As anyone who has tried pointing their phone's camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial. Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning's announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent. "A translator translates more than just words, we build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way," says Michele Hutchison, winner of 2020's International Booker prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening. "We smuggle in subtle clues to help the reader understand particular cultural elements or traditions. We convey rhythm, poetry, wordplay, metaphor. We research the precise terminology for say agricultural machinery, even in a novel."

As marketers attempt to harness a myriad of easily accessible customer information, the influx of data has made their jobs more complex. For those creating video content to reach consumers, artificial intelligence tools hold promise as a way of analyzing the wave of data to quickly make content decisions as well as save time and money, experts say. Many marketers have AI-based hyper-personalization on their minds, but only 9% of marketers have used these tools, according to Ascends2's Hyper-Personalization Strategies Survey Summary Report. Video is already essential to marketers, because the medium delivers high conversion rates and builds strong connections with consumers. The question marketers have to answer going forward is how to get the most insights out of the data they obtain.

It's pretty much universally agreed that we shouldn't give AI-powered robots rocket launchers and set them loose to battle each other to the death. Luckily, we can recreate that in a video game. Facebook and Intel took home 1st place prizes today (Sept. The 1993 video game, in which a player fights the scourge of hell, has become a touchstone for AI research for its simple 3D maps and potential for different styles of play. Facebook, which competed under the team name F1, took home the (figurative) gold medal in the competition's first challenge, where AIs are armed with rocket launchers on a map they've seen before. The goal was simple: kill each other.

There were two "tracks" for agents to compete on, offering very different challenges. Track 1 featured a map known to the teams, and rocket launchers were the only weapons. The agents started with a weapon but were able to collect ammo and health kits. Track 2 was a far harder challenge. It featured three maps, unknown to teams, and a full array of weapons and items.

On the island of Santorini, Greece, a group of AIs has been facing off in an epic battle of Doom. This is VizDoom, a contest born from one man's idea: To improve the state of artificial intelligence by teaching computers the art of fragging. That simple notion then spiraled into a battle between tech giants, universities and coders. Over the past few months they've all been honing their bots (known as "agents"), building up to one, final death match. Okay, it was a lot more than one match.