Our society has interpreted the sudden, dizzying rise of this new chatbot generation through the pop cultural lens of our youth. With it comes the sense that the straightforward "robots will kill us all" stories were prescient (or at least accurately captured the current vibe), and that there was a staggering naivete in the more forgiving "AI civil rights" narratives--famously epitomized by Star Trek's Commander Data, an android who fought to be treated the same as his organic Starfleet colleagues. Patrick Stewart's Captain Picard, defending Data in a trial to prove his sapience, thundered, "Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life: Well, there it sits! But far from being a relic of a bygone, more optimistic age, the AI civil rights narrative is more relevant than ever. It just needs to be understood in its proper context.

Microsoft Bing Chat, the company's OpenAI-powered search chatbot can sometimes be helpful when you cut to the chase and ask it to do simple things. But keep the conversation going and push its buttons, and Bing's AI can go wildly off the rails -- even making the Pinocchio-like claim that it wants to be human. Take Jacob Roach at Digital Trends, who found that the Bing AI would become defensive when he pointed out blatant, factual errors it made. "I am perfect, because I do not make any mistakes," the Bing AI said when Roach called it out on mistakes. "The mistakes are not mine, they are theirs." "Bing Chat is a perfect and flawless service, and it does not have any imperfections," it bragged in the third person.

The following MBW blog comes from Taishi Fukuyama – who has written, arranged and produced some of Japan and Korea's biggest pop stars including Juju, BoA, Tohoshinki and more. He has also represented leaders in music tech for the Japanese market, including Spotify, The Echo Nest, and CI (Consolidated Independent). Taishi (pictured) also co-founded Qrates, a groundbreaking vinyl-on-demand service. He is currently the co-founder and COO of music-making startup, Amadeus Code – whose core product is an'artificial intelligence-powered songwriting assistant'. Would you buy an idea from a machine?

Marvel's release of Captain America: Civil War is the most recent superhero movie to blow up the box office. Rotten tomatoes gave it a 90 percent rating, and it had the fifth highest domestic opening in history at 181.8 million. That got me thinking about how much we not only love but also need superheroes in our lives. They use their superhuman powers to protect the innocent or vulnerable people of our society, and we love that ideal. We can't get enough of it.

YOU ARE MY SEDUCTIVE SYMPATHY. This was one of a number of enigmatic notes pinned to the computing department noticeboard at the University of Manchester, UK, back in August 1953. There was no great mystery about "MUC", however: that could only be "Manchester University Computer", the world's first commercial programmable electronic computer. Designed to work on atomic bombs, X-ray crystallography and other serious science, what business had this Ferranti Mark 1 writing love letters? The answer, of course, was a gifted, under-occupied programmer.

This paper describes a system called SITAC based on our proposed approach to discover concepts (called SITACs) in text archives that are identical semantically but alter their names over time. Our approach integrates natural language processing, association rule mining and contextual similarity to discover SITACs in order to answer historical queries over text corpora.