The rise of AI programs like ChatGPT has triggered a tidal wave of ethical handwringing, most prominently from within the industries that it threatens to destroy. After all, just because you can get a robot to instantly write code or write contracts or provide customer support for free, should you? Well, the answer from the Writers Guild of America is a qualified yes. This week, the Writers Guild of America proposed that ChatGPT would absolutely be allowed to write scripts in the future, provided that the credit (and the money) goes to the human writer who came up with the prompts in the first place. The proposal paints a scary picture of the future; a future in which even the most human of arts are crushed under the wheels of an unthinking technology.

Quite how Halo hasn't made it to the screen, small or big, before this is an enigma almost as nebulous as the long-running first person shooter video game's crowded mythos. Luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and District 9's Neill Blomkamp have all been involved in trying to get a film based on the explosive exploits of Masterchief across the line for the best part of two decades, yet to no avail. Even this big-budget – it reputedly cost more than $200m and looks like gold – TV series starring Pablo Schreiber as the genetically engineered soldier-hero of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) has been held up for two years by Covid. Never mind, it's here now, and fans of the games who just want to see their nightly battles with giant space monsters played out on the TV screen will no doubt be more than content with Kyle Killen and Steven Kane's adventurous if somewhat insipid reimagining. Unfortunately, those of us who don't recognise every re-enacted power-up bleep and helmet-cam vision of destruction will probably find ourselves wondering, much of the time, quite what is going on.

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. From a report: Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself. The scale of the search demands automation: There are nearly 750 million possible light sources in the data accumulated through NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission alone. In tests, the machine-learning system agreed with human identifications of debris disks 97 percent of the time. The researchers also trained their system to rate debris disks according to their likelihood of containing detectable exoplanets.

Debris disks around stars are good indicators of exoplanets. As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself. The scale of the search demands automation: There are nearly 750 million possible light sources in the data accumulated through NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission alone. In tests, the machine-learning system agreed with human identifications of debris disks 97 percent of the time.