Real-sounding but made-up news articles have become much easier to produce thanks to a handful of new tools powered by artificial intelligence--raising concerns about potential misuse of the technology. What deepfakes did for video--producing clips of famous people appearing to say and do things they never said or did--these tools could do for news, tricking people into thinking the earth is flat, global warming is a hoax or a political candidate committed a crime when he or she didn't. While false articles are nothing new,...

Will intelligent machines take, make, or reboot your job – how might AI transform occupations and professions across society? The robots are coming – "Lock up your knowledge and protect your job at all costs!" The apocalyptic warnings are starting to flow of how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics combined with other disruptive technologies could eliminate the need for humans in the workplace. Equally skeptical voices are rubbishing the idea that anything drastic will happen, citing previous industrial revolutions as proof that new jobs will emerge to fill any gaps created by the automation of existing ones. In practice, no one really knows how quickly AI might eliminate jobs, or what the employment needs will be of the future businesses and industries that have not yet been born.

Actor and equality campaigner Geena Davis has announced that Disney has adopted a digital tool that will analyse scripts and identify opportunities to rectify any gender and ethnic biases. Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, was speaking at the Power of Inclusion event in New Zealand, where she outlined the development of GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias, a machine learning tool described as "an intervention tool to infuse diversity and inclusion in entertainment and media". Developed by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, the Spellcheck for Bias is designed to analyse a script and determine the percentages of characters' "gender, race, LGBTQIA [and] disabilities". It can also track the percentage of "non-gender-defined speaking characters". Davis said that Disney had partnered with her institute to pilot the project: "We're going to collaborate with Disney over the next year using this tool to help their decision-making [and] identify opportunities to increase diversity and inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive. We're very excited about the possibilities with this new technology and we encourage everybody to get in touch with us and give it a try."

If you've shopped in the online world, you've encountered recommendation engines. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems, also known as recommendation systems or recommender systems, leverage algorithms that help users find products and services based on their past buying behaviors, known preferences and more. Through their ability to predict interests and desires at a personalized level, recommendation engines help content and product providers drive people to music, video, books, clothes and just about any other product or service they might be interested in. Services like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube make heavy use of recommendation engines in an effort to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. Best Buy has some recommendations tailored to your tastes.

Newswire) GBT Technologies Inc. (OTCPINK: GTCH) ("GBT", or the "Company"), a company specializing in the development of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled networking and tracking technologies, including its GopherInsight wireless mesh network technology platform for both mobile and fixed solutions, announced that it is now implementing a new approach within its intelligent agent, recurrent relational reasoning (RRN). The new set of algorithms enables GBT's AI system to explicitly consider relations between objects (Static, moving), or abstract ideas. The RRN methodology will be implemented within Avant! AI within the next months, enabling it with logic analysis boost to handle vast information and data interpretation complexity. One of the key reasons for implementing this new method is to achieve outstanding image-based reasoning tasks for Avant!

The first tool studies a handful of "golden utterances" (that is, reference commands suggested by the developers) to learn general syntax and semantics patterns. After that, it produces "rewrite expressions" that themselves create thousands of new yet similar sentences to work from. The system works quickly -- you could move from 50 utterances to a fully operational linguistic set in less than two days. Amazon's other tool uses guided resampling to replace terms that can be safely swapped, further improving the AI's training. The technique draws both on data from existing Alexa languages as well as media sources like the Amazon Music catalog, and it's capable enough to be aware of context (it won't swap a musician's name for an audiobook, for example).