We risk a deluge of AI-written'science' pushing corporate interests - here's what to do about it Back in the 2000s, the American pharmaceutical firm Wyeth was sued by thousands of women who had developed breast cancer after taking its hormone replacement drugs. Court filings revealed the role of "dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements being used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms" related to the drugs. Wyeth, which was taken over by Pfizer in 2009, had paid a medical communications firm to produce these articles, which were published under the bylines of leading doctors in the field (with their consent). Any medical professionals reading these articles and relying on them for prescription advice would have had no idea that Wyeth was behind them. The pharmaceutical company insisted that everything written was scientifically accurate and - shockingly - that paying ghostwriters for such services was common in the industry.

One of the most prestigious publishers of science fiction short stories has closed itself to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated pitches overwhelmed its editorial team. Clarkesworld, which has published writers including Jeff VanderMeer, Yoon Ha Lee and Catherynne Valente, is one of the few paying publishers to accept open submissions for short stories from new writers. But that promise brought it to the attention of influencers promoting "get rich quick" schemes using AI, according to founding editor Neil Clarke. In a typical month, the magazine would normally receive 10 or so such submissions that were deemed to have plagiarised other authors, he wrote in a blog post. But since the release of ChatGPT last year pushed AI language models into the mainstream, the rate of rejections has skyrocketed.

There is a mediocre content deluge coming to the internet the likes of which we have not seen. What if you could produce 10x the amount of content at at 10x cost savings, what would you do? Even if the content were mediocre would you still be tempted to take advantage of the ability to throw content against the well and see what sticks? What would that mean for websites, link farms, private blog networks, link builders, SEOs and search engine algorithms? What would it mean for quality, believable, original content?

The term conversational AI (CAI) refers to the underlying set of intelligent technologies that enable software systems to interact with humans using natural language processing (NLP). This involves the ability of software to understand the intent behind what a human is saying and respond in an intelligent, conversational way. In the last decade, technologies and use cases have evolved so rapidly that we have seen a deluge of terms enter circulation like chatbot, virtual agent, voice assistant and conversational UI to name a few. For senior executives and customer-focused leaders, certainly they should be looking to make this new channel a fundamental part of their banks' wider customer engagement strategy. That's why EPAM has produced a white paper outlining 7 Lessons Learned from the Field as a practical guide for both business leaders and technologists with customer-facing responsibilities in banking.

In 2012, economist Robert Gordon published a controversial paper in which he argued that economic growth was largely over, due in no small part to our failure to maintain the engines of innovation in recent decades. A study from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research supported his general thesis and argued that while we're spending even more money on creativity and innovation, our returns are flatlining. And this investment is not only in dollars, as the research revealed roughly 20 times as many people work in R&D today as did in 1930. Why has creating things become so difficult? Researchers from Northwestern University attempt to answer this in a paper that shows a growing percentage of today's creation is what's known as recombination.

This year's incarnation of the CES trade show will be like no other. Last year, nearly 175,000 attendees crammed into the Las Vegas Convention Center and hotels across the Strip to get a glimpse of the latest and greatest gadgets. That obviously can't happen now. But the show must go on, and we're still expecting a deluge of awesome hardware to be unveiled at the all-virtual CES 2021, running January 11 to January 14. A lot of CES is devoted to smart home technology, and the announcements have already started rolling out at our sister site TechHive.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its supercomputer hosted in Azure Cloud which it developed in collaboration with OpenAI. The company said that the supercomputer could train various artificial intelligence models and comes with more than 2,85,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400Gbps of network connectivity for each GPU server. Not just this, Hewlett Packard Enterprise recently acquired the supercomputing leader Cray, following which it has introduced the HPE Cray supercomputing line that can perform data-centric AI workloads with exceptionally high speed. It also built the new TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator) computing system at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center which has been ranked as the most powerful AI supercomputer at any university in the world. With a performance of 100 AI petaflops, it can perform complex deep neural network operations with much ease.

An experimental tool helps researchers wade through the overwhelming amount of coronavirus literature to check whether emerging studies follow scientific consensus. Why it matters: Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a flood of relevant preprints and papers, produced by people with varying degrees of expertise and vetted through varying degrees of peer review. This has made it challenging for researchers trying to advance their understanding of the virus to sort scientific fact from fiction. How it works: The SciFact tool, developed by the Seattle-based research nonprofit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), is designed to help with this process. Type a scientific claim into its search bar--say, "hypertension is a comorbidity for covid" (translation: hypertension can cause complications for covid patients)--and it will populate a feed with relevant papers, labeled as either supporting or refuting the assertion.

The FBI says that security officials are being "inundated" with drones flying around the Atlanta stadium that will host Sunday's Super Bowl 53.

For anyone starting up a business, there is never enough time and always too much to do. The same is true of information flow within a startup, with often way too much input and not enough output. Chatbots can play a key role in helping the business manage that information and organise customer contact. With many businesses increasingly reliant on websites as the first point of customer contact, the old-style contact form is becoming less useful. People would like to communicate with the business now, and a chatbot is an ideal way of starting a conversation without tying up you or your team.