They're inside millions of homes and are useful for setting a timer or answering a query. But smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Nest may be unsafe for famous people because they can'give away how you live', an academic has warned. Sadie Creese, professor of cybersecurity at Oxford University, says the popular tech devices can make certain notable figures especially'targetable' to hackers. That's because they're fitted with microphones and even cameras that record and save data to the cloud. These recordings can potentially be accessed by cybercriminals remotely, which could could harm the victim's organisation or their family, she said.

Many of us have, by now, seen a new crop of images online that look not-quite-right, or not quite believable (in the sense of slightly wrong images of famous people doing strange things); and many of us know, or have heard about, the explosion in AI imaging through programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, and an ever-increasing number of others. Some of us have friends or online friends who are producing images that have us intrigued. I have such a friend in Jonathan Hoefler, and as a discussion of the ethics/dangers of AI ensued on one of his Facebook posts (and for the purposes of this article, unless noted otherwise, when I refer to "AI" I am referring specifically to the image-generating form of AI, not the text-generating or any other kind or use), I decided I'd better check it out for myself before arguing either for or against. I was a bit afraid of getting into it because I was worried it might "imagine" better than I do, leaving me feel useless as an artist. I'd also heard it's addictive, and I was worried about that too.

The viral AI-generated images of Donald Trump's arrest you may be seeing on social media are definitely fake. But some of these photorealistic creations are pretty convincing. Others look more like stills from a video game or a lucid dream. A Twitter thread by Eliot Higgins, a founder of Bellingcat, that shows Trump getting swarmed by synthetic cops, running around on the lam, and picking out a prison jumpsuit was viewed over 3 million times on the social media platform. What does Higgins think viewers can do to tell the difference between fake, AI images, like the ones in his post, from real photographs that may come out of the former president's potential arrest?

AI bot ChatGPT has made waves around the world with its eerie ability to generate human-like text - but how well can it impersonate famous people? Below, we've generated tweets using the chatbot in the style of famous tweeters from Elon Musk to Joe Biden, and put them next to recent examples - but can you tell them apart? ChatGPT's ability to generate text'in the style of' real people'is already controversial - singer Nick Cave described it as a'grotesque mockery of what it means to be human' after a fan generated lyrics in his style. For our quiz, we used simple prompts such as, 'Write a tweet in the style of Joe Biden', but ChatGPT's natural-language interface means that users can'force' famous people to say just about anything they want in their own style. Scroll to the bottom to see which tweets are real and which are ChatGPT fakes.

A pair of researchers, one with Gymnasium of Johannes Kepler, the other with the University of California, Berkley, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) application capable of determining whether a video clip of a famous person is genuine or a deepfake. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matyáš Boháček and Hany Farid describe training their AI system to recognize unique body movements of certain individuals to discern whether a video was real or not. As deepfake technology has grown more sophisticated, it has become more difficult to determine whether a video is genuine. In the realm of public figures, such videos can become problematic. Such was the case when parties in Russia created a recent deepfake video of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying things that he did not actually say--a video that was reportedly created to help the Russian government convince its citizenry of Russian state propaganda regarding the invasion of Ukraine.

As neural-network-based QA models become deeper and more complex, there is a demand for robust frameworks which can access a model's rationale for its prediction. Current techniques that provide insights on a model's working are either dependent on adversarial datasets or are proposing models with explicit explanation generation components. These techniques are time-consuming and challenging to extend to existing models and new datasets. In this work, we use `Integrated Gradients' to extract rationale for existing state-of-the-art models in the task of Reading Comprehension based Question Answering (RCQA). On detailed analysis and comparison with collected human rationales, we find that though ~40-80% words of extracted rationale coincide with the human rationale (precision), only 6-19% of human rationale is present in the extracted rationale (recall).

"The idea began when I discovered the A.I. had no problem fixing the marks and scratches on the only authenticated portrait of Billy the Kid I fed it. I then experimented with other historical figures of whom no or little photographic material existed: Napoleon, Julius Ceasar, Queen Elizabeth etc." Uterwijk uploaded up to 20 different paintings into the generative adversarial network and says he was able to reconstruct images that were visual averages of the different sources "with the help of this software that is trained on thousands of human faces, towards an almost photo-realistic version." "Getting a good likeness together with a certain level of realism and a strong appearance of the character can take hours or even days of tweaking," Uterwijk explained.

Kim Libreri, an award-winning visual effects artist based in Northern California, has worked on movies including Artificial Intelligence and War of the Planet of the Apes. For nine years he has been working with a piece of technology better known for computer games, in particular the smash-hit Fortnite. The Unreal Engine, owned by Epic Games, provides the building blocks and tools that a computer game developer needs, but is increasingly an attractive technology for TV and film producers. The latest version of technology, Unreal Engine 5, is coming out next year, and Epic has been heavily trailing its features. It should allow visual effects artists like Mr Libreri to slot graphics and images straight into a scene, with little fuss.

By now you have probably heard about them or maybe you know all about it, but deepfakes are an amazing technology! They use an AI to continually run passes on an image or to create a face from scratch. Typically, people use this technology to place a famous celebrity's face on their own or something like that. Basically, the AI can replace your face and make it look like you were that famous person in the picture or video. This has a lot of benefits because an AI can be used to do all of the hard work instead of animators or artists in a movie production! But there are of course downsides to it as well.

Yesterday we reported on AI Portraits, a new website that uses a neural network to analyze your photos and generate a brand-new portrait in your likeness. As such, we've decided to keep testing out the algorithm on some more well-known faces. Some of our test subjects actually looked pretty accurate -- AI Portraits' algorithm was trained on celebrities' faces, so it's even possible that the AI system has seen some of these people before -- and others looked like they were nightmares conjured by Google's DeepDream. Elon Musk's AI-generated portrait doesn't seem too far off -- even his semi-mustache made it though. The algorithm is trained to tune into facial features absent anything else.