For years now, generative AI has been used to conjure all sorts of realities--dazzling paintings and startling animations of worlds and people, both real and imagined. This power has brought with it a tremendous dark side that many experts are only now beginning to contend with: AI is being used to create nonconsensual, sexually explicit images and videos of children. And not just in a handful of cases--perhaps millions of kids nationwide have been affected in some way by the emergence of this technology, either directly victimized themselves or made aware of other students who have been. This morning, the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights and privacy, released a report on the alarming prevalence of nonconsensual intimate imagery (or NCII) in American schools. In the past school year, the center's polling found, 15 percent of high schoolers reported hearing about a "deepfake"--or AI-generated image--that depicted someone associated with their school in a sexually explicit or intimate manner.

TaskUs, the business process outsourcing service that moderates content, annotates information and handles back office customer support for some of the world's largest tech companies, has raised $250 million in an investment from funds managed by the New York-based private equity giant, Blackstone Group. It's been ten years since TaskUs was founded with a $20,000 investment from its two co-founders, and the new deal, which values the decade-old company at $500 million before the money even comes in, is proof of how much has changed for the service in the years since it was founded. The Santa Monica-based company, which began as a browser-based virtual assistant company -- "You send us a task and we get the task done," recalled TaskUs chief executive Bryce Maddock -- is now one of the main providers in the growing field of content moderation for social networks and content annotation for training the algorithms that power artificial intelligence services around the world. "What I can tell you is we do content moderation for almost every major social network and it's the fastest growing part of our business today," Maddock said. From a network of offices spanning the globe from Mexico to Taiwan and the Philippines to the U.S., the thirty two year-old co-founders Maddock and Jaspar Weir have created a business that's largest growth stems from snuffing out the distribution of snuff films; child pornography; inappropriate political content and the trails of human trafficking from the user and advertiser generated content on some of the world's largest social networks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) advocates within enterprise IT teams must focus their efforts on solving "real business problems" if they are to convince the board to support the technology. That was the key message from BGL Group's insight and technology manager, who was speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 this morning. Mike Maddock began by spelling out the differences between the public's perception of AI, and what it can now realistically achieve for the enterprise. He described Gartner's recent prediction that, by 2020, five per cent of financial transactions across the world will be carried out by AI, as a "bold claim". He also cast doubt on the usefulness of hypothesis-driven AI, as epitomised IBM's Watson, which achieved fame after its victory in the US gameshow Jeopardy.