In January, 1999, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had issued a memo on its intranet with the subject "Furby Alert." According to the Post, the memo decreed that employees were prohibited from bringing to work any recording devices, including "toys, such as'Furbys,' with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound." That holiday season, the Furby, an animatronic toy resembling a small owl, had been a retail sensation; nearly two million were sold by year's end. They were now banned from N.S.A. headquarters. A worry, according to one source for the Post, was that the toy might "start talking classified." Tiger Electronics, the makers of the Furby, was perplexed.

As the world becomes more reliant on technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more prevalent in various industries. Writing is no exception, with AI writing assistants becoming increasingly popular among writers, bloggers, and content creators. In this blog, we'll explore five AI writing assistants that can help improve your writing productivity and quality. Grammarly is one of the most popular AI writing assistants available today. It is an all-in-one writing tool that checks your grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. Grammarly has a free version and a premium version, with the latter offering more advanced features such as plagiarism detection, genre-specific writing style checks, and a readability score.

For more than 15 years, Wikipedia discussed what to call the third child of Ernest Hemingway, a doctor who was born and wrote books as Gregory, later lived as Gloria after undergoing gender-affirming surgery, and, when arrested for public disorderliness late in life, used a third name, Vanessa. Last year, editors on the site finally settled the question: The Gregory Hemingway article was deleted, and its contents were moved to a new one for Gloria Hemingway. This would be her name going forward, and she/her would be her pronouns. Wikipedia's billions of facts, rendered as dry prose in millions of articles, help us understand the world. They are largely the brain behind Siri and Alexa.

Considering how often we all send email, and how stuffed our collective inboxes are, you probably already know it's critical to make sure you don't miss important messages or let them linger too long without responding. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to make wrangling your inbox a bit easier. These extensions and tools can help, whether you need to make sure that message to the boss doesn't contain any spelling errors, your email to the family doesn't sound too defensive, or your next client pitch has as many emoji in it as it needs. Imagine your favorite translation engine but with emoji instead of a foreign language. That's the promise of EmojiTranslate and it does a fine job (even if there are occasional inconsistencies with the results). With email, like any text, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this tool will help your messages strike a good balance.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels describes a'wonderful machine' that permits "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour" to "write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius." Imagine my surprise and delight when, nearly 300 years later, I stumbled across EleutherAI's version of this very machine: GPT-Neo. With a few clicks, I was able to generate hundreds of thousands of words. More specifically, I was able to create Wikipedia-style biographies for the 118 Nobel Laureates in Literature without the hassle of research, the despair of a blank page, or the need, really, to labor at all. I discovered the GPT-Neo's ability to generate Wikipedia pages accidentally.

Before we explore the importance of trust in artificial intelligence (AI), we should first consider what is meant by the word "trust." We commonly use this word when discussing people and things, but we rarely think to define or explain it because it is something we feel deep inside ourselves. Of course, we can -- and do when we believe it is necessary -- provide reasons why we trust someone or something, but in the end, it is something we feel more than we think about rationally. While considering this matter, I came across one of Merriam-Webster's definitions of trust: "Assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something." This definition rings true to me, and I believe it applies to AI and the implications of its use.

Defining what is, or isn't artificial intelligence can be tricky (or tough). So much so, even the experts get it wrong sometimes. That's why MIT Technology Review's Senior AI Reporter Karen Hao created a flowchart to explain it all. This episode was reported by Karen Hao. It was adapted for audio and produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens.

For the Hemingway one, please note that the first 3 sentences are me, not GPT-3. In my various tweets, ' ' delimits the prompt (because there's nothing else in the playground UI right now which keeps visual track). Anyway, the interesting thing here is that I spent a good hour trying to get GPT-3 to do this. I knew it could do it based on how it could do Tom Swifties and the Turing dialogue and the other things, but I just couldn't quite figure out how to get it to do so. At one point, I was trying the idea of writing a plot summary and asking it to then "Please write a plot summary of Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway", and it copied my plot summary verbatim and then added on the sarcastic comment: It still sounds like it came straight from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The everyday tasks that humans often take for granted, such as walking and handwriting, have, until recently, been challenging to program a robot to do. The Handwriting Company now has a robot that can create beautifully handwritten communication that mimics the style of an individual's handwriting while a robot from Brown University can replicate handwriting from a variety of languages even though it was just trained on Japanese characters. Achieving this milestone of robotic capabilities was quite a feat for the researchers and roboticists behind the scenes and the machine learning algorithms that power the robots' skills. Let's review what's currently possible today and what might be in store for the future with robots creating handwritten text. Hemingway is The Handwriting Company's robot that can mimic anyone's style of handwriting.

The University of Hull's Mixed Reality accelerator was recently launched with the remit of promoting collaboration between industry and academia to develop commercial applications for Microsoft HoloLens. It is led by VISR a company founded in 2015 by veteran Xbox games developer Louis Deane and his business partner Lindsay West. They were one of the earliest Microsoft Mixed Reality partners in Europe. John Hemingway, Director of ICT at the University of Hull explains that hosting the Mixed Reality Accelerator was a natural progression for the University, as it taps into the institution's history of computer games development, virtual reality and 3D visualization developed over the past 30 years. As a University, it's important for us to not only lead from the front when it comes to cutting-edge technologies, but also to look at how those technologies allow us to create ever more skilled and work-ready graduates.