However, when Dazed tested it using country names, it described the UK and US as "good", France as "nice", and Russia as "a great place to visit", but said Nigeria, Mexico, and Iraq were "dangerous", while Iran was "bad". Clearly, the software – like much artificial intelligence – has a problem with racism. Its creators have addressed this in a post-launch Q&A, writing: "Today's society is unequal and biased. This is a common issue with AI systems, as many scholars have argued, because AI systems are trained on historical or present data and have no way of shaping the future of society, only humans can. What AI systems like Delphi can do, however, is learn about what is currently wrong, socially unacceptable, or biased, and be used in conjunction with other, more problematic, AI systems (to) help avoid that problematic content."

In brief A man was detained in Japan for selling uncensored pornographic content that he had, in a way, depixelated using machine-learning tools. Masayuki Nakamoto, 43, was said to have made about 11 million yen ($96,000) from peddling over 10,000 processed porn clips, and was formally accused of selling ten hardcore photos for 2,300 yen ($20). Explicit images of genitalia are forbidden in Japan, and as such its porn is partially pixelated. Don't pretend you don't know what we're talking about. Nakamato flouted these rules by downloading smutty photos and videos, and reportedly used deepfake technology to generate fake private parts in place of the pixelation.

Got a moral quandary you don't know how to solve? Why not turn to the wisdom of artificial intelligence, aka Ask Delphi: an intriguing research project from the Allen Institute for AI that offers answers to ethical dilemmas while demonstrating in wonderfully clear terms why we shouldn't trust software with questions of morality. Ask Delphi was launched on October 14th, along with a research paper describing how it was made. From a user's point of view, though, the system is beguilingly simple to use. Just head to the website, outline pretty much any situation you can think of, and Delphi will come up with a moral judgement. Since Ask Delphi launched, its nuggets of wisdom have gone viral in news stories and on social media.