Last week, a who's who of technologists called for artificial intelligence (AI) labs to stop training the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing "profound risks to society and humanity." In an open letter that now has more than 3,100 signatories, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, tech leaders called out San Francisco-based OpenAI Lab's recently announced GPT-4 algorithm in particular, saying the company should halt further development until oversight standards are in place. That goal has the backing of technologists, CEOs, CFOs, doctoral students, psychologists, medical doctors, software developers and engineers, professors, and public school teachers from all over the globe. On Friday, Italy became the first Western nation to ban further development of ChatGPT over privacy concerns; the natural language processing app experienced a data breach last month involving user conversations and payment information. ChatGPT is the popular GPT-based chatbot created by OpenAI and backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft.

Repressive regimes are working hard on artificial intelligence (AI) systems that control populations and suppress dissent. If these efforts succeed, political protests will be a sentimental relic of the past, squashed before they ever get to the streets. Less dramatic but nonetheless serious risks also exist for AI in the enterprise. What if incorrect AI credit scoring stops consumers from securing loans? Or an attack on the AI model of a self-driving vehicle leads to a fatal accident?

Nostalgia website MyHeritage has launched a new service that allows you to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos. The AI-powered service called Deep Nostalgia, launched last week, is free to try and is remarkably accurate in depicting how a person would look if captured on video. Their eyes blink, their head moves and their mouth forms a smile. "You'll have a'wow moment' when you see a treasured family photo come to life with Deep Nostalgia," Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage, said in a statement. "Seeing our beloved ancestors' faces come to life in a video simulation lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history," he added.

Deepfakes (aka synthetic media) can spread misinformation and disinformation very effectively. The 2020 US election is just one example, but the use of deepfakes isn't limited to politics. In fact, representatives from a big brand company recently asked Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, what they could do if deepfakes were used to undermine the reputation of the brand or CEO. Unfortunately, her reply was "nothing," because there's no way they can stop the social sharing of content. "[T]he companies that have to solve this problem are the social media networks in terms of spreading deepfakes around the world," said Litan.

Microsoft is pitching blockchain technology as a way to make artificial intelligence less scary for its corporate customers. Much like consumers who are wary of AI, enterprises are queasy about putting their full trust in a "black box" where machine learning algorithms are indiscriminately applied to vast data sets. But Microsoft, which helps thousands of firms manage their data, claims a blockchain can add trust and a degree of transparency, assuaging such concerns. Underpinning this is a new tool called Azure Blockchain Data Manager, which the software giant released at its annual Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, but was overshadowed by the announcement of a platform for creating enterprise tokens. Blockchain Data Manager takes on-chain data and connects it to other applications.

They're using machine learning to sort through millions of malware files, searching for common characteristics that will help them identify new attacks. They're analyzing people's voices, fingerprints and typing styles to make sure that only authorized users get into their systems. And they're hunting for clues to figure out who launched cyberattacks--and make sure they can't do it again. "The problem we're running into these days is the amount of data we see is overwhelming," says Mathew Newfield, chief information-security officer at Unisys Corp. UIS 0.50% "Trying to analyze that information is impossible for a human, and that's where machine learning can come into play." The push for AI comes as companies face a huge increase in threats and more-sophisticated criminals who can often draw on nation-states for resources.

Machine-learning has become one of the biggest buzzwords in cyber security, with almost every maker of a product in this sector touting it as part of their detection capability. A recent example of that turned up last week in a blog from Microsoft describing how in May Windows Defender spotted something suspicious in a small-scale email campaign purportedly from a landscaping business in Calgary. Microsoft's machine learning systems stopped the mail, which asked target victims to review an attached PDF document. It turned out the mail was coming from a spoofed address of the landscaping business. More than that, it was a spear phishing campaign to around 80 persons or firms.