Karen Price was just 15 when she vanished in 1981 and, had it not been for a chance discovery by two builders, her body might never have been found. Because no-one was looking for her. Dubbed Little Miss Nobody, Karen had not been seen for eight years when her skeletal remains, wrapped in a carpet, were uncovered by two unsuspecting builders in Cardiff city centre on 7 December 1989. Her body, found in a shallow grave outside a basement flat on Fitzhamon Embankment, was so badly decomposed it was impossible to establish the cause of her death. Now, more than 40 years on and after the release of her killer, a new documentary has examined how police put together the jigsaw to solve the killing of a teenager known to no-one and how it involved groundbreaking methods to bring two men to justice.

Ammaar Reshi was playing around with ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI when he started thinking about the ways artificial intelligence could be used to make a simple children's book to give to his friends. Just a couple of days later, he published a 12-page picture book, printed it, and started selling it on Amazon without ever picking up a pen and paper. The feat, which Reshi publicized in a viral Twitter thread, is a testament to the incredible advances in AI-powered tools like ChatGPT--which took the internet by storm two weeks ago with its uncanny ability to mimic human thought and writing. But the book, Alice and Sparkle, also renewed a fierce debate about the ethics of AI-generated art. Many argued that the technology preys on artists and other creatives--using their hard work as source material, while raising the specter of replacing them.

You type in words – however nonsensical or disjointed – and the algorithm creates a unique image based on your search. This is Dall-E 2, a startlingly advanced, image-generating AI trained on 250 million images, named after the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar's Wall-E. While use of Dall-E 2 is currently limited to a narrow pool of people, Dall-E mini (or Craiyon) is a free, unrelated version that is open to the public. Drawing on 15m images, Dall-E mini's algorithm offers a smorgasbord of surreal images, complete with absurd compositions and blurred human forms. Already, trends have emerged: nuclear explosions, dumpster fires, toilets and giant eyeballs abound. On a dedicated Reddit thread, people delight in the images generated by the free, low-resolution version, which range from amusing (Kim Jong-un lego) to dark (The Last Supper by Salvador Dali), hellish (synchronized swimming in lava) and deeply disturbing (Steve Jobs introducing a guillotine). Like other machine-learning networks, this AI model seems biased in its images of people – who appear, perhaps unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly white and mostly male.

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which ones really stood out. Which stories did their colleagues publish that made them proud to work for MIT Technology Review? (And no, they weren't allowed to choose their own.) An edited version of the list runs below, but there was one story that our team kept coming back to as a touchstone for the kind of coverage that we do: Karen Hao's investigation into Facebook.

Olivia Rodrigo's latest single, "Good 4 U," comes from a long lineage of teen girl pop rock--that 2007 Radio Disney sound, as fellow young rocker Willow Smith put it. The 18-year-old Rodrigo's trio of singles have garnered praise for paying homage to her female Disney Channel predecessors, who similarly explored the emotional spectrum of girlhood through their music, chronicling its cheesy jubilance, frustration, pettiness, adventurousness, and confusion. For young girls in the 2000s, Disney-produced pop rock provided an outlet for those budding teenage feelings of rage against various "machines," defined as anything from annoying boys to the restrictions of youth--"they just don't understand me" is perhaps the catchphrase of ages 12 to 19. At almost 21 years old, barely two years removed from this demographic, I'm still desperately on the hunt for self-definition; it's an endless quest that, like all journeys, deserves a proper soundtrack. Radio Disney rock spoke to a generation of girls who grew up watching blogs, tabloids, and TV news conduct public crucifixions of women for daring to have fun, feel human emotions, or have a body--basically, for existing.

I read a pretty heartbreaking story this week about a young girl named Alexa who has reportedly been bullied at school. According to NBC San Diego, Alexa's classmates have been treating her just like an Amazon Echo, asking "Alexa" the weather and treating her like a "servant." Unfortunately, at least for that young girl, the name "Alexa" has become pretty much synonymous with the Amazon Echo and is often used interchangeably with other smart home devices. My guess is that Amazon won't change the name to something else. However, there is a way for you to change the name.

I will begin by saying, we are living in a time where the dangers of Military technology is now beyond our control. We live as guinea pigs in a world where those with the power, knowledge and technology keep us from our true freedom. To live with free will in this beautiful world. They manipulate us, direct us and destroy everything that was truly divine and sacred in our mind. In this timeline we must decide, will they take our spirit and destroy what god intended or will we stand and fight the evil and it's new designs.

The technology and science community has been swift to embrace the opportunities presented by International Women's Day (IWD). This comes from the belief (based on solid evidence) that diversity is essential to improving STEM, that women working in the field should be well supported and that more women should be encouraged to take up careers in related fields. I am completely behind these efforts and am delighted to see IWD being used as a regular reminder to all of us working in technology that we must not lose sight of the importance of improving diversity in our subject areas. As a woman working in the field of data science and artificial intelligence (AI), I feel this particularly acutely, for I believe it is now urgent that we improve diversity in AI. In the U.K. the government has acknowledged the importance of AI and data science by making it one of the four pillars of its Industrial Strategy.

For years, YouTube, the world's most popular video network, has been battling issues with "bad actors" wreaking havoc with the system. The Google-owned property wants to be a safe haven for advertisers to reach young viewers, primarily, with its mix of original videos and a library with virtually anything ever recorded on video. Yet once again, YouTube found itself under scrutiny this week for more abuses. Seemingly innocent videos of young girls doing gymnastics were hijacked by adult viewers commenting with time stamps and links to child pornography videos elsewhere on the web. So after being outed by YouTuber Matt Watson expressing his rage and losing top advertisers like Disney, AT&T, Epic Games and others in response, YouTube said it would change its ways, and disable commenting on any video involving children.

More than a year on from a child safety content moderation scandal on YouTube and it takes just a few clicks for the platform's recommendation algorithms to redirect a search for "bikini haul" videos of adult women towards clips of scantily clad minors engaged in body contorting gymnastics or taking an ice bath or ice lolly sucking "challenge." A YouTube creator called Matt Watson flagged the issue in a critical Reddit post, saying he found scores of videos of kids where YouTube users are trading inappropriate comments and timestamps below the fold, denouncing the company for failing to prevent what he describes as a "soft-core pedophilia ring" from operating in plain sight on its platform. He has also posted a YouTube video demonstrating how the platform's recommendation algorithm pushes users into what he dubs a pedophilia "wormhole," accusing the company of facilitating and monetizing the sexual exploitation of children. We were easily able to replicate the YouTube algorithm's behavior that Watson describes in a history-cleared private browser session which, after clicking on two videos of adult women in bikinis, suggested we watch a video called "sweet sixteen pool party." Clicking on that led YouTube's side-bar to serve up multiple videos of prepubescent girls in its "up next" section where the algorithm tees-up related content to encourage users to keep clicking.