In case you didn't hear the news about Microsoft's artificial intelligence PR stunt, read this first (link to Telegraph.uk). Artificial intelligence has made leaps and bounds in recent years with Google's AlphaGo defeating Go grandmaster Lee Sedol most recently. Just weeks after AI's huge success, Microsoft's Tay reminds us that we're not fully in control of AI. Tay is essentially a chatbot for Twitter, an evolution of AIM chatbots if you will. She was given the voice of a teenage girl because, you know, talking about Taylor Swift and highschool drama is the best way to represent your brand.

Yesterday Microsoft launched a teen girl AI on Twitter named "Tay." I work with chat bots and natural language processing as a researcher for my day job and I'm pretty into teen culture (sometimes I write for Rookie Mag). But even further more, I love bots. Bots are the best, and Olivia Tators is a national treasure that we needed but didn't deserve. But because I work with bots, primarily testing and designing software to let people set up bots and parse language, and I follow bot creators/advocates such as Allison Parrish, Darius Kazemi and Thrice Dotted, I was excited and then horrifically disappointed with Tay.

A novel written through an artificial intelligence program has passed through the first round of judging for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The book is called, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, and is one of 11 books submitted to the prize that were written by robots (1,450 books were submitted in total). "I was surprised at the work because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions," said Satoshi Hase, a Japanese science fiction novelist who was part of the press conference surrounding the award. These programs are not without some human intelligence.

There is growing concern across the board that we might be losing control over cybersecurity. The rapid changes in how we use technology to communicate and the increased number of connected devices means the points of entry or breach are growing. Because the pace of change has been so rapid, security hasn't adapted fast enough and hackers are taking full advantage. The traditional ways of dealing with cyber threats are beginning to look hopelessly inadequate. This concern goes right to the top.

General Motors Co. GM -1.12 % 's proposed purchase of tiny Cruise Automation Inc. for more than 1 billion would be one of the auto industry's biggest Silicon Valley acquisitions to date. And it would certainly not be the last. Auto makers and car-parts suppliers have hooked into tech startups in recent years to boost their in-vehicle connectivity and to accelerate autonomous-car development. The Bay Area already is dotted with auto-industry outposts funding or recruiting Silicon Valley engineering talent to keep pace with Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -0.36 % 's Google X and others working on self-driving cars. Carol Reiley, president of Bay Area autonomous-driving startup Drive.ai, said her company, which like Cruise Automation and Zoox has been operating under the radar, just raised 12 million from venture-capital investors.

You may already know the short, sordid story of Microsoft's artificial intelligence called'Tay.' Modeled to speak like a teen girl, in an effort to help improve the company's voice recognition software, Tay took to Twitter, Kik and GroupMe and proved to be quite the conversationalist -- if you speak'teen girl' that is. And if you do speak teen girl, Tay would not simply speak with you -- she'd learn from you. You see, like most AIs, Tay is a learning machine, one that gets'smarter' and whose speech gets more nuanced the more it converses with real live human beings (in this case, the Twitterati). And that's where things went pear-shaped… Within 24 hours of going live on Twitter, her human conversation companions had turned her into a sex-crazed, Nazi -- two inarguably inappropriate attributes for a bot, worse still (as if they're not bad enough to start with) for one that portrays itself as a teenager. And so it should come as no surprise that Microsoft took Tay offline immediately, deleting the offending tweets and leaving (as of this writing) just three tweets -- including her first'hello' and her quiet'c u soon'.

Toves goes on, "Since its launch last fall, the Android-only smartphone keyboard has put AI in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of users. SwiftKey Neural Alpha represents a trend in technology to shift AI away from bulky supercomputers like IBM's Watson or the U.S. Government's Titan. 'Until now, neural network language models have been deployed mostly on large servers, requiring significant computational resources,' the SwiftKey Team said. 'The launch of SwiftKey Neural Alpha is a breakthrough as it marks the first time this type of language model technology has been engineered specifically to operate locally on a smartphone keyboard'."

The folks over at x.ai – creators of Amy, the artificial intelligence answer to scheduling meetings – have had a shot at showing exactly what it looks like inside their bot's brain, using AI, of course. The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech. Without a human ever telling the RNN the definitions of different word groups, it has managed to understand that Stanford is different from Instagram, and that Jesse, Luke and Jason are names. This data was cut to down to the 3,500 most frequently used words and has then been projected into a 2D shape in order to show the relationships the AI has made between different words.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll on drugs and substance abuse was conducted by NORC Feb. 11-14. It is based on online and telephone interviews of 1,042 adults who are members of NORC's nationally representative AmeriSpeak panel. The original sample was drawn from respondents selected randomly from NORC's National Frame based on address-based sampling and recruited by mail, email, telephone and face-to-face interviews. NORC interviews participants over the phone if they don't have Internet access. With a probability basis and coverage of people who can't access the Internet, surveys using AmeriSpeak are nationally representative.

If you'd rather not spend 180 on an Amazon Echo speaker, Amazon will now help you rig up a poor man's version with a Raspberry Pi. As Lifehacker points out, Amazon has posted instructions on Github for connecting a Raspberry Pi to Alexa, the company's virtual assistant software. Although Amazon says that project requires basic programming experience, the instructions are detailed enough that anyone who's good at following directions could probably pull it off. Beyond the 35 Raspberry Pi itself, you'll need a USB microphone ( 2.55 on Amazon), plus a USB keyboard and mouse and an HDMI-equipped monitor for setup. Although some intrepid hackers had figured out how to build Raspberry Pi Alexa setups on their own, the new instructions come straight from Amazon, and are far more in-depth than any tutorials out there already.