A new program trained on iPhone photos could curb food waste. Avocados have a carbon footprint that is three times higher than bananas. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The days of buying a rock-tough avocado in the hopes of avoiding mushy food waste may soon be over. Machine learning researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) recently designed an artificial intelligence program that visually assesses avocado quality and ripeness .

Suzi Dougherty was chuffed when a happy snap she took of her son on her iPhone turned out so well. She was so happy with the sharp, colour-saturated picture of him posing with mannequins at a Gucci exhibition that she had a copy printed off for her mum and entered it in a local photography competition. Four judges considered the photo – and they loved it. They were suspicious it had been generated by artificial intelligence. Dougherty jokes that she's just upset she didn't win.

Staring enigmatically at an unseen object to her right, the black-haired woman bears a striking resemblance to the person depicted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting Gabrielle, which Sotheby's recently valued at between £100,000-150,000. However, art connoisseurs disagree over whether the work, which is owned by a private Swiss collector, is the real deal. Now, artificial intelligence has waded in to help settle the dispute, and the computer has deemed that it probably is a genuine Renoir. AI is increasingly being used to help adjudicate on whether valuable artworks are real or fake. Earlier this month, Art Recognition, the Swiss company that developed the technology, announced it had concluded that Switzerland's only Titian – a work titled Evening Landscape with Couple, held by Kunsthaus Zürich – was probably not painted by the 16th-century Venetian artist.

Microsoft is rolling out an update to its AI-powered photo editing app, Microsoft Pix, that aims to give Prisma and others like it some new competition. While the app was originally designed to enhance your iPhone photos by tweaking things like color, exposure and other variables, the newly updated Microsoft Pix will now let you have a little more fun with your photos, too – this time, by turning them into art. Similar to Prisma, the new app introduces a feature called Pix Styles, which allows you to transform your photos into works of art, and use other effects. For example, one effect will make the picture look like it's on fire. These are not photo filters, to be clear – the styles actually transfer texture, pattern and tones to the photo, explains Microsoft.

Microsoft is rolling out an update to its AI-powered photo editing app, Microsoft Pix, that aims to give Prisma and others like it some new competition. While the app was originally designed to enhance your iPhone photos by tweaking things like color, exposure and other variables, the newly updated Microsoft Pix will now let you have a little more fun with your photos, too – this time, by turning them into art. Similar to Prisma, the new app introduces a feature called Pix Styles, which allows you to transform your photos into works of art, and use other effects. For example, one effect will make the picture look like it's on fire. These are not photo filters, to be clear – the styles actually transfer texture, pattern and tones to the photo, explains Microsoft.

Even before the blockbuster success of Instagram, there was never a shortage of photo-filtering apps for iOS. To this day, the app store is chock-full of them. But every once in a while, a photo-effect app comes along that generates buzz. Using artificial intelligence technology, the app goes beyond merely filtering by letting your photos mimic the work of modernist masters like Van Gogh and Picasso. Starting Up The free app, for all its wizardry, is just a tiny 15MB download; that's because it performs its magic in the cloud (which can have its own downside, however, as I'll explain later).