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"Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now, your web browser has its own affliction: slop. "Slop" is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view. Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to actually answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Instead, it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content, benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards other sites."

"Automated decision-making is appealing to businesses as it can save time and eliminate human emotional volatility. "People have a bad day and it then colors their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that's a big deal," he added."

"A company owned by Google has been given access to the healthcare data of up to 1.6 million patients from three hospitals run by a major London NHS trust. DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its innovative use of artificial intelligence, is being provided with the patient information as part of an agreement with the Royal Free NHS trust, which runs the Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals. It includes information about people who are HIV-positive as well as details of drug overdoses, abortions and patient data from the past five years, according to a report by the New Scientist."

"This algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to predict sound features from videos and then produces a waveform from these features with an example-based synthesis procedure. We show that the sounds predicted by our model are realistic enough to fool participants in a "real or fake" psychophysical experiment, and that they convey significant information about material properties and physical interactions."

"An artificially intelligent fighter pilot system has defeated two attacking jets in a combat simulation. The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft - and did not suffer any losses. Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot."

"Such powerful software is still several years away from being fully developed, if at all, and raises all sorts of ethical questions. But the potential applications-such as masterfully translating foreign languages, identifying objects in photos and directing self-driving cars through busy intersections-are so compelling that technology giants like Facebook and Google Inc. are investing heavily in artificial intelligence"

"Machine learning is what's taking place with our personal data while we're passive players in the process. "

""China wanted to discuss 'existing and emerging technologies' but the wording insisted on by the US and the UK is that it is only about emerging technologies," said Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, a coalition of robotics experts who are campaigning against the military use of robots."

"When it comes to the speed of these improvements, Yudkowsky says its important to not confuse the current speed of AI research with the speed of a real AI once built. Those are two very different things. What's more, there's no reason to believe that an AI won't show a sudden huge leap in intelligence, resulting in an ensuing "intelligence explosion" (a better term for the Singularity)."

"Apocalypsarians who are equally convinced that a super-intelligent AI will have no interest in curing cancer or old age, or ending poverty, but will - malevolently or maybe just accidentally - bring about the end of human civilisation as we know it."

""I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," Gates wrote. "First, the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.

"But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines."