The California Superior Court in Sacramento has ruled in favor of Waymo, allowing the company to keep specific details about its autonomous vehicle technology a secret. Waymo won the case against the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which it sued back in January to prevent the agency from disclosing what it considers trade secrets that could give its competitors an edge. While the Alphabet company filed a lawsuit against the DMV, it was an unidentified party that made a public records request for its driverless technology that started it all. The DMV gave Waymo the chance to redact information it deems to be trade secrets from its driverless deployment application before handing the copy over to the requester. However, the third party challenged the blacked out sections, and the DMV had advised Waymo to seek an injunction if it wants to prohibit the disclosure of the redacted materials. The information Waymo wants to keep secret includes how it plans to handle emergencies, such as how it analyzes collisions involving its vehicles, and how its technology decides when to hand over control to a human driver.

Experts predict artificial intelligence will gain sentience within the next 100 years. Some predict it'll happen sooner. Others say it'll never happen. Still other experts say it already has happened. It's possible the experts are just guessing.

Businesses are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the productivity of their employees. If you think that AI is here to take over your job, then you are highly mistaken. The fact is that AI in the workplace is going to assist you to accomplish tedious tasks and optimize your performance. The technology that helps us know the traffic status, navigates us to our destination, and recommends us movies on Netflix has now entered our workplace too! AI is one such technology that has no end when it comes to innovation and breakthroughs.

The European Parliament's Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee, one of the 20 standing committees made up of a number of Members of the European Parliament, recently held a session discussing the EU Artificial Intelligence Act ("AI Act"). Here, we highlight key'thinking points' discussed to give an indication of where the AI Act may change from its current draft. The session was short, so potential answers will be the subject of further debate. For the background on the European Commission's proposed AI Act, see our articles "Artificial intelligence - EU Commission publishes proposed regulations" and "EU Artificial Intelligence Act - what has happened so far and what to expect next". AI has the potential to bring many benefits to users and wider society.

The board found that Thaler's AI-created image didn't include an element of "human authorship" -- a necessary standard, it said, for protection. Creativity Machine's work, seen above, is named "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." It's part of a series Thaler has described as a "simulated near-death experience" in which an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images and a fictional narrative about the afterlife. A 1997 decision says that a book of (supposed) divine revelations, for instance, could be protected if there was (again, supposedly) an element of human arrangement and curation. This doesn't necessarily mean any art with an AI component is ineligible.

A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages A.I. technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will be able to have their apps analyzed then receive a report with actionable insights about how to address the problems that are found. Checks was co-founded by Fergus Hurley (GM) and Nia Castelly (Legal Lead), who developed the project over the past two years as a part of Google's in-house incubator, Area 120. The Checks team had previously built tools like Android Vitals to address developers' technical challenges, and had the idea to use A.I. to now address privacy compliance challenges, as well. Today's app developers have to keep up with a number of newer regulations and policies, from Europe's GDPR requirements to new rules implemented by the app stores themselves.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting almost every industry and profession, some faster and more profoundly than others. Unlike the industrial revolution that automated physical labor and replaced muscles with hydraulic pistons and diesel engines, the AI-powered revolution is automating mental tasks. While it may be merely optimizing some blue-collar jobs, AI is bringing about a more fundamental change to many white-collar roles previously thought safe from automation. Some of these professions are being completely transformed by the superhuman capabilities of AI to do things that were not possible before, augmenting -- and to some degree replacing -- their human colleagues in offices. In this way, AI is having a profound effect on the practice of law.

Maintaining artificial intelligence while ensuring data privacy is a challenging feat to do. While artificial intelligence holds a lot of promise, it also raises worries about data misuse and personal privacy breaches. AI must operate in a robust, secure, and safe manner, with risks constantly reviewed and addressed. Organizations that create AI must be accountable for ensuring that these systems operate in accordance with these principles. The EU Artificial intelligence Act has introduced a sophisticated'product safety framework' built around a set of four risk categories.

Massive efforts are made to reduce biases in both data and algorithms in order to render AI applications fair. These efforts are propelled by various high-profile cases where biased algorithmic decision-making caused harm to women, people of color, minorities, etc. However, the AI fairness field still succumbs to a blind spot, namely its insensitivity to discrimination against animals. This paper is the first to describe the 'speciesist bias' and investigate it in several different AI systems. Speciesist biases are learned and solidified by AI applications when they are trained on datasets in which speciesist patterns prevail. These patterns can be found in image recognition systems, large language models, and recommender systems. Therefore, AI technologies currently play a significant role in perpetuating and normalizing violence against animals. This can only be changed when AI fairness frameworks widen their scope and include mitigation measures for speciesist biases. This paper addresses the AI community in this regard and stresses the influence AI systems can have on either increasing or reducing the violence that is inflicted on animals, and especially on farmed animals.

The recent development of new technologies relying on artificial intelligence ("AI") across the world has shown the innovation, opportunities and potential value to society AI can undeniably bring. Partly due to the Covid crisis which encouraged the early adoption of automated processes, there has been a significant uptake of AI in recent times among businesses. AI is changing how companies operate across almost every sector, and notably fintech, healthcare, human resources, insurance, the internet of things, to name a few. Focussing on Ireland, an interesting study has shown that nearly two thirds of businesses are likely to use AI (or machine learning, one of AI's major subfields) by 2023. Many businesses see AI as being capable of bringing a competitive edge to the table by speeding up processes and driving cost savings.