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"The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"In a simulated test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI killed its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month. AI used "highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal" in the simulated test, said Col Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy enemy's air defense systems, and attacked anyone who interfered with that order."

"But by far the most immediate danger is the role that AI data analysis and generation plays in spreading disinformation and extremism on social media. This technology powers bots and amplification algorithms. These have played a direct role in fomenting conflict in many countries. They are helping to intensify racism, conspiracy theories, political extremism and a plethora of violent, irrationalist movements."

"A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real system - a building, the power grid, a city, even a human being - that mimics the characteristics of the system. A digital twin is more than just a computer model, however. It receives data from sensors in the real system to constantly parallel the system's state."

"Data is sometimes compared to oil, but a better analogy might be coal. Coal was the fuel that powered the steam engine. It propelled the capitalist reorganisation of manufacturing from an artisanal to an industrial basis, from the workshop to the factory, in the 19th century. Data has played a comparable role. It has propelled the capitalist reorganisation of the internet, banishing the remnants of the research network and perfecting the profit engine."

"Although disinformation has been extensively discussed as a powerful weapon employed by state and non-state actors, especially given the quick rise of AI tools capable of generating fabricated texts, sounds, and moving or still images,"

"Those whom the Gods wish to destroy," says the adage, "they first make mad." Actually, that's overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it's been clouding our perceptions of what's been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that."

"The new tool was recently unveiled by Wonder Dynamics founders Nikola Todorovic, and Tye Sheridan, star of Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The above video showcases the capabilities of Wonder Studio, where an amateur filmmaker can use their footage of an individual and replace them with a variety of different CGI characters. The video shows Wonder Studio is as simple as dragging and dropping different CGI characters into real-life actors within the footage, while also having more in-depth options for lighting, motion, grain, color, and more."

"The fact that flow is not only rare, but draining; and that taking a break to scroll a different screen or play a game on your phone can be restorative, is proof of the need for nuance. The moralising over productivity and screentime is unhelpful when it comes to finding solutions - but highly profitable as the boom in (useless) blue-light glasses and "distraction-free" tech goes to show."

"For women who have been victims of the creation and sharing of nonconsensual deepfake pornography, the events of the past week will have been a horrible reminder of their own abuse, even if they may also hope that the spotlight will force legislators into action. But because the pictures were removed, Swift's experience is far from the norm. Most victims, even those who are famous, are less fortunate. The 17-year-old Marvel actor Xochitl Gomez spoke this month about X failing to remove pornographic deepfakes of her. "This has nothing to do with me. And yet it's on here with my face," she said."

"The end result of that was, of course, the foundational contribution that the French revolution made to democracy. But now here we are, those of us living in liberal democratic states that depend on an educated, engaged population for their continued existence, facing a 21st-century arbre de Cracovie. Except this one is incalculably more ubiquitous, more instantaneous, more overwhelming, and more powerful. And as voters around the world proceed through the biggest election year in history, I find myself increasingly wondering: can democracy survive social media?"

"That is, in a way, Orion's most powerful and dangerous feature: they're so normal that people will want to wear them; they're so normal that people won't notice them. On the other hand, Meta has created a new gadget that, like every other before, can be enhanced or modified for other purposes, for better or worse. Should Meta stop building tech because a small number of people will use it for evil? If they had served this use case on a silver platter then yes, they should be held accountable. They didn't. Sure, Zuck's no friend, but he's not the one sneaking into your privacy."

"Google's goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years. Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons."

"The climate crisis could prove AI's greatest challenge. While Google publicises AI-driven advances in flooding, wildfire and heatwave forecasts, like many big tech companies, it uses more energy than many countries. Today's large models are a major culprit. It can take 10 gigawatt-hours of power to train a single large language model like OpenAI's ChatGPT, enough to supply 1,000 US homes for a year."

"The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a panic about computers gaining power over humankind. But the real threat comes from falling for the hype"

"The researchers found that the cost of the computational power required to train the models is doubling every nine months. This is a prodigious rate of growth-at this rate, the cost of the hardware and electricity needed to build cutting-edge AI systems alone would be in the billions by later this decade, without accounting for other costs such as employee compensation."

"Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his "new AI technology" as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time. In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi's personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi's speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi."

"Cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of complex information from microscopy images by pathologists, which requires time-consuming expert interpretation prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful, but are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training. Therefore, we present Histomorphological Phenotype Learning, a self-supervised methodology requiring no labels and operating via the automatic discovery of discriminatory features in image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute an atlas of histomorphological phenotypes (HP-Atlas), revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. These properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study."

"But we're not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley's dirtiest design feature - which is everywhere once you spot it - is the infinite scroll, likened to the "bottomless soup bowl" experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly "refills" manipulates the brain's dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless "seeking" can become addictive."