People's hair in animated movies and video games could start to look far more realistic, thanks to artificial intelligence. For decades, hair in video games and animated movies has looked unnatural because of the complexity of modelling its movement. "Almost all works that exist today consider hair as a mesh," says Vanessa Sklyarova at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow, Russia. The graphical texture is then laid on top of this mesh, she says.

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most rapidly advancing technology humans have ever developed. A year ago you wouldn't often hear AI come up in a regular conversation, but today it seems there's constant talk about how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E will affect the future of work, the spread of information, and more. A major question that has thus far been almost entirely unexamined is how this AI-dominated future will affect people's minds. There's been some research into how using AI in their jobs will affect people mentally, but there isn't yet an understanding of how simply living amongst so much AI-generated content and systems will affect people's sense of the world. How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future?

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! In April 2022, OpenAI -- the artificial intelligence (AI) company cofounded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman -- debuted DALL-E 2, an AI tool that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language, like "teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s," for instance. In an attempt to take a step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) by rendering it with the sense of sight, OpenAI created an internet sensation. In the company's words, "DALL-E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively."

Shooter video games like Call of Duty are often citied as the motivation for real-life gun crimes. But according to a new scientific study published today, there's no evidence that these games cause violence in the real world. The London-based study author looked at how adolescent boys' violent behaviour is affected by the releases of new violent video games in the US. She concluded that policies intended to place restrictions on video game sales to minors – as attempted by several US states – are unlikely to reduce violence. Real-life displays of violence, such as mass shootings, have famously been blamed on video games by some politicians, rather than lax gun regulation and easy access to firearms.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is "really jazzed" about artificial intelligence. In a new interview with TIME, he said that AI, or a machine's ability to simulate human intelligence like logic and reasoning, is the most promising innovation of today for two simple reasons. It's "everywhere" and it has the potential to "make people's lives easier." AI is already present in "a number of products that you don't really think about," he said. He gave examples you can see if you just look down at your iPhone, from the way it recognizes your face and fingerprint, to "the way that Siri works," and even how photos are grouped together. "I see that we're at the very early stages of what it can do for people and how it can make people's lives easier," he said.

Whether it's police brutality, the disproportionate over-exposure of racial minorities to COVID-19 or persistent discrimination in the labour market, Europe is "waking up" to structural racism. Amid the hardships of the pandemic and the environmental crisis, new technological threats are arising. One challenge will be to contest the ways in which emerging technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), reinforce existing forms of discrimination. From predictive policing systems that disproportionately score racialised communities with a higher "risk" of future criminality, all the way to the deployment of facial recognition technologies that consistently mis-identify people of colour, we see how so called "neutral" technologies are secretly harming marginalised communities. The use of data-driven systems to surveil and provide a logic to discrimination is not novel.

As AIs progress, the limits between robots and humans are narrowing. AI challenges us in countless areas and is surpassing our ability to complete countless tasks. And today, companies want us to talk to them via AI–their so-called vocal assistants. As if talking to a robot has become normal! Recent years have seen an explosion in so-called conversational AI. The problem is that some current systems are still unstable and don't exactly spark the desire for conversation.

Back in March, shortly after the coronavirus had been deemed a national crisis, I walked into a 7-Eleven to pick up a late-night snack. Taped to the door was a makeshift sign warning not to touch the Slurpee machine to limit the risk of viral spread. I glanced at the coolers full of soft drinks, the touchscreen payment reader beside the cash register, the plastic surface of the smartphone case I'd touched perhaps 2,600 times that day. Maybe the Slurpee machine was riskier by some small degree than these other surfaces, but by how much? The whole strange episode called me to wonder if people would recall this time as the death knell of public touchscreens, or at least the dawn of a new era in conversant interfaces, an age in which our voices, not our hands, would help us navigate the world.

Every time I speak in front of people, regardless of if it's a class project, or a keynote presentation like at Apple, a certain human comes into my mind, that is Steve Jobs. The visionary founder and former CEO of Apple didn't just rely on statistics, tech specs, and words in his presentations, he emphasized on the small meaningful details on engaging the audience. He sold a story in every slide and in every slide, there was an association to an emotion. One of the best presentation I have ever seen in my life is When Jobs' introduced the iPhone in 2007. Don't tell me you haven't watched it, don't you?

Facebook has developed software to make people invisible to facial recognition technology. Its'de-identification' program is intended to protect people from'deepfake' style videos in which their faces can be edited onto videos of other people. These convincing clips are becoming so advanced it can be difficult to tell which videos are real and which ones are fake. And there are concerns that, in future, people will be able to make footage of others doing or saying things that they never actually did. But Facebook AI Research now says it has a way of fooling the artificial intelligence used to make these videos while still keeping the original video lifelike.