With creative AI emerging, art creation doesn't seem to be unique to humans, not anymore. Creativity is one of the few traits that make humans different from other species. We alone can make music and art that speak to our experiences or illuminate truths about our world. But suddenly, humans' artistic abilities have some competition--and from a decidedly non-human source; Artificial Intelligence. Over the last couple of years, there have been some remarkable examples of art produced by deep learning algorithms.

Software giant IBM has announced that it is withdrawing certain face-recognition products from the market, and has called for a "national dialogue" about the technology's use by US law enforcement agencies. The move, which comes as global protests against racism and police brutality enter their third week, is a marked change in the company's approach to face recognition. In November 2019, IBM said "blanket bans on technology are not the answer to concerns around specific use cases". Flaws in face-recognition technology are well documented. A 2018 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft found that dark-skinned women are misidentified by such systems 35 per cent of the time.

Its use has become increasingly controversial due to privacy concerns and issues of bias. Now, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter to Congress that his company "no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software." He continued, "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms." We'll see how other business leaders and politicians respond, and whether this represents any kind of turning point in the deployment of facial recognition. After postponing its showcase last week amid widespread anti-racism protests, Sony will debut its PlayStation 5 showcase on Thursday afternoon. The company is apparently planning to show off about an hour's worth of next-gen games, although whether or not we'll see the system itself is unknown.

New AI technologies are helping scientists to sort through the wealth of COVID-19 papers -- hopefully hastening the research process.Credit: Adapted from Getty The COVID-19 literature has grown in much the same way as the disease's transmission: exponentially. But a fast-growing set of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools might help researchers and clinicians to quickly sift through the literature. Driven by a combination of factors -- including the availability of a large collection of relevant papers, advances in natural-language processing (NLP) technology and the urgency of the pandemic itself -- these tools use AI to find the studies that are most relevant to the user, and in some cases to extract specific findings from the results. Beyond the current pandemic, such tools could help to bridge fields by making it easier to identify solutions from other disciplines, says Amalie Trewartha, one of the team leads for the literature-search tool COVIDScholar, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The tools are still in development, and their utility is largely unproven.

IBM's chief executive officer Arvind Krishna today revealed that the company is sunsetting its "general-purpose" facial recognition business. The announcement was revealed in Krishna's letter to members of Congress Monday about racial justice reform. The letter included suggestions for legislation around police reform and the responsible use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, a tool often used in facial recognition and other surveillance software. Krishna wrote that IBM "firmly opposes" the use of "any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms." He asked for a "national dialogue" on how facial recognition should be used, if at all.

Law enforcement has used surveillance technology to monitor participants of the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, as it has with many other protests in US history. License plate readers, facial recognition, and wireless text message interception are just some of the tools at its disposal. While none of this is new, the exposure that domestic surveillance is getting in this moment is further exposing a great fallacy among policymakers. All too often, there is a tendency among the policy community, particularly for those whose work involves national security, to discuss democratic tech regulation purely in terms of geopolitical competition. There are arguments that regulating big tech is vital to national security.

Climate change is seen as the biggest challenge to the future of human life on Earth, and understanding the scientific language used to describe it can sometimes feel just as difficult. But help is at hand. Use our translator tool to find out what some of the words and phrases relating to climate change mean. Keeping the rise in global average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius will avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say.

Artificial Intelligence is a technology that has the potential to greatly improve our public services by reducing costs, enhancing quality, and freeing up valuable time of frontline staff. Recognising this, the UK Government published the Data Ethics Framework and A Guide to using AI in the Public Sector to enable public bodies to adopt AI systems in a way that works for everyone in society. These new procurement guidelines will help inform and empower buyers in the public sector, helping them to evaluate suppliers, then confidently and responsibly procure AI technologies for the benefit of citizens.

The backlash to facial recognition among governments is extending to corporate heavyweights. IBM chief Arvind Krishna has sent a letter (via Axios and CNBC) to Congress revealing that the company has exited its "general purpose" facial recognition business. The company "firmly opposes" use of the technology for surveillance, racial profiling and "violations of basic human rights and freedoms," according to Krishna. Instead, he suggested that now was the moment for a "national dialogue" on not only how facial recognition should be used, but whether or not it should be used at all. The CEO contended that AI was a "powerful tool" for law enforcement, but that its use had to be kept in check with audited tests for bias.

Policy and guideline proposals for ethical artificial-intelligence research have proliferated in recent years. These are supposed to guide the socially-responsible development of AI for the common good. However, there typically exist incentives for non-cooperation (i.e., non-adherence to such policies and guidelines); and, these proposals often lack effective mechanisms to enforce their own normative claims. The situation just described constitutes a social dilemma---namely, a situation where no one has an individual incentive to cooperate, though mutual cooperation would lead to the best outcome for all involved. In this paper, we use stochastic evolutionary game dynamics to model this social dilemma in the context of the ethical development of artificial intelligence. This formalism allows us to isolate variables that may be intervened upon, thus providing actionable suggestions for increased cooperation amongst numerous stakeholders in AI. Our results show how stochastic effects can help make cooperation viable in such a scenario. They suggest that coordination for a common good should be attempted in smaller groups in which the cost for cooperation is low, and the perceived risk of failure is high. This provides insight into the conditions under which we should expect such ethics proposals to be successful with regard to their scope, scale, and content.