An AI customer service chatbot for international delivery service DPD used profanity, told a joke, wrote poetry about how useless it was, and criticized the company as the "worst delivery firm in the world" after prompting by a frustrated customer. Ashley Beauchamp, a London-based pianist and conductor, according to his website, posted screenshots of the chat conversation to X on Thursday, the same day he said in a comment that the exchange occurred. At the time of publication, his post had gone viral with 1.3 million views, and over 20 thousand likes. The humorous exchange symbolizes bigger issues as artificial intelligence has infiltrated every area of life––from art to education to business––especially with the introduction of publicly available chatbot ChatGPT. Companies have turned to AI to streamline their work, amid an ongoing debate about how effective bots are in replacing humans or whether AI will eventually outsmart us.

UC Berkeley SkyDecky startup "!Important" has made it a mission to save lives through software that would prevent self-driving vehicles from striking pedestrians. When a 49-year-old woman died on March 18, 2018, after getting struck by an autonomous Uber test vehicle in Tempe, Arizona, Bastien Beauchamp was inspired to create a product that would prevent more self-driving cars from hitting pedestrians and, in turn, save lives. More than two years later, as part of UC Berkeley SkyDeck's startup accelerator program, Beauchamp and his company,!Important, have developed technology that he calls "the digital version of a seat belt." The software uses smartphone location data and machine learning to calculate distances between pedestrians, drivers and self-driving cars and to alert all of them prior to a collision. "Pedestrian fatalities are a significant problem," said Beauchamp.

The U.S. Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane has now spent 600 days in Earth orbit on the vessel's latest mission, and is nearing a program record for longest time spent in space. The robotic X-37B lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 20, 2015, kicking off the program's fourth space mission (which is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-4, or OTV-4). If the uncrewed spacecraft spends 74 more days aloft, it will break the duration record set during OTV-3, which touched down in October 2014. But it's unclear how long OTV-4 will last, or just what the X-37B is doing as it circles Earth; most details about the space plane's missions and payloads are classified. The first OTV mission began on April 22, 2010, and concluded on Dec. 3 of that year, following 224 days of orbit.

Rai said that his AI system shows that the candidate in each election who had leading engagement data ended up winning the election. "If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC. Currently most national polls put Clinton and the Democrats ahead by a strong margin. Rai said his data shows that Clinton should not get complacent. But the entrepreneur admitted that there were limitations to the data in that sentiment around social media posts is difficult for the system to analyze.

When Donald Trump opens his mouth, the output can seem like the work of a demented Markov chain, a poorly trained algorithm trying its hand at rhetoric. Key words--"great again," "let me tell you," "we don't win anymore"--end up strung together by exceptionally weak ligaments. His syntax seems generated on the fly, word to word, each stumbling straight into the next, bound by the barest loyalty to grammar. As only he could, Trump's brought the state of political speech down to the state of the art of machine speechwriting. This past winter, a graduate student at the Technical University of Denmark earned significant attention for the politicians he was crafting in Python.