One task that AI can handle quite well is summarizing data, so Amazon and Microsoft are putting AI to work. Today, mobile users will begin seeing AI-generated summaries of Amazon product reviews, and Microsoft is also beginning to add AI-generated review summaries to the Microsoft Store app within Windows. If you're buying a product on Amazon, you're familiar with the collection of reviews and ratings that appears well down the product's page. Today, you'll also see a short paragraph that uses AI to sum up what those customers think. AI has become a controversial tool, as artists complain that placing AI art next to their own original works devalues the medium. As a business tool, however, it's received a warmer reception.

The three-year contract will be split across multiple bidders. It replaces the 10-year, $10 billion JEDI cloud-computing contract terminated in July, which was planned to consolidate the Pentagon's patchwork of data systems to give defense personnel better access to real-time information and artificial-intelligence capabilities. The Pentagon said the contract was canceled because of its evolving needs. The project was mired in years of squabbling between Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.26%, which won the bidding, and Amazon.com Inc., AMZN 2.15% which contended the process was politically motivated under the Trump administration.

Joy Buolamwini from the MIT Media Lab says facial-recognition software has the highest error rates for darker-skinned females. New applications powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are being embraced by the public and private sectors. Their early uses hint at what's to come. In June 2020, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft announced that they were stepping back from facial-recognition software development amid concerns that it reinforces racial and gender bias. Amazon and Microsoft said they would stop selling facial-recognition software to police until new laws are passed in the United States to address potential human-rights abuses.

Turns out, computers do too. When US and European researchers fed pictures of members of Congress to Google's cloud image recognition service, the service applied three times as many annotations related to physical appearance to photos of women as it did to men. The top labels applied to men were "official" and "businessperson"; for women they were "smile" and "chin." The researchers administered their machine vision test to Google's artificial intelligence image service and those of rivals Amazon and Microsoft. Crowdworkers were paid to review the annotations those services applied to official photos of lawmakers and images those lawmakers tweeted.

IBM announced this week that it would stop selling its facial recognition technology to customers including police departments. The move prompted calls for other tech firms, like Amazon and Microsoft, to do the same. IBM announced this week that it would stop selling its facial recognition technology to customers including police departments. The move prompted calls for other tech firms, like Amazon and Microsoft, to do the same. IBM will no longer provide facial recognition technology to police departments for mass surveillance and racial profiling, Arvind Krishna, IBM's chief executive, wrote in a letter to Congress.

The US-based Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has developed the first ever accredited standard for use of artificial intelligence in health care, with input from tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. More than 50 organisations, from tech giants to startups and healthcare industry leaders, have developed the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited quality mark. The standard is part of the CTA's new initiative on AI and is the first in a series that aims to set a foundation for implementing medical and health care solutions built on the technology. One issue that the standard aims to resolve is the way that AI-related terms are used in different ways, leading to confusion, particularly in the healthcare industry. The standard defines over 30 terms including machine learning, model bias, artificial neural network and trustworthiness.

Google became what it is by creating advanced new technology and throwing it open to all. Giant businesses and individuals alike can use the company's search and email services, or tap its targeting algorithms and vast audience for ad campaigns. Yet Google's progress on artificial intelligence now appears to have the company rethinking its do-what-you-will approach. The company has begun withholding or restricting some of its AI research and services, to protect the public from misuse. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has made "AI first" a company slogan, but the company's wariness of AI's power has sometimes let its competitors lead instead.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is pressing forward with a lawsuit involving the facial recognition software offered by Amazon and Microsoft to government clients. In a complaint filed in a Massachusetts federal court, the ACLU asked for a variety of different records from the government, including inquiries to companies, meetings about the piloting or testing of facial recognition, voice recognition, and gait recognition technology, requests for proposals, and licensing agreements. At the heart of the lawsuit are Amazon's Rekognition and Microsoft's Face API, both facial recognition products that are available for customers of the companies' cloud platforms. The ACLU has also asked for more details on the US government's use of voice recognition and gait recognition, which is the automated process of comparing images of the way a person walks in order to identify them. Police in Shanghai and Beijing are already using gait-analysis tools to identify people.

WASHINGTON – Amazon, Microsoft and Intel are among leading tech companies putting the world at risk through killer robot development, according to a report that surveyed major players from the sector about their stance on lethal autonomous weapons. Dutch NGO Pax ranked 50 companies by three criteria: whether they were developing technology that could be relevant to deadly AI, whether they were working on related military projects, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future. "Why are companies like Microsoft and Amazon not denying that they're currently developing these highly controversial weapons, which could decide to kill people without direct human involvement?" The use of AI to allow weapon systems to autonomously select and attack targets has sparked ethical debates in recent years, with critics warning they would jeopardize international security and herald a third revolution in warfare after gunpowder and the atomic bomb. A panel of government experts debated policy options regarding lethal autonomous weapons at a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva on Wednesday.

If you're looking for exposure to the artificial intelligence trend, you'll find no lack of potentially attractive investment options. From retail to cloud services to software, the technology is already reshaping fundamental aspects of dozens of industries. To narrow that wide field a bit, we asked Motley Fool contributors to highlight a few AI stocks worth following in February, and they offered up IBM (NYSE: IBM), iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). Read on to see why these investments might deserve a spot on your watch list. Leo Sun (IBM): IBM is often considered a dusty old tech company, but it remains a major player in the AI market.