenal, after it successfully uncovered 20,356 illegally-built private swimming pools. The country's tax authority announced yesterday that the system allowed it to collect about €10 million (£8.5 million) from homeowners who failed to report the facilities. Developed by Google and Capgemini, the AI software was trained to spot pools in aerial images of nine French departments. The results of a trial run last October were then cross-checked with land registry databases, before Direction generale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP) took action.

At a workshop hosted through the Air Force's military university on Aug. 26 in Montgomery, Alabama, students were shown a video of President Joe Biden addressing the UN while effortlessly switching between five languages including Mandarin and Russian. While Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams were fluent in several languages, Biden, like most U.S. presidents, is only known to speak English. The video was a piece of synthetic media, more commonly known as a "deepfake." Created using a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, deepfakes are hyperrealistic videos that replace one person's likeness with that of another, or appear to show them doing something they never did. And as the technology improves, they get harder to detect.

Russia's defence ministry has said Russian forces shot down a Ukrainian drone that was trying to attack the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex, while other officials said a Ukrainian missile hit a fuel depot at the plant.

Elon Musk, a man not known for thinking small, has taken to the stage at an energy conference to announce his goals for the rest of the year. The Tesla chief said that he hopes his company's self-driving cars will be'in wide release' in the US and Europe by the end of 2022. Speaking at Offshore Northern Seas 2022 in Norway yesterday, he claimed that the launch of the autonomous electric vehicles depends on regulatory approval. The billionaire also said that he was focusing on the SpaceX Starship spacecraft, that had an orbital flight scheduled for this summer that has now been delayed. SpaceX was granted a license for this flight by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission earlier this month, and is now targeting a six-month window that opens on September 1. Musk told the audience: 'The two technologies I am focused on, trying to ideally get done before the end of the year, are getting our Starship into orbit ... and then having Tesla cars to be able to do self-driving.

Welcome to our August 2022 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. This month, we continue our conference coverage, chat to winners of best paper awards, and listen to some interesting podcasts. Wouldn't it be handy to be able to automatically update information in an outdated article? Well, Robert Logan, Alexandre Passos, Sameer Singh and Ming-Wei Chang designed an algorithm to do just that in their paper FRUIT: Faithfully Reflecting Updated Information in Text. This work won them a best new task award at NAACL 2022 (Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics).

Tatum, Texas might not seem like the most obvious place for a revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), but in October of 2020, that's exactly what happened. That was when Wayne Brown, the operations manager at the Vistra-owned Martin Lake Power Plant, built and deployed a heat rate optimizer (HRO). Vistra Corp. is the largest competitive power producer in the United States and operates power plants in 12 states with a capacity of more than 39,000 megawatts of electricity--enough to power nearly 20 million homes. Vistra has committed to reducing emissions by 60 percent by 2030 (against a 2010 baseline) and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. To achieve its goals, the business is increasing efficiency in all its power plants and transforming its generation fleet by retiring coal plants and investing in solar- and battery-energy storage, which includes the world's largest grid-scale battery energy-storage facility.

It seems unlikely that their new argument about AI-induced mass unemployment will turn out to be the silver bullet they are hoping for. While many of these justifications have become quite familiar over the years of waxing and waning interest in UBI, it is interesting to note the recent surge of interest in one particular argument, which sounds more like something from a science fiction novel than an economics textbook. This argument runs roughly as follows: In the not too distant future, rapidly advancing technology will allow robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to perform many of the jobs now being done by humans and to do so more cheaply and efficiently than humans ever could. This will result in robots/AI replacing humans in almost all jobs, making the vast majority of people permanently unemployed, and without Universal Basic Income, how will they (the people) be able to keep food on their tables?

Taipei and Beijing have traded barbs over a recent string of drone sorties that have flown from the Chinese mainland to an outlying Taiwanese island, some surveilling military outposts. Photos and video taken by Chinese drones of the Kinmen islands have been circulating on both Taiwan and Chinese social media, with one video showing Taiwanese soldiers hurling rocks at one to drive it off. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was not "anything worth making a fuss about" as the drones were "flying around Chinese territory" when asked to comment on the videos on Monday. But that response triggered an angry riposte from Taipei which compared the drone harassment to the acts of a "thief". "Those who come uninvited are called thieves, whether they are breaking through the door or peeping from the air, the people of Taiwan do not welcome such thieves," Taiwan's foreign ministry said in a statement late Monday. "The authoritarian expansionist government of the Chinese Communist Party has always made harassing other countries a daily routine, and therefore its title of a'regional troublemaker' is well-deserved."

At this point in the film, with artificial intelligence (AI) creating art, music and chronicles, directing ships and planes, creating deepfakes that put the most experienced of views to the test and passing almost as human --or without the almost, that depending on who you ask--the question seems quite pertinent: why not let it set the course for governments? It sounds bizarre, but in the Kingdom of Denmark there are those who believe that it would be a barbaric idea. So much so, in fact, that he has already set in motion the administrative machinery to achieve it. At the end of May, the artist collective Computer Lars launched Det Syntetiske Parti, which translated into Spanish would be equivalent to El Partido Sintético. The name may be somewhat cryptic, but it captures part of the essence of the Danish formation: its artificial character and its effort to synthesize ideas, something that it has achieved by using precisely the possibilities offered by AI.