AI data centers are so hot right now. Each time generative AI services churn through their large language models to make a chatbot answer one of your questions, it takes a great deal of processing power to sift through all that data. Doing so can use massive amounts of energy, which means the proliferation of AI is raising questions about how sustainable this tech actually is and how it affects the ecosystems around it. Some companies think they have a solution: running those data centers underwater, where they can use the surrounding seawater to cool and better control the temperature of the hard working GPUs inside. But it turns out just plopping something into the ocean isn't always a foolproof plan for reducing its environmental impact.

The mayor of Australia's second biggest city's desperate attempt to get residents excited about dozens of potential new parks has been completely derailed by the use of creepy AI-generated concept images. Melbourne Lord Mayor Nick Reece took to social media on Sunday to share a series of AI-generated images of some of the parks he's promised to create if re-elected next month. Cr Reece has vowed to transform the CBD into the'Garden City' by opening 28 new parks if he returns to the top job. But the plan backfired after the AI images left residents more concerned than excited for the new greenery. The images showed a number of confusing errors, including two people laying on the ground metres away from young children playing, a man with two legs melded into one, and several extra arms, sparking a range of reactions from baffled Aussies.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to better patient care while creating cost-efficiencies that would be impossible without it. But it could also worsen racial disparities, have profit outweighing patient care, or simply lead to mistakes that a human wouldn't make. In other news at the intersection of health care and technology: video games, virtual reality for nursing home patients and ways to identify bacteria's genetic makeup. Artificial intelligence can make diagnoses from digitized images such as mammograms and diabetic retinal scans. More sophisticated interventions might also be possible someday: algorithms that guide robots through surgery, for example, or even help restore motor control in paralyzed patients.

In a stifling room at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Chris Reece discussed what artificial intelligence could do for the telecommunications industry. Reece, a technologist for Award Solutions, explained that AI, which telecos have already leveraged in some situations, could help solve some of communications service providers' (CSPs) most complicated problems. CSPs have been slow to adopt artificial intelligence, Reece explained, in part because the initial problems AI was developed to address didn't really affect them. When he asked the crowd for examples of problems they'd heard of AI solving, one person suggested chess, and another mentioned image recognition. Reece agreed, saying, "I don't know a lot of teleco operators who really need a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog." "There's a lot of opportunity to use AI in the telecom space, and we're just starting to scratch the surface," Reece added.