Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it
At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from Russia, China,…
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This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer
The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window. “My perception was that my performance was spectacular,” Grantcharov says, and then pauses—“until the moment I saw the video.” Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of…
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What I learned from the UN’s “AI for Good” summit
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Greetings from Switzerland! I’ve just come back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN’s AI for Good Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. The summit’s big focus was how AI can…
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Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that “Google will do the googling for you.” The new feature,…
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AI-directed drones could help find lost hikers faster
If a hiker gets lost in the rugged Scottish Highlands, rescue teams sometimes send up a drone to search for clues of the individual’s route—trampled vegetation, dropped clothing, food wrappers. But with vast terrain to cover and limited battery life, picking the right area to search is critical. Traditionally, expert drone pilots use a combination…
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AI-readiness for C-suite leaders
Generative AI, like predictive AI before it, has rightly seized the attention of business executives. The technology has the potential to add trillions of dollars to annual global economic activity, and its adoption for business applications is expected to improve the top or bottom lines—or both—at many organizations. While generative AI offers an impressive and…
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Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through
Modern life is noisy. If you don’t like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear. A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives…
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Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”
Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday. “The interesting thing so far—I stress, so far—is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is],” said Clegg during an…
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OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last week’s release of GPT-4o, a new AI “omnimodel” that you can interact with using voice, text, or video, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later,…
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Five ways criminals are using AI
Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro. Most criminals are “not living in some dark…
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