Last year, as FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, a civil servant overseeing West Coast stations privately pledged support, according to emails obtained by WIRED. A senior Federal Communications Commission official overseeing ABC-owned California stations privately offered to assist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's campaign last year against the Walt Disney Co. and, according to internal emails obtained by WIRED. On September 17, Carr threatened Disney with regulatory action regarding the Jimmy Kimmel monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, prompting major station affiliates to drop the broadcast and forcing ABC to temporarily suspend the show. The email, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, was titled "personal note of support re Charlie Kirk ABC/Disney issue" and quoted Carr's remarks from an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson: "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Carr said during the interview.

Counter-terrorism authorities have, for years, characterized keeping up with terrorist organizations and their use of digital tools and social media apps as a game of Whac-a-Mole. Jihadist terrorist groups such as Islamic State and its predecessor al-Qaida, or even the neo-Nazi group the Base, have leveraged digital tools to recruit, covertly finance via crypto, download weapons for 3D printing and spread tradecraft to its followers, all while leaving law enforcement and intelligence agencies playing catch up. Over time, thwarting attacks and maintaining the technological advantage over these types of terror groups has evolved, as more and more open source resources become available. Now, with artificial intelligence – both on the horizon as a rapidly developing technology and in the here and now as free, accessible apps – agencies are scrambling. Sources familiar with the US government's counterterrorism efforts told the Guardian that multiple security agencies are very concerned about how AI is making hostile groups more efficient in their planning and operations.

Extremist groups have begun to experiment with artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, in order to create a flood of new propaganda. Experts now fear the growing use of generative AI tools by these groups will overturn the work Big Tech has done in recent years to keep their content off the internet. "Our biggest concern is that if terrorists start using gen AI to manipulate imagery at scale, this could well destroy hash-sharing as a solution," Adam Hadley, the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED. "This is a massive risk." For years, Big Tech platforms have worked hard to create databases of known violent extremist content, known as hashing databases, which are shared across platforms to quickly and automatically remove such content from the internet.

In the age of big data, companies track and analyze our buying habits, hobbies and social media accounts to make business decisions. But the impact of big data could have an even greater potential – improving human health. That was the focus of a recent Wellness Education, AI Lifestyle and Health (WEALTH) Symposium in Lake Nona, organized by Dexter Hadley, a College of Medicine physician and big data expert who lead's UCF's Division of Artificial Intelligence. "The UCF College of Medicine is a young school with lots of opportunities and forward thinking," Hadley says. "I want to see the bridging between engineering, AI and medicine."

Unless you believe the click-bait --i.e. "Google is using Machine Learning to predict a patient's death with 95% accuracy!" In the next five years, however, AI's assimilation into the health system is set to advance. An expert panel at London's recent Connected World Summit discussed the inherent pitfalls and rampant potential of this impending clash of tech and ethics. Despite the ubiquitous digitisation of data (notably our friendships and finances), the most important information out there -- our health -- hasn't made the leap to digitisation.

Researchers are developing AI algorithms to detect breast cancer in mammograms.BSIP/UIG/Getty Dexter Hadley thinks that artificial intelligence (AI) could do a far better job at detecting breast cancer than doctors do -- if screening algorithms could be trained on millions of mammograms. The problem is getting access to such massive quantities of data. Because of privacy laws in many countries, sensitive medical information remains largely off-limits to researchers and technology companies. So Hadley, a physician and computational biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is trying a radical solution. He and his colleagues are building a system that allows people to share their medical data with researchers easily and securely -- and retain control over it.