In May, Sputnik International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses to tweets by the Russian embassy and Chinese news outlets criticizing the US. Russian criticism of the US is far from unusual, but CounterCloud's material pushing back was: The tweets, the articles, and even the journalists and news sites were crafted entirely by artificial intelligence algorithms, according to the person behind the project, who goes by the name Nea Paw and says it is designed to highlight the danger of mass-produced AI disinformation. Paw did not post the CounterCloud tweets and articles publicly but provided them to WIRED and also produced a video outlining the project.

It was 2018, and the world as we knew it--or rather, how we knew it--teetered on a precipice. Against a rising drone of misinformation, The New York Times, the BBC, Good Morning America, and just about everyone else sounded the alarm over a new strain of fake but highly realistic videos. Using artificial intelligence, bad actors could manipulate someone's voice and face in recorded footage almost like a virtual puppet and pass the product off as real. In a famous example engineered by BuzzFeed, Barack Obama seemed to say, "President Trump is a total and complete dipshit." Synthetic photos, audio, and videos, collectively dubbed "deepfakes," threatened to destabilize society and push us into a full-blown "infocalypse."

For years, Tidal, a project within Alphabet's "moonshot factory" X division, has been using cameras, computer vision and machine learning to get a better understanding of life beneath the oceans, including monitoring fish off the coast of Norway. Now, MIT Technology Review can report, Tidal hopes its system can help preserve and restore the world's seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and store away far more carbon dioxide. The project's ambitious mission is to improve our understanding of underwater ecosystems in order to inform and incentivize efforts to protect the oceans amid mounting threats. It could also provide crucial answers to the many questions hanging over seagrass' role in both sucking up carbon and regulating the climate. China is copying Russia's election interference playbook China is increasingly interfering in US politics by getting its agents to create social media accounts posing as American citizens, according to research co-led by Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who has studied foreign influence on social media for years.

Have you ever ignored a seemingly random LinkedIn solicitor and been left with a weird feeling that something about the profile just seemed…off? Well, it turns out, in some cases, those sales reps hounding you might not actually be human beings at all. Yes, AI-generated deepfakes have come for LinkedIn and they'd like to connect. DiResta, who made a name for herself trudging through torrents of Russian disinformation content in the wake of the 2016 election, said she became aware of a seeming phenomenon of fake, AI computer-generated LinkedIn profile images after one particularly strange-looking account tried to connect with her. The user, who reportedly tried to pitch DiResta on some unimportant piece of software, used an image with strange incongruities that stood out to her as odd for a corporate photo.

Two Stanford researchers have fallen down a LinkedIn rabbit hole, finding over 1,000 fake profiles using AI-generated faces at the bottom. Renée DiResta and Josh Goldstein from the Stanford Internet Observatory made the discovery after DiResta was messaged by a profile reported to belong to a "Keenan Ramsey". It looked like a normal software sales pitch at first glance, but upon further investigation, it became apparent that Ramsey was an entirely fictitious person. While the picture appeared to be a standard corporate headshot, it also included multiple red flags that point to it being an AI-generated face like those generated by websites like This Person Does Not Exist. DiResta was specifically tipped off by the alignment of Ramsey's eyes (the dead center of the photo), her earrings (she was only wearing one) and her hair, several bits of which blurred into the background.

It's a truism that we live in a "digital age". It would be more accurate to say that we live in an algorithmically curated era – that is, a period when many of our choices and perceptions are shaped by machine-learning algorithms that nudge us in directions favoured by those who employ the programmers who write the necessary code. A good way of describing them would be as recommender engines. They monitor your digital trail and note what interests you – as evidenced by what you've browsed or purchased online. Amazon, for example, regularly offers me suggestions for items that are "based on your browsing history".