The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain's 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government. Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match. The move, contained in a single clause in a new criminal justice bill, could put every driver in the country in a permanent police lineup, according to privacy campaigners. Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere. The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK's driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is "sneaking it under the radar".

Artificial intelligence began to reshape music, movies and art in 2023, sparking both enthusiasm and panic. Some artists used AI to aid their creative practices. Others took legal action against the companies that co-opted art to make their models more powerful. As battles played out across picket lines and courtrooms, millions of viewers and listeners around the world tuned into AI-created content with curiosity, disdain and glee. Here are the major ways AI impacted culture this year.

Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people – particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people – on "numerous" occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years. The FTC said in a federal court complaint that Rite Aid used facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores from October 2012 to July 2020 to identify shoppers "it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior". The technology sent alerts to Rite Aid employees either by email or phone when it identified people entering the store on its watchlist. The FTC said in its complaint that store employees would then put those people under increased surveillance, ban them from making purchases or accuse them in front of friends, family and other customers of previously committing crimes.

Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition technology for five years over allegations that its surveillance system was used incorrectly to identify potential shoplifters, especially Black, Latino, Asian or female shoppers. The settlement with the Federal Trade Commission addresses charges that the struggling drugstore chain didn't do enough to prevent harm to its customers and implement "reasonable procedures," the government agency said. Rite Aid said late Tuesday that it disagrees with the allegations, but that it's glad it reached an agreement to resolve the issue. The FTC said in a federal court complaint that technology used by Rite Aid for several years led to thousands of incorrect matches, including an incident where Rite Aid store employees stopped and searched an 11-year-old girl. Rite Aid used facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores from October 2012 to July 2020 to identify shoppers "it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior," the FTC said. The complaint noted that many images it used for its database were low-quality, coming from security cameras, employee phone cameras and news stories in some cases.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. An artificial intelligence system can't be registered as the inventor of a patent, Britain's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a decision that denies machines the same status as humans. The U.K.'s highest court concluded that "an inventor must be a person" to apply for patents under the current law. The decision was the culmination of American technologist Stephen Thaler's long-running British legal battle to get his AI, dubbed DABUS, listed as the inventor of two patents.

Hidden inside the foundation of popular artificial intelligence (AI) image generators are thousands of images of child sexual abuse, according to new research published on Wednesday. The operators of some of the largest and most-used sets of images utilized to train AI shut off access to them in response to the study. The Stanford Internet Observatory found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that's been used to train leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion. The watchdog group based at Stanford University worked with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities to identify the illegal material and report the original photo links to law enforcement. More than 1,000 of the suspected images were confirmed as child sexual abuse material.

Researchers from the Stanford Internet Observatory say that a dataset used to train AI image generation tools contains at least 1,008 validated instances of child sexual abuse material. The Stanford researchers note that the presence of CSAM in the dataset could allow AI models that were trained on the data to generate new and even realistic instances of CSAM. LAION, the non-profit that created the dataset, told 404 Media that it "has a zero tolerance policy for illegal content and in an abundance of caution, we are temporarily taking down the LAION datasets to ensure they are safe before republishing them." The organization added that, before publishing its datasets in the first place, it created filters to detect and remove illegal content from them. However, 404 points out that LAION leaders have been aware since at least 2021 that there was a possibility of their systems picking up CSAM as they vacuumed up billions of images from the internet.

Rajvinder Jagdev, of specialist intellectual property litigation firm Powell Gilbert, said: "The judgement does not preclude a person using an AI to devise an invention - in such a scenario, it would be possible to apply for a patent, provided that person is identified as the inventor. The judgement alludes that had this been the scenario it had been asked to consider, the outcome may have been different."

AI may or may not take people's jobs in years to come, but in the meantime, there's one thing they cannot obtain: patents. Dr. Stephen Thaler has spent years trying to get patents for two inventions created by his AI "creativity machine" DABUS. Now, the United Kingdom's Supreme Court has rejected his appeal to approve these patents when listing DABUS as the inventor, Reuters reports. The court's rationale stems from a provision in UK patent law that states, "an inventor must be a natural person." The ruling stipulated that the appeal was unconcerned with whether this should change in the future. "The judgment establishes that UK patent law is currently wholly unsuitable for protecting inventions generated autonomously by AI machines," Thaler's lawyers said in a statement.

Artificial intelligence cannot be legally named as an inventor to secure patent rights, the UK supreme court has ruled. In a judgment on Wednesday, Britain's highest court concluded that "an inventor must be a person" in order to apply for patents under the current law. The ruling comes after the technologist Dr Stephen Thaler took his long-running dispute with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to the country's top court over its rejection of his attempt to list an AI he created as the inventor for two patents. The US-based developer claims the AI machine named DABUS autonomously created a food or drink container and a light beacon and that he is entitled to rights over its inventions. However, the IPO concluded in December 2019 that the expert was unable to officially register DABUS as the inventor in patent applications because it was not a person.