Early dementia diagnosis requires biomarkers sensitive to both structural and functional brain changes. While structural neuroimaging biomarkers have progressed significantly, objective functional biomarkers of early cognitive decline remain a critical unmet need. Current cognitive assessments often rely on behavioral responses, making them susceptible to factors like effort, practice effects, and educational background, thereby hindering early and accurate detection. This work introduces a novel approach, leveraging a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) to infer cognitive impairment levels directly from electroencephalography (EEG) data. Critically, this method employs a passive fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) paradigm, eliminating the need for explicit behavioral responses or task comprehension from the participant. This passive approach provides an objective measure of working memory function, independent of confounding factors inherent in active cognitive tasks, and offers a promising new avenue for early and unbiased detection of cognitive decline.

A song featuring the voices of Drake and The Weeknd called "Heart on My Sleeve" has amassed over 250,000 Spotify streams and 10 million views on TikTok. But the two renowned musicians had nothing to do with the song -- an artist going by the name "Ghostwriter" generated the song using AI. Drake and The Weeknd have not yet responded to the song, but Drake recently commented on AI-generated music that rips off his voice. When Drake noticed an AI model of himself singing "Munch" by Ice Spice, he wrote on his Instagram story, "This is the final straw AI." It's possible he was messing around, but he would be far from the first major artist to take issue with the rising count of deepfake songs. Ghostwriter and Spotify did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's requests for comment.

This month, the internet was flooded with stunningly ethereal digital art portraits, thanks to the work of the latest artificial intelligence-assisted application to go viral: Lensa. Users uploaded their photographs to the app and then – for a small fee – it used AI to transform their profile pictures into, say, a magical elfin warrior princess version of themselves, in no time at all. This year has seen a breakthrough for AI-driven image generators, which are now better than ever in quality, speed and affordability. The AI models are "trained" on millions of pieces of image and text data scraped from publicly available content online, and as in the case of Microsoft-backed DALL-E, can turn short text prompts such as "Ronald McDonald performing open heart surgery" into unique images. Anyone can now produce professional-looking images tailored to their desires, without having any training in art or design themselves.

Stable Diffusion, the AI that can generate images from text in an astonishingly realistic way, has been updated with a bunch of new features. However, many users aren't happy, complaining that the new software can no longer generate pictures in the styles of specific artists or generate NSFW artworks, The Verge has reported. Version 2 does introduce a number of new features. Key among those is a new text encoder called OpenCLIP that "greatly improves the quality of the generated images compared to earlier V1 releases," according to Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion. It also includes a new NSFW filter from LAION designed to remove adult content.

It's a scenario that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Earlier this month, a popular Korean-language artist who goes by @ato1004fd on Twitch livestreamed an 11-hour sketch session, letting their 22,000 followers watch as they built up an image of a popular character from the video game Genshin Impact. But by the time @ato1004fd had completed the digital painting, a rogue viewer had already grabbed a picture of the work in process from the stream, used A.I. to "complete" it, and posted their own version to social media--before turning around and accusing @ato1004fd of being the copycat. "Bro, when you ask your fans to cry about art stealing, [be] reasonable," the forger wrote. "So you took as reference an AI image but at least admit it."

Greg Rutkowski is an artist with a distinctive style: He's known for creating fantasy scenes of dragons and epic battles that fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons have used. He said it used to be "really rare to see a similar style to mine on the internet." Yet if you search for his name on Twitter, you'll see plenty of images in his exact style -- that he didn't make. Rutkowski has become one of the most popular names in AI art, despite never having used the technology himself. People are creating thousands of artworks that look like his using programs called AI-image generators, which use artificial intelligence to create original artwork in minutes or even seconds after a user types in a few words as directions.

An art-generating artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the internet by storm with the ability to produce fully rendered pieces of "original" artwork in seconds, images that would take professional artists weeks to accomplish. The application is called Stable Diffusion and it has been hailed as a way to "bring creativity to all" by Stability AI, the coders who designed it. The application can create artwork on demand, and all a user has to do is type in a description of what artwork they want before they are given a number of examples to choose from in seconds. The AI-generated art is created via a trawl of professional artwork and photographs that already exist on the internet. A sophisticated algorithm then rearranges this "big data" to create a multitude of new pieces of art that are related to the inputted text prompts.

In brief AI probably won't replace software engineers, but will dramatically change the way they work in the future especially if they can instruct machines using natural language to generate code. Several organizations – from OpenAI and Microsoft to Amazon and research labs like DeepMind – have trained neural networks to learn how to code. A recent survey of more than 2,000 developers by GitHub found that the vast majority of respondents found GitHub's Copilot helped increase their productivity since the AI tool can act like a super-autocomplete, helping devs write boilerplate code for programs more quickly. But will programmers' jobs be taken by machines in the future? "I don't believe AI is anywhere near replacing human developers," Vasi Philomin, Amazon's vice president for AI services, told IEEE Spectrum.

In brief AI probably won't replace software engineers, but will dramatically change the way they work in the future especially if they can instruct machines using natural language to generate code.… Several organizations – from OpenAI and Microsoft to Amazon and research labs like DeepMind – have trained neural networks to learn how to code. A recent survey of more than 2,000 developers by GitHub found that the vast majority of respondents found GitHub's Copilot helped increase their productivity since the AI tool can act like a super-autocomplete, helping devs write boilerplate code for programs more quickly. But will programmers' jobs be taken by machines in the future? "I don't believe AI is anywhere near replacing human developers," Vasi Philomin, Amazon's vice president for AI services, told IEEE Spectrum.

Thanks to his distinctive style, Rutkowski is now one of the most commonly used prompts in the new open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, which was launched late last month--far more popular than some of the world's most famous artists, like Picasso. His name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. He thinks it could threaten his livelihood--and he was never given the choice of whether to opt in or out of having his work used this way. The story is yet another example of AI developers rushing to roll out something cool without thinking about the humans who will be affected by it. Stable Diffusion is free for anyone to use, providing a great resource for AI developers who want to use a powerful model to build products.