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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could soon offer more help to those with speech disabilities. Big tech companies are partnering with the University of Illinois to form the Speech Accessibility Project to upgrade AI's understanding of people with disabilities or unusual speech patterns. The project will gather a set of high-quality, diverse speech samples that will help improve speech technologies. "Being able to devise new interventions and screening tools will help us be more proactive in early detection of conditions in children and help us customize more specific therapies for a patient's condition," Karen Panetta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University and an IEEE Fellow, who is not involved in the project, told Lifewire in an email interview. Speech recognition, found in many software programs and voice assistants, has become a part of many people's everyday lives.

A new artificial intelligence system (AI) could watch and listen to your videos and label things that are happening. MIT researchers have developed a technique that teaches AI to capture actions shared between video and audio. For example, their method can understand that the act of a baby crying in a video is related to the spoken word "crying" in a sound clip. It's part of an effort to teach AI how to understand concepts that humans have no trouble learning, but that computers find hard to grasp. "The prevalent learning paradigm, supervised learning, works well when you have datasets that are well described and complete," AI expert Phil Winder told Lifewire in an email interview.

Artificial intelligence that mimics the human brain could result in smarter, more efficient computers, experts say. Nara Logics' new AI engine uses recent discoveries in neuroscience to replicate brain structure and function. The research is part of a decades-long quest to make computers that can "think" as well as or better than humans. Simulating brain function is one promising approach. "There are obvious benefits to copying what seems to work in biology and implementing them in machines to aid automated decision making in a broad spectrum of daily activities," Stephen T.C. Wong, a computer science professor at Houston Methodist Research Institute, said in an email interview. The uses for humanlike AI could range "from playing chess, recognizing faces, and trading stocks to making a medical diagnosis, driving autonomous vehicles, and engaging business negotiations or even legal litigation," he added.

Car systems that use increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) could keep you safer by monitoring your driving, but some experts say AI isn't ready to replace human drivers. Toyota is developing a system called Guardian that uses a dashboard camera to check to see if a driver falls asleep. It's part of a growing movement to increase automation in vehicles, but some experts say we're a long way off from cars that are safe enough to fully drive themselves. "I've been a bit of a skeptic of full automation in terms of the timelines," MIT professor John Leonard, who is working on Guardian, said at a recent MIT Mobility Forum, according to the news release. "[It] is going to take a lot longer to have this sort of ubiquitous robo taxi fleet, whereby, you know, a teenager today would never need a driver's license or never need to have a real human Uber driver because all cars would drive themselves autonomously."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping prevent overfishing in a bid to protect the world's rapidly dwindling supply of edible marine species. A new project uses AI to improve the identification and measurement of fish species in Africa's Nile Basin. The software can help scientists understand fish population density more quickly than human observers. It's part of a larger effort to harness AI to improve sustainability across a wide range of industries. "The promising thing about AI is that it now allows us to do tasks that would be time-consuming or impossibly complex using traditional methods, with considerably more speed and efficiency," Andrew Dunckelman, head of impact and insights at Google.org, the search giant's charitable arm, told Lifewire in an email interview.

A new technique that measures the reasoning power of artificial intelligence (AI) shows that machines are catching up to humans in their abilities to think, experts say. Researchers at MIT and IBM Research have created a method that enables a user to rank the results of a machine-learning model's behavior. Their technique, called Shared Interest, incorporates metrics that compare how well a model's thinking matches people's. "Today, AI is capable of reaching (and, in some cases, exceeding) human performance in specific tasks, including image recognition and language understanding," Pieter Buteneers, director of engineering in machine learning and AI at the communications company Sinch, told Lifewire in an email interview. "With natural language processing (NLP), AI systems can interpret, write and speak languages as well as humans, and the AI can even adjust its dialect and tone to align with its human peers."

Artificial intelligence (AI) could soon get a boost from a new type of computer chips inspired by the human brain. Researchers at Purdue University have built a new piece of hardware that can be reprogrammed on demand through electrical pulses. The team claims that this adaptability would allow the device to take on all of the necessary functions to build a brain-inspired computer. It's part of an ongoing effort to build AI systems that can learn continuously. "When AI systems learn continually in the environment, they can adapt to a world that changes over time," Stevens Institute of Technology AI expert Jordan Suchow told Lifewire in an email interview.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may soon know more about you than you think. A startup called Hume AI claims to use algorithms to measure emotions from facial, vocal, and verbal expressions. It's one of a growing number of companies that purport to read human emotions using computers. But some experts say that the concept raises privacy issues. "Whoever controls these systems and platforms are going to have a lot of information on individuals," Bob Bilbruck, a tech startup advisor, told Lifewire in an email interview.

A new generation of smartphones and other gadgets could be powered by chips designed to act like your brain. BrainChip recently announced its Akida neural networking processor. The processor uses chips inspired by the spiking nature of the human brain. It's part of a growing effort to commercialize chips based on human neural structures. The new generation of chips could mean "more deep neural network processing capability in the future on portable devices, e.g., smartphones, digital companions, smartwatches, health monitoring, autonomous vehicles and drones," Vishal Saxena, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware told Lifewire in an email interview.