Its creators say the bot is most effective when it poses as a 15-year-old girl. You can find "her" number within fake messages placed alongside real ads on websites popular with those looking to buy sex. Naive and innocent, the bot will tell you she is nervous and check that her age is "cool with you". If you say yes, that's when it's revealed: you've been talking to a chatbot, and buying sex is a crime that harms women the world over. It's a message designed to shock the recipient into reconsidering their actions, says Robert Beiser from Seattle Against Slavery.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an established alternative to human capabilities in computation, data-driven optimisation and manual labour. However, the latest models are also capable of that most human of qualities – creativity. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered.

As a person living in the 21st century, it's almost inevitable that you've had the seamless, fast, and hassle-free experience of shopping online: a few clicks and you're done without ever needing to interact with anyone, and then your items can show up at your door in as little as a day. But as the holiday season ramps up, it's a good time to remember that there's actually a whole lot of human labor behind that fast and easy click. While we at Mother Jones recently reported on how robots will one day take these jobs, they haven't taken over just yet. Just consider a great story last week from Gizmodo's Bryan Menegus shedding light on a mysterious program known as Amazon Flex: a "nearly invisible workforce" of independent contractors charged with delivering the "last mile" of Amazon orders from a local storage facility to the customer's door. As Menegus explains, "It's a network of supposedly self-employed, utterly expendable couriers enrolled in an app-based program which some believe may violate labor laws."

One year ago, we wrote about the world's first robot lawyer. It is a website with a chatbot that started off with a single and free legal service: helping to appeal unfair parking tickets. When the article was published, the services was available in the UK, and in New York and Seattle. At the time, it had helped overturn traffic tickets to the value of 4 million dollars. Apart from appealing parking tickets, the website could already assist you, too, in claiming compensation if your flight was delayed.

There have been ominous signs that artificial intelligence is ready to make a serious impact on the insurance world, but not many had expected it to arrive in the insurance law field. Top 100 law firm Keoghs has announced the introduction of it what it is deeming the "first true AI lawyer to hit the insurance market." Known as Lauri, it has been launched today and will initially handle avoidable litigation cases with the aim being that insurers can enjoy transformative speed and ease of service while reducing costs. The firm believes that Lauri can settle cases back to insurers within seconds. It communicates via email using natural language processing – it interacts with Keoghs' case management system and can be applied across a range of claims types. "There has been a lot of talk in the industry over the last year or two regarding AI, in particular solutions being discussed that almost hijack the true meaning of artificial intelligence," said Dene Rowe, Keoghs partner and director of public development.

Jennifer Lawrence, director Darren Aronofsky split After Charlie Rose accusations, Seth Meyers says it's time to retire the bathrobe Nick Carter, accused of rape by Dream singer Melissa Schuman, is'shocked and saddened' Russell Simmons' accuser tells Megyn Kelly: 'There was no dispute about what happened' David Cassidy remembered: Who'did not want to look like, sound like, just be him?' After Charlie Rose accusations, Seth Meyers says it's time to retire the bathrobe Nick Carter, accused of rape by Dream singer Melissa Schuman, is'shocked and saddened' Russell Simmons' accuser tells Megyn Kelly: 'There was no dispute about what happened' David Cassidy remembered: Who'did not want to look like, sound like, just be him?' 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' will return to Netflix for season 12 Fans of wisecracking robots and terrible science fiction flicks, rejoice: "Mystery Science Theater 3000" will return for a new season on Netflix. The news of the 12th season was announced at the end of the annual "MST3K" Thanksgiving marathon hosted by Jonah Ray, Felicia Day and Joel Hodgson. The reveal didn't include a premiere date, but the corresponding news release promised the new season would drop in the "not-too-distant-future." Factory) launched a Kickstarter in hopes of resurrecting the scrappy series, which aired from 1988 to 1999. The crowdfunded operation was a success and brought in more than $5 million for a brand new Satellite of Love, the spaceship in which Joel and his pals reside.

This paper proposes the continuous semantic topic embedding model (CSTEM) which finds latent topic variables in documents using continuous semantic distance function between the topics and the words by means of the vari-ational autoencoder(V AE). The semantic distance could be represented by any symmetric bell-shaped geometric distance function on the Euclidean space, for which the Mahalanobis distance is used in this paper. In order for the semantic distance to perform more properly, we newly introduce an additional model parameter for each word to take out the global factor from this distance indicating how likely it occurs regardless of its topic. It certainly improves the problem that the Gaussian distribution which is used in previous topic model with continuous word embedding could not explain the semantic relation correctly and helps to obtain the higher topic coherence. Through the experiments with the dataset of 20 Newsgroup, NIPS papers and CNN/Dailymail corpus, the performance of the recent state-of-the-art models is accomplished by our model as well as generating topic embedding vectors which makes possible to observe where the topic vectors are embedded with the word vectors in the real Euclidean space and how the topics are related each other semantically.

Calls to arms to build interpretable models express a well-founded discomfort with machine learning. Should a software agent that does not even know what a loan is decide who qualifies for one? Indeed, we ought to be cautious about injecting machine learning (or anything else, for that matter) into applications where there may be a significant risk of causing social harm. However, claims that stakeholders "just won't accept that!" do not provide a sufficient foundation for a proposed field of study. For the field of interpretable machine learning to advance, we must ask the following questions: What precisely won't various stakeholders accept? What do they want? Are these desiderata reasonable? Are they feasible? In order to answer these questions, we'll have to give real-world problems and their respective stakeholders greater consideration.

During yesterday's Autumn statement, Chancellor Philip Hammond outlined positive measures to push the adoption of autonomous and electric cars, develop new 5G networks, treble the number of computer science teachers and further research into AI and robotics. But tucked away in the 88-page document were small changes that show the UK government plans to get a lot tougher on technology companies that aren't willing to give back as much as they should. The most important notice came during Hammond's budget speech. As he pledged £400 million for a UK-wide EV charging network and a £100 million subsidy for electric car buyers, the finance minister also outlined steps to claw back money from tech giants like Google, Amazon and Apple, which use legal loopholes to avoid paying tax in the UK. "Multinational digital businesses pay billions of pounds in royalties to jurisdictions where they are not taxed – and some of these royalties relate to UK sales," said Hammond in his speech.