Internet Watch Foundation has found a manual on dark web encouraging criminals to use software tools that remove clothing. The manipulated image could then be used against the child to blackmail them into sending more graphic content, the IWF said.

While Apple removed the platform from App Stores without a squeak of public protest, its battle with the EU rages on.

"When an authoritarian regime tells Apple what it can do with the App Store, the company’s response is a curt single paragraph. When a democratic union tries to do the same, the response is vociferous and negative."

Emotion artificial intelligence uses biological signals such as vocal tone, facial expressions and data from wearable devices as well as text and how people use their computers, to detect and predict how someone is feeling. It can be used in the workplace, for hiring, etc. Loss of privacy is just the beginning. Workers are worried about biased AI and the need to perform the ‘right’ expressions and body language for the algorithms.

Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.

Employers are letting artificial intelligence conduct job interviews. Candidates are trying to beat the system.

"And when they got on the phone, Ty assumed the recruiter, who introduced herself as Jaime, was human. But things got robotic."

Israeli company NSO Group is accused in lawsuit by Meta’s messaging app of spying on 1,400 users over a two-week period.

It’s cheap, quick and available 24/7, but is a chatbot therapist really the right tool to tackle complex emotional needs?

Experts ​alerted motor trade to security risks of ‘smart key’ systems which have now fuelled highest level of car thefts for a decade.

A massive data leak from a Chinese cybersecurity firm has offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Beijing-linked hackers. Analysts say the leak is a treasure-trove of intel into the day-to-day operations of China’s hacking programme, which the FBI says is the biggest of any country.

In this perspective, Fokas argues that computations reflect a small part of conscious thinking and that conscious thought itself is just one part of human cognition. An immense amount of unconscious work goes on behind the scenes.

Also, AI models are often conceptualized as artificial neural networks, but human thinking is not limited to the neurons; thinking involves the entire body, and many types of brain cells, such as glia cells, that are not neurons.

Fokas concludes that AI is a long way from surpassing humans in thought.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/12/pgad409/7477223?login=false (open access)

In these two new studies a new hypothesis for explaining the effectiveness of ECT as a treatment for depression symptoms proposes that ECT alleviates symptoms by increasing aperiodic activity, a type of electrical activity in the brain that doesn’t follow a consistent pattern and is generally considered to be the brain’s background noise.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-023-02631-y

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-023-02634-9

This study shows the development and capabilities of Coscientist, an artificial intelligence system driven by GPT-4 that autonomously designs, plans and performs complex experiments using tools such as documentation search, code execution and experimental automation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06792-0#citeas (open access)