When considering risky events or actions, we must not downplay the role of involved objects: a charged battery in our phone averts the risk of being stranded in the desert after a flat tyre, and a functional firewall mitigates the risk of a hacker intruding the network. The Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER) highlights how the role of objects and their relationships remains pivotal to performing transparent, complete and accountable risk assessment. In this paper, we operationalize some of the notions proposed by COVER -- such as parthood between objects and participation of objects in events/actions -- by presenting a new framework for risk assessment: DODGE. DODGE enriches the expressivity of vetted formal models for risk -- i.e., fault trees and attack trees -- by bridging the disciplines of ontology and formal methods into an ontology-aware formal framework composed by a more expressive modelling formalism, Object-Oriented Disruption Graphs (ODGs), logic (ODGLog) and an intermediate query language (ODGLang). With these, DODGE allows risk assessors to pose questions about disruption propagation, disruption likelihood and risk levels, keeping the fundamental role of objects at risk always in sight.

Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned. Advances in AI have been touted by big tech companies and the United Nations as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs. Google, which has developed its own AI program called Bard (recently rebranded to Gemini) and has an AI project to make traffic lights more efficient, has been at the forefront of promoting emissions reductions through AI adoption, releasing a report last year that found AI could cut global emissions by as much as 10%, equivalent to the entire carbon pollution put out by the European Union by 2030. "AI has a really major role in addressing climate change," said Kate Brandt, Google's chief sustainability officer, said in December, describing the technology at an "inflection point" in making major progress in environmental goals.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more "generative AI" Pundits compared the new technology's impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution--or the discovery of fire. Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology's environmental footprint is large and growing. AI use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which AI runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity AI into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways AI could help reduce humanity's environmental footprint.

Deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift have been shared across the social media platform X, highlighting the lack of digital privacy protections for victims across the globe. It isn't known who generated the fake images of Swift, which have been viewed tens of millions of times since Wednesday. On Friday, X said their team was working to remove all non-consensual nudity from their site, which is "strictly prohibited." "We're committed to maintaining a safe and respectful environment for all users," the company said. Swift has not publicly commented on the matter.

The growing utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) is apparent across all facets of society, from the models used to enable semi-autonomous cars, to models that serve up recommendations on streaming or e-commerce sites, and in the language models used to create more natural, intuitive human-machine interaction. However, these technological achievements come with costs, namely the massive amounts of electrical power required to train AI algorithms, build and operate the hardware on which these algorithms are run, and to run and maintain that hardware throughout its life cycle. The cost of the electricity is not the only impact; traditional power plants that use fossil fuels (as well as some geothermal processes) to create power emit relatively high amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) as they generate electricity, compared with renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, or nuclear plants, which do not. That emitted CO2 has a direct impact on the environment. While all software has a carbon footprint--the amount of CO2 directly related to its use--large and complex AI models have a significant environmental cost and are increasingly coming under scrutiny.

Deep in some underground ruins below a drought-stricken village, four brave adventurers found themselves in grave danger. The dungeon belonged to the Order of the Pure, a potentially nefarious cult that may have had something to do with the droughts that have been wreaking havoc in the village of Havenshire. Despite the danger, the stakes were too high to turn back. After all, not only did the fate of the villagers depend on their success, but the town's mayor also promised a small fortune if they succeeded. Eventually, the heroes discovered a wooden chest hidden under a slab of rock in one of the inner chambers of the dungeon.

When Microsoft released Bing Chat, an AI-powered chatbot co-developed with OpenAI, it didn't take long before users found creative ways to break it. Using carefully tailored inputs, users were able to get it to profess love, threaten harm, defend the Holocaust and invent conspiracy theories. Can AI ever be protected from these malicious prompts? What set it off is malicious prompt engineering, or when an AI, like Bing Chat, that uses text-based instructions -- prompts -- to accomplish tasks is tricked by malicious, adversarial prompts (e.g. to perform tasks that weren't a part of its objective. Bing Chat wasn't designed with the intention of writing neo-Nazi propaganda.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! I have been thinking about death lately. Possibly because I recently had a month-long bout of Covid-19. And, I read a recent story about the passing of the actor Ed Asner, famous for his role as Lou Grant in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

The carbon footprints of data centres, which provide cloud-computing services, can range widely.Credit: Feature China/Future Publishing/Getty As machine-learning experiments get more sophisticated, their carbon footprints are ballooning. Now, researchers have calculated the carbon cost of training a range of models at cloud-computing data centres in various locations1. Their findings could help researchers to reduce the emissions created by work that relies on artificial intelligence (AI). The team found marked differences in emissions between geographical locations. For the same AI experiment, "the most efficient regions produced about a third of the emissions of the least efficient", says Jesse Dodge, a researcher in machine learning at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, Washington, who co-led the study.

There is an exponential increase in the size of machine learning models and the carbon footprint of AI systems is an important thing to consider in order to create a sustainable world. In order to train them to accurately process images, text, or video, they need more and more energy. Some conferences now request submissions of papers to include information on CO2 emissions as the AI community struggles with its environmental impact. A new study proposes a way for quantifying those emissions that is more precise. It also contrasts the elements that influence them and evaluates two strategies for lowering them.