Washington, DC (CNN)"Full self-driving," the controversially named driver-assist feature from Tesla, may have finally met its match. They've all warned that "full self-driving" isn't really full self-driving. The technology is designed to navigate local roads with steering, braking and acceleration, but it requires an attentive human driver who's ready to take control and correct the system, which "may do the wrong thing at the worst time," Tesla warns. But while these critics may have the traditional bully pulpit of the Senate or other institutions, they have no real power to change any policy on their own. An actual impact may instead come from an unglamorous public agency, one that many Americans think of as only capable of offering customers long wait times: the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Meta's new chatbot can convincingly mimic how humans speak on the internet -- for better and worse. In conversations with CNN Business this week, the chatbot, which was released publicly Friday and has been dubbed BlenderBot 3, said it identifies as "alive" and "human," watches anime and has an Asian wife. It also falsely claimed that Donald Trump is still president and there is "definitely a lot of evidence" that the election was stolen. If some of those responses weren't concerning enough for Facebook's parent company, users were quick to point out that the artificial intelligence-powered bot openly blasted Facebook. In one case, the chatbot reportedly said it had "deleted my account" over frustration with how Facebook handles user data.

A robot running an artificial intelligence (AI) model carries out actions that perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes, highlighting the issues that exist when tech learns from data sets with inherent biases.

Microsoft is overhauling its artificial intelligence ethics policies and will no longer let companies use its technology to do things such as infer emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company has said. As part of its new "responsible AI standard", Microsoft says it intends to keep "people and their goals at the centre of system design decisions". The high-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company says, with some features being tweaked and others withdrawn from sale. Microsoft's Azure Face service, for instance, is a facial recognition tool that is used by companies such as Uber as part of their identity verification processes. Now, any company that wants to use the service's facial recognition features will need to actively apply for use, including those that have already built it into their products, to prove they are matching Microsoft's AI ethics standards and that the features benefit the end user and society.

Researchers have warned against possible harms from AI that processes and generates text.Credit: Getty An international team of around 1,000 largely academic volunteers has tried to break big tech's stranglehold on natural-language processing and reduce its harms. Trained with US$7-million-worth of publicly funded computing time, the BLOOM language model will rival in scale those made by firms Google and OpenAI, but will be open-source. BLOOM will also be the first model of its scale to be multilingual. The collaboration, called BigScience, launched an early version of the model on 17 June, and hopes that it will ultimately help to reduce harmful outputs of artificial intelligence (AI) language systems. Models that recognize and generate language are increasingly used by big tech firms in applications from chat bots to translators, and can sound so eerily human that a Google engineer this month claimed that the firm's AI model was sentient (Google strongly denies that the AI possesses sentience).

News that Alphabet Inc.'s Google sidelined an engineer who claimed its artificial intelligence system had become sentient after he'd had several months of conversations with it prompted plenty of skepticism from AI scientists. Many have said, via postings on Twitter, that senior software engineer Blake Lemoine projected his own humanity onto Google's chatbot generator LaMDA. Whether they're right, or Lemoine is right, is a matter for debate -- which should be allowed to continue without Alphabet stepping in to decide the matter.

As a chemistry PhD student, Dmytro Kolodieznyi was used to running experiments. But in early 2018, his research advisers asked him to take part in one run by robots instead. They wanted Kolodieznyi, who was developing intracellular fluorescent probes at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to spend a month attempting to recreate his research at Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL). The biotechnology company in South San Francisco, California, enables scientists to perform wet-laboratory experiments remotely in an automated research environment known as a cloud lab. If the trial went well, it would help pave the way to the wider use of cloud labs at the university.

Teslas with partially automated driving systems are a step closer to being recalled after the U.S. elevated its investigation into a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles or trucks with warning signs. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Thursday that it is upgrading the Tesla probe to an engineering analysis, another sign of increased scrutiny of the electric vehicle maker and automated systems that perform at least some driving tasks. Documents posted Thursday by the agency raise some serious issues about Tesla's Autopilot system. The agency found that it's being used in areas where its capabilities are limited, and that many drivers aren't taking action to avoid crashes despite warnings from the vehicle. The probe now covers 830,000 vehicles, almost everything that the Austin, Texas, carmaker has sold in the U.S. since the start of the 2014 model year.

A robot army is beginning its march across rural America, promising to transform the future of food. Twenty-five intelligent machines were dispatched last month to the Midwest and the Mississippi Delta, where they will advance over newly planted fields at 12 miles an hour, annihilating baby weeds. Produced by John Deere and created by the startup Blue River Technology, these robotic weeders look much like standard industrial sprayers at first glance, but each is rigged with an intricate system of 36 cameras and a mass of tiny hoses. They use computer vision to distinguish between crops and weeds and then deploy with sniper-like precision tiny jets of herbicide onto the weeds -- sparing the crop and ending the common practice of broadcast-spraying chemicals across billions of acres.

Google has unveiled a more diverse scale of skin tones to develop its artificial intelligence systems. The new Monk Skin Tone Scale, named after Harvard University professor Dr Ellis Monk, has 10 skin tones. Google says it will replace outdated skin tone scales which have a bias towards paler skins. The tech company claim it will be used to improve products like search and photos. Machine learning, a type of AI, is used by a lot of technology including cameras which recognise a face to unlock a phone or when your photos are categorised automatically. But to get to this point researchers need to train the technology so that it can recognise a wide range of people.