The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso. "We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!" he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup. Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time. On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform. They were generated with artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a startup based in east London.

China has released a new propaganda video of its deadly unmanned fighter jet, which shows the aircraft striking still and moving targets. CH-5, also known as Rainbow-5, was unveiled in 2016 and is said to be China's largest and most powerful drone bomber. The aircraft can carry 16 missiles and strike targets while flying at an altitude of 6,000 metres (19,685 feet), Chinese media have claimed. It can fly up to 60 hours without refuelling with a maximum flight altitude of 8,000 metres (26,246 feet) and a maximum range of 10,000 kilometres (6,213 miles). CH-5, also known as Rainbow-5, is on display during the 11th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in 2016.

Britain's Home Office unveiled a tool Tuesday that algorithmically detects ISIS propaganda videos on small video hosting sites. The technology, developed by ASI data science, is designed to detect and remove videos that have been created by ISIS. Thousands of hours of ISIS video content was analyzed in order to "teach" the software's artificial intelligence what to look out for. The program looks for certain cues, but much of the proprietary information wasn't released for security reasons. The British government said that the technology was developed in order to prevent smaller video content publishers without large budgets from inadvertently spreading ISIS content.

Neil Prakash, an Australian recruiter for the Islamic State group (also called ISIS), was arrested somewhere in the Middle East after surviving drone attacks by the FBI, the New York Times reported Thursday. The 25-year-old, who was linked to militant plots in Australia and had appeared in several ISIS propaganda videos, was believed killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in April. According to the Times, which cited an unnamed senior American military official, Prakash was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year but survived. Another senior U.S. military official reportedly said the former Melbourne resident was arrested some time in the last few weeks by an unidentified Middle Eastern government. Prakash, who converted to Islam from Buddhism and took the name Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, left Australia in 2013 and has been recruiting fighters for ISIS since then.

Today, Facebook has apologised for a Safety Check error that led to people around the world being texted in the wake of the Sunday's bombing in Lahore, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite has lost communication with Earth, Microsoft has issued a formal explanation for the actions of its short-lived machine learning chatbot, Tay, and more. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. In the wake of a suicide bombing that left at least 69 people dead in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday, Facebook has apologised for an error in its Safety Check disaster response system that saw people around the world being asked to check in as safe (The Guardian). Users in areas as geographically diverse as Australia, Egypt and Belgium received text messages asking if they'd been affected by the explosion, without any information on where the incident had occurred.