A video has surfaced of a senior official at Israel's cyber intelligence agency, Unit 8200, talking last year about the use of machine learning "magic powder" to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza. The footage raises questions about the accuracy of a recent statement about use of artificial intelligence (AI) by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which said it "does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist". However, in the video, the head of data science and AI at Unit 8200 – named only as "Colonel Yoav" – said he would reveal an "example of one of the tools we use" before describing how the intelligence division used machine learning techniques in Israel's May 2021 offensive in Gaza for "finding new terrorists". "Let's say we have some terrorists that form a group and we know only some of them," he said. "By practising our data science magic powder we are able to find the rest of them."

This month we heard about a fascinating AI experiment from a US Air Force colonel. An AI-controlled drone trained to autonomously carry out bombing missions had turned on its human operator when told not to attack targets; its programming prioritised successfully carrying out missions, so it saw human intervention as an obstacle in its way and decided to forcefully take it out. The only problem with the story was that it was nonsense. Firstly, as the colonel told it, the test was a simulation. Secondly, a US Air Force statement was hastily issued to clarify that the colonel, speaking at a UK conference, had "mis-spoke" and that no such tests had been carried out.

Every so often, I like to look at some of the more weird conspiracy theories and then try to debunk them. I consider it a media literacy exercise, but there has been one theory that I've come across that is impressively hard to debunk: the "Dead Internet" theory. I think that the best conspiracy theories are the ones that are hardest to debunk, and this one is increasingly getting more difficult to debunk. The core idea is that the Internet itself is actually dead, no human authorship of any content exists. Any actual human content that is created is isolated into its own little heavenbanned bubble. Mainstream platforms, news outlets, social media sites, Internet forums, chatrooms, everything filled with bot generated content to the point that it's impossible to find another human. To be clear, this theory as literally written is absolute nonsense and probably not worth taking too seriously.

Rose: We've always kept records of our lives. But not all the information was inherited by later generations. Colonel: A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Rose: That's what history is, Jack. Colonel: But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness.

In the early years of personal computers, the adventure game genre reigned supreme, exemplified by classic titles such as King's Quest and The Secret of Monkey Island. Toronto-based artist Julia Minamata grew up playing this style of game, which emphasizes storytelling and story-based puzzles. "With an adventure game, you move through it at your own speed, and it's more like a book than an arcade game," Minamata says in Episode 459 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I found--as an artsy, bookish kid--that interactive storytelling was the kind of game that was more appealing to me." Video game journalist Kurt Kalata loves adventure games so much that he wrote and edited The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures, a massive tome that details dozens of different games. It's exactly the sort of book he wishes he'd had as a kid growing up in the '90s.

Automated story plot generation is the task of generating a coherent sequence of plot events. Causal relations between plot events are believed to increase the perception of story and plot coherence. In this work, we introduce the concept of soft causal relations as causal relations inferred from commonsense reasoning. We demonstrate C2PO, an approach to narrative generation that operationalizes this concept through Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering. Using human-participant protocols, we evaluate our system against baseline systems with different commonsense reasoning reasoning and inductive biases to determine the role of soft causal relations in perceived story quality. Through these studies we also probe the interplay of how changes in commonsense norms across storytelling genres affect perceptions of story quality.

WASHINGTON – Islamic State jihadis are using small commercial drones to attack Iraqi security forces in the battle for Mosul, a U.S. commander said Wednesday. Col. Brett Sylvia, who commands an "advise and assist" U.S. unit in Iraq, said IS fighters are attaching small munitions to quadcopters in an attempt to kill local forces as they retake Mosul, the last major IS bastion in Iraq. "They are small drones with small munitions that they've been dropping," Sylvia said. While the munitions were no larger than "a small little grenade," he said, that was enough to do what "Daesh does, and that's just, you know, indiscriminate killing," he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS. The group's use of small drones is not new, Sylvia said, though initially they were mainly used for reconnaissance.

Automation has disrupted work for centuries. Two hundred years ago in Britain, the Luddites rose in rebellion, smashing the machines that made their weaving skills obsolete. Today it's high status cognitive jobs that are under threat. Earlier this year ROSS, a legal version of IBM's Watson, was launched and hailed as the first artificially intelligent lawyer. Future iterations may put lawyers out of work.