Jason M. Allen was almost too nervous to enter his first art competition. Now, his award-winning image is sparking controversy about whether art can be generated by a computer, and what, exactly, it means to be an artist. In August, Allen, a game designer who lives in Pueblo West, Colorado, won first place in the emerging artist division's "digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography" category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. His winning image, titled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" (French for "Space Opera Theater"), was made with Midjourney -- an artificial intelligence system that can produce detailed images when fed written prompts. A $300 prize accompanied his win.

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.

Washington, DC (CNN)Tesla (TSLA) is increasingly turning to machines rather than humans as it attempts to develop autonomous vehicles. As part of Tesla's plans to cut 10% of salaried staff, the company has laid off a significant number of its data annotation specialists. These specialists do grunt work that is critical to empowering artificial intelligence systems to handle complex tasks like driving safely down a city street. The layoffs were first reported by Bloomberg Tuesday and confirmed by CNN Business. Data annotation specialists use software tools to manually label objects in video clips collected from Tesla vehicles.

Tech companies are constantly hyping the capabilities of their ever-improving artificial intelligence. But Google was quick to shut down claims that one of its programs had advanced so much that it had become sentient. According to an eye-opening tale in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting edge, unreleased AI system called LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness. In interviews and public statements, many in the AI community pushed back at the engineer's claims, while some pointed out that his tale highlights how the technology can lead people to assign human attributes to it. But the belief that Google's AI could be sentient arguably highlights both our fears and expectations for what this technology can do.

In the third week of Russia's war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky appeared in a video, dressed in a dark green shirt, speaking slowly and deliberately while standing behind a white presidential podium featuring his country's coat of arms. Except for his head, the Ukrainian president's body barely moved as he spoke. His voice sounded distorted and almost gravelly as he appeared to tell Ukrainians to surrender to Russia. "I ask you to lay down your weapons and go back to your families," he appeared to say in Ukrainian in the clip, which was quickly identified as a deepfake. "This war is not worth dying for. I suggest you to keep on living, and I am going to do the same."

New York (CNN Business)Amazon's vision for the future of home security includes drones flying over your roof, outdoor cameras that monitor for possible trespassers and cute robots patrolling indoors. During an invite-only press conference on Tuesday, the company showed off an autonomous, 20-pound dog-like robot named Astro with large, cartoon-y eyes on its tablet face and a cup holder. The robot -- not unlike an Alexa on wheels -- uses voice-recognition software, cameras, artificial intelligence, mapping technology and voice- and face-recognition sensors as it zooms from room to room, capturing live video and learning your habits. Amazon also announced a subscription service called Virtual Security Guard for Ring cameras. Ring, the smart doorbell and camera company it acquired in 2018 for $1 billion, will work with third-party professional monitoring companies, such as Rapid Response, to analyze a live feed from its outdoor cameras.

Washington, DC (CNN)Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the company will roll out the latest beta version of its "full self-driving" software to 1,000 owners this weekend. Yet there aren't actually any self-driving cars for sale today, according to autonomous vehicle experts and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates cars. Tesla's "full self-driving" is more like an enhanced cruise control, they say. Videos posted on the internet by people who already have the feature unlocked show that it might stop for traffic lights and turn smoothly at intersections, but it also might veer toward pedestrians or confuse the moon for a traffic signal. Tesla says that a human driver needs to be watching and ready to take over at any moment, and the company is only allowing initial access to the system to the people it considers the safest drivers.

Washington, DC(CNN) Frustrated Tesla owners continue to wait for "full self-driving," an expensive and long-delayed software feature that isn't even guaranteed to help their cars' resale values. Some of the company's earliest backers of the "full self-driving" option are even beginning to lose faith in the promise of ever enjoying a truly autonomous Tesla. Years-long delays, buggy beta software, and the risk of no return on their investment in the option package have left some Tesla owners disappointed. Tesla CEO Elon Musk's prognostications, and Tesla's actual reality have diverged so much that some owners describe to CNN Business that they've lost confidence in his predictions. Some otherwise satisfied Tesla owners describe feeling duped into buying "full self-driving" ahead of its polished release, because Musk warned that the price would increase.

Earlier this year, videos of Tom Cruise started popping up on TikTok of the actor doing some surprisingly un-Tom-Cruise-like stuff: goofing around in an upscale men's clothing store; showing off a coin trick; growling playfully during a short rendition of Dave Matthews Band's "Crash Into Me." In one video, he bites into a lollipop and is amazed to find gum in the center. "Mmmmm," he says to the camera. How come nobody ever told me there's bubblegum? The 10 videos, which were posted between February and June, featured an artificial intelligence-generated doppelganger meant to look and sound like him.

Artificial intelligence systems are often criticized for built-in biases. Commercial facial-recognition software, for instance, may fail when attempting to classify women and people of color. In an effort to help make AI fairer in a variety of ways, Facebook (FB) is rolling out a new data set for AI researchers that includes a diverse group of paid actors who were explicitly asked to provide their own ages and genders. Facebook hopes researchers will use the open-source data set, which it announced Thursday, to help judge whether AI systems work well for people of different ages, genders, skin tones, and in different types of lighting. Facebook also released the data set internally for use within Facebook itself; the company said in a blog post that it is "encouraging" teams to use it.