Within days of being released from his seventh prison term for romance fraud, Raymond McDonald was back on a dating app looking for his next victim. Over more than 20 years he had racked up 58 convictions, mostly for fraud and theft, while telling lies on an industrial scale and taking thousands of pounds from women for holidays and weddings which were never going to happen. This time when he went looking, the BBC was waiting. He thought he was having a date with Kaye, but instead found himself being approached by a BBC reporter and camera crew. He had met Kaye online and, calling himself Rob, told her he was a deep-sea diver looking for a wife.

A lot of what Conor Grennan does as a dean of students at NYU's Stern School of Business could be done at least in part by bots. Brainstorming and planning are prime examples of tasks that can be easily handled by generative AI tools like ChatGPT. But instead of feeling like he could be replaced by AI, Grennan has become an evangelist of this technology and its potential to make work better. He likens the opportunity to work with AI technology right now to finding material wealth. "It feels like the Gold Rush, like there's a bunch of people getting to California and seeing little flakes of gold in the river," he told Vox.

Dating app OkCupid is the latest company to get in on the AI and ChatGPT frenzy. The company's head of global communications Michael Kaye told TechCrunch in an email that OkCupid is testing a new category of match questions generated by the OpenAI chatbot. The news was first reported by Mashable. The app's match questions let you define yourself and what's important to you, and your match percentage with someone shows how compatible OkCupid thinks you might be. The app has thousands of match questions, and is now testing some that were generated by ChatGPT.

Oregon Health & Science University is one of five universities nationwide to form a new National Science Foundation-funded institute to design and build intelligent systems to help people age in place. The five-year, $20 million grant will support the creation of an AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups, or AI-Caring. The institute will develop artificial intelligence systems that work for aging adults, including those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, and their caregivers. Most older adults prefer to remain in their own homes. But safety concerns, medication schedule and isolation can all make it difficult for them to do so.

The half-dozen industry leaders who recently convened for this virtual roundtable found immediate common ground in the staunch belief that as powerful a tool as AI is to help smart communicators do their jobs even better, its value is very much linked to human input and guidance. "Technology tools and intelligence data can help us become more performative," says Aaron Kwittken, founder and CEO of PRophet, an AI-driven, SaaS platform designed for and by PR pros. "But sometimes we focus too much on the artificial side of AI, as opposed to the augmented side." The assembled leaders were quick to detail some of the key PR functions in which AI can either enhance or expedite their efforts. Myriad media benefits "AI should be feeding us suggestions for content creation, giving us a first draft, creating a list of pitch targets and taking a first swing at how we might personalize the pitch to individual reporters," offers Nationwide CCO Brian Grace.

New York – Dating apps offer a snapshot about a person's life, but in the space of a few weeks, a surprising health issue has emerged as a dealmaker or heartbreaker: Have you had the coronavirus vaccine? Some are bragging they have gotten the shot in order to better their chances, while others are using it to justify what one singleton described as "the most 2021 rejection ever." But can you trust every lonely heart who claims they've been inoculated against COVID-19? Samantha Yammine, a scientist who often talks on Twitter about health issues, says she's received messages about "dudes on dating apps claiming they're'totally safe for close contact' because they have received the vaccine." Of course, most young people using dating apps are not in vaccination priority groups at the front of the line, so some see having gotten the shot as a sort of golden ticket for hooking up.

As the industry grapples with how to reopen for production safely, one movie is proceeding with a lead actress who is immune to COVID-19 -- because she's a robot named Erica. Bondit Capital Media, which financed titles such as To the Bone and the Oscar nominated Loving Vincent, Belgium-based Happy Moon Productions and New York's Ten Ten Global Media have committed to back b, a $70 million science fiction film which producers say will be the first to rely on an artificially intelligent actor. Based on a story by visual effects supervisor Eric Pham, Tarek Zohdy, and Sam Khoze, who also produces through Life Entertainment, b follows a scientist who discovers dangers associated with a program he created to perfect human DNA and helps the artificially intelligent woman he designed (Erica) escape. Japanese scientists Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kohei Ogawa, who created Erica in real life as part of their study of robotics, also taught her to act, applying the principles of method acting to artificial intelligence, according to Khoze. "In other methods of acting, actors involve their own life experiences in the role," Khoze says.

It's beginning to look a lot like the end of the year in cybersecurity! In an interview with the Pentagon's artificial intelligence honcho, we looked forward at how AI will intersect with warfare in the future--and the many unresolved questions that raises. And in an interview with venerated author Cliff Stoll, we took a look back a historic moment in cybersecurity. We detailed how popular conference room video displays can be hacked, and how WhatsApp group chat security still needs a little work. Chrome will check your passwords to make sure they're not already in some data breach somewhere.

In 1998, director Tony Kaye released "American History X," an unsettling drama focused on neo-Nazis. His next project could leave viewers just as uneasy, but for a different reason: because of its star, an artificially intelligent robot. On Wednesday, Deadline published a report revealing that Kaye plans to cast a robot as the lead in "2nd Born," a sequel to the 2018 indie comedy "1st Born." The report doesn't include many specifics on the robot star, other than that it will learn various acting methods and techniques prior to filming. However, Kaye hopes the performance will be enough to earn the bot recognition from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), meaning it could conceivably go up against human actors come awards season.

The research is part of a trend sweeping health care: the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help better diagnose and treat patients. The goal is to capture information by monitoring their everyday movements and behaviors. This could yield insights never possible in a pre-digital age. It also, in the case of commercial companies, raises questions about how best to protect the privacy of research subjects. AI gives researchers a chance to get much more real-time information on how people function, says Jeffrey Kaye, director of the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology, part of Oregon Health & Science University.