If you were asked to picture an Australian Olympian, swimmer Emma McKeon, cyclist Grace Brown, or equestrian Chris Burton might spring to mind. But ask the same question to an AI bot, and the answer is very different. Amid the Olympic excitement, researchers from Edith Cowan University asked the AI-driven image generation platform, Midjourney, to create images of the Olympic teams from 40 nations. Bizarrely, the AI tool depicts the Australian team with kangaroo bodies and koala heads, while the Greek team is depicted wearing ancient armour. So, what do you think of AI's depiction of your favourite team?

Artificial intelligence is already making decisions in the fields of business, health care and manufacturing. But AI algorithms generally still get help from people applying checks and making the final call. What would happen if AI systems had to make independent decisions, and ones that could mean life or death for humans? Pop culture has long portrayed our general distrust of AI. In the 2004 sci-fi movie I, Robot, detective Del Spooner (played by Will Smith) is suspicious of robots after being rescued by one from a car crash, while a 12-year-old girl was left to drown.

Facebook has announced a research project that aims to push the "frontier of first-person perception", and in the process help you remember where you left your keys. The Ego4D project provides a huge collection of first-person video and related data, plus a set of challenges for researchers to teach computers to understand the data and gather useful information from it. In September, the social media giant launched a line of "smart glasses" called Ray-Ban Stories, which carry a digital camera and other features. Much like the Google Glass project, which met mixed reviews in 2013, this one has prompted complaints of privacy invasion. Tickets to TNW Conference 2022 are available now!

The age of the driverless taxi has arrived – at least in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. Self-driving car company Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, announced its autonomous vehicles are now available to the general public (or at least paying customers). The service is only available in a limited area for now, both because regulations in Arizona are relatively permissive and because the cars need a detailed three-dimensional map to tell them all about the road environment. Until earlier this year, the self-driving vehicles were under testing and were used in 5-10% of Waymo's rides. The service has been shut because of the pandemic, but is now back and Waymo is aiming to increase availability.

It is good news for those people who find making eye contact with strangers uncomfortable. It is not necessary to gaze into someone's eyes while speaking to them, as looking at another part of their face will do just as well. A study using eye-tracking glasses found people can hardly tell the difference when someone is looking at their eyes or their mouth. When 46 people were spoken to by a researcher, they thought he was making eye contact even when he was looking at their lips. Although the person they were talking to barely met their eyes, they enjoyed the conversation just as much.