Artificial Intelligence news

When IEEE Spectrum first wrote about Covariant in 2020, it was a new-ish robotics startup looking to apply robotics to warehouse picking at scale through the magic of a single end-to-end neural network. At the time, Covariant was focused on this picking use case, because it represents an application that could provide immediate value—warehouse companies pay Covariant for its robots to pick items in their warehouses. But for Covariant, the exciting part was that picking items in warehouses

AI makes the challenge of spotting manipulated or faked media even greaterAt a time when suspicion of manipulated media has reached a new pitch of concern, the Princess of Wales photo furore underlines the sensitivity around image doctoring.Catherine was the subject of an image editing row in 2011 when Grazia adapted a photo of her on her wedding day – but that was before breakthroughs in artificial intelligence put everyone on edge. Continue reading...

The global ocean is difficult to explore—the common refrain is that we know less about the deep ocean than we do about the surface of the moon. Australian company Advanced Navigation wants to change that with a pint-sized autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that it hopes will become the maritime equivalent of a consumer drone. And the new AUV is already getting to work mapping and monitoring Australia’s coral reefs and diving for shipwrecks.The Sydney-based company has been developin

Experts say action needed as report finds minority ethnic people, women and those from deprived backgrounds at risk of poorer healthcareMinority ethnic people, women and people from deprived communities are at risk of poorer healthcare because of biases within medical tools and devices, a new report has revealed.Among other findings, the Equity in Medical Devices: Independent Review, has raised concerns over devices that use artificial intelligence (AI), as well as those that measure oxygen leve

In the near future humanity is doomed and our options are being determined by AI simulation – unfortunately for us, the AI doesn’t seem particularly bothered if we surviveThis intriguing sci-fi thriller is a throwback to the kind of cerebral teleplays and low-budget movies that flourished in the 1960s: ripe with gloomy lighting and dystopian pessimism, but with barely enough money in the budget to pay for more than two sets. Think On the Beach from 1959, or Seconds from 1966 –

When Eugenia Kuyda created Replika, the AI companion app, she had no idea it would be downloaded millions of times all around the world. The results were more powerful than she could ever have predicted. But so was the backlash
Thanks to Kate Devlin at King’s College London for sharing her expertise for this episode. Her book is called Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots.This episode contains a reference to suicide. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or

For the past six months, the Guardian journalist Michael Safi has been trying to find out who is behind an AI company that creates deepfakes. Deepfakes that are causing havoc around the world, with police and lawmakers baffled about how to deal with them. And in trying to answer one question, he has been left with a bigger one: is AI going to make it impossible to sort fact from fiction?Subscribe to Black Box, a new Guardian audio series on artificial intelligence, for all the remaining episodes