Everyone should have the right to protest. And, if done legally, to do so without fear of having things like their future job prospects ruined because they’ve been snapped at a demonstration – from which a select few may have gone on to do criminal acts such as arson and looting.

With images from the protests being widely shared on social media to raise awareness, police have been using the opportunity to add the people featured within them to facial recognition databases.

“Over the past weeks, we have seen an increasing number of arrests at BLM protests, with images circulating around the web enabling automatic identification of those individuals and subsequent arrests to hamper protest activity,” the researchers explain.

Software has been available for some time to blur faces, but recent AI advancements have proved that it’s possible to deblur such images.

Researchers from Stanford Machine Learning set out to develop an automated tool which prevents the real identity of those in an image from being revealed.

The result of their work is BLMPrivacyBot:

Rather than blur the faces, the bot automatically covers them up with the black fist emoji which has become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement. The researchers hope such a solution will be built-in to social media platforms, but admit it’s unlikely.

The researchers trained the model for their AI bot on a dataset consisting of around 1.2 million people called QNRF. However, they warn it’s not foolproof as an individual could be identified through other means such as what clothing they’re wearing.

To use the BLMPrivacyBot, you can either send an image to its Twitter handle or upload a photo to the web interface here. The open source repo is available if you want to look at the inner workings.

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The live stream of the showdowns was viewed by more than 55,000 people.

“This is, of course, an exciting moment for us,” said David Silver, a researcher at DeepMind. “For the first time, we saw an AI that was able to defeat a professional player.”

DeepMind created five versions of their ‘AlphaStar’ AI. Each AI was trained with historic game footage that StarCraft-developer Blizzard has been releasing on a monthly basis.

In order to further improve their abilities, the five AIs were pitted against each other in a league. The leading AI racked up experience that would equate to a human training for around 200 years.

Perhaps needless to say, AlphaStar wiped the floor with human players Grzegorz Komincz and Dario Wunsch.

You can watch AlphaStar taking on the human players below:

The only hope for humans so far is that AlphaStar was trained for a single map and using just the one alien race type of three available in the game. Removed from its comfort zone, it would not perform as well.

Video games have driven more rudimentary AI developments for decades. The advancement shown by AlphaStar could be used to create more complex ‘bots’ that can pose a challenge and help train even the best human players.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen DeepMind’s AI bots in action – but, in the past, they’ve had a tendency of immediately rushing its opponents with ‘workers’ in a behaviour that Blizzard called “amusing”.

deepgeniusai.com/">AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, , & .

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StarCraft 2 is a complex game with many strategies, making it the perfect testing ground for AI. Google’s DeepMind first started exploring how it can use AI to beat the world’s best StarCraft players back in 2016.

In 2017, StarCraft’s developer Blizzard made 65,000 past matches available to DeepMind researchers to begin training bots. Blizzard promised it would make a further half a million games available each month.

We’ve seen DeepMind’s AI bots in action with various degrees of success. The AI had a tendency of immediately rushing its opponents with ‘workers’ in a behaviour that Blizzard called “amusing,” but confessed it had a 50 percent success rate even against StarCraft 2’s AI bots on ‘insane’ difficulty.

Fed with some replays from human players using more complex strategies, the AI began adopting them.

“After feeding the agent replays from real players, it started to execute standard macro-focused strategies, as well as defend against aggressive tactics such as cannon rushes,” Blizzard said.

We’re yet to see these new strategies being used by DeepMind’s AI but it won’t be much longer until we do.

“It’s only been a few months since BlizzCon but DeepMind is ready to share more information on their research,” Blizzard said today.

“The StarCraft games have emerged as a ‘grand challenge’ for the AI community as they’re the perfect environment for benchmarking progress against problems such as planning, dealing with uncertainty, and spatial reasoning.”

You can find a stream of DeepMind’s AI playing StarCraft 2 via StarCraft’s Twitch or Deepmind’s YouTube at 6pm GMT/10am PT/1pm ET on January 24th.

deepgeniusai.com/">AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, , & .

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XOXCO have been in operation since 2013 and gained renown for creating Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack.

Microsoft believes that bots will become a key way that businesses engage with employees and customers. The company has undertaken many projects with the aim of unlocking their potential, to various success.

Tay, for example, has become an infamous example of a bot gone wrong after the wonderful denizens of the internet taught Microsoft’s creation to be a “Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11’-proclaiming robot”.

However, the company has grand ideas about inter-communicating bots which could be groundbreaking. Asking Cortana to order a pizza could invoke a bot by Dominos, or to book a flight may call on KAYAK.

The Microsoft Bot Framework already supports over 360,000 developers. With the acquisition of XOXCO, the company hopes to further democratise AI development, conversation and dialog, and the integration of conversational experiences where people communicate.

Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President of Conversational AI at Microsoft, wrote in a post:

“Our goal is to make AI accessible and valuable to every individual and organization, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.

To do this, Microsoft is infusing intelligence across all its products and services to extend individuals’ and organizations’ capabilities and make them more productive, providing a powerful platform of AI services and tools that makes innovation by developers and partners faster and more accessible, and helping transform business by enabling breakthroughs to current approaches and entirely new scenarios that leverage the power of intelligent technology.”

Microsoft has made several related acquisitions this year, demonstrating how important AI and bots are to the company.

• May – Microsoft bought Semantic Machines, another company working on conversational AI.
• July – Bonsai was acquired, a firm combining machine teaching, reinforcement learning, and simulation.
• September – Lobe came under Microsoft’s wing, a company aiming to make AI and deep learning development easier.

Gartner backs Microsoft’s belief in bots, recently predicting: “By 2020, conversational artificial intelligence will be a supported user experience for more than 50 percent of large, consumer-centric enterprises.”

Microsoft is setting itself up to be in one of the best positions to capitalise on the growth of conversational AIs, and it looks set to pay off.

 AI & >.

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Many were slightly disturbed by Google’s demo of its Duplex AI conducting a phone call and the other participant being unaware they weren’t speaking to a human. Less than a month later, Microsoft demonstrated it also had the same capabilities.

There are clearly big changes ahead in how we interact, and not everyone is going to be happy speaking to a robot without being aware. The B.O.T. Act (SB 1001) intends to make it illegal for a computer to speak to someone in California without revealing it’s not human.

The summary of the bill reads:

“This bill would make it unlawful for any person to use a bot, as defined, to communicate or interact with natural persons in California online with the intention of misleading and would provide that a person using a bot is presumed to act with the intent to mislead unless the person discloses that the bot is not a natural person.

The bill would require an online platform to enable users to report violations of this prohibition, to respond to the reports, and to provide the Attorney General with specified related information.”

Google and Microsoft have both said their respective AIs would reveal themselves not to be human regardless of legislation.

The B.O.T. Act is facing stiff opposition from the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) who appear to be setting themselves up as champions of rights for machines.

In a post, the EFF wrote: “Why does it matter that a bot (instead of a human) is speaking such that we should have a government mandate to force disclosure?”

The non-profit for digital privacy argues the law raises ‘significant free speech concerns’ and could represent the start of what’s going to be a long debate over what rights machines should have.

Do you think AIs should be forced to reveal themselves as not human?

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The company first launched its XiaoIce project back in August 2017. In April, Microsoft said it had achieved full duplexing — the ability to speak and listen at the same time, similar to humans.

Microsoft’s announcement was made before Google’s demonstration earlier this month but, unlike Google, the company had nothing to show at the time.

XiaoIce has now been demonstrated in action during a London event:

The chatbot is only available in China at this time, but it’s become incredibly popular with more than 500 million users.

XiaoIce also features over 230 skills and has been used to perform things such as creating news and hosting radio programs as part of its ‘Content Creation Platform’.

In a blog post, Microsoft VP of AI Harry Shum revealed that more than 600,000 people have spoken on the phone with XiaoIce since it launched in August.

“Most intelligent agents today like Alexa or Siri focus on IQ or task completion, providing basic information like weather or traffic,” wrote Shum. “But we need agents and bots to balance the smarts of IQ with EQ – our emotional intelligence.”

“When we communicate, we use tone of voice, word play, and humour, things that are very difficult for computers to understand. However, Xiaoice has the ability to have human-like verbal conversations, which the industry calls full duplex.”

As many have called for since the Duplex demo, and Google has promised, Microsoft ensures a human participant is aware they’re speaking to an AI.

One thing we’d love to see is a conversation between XiaoIce and Google Duplex to see how well they each hold up. However, let’s keep our hands on the kill switch in case world domination becomes a topic.

What are your thoughts on conversational AIs like XiaoIce and Duplex?

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Until now we’ve come to accept them as a necessary evil, but it seems CAPTCHAs are quickly becoming a waste of time. Whether it’s one that asks you to solve a simple math equation, copy a jumbled (and often utterly illegible) set of characters, or choose select blocks from a grid.

At least, that’s according to research published in the journal Science conducted by Californian artificial intelligence firm Vicarious.

To be fair, not everyone has access to the same CAPTCHA-cracking AI as Vicarious — a company with significant funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. So, for now, CAPTCHAs aren’t entirely irrelevant.

CAPTCHAs were developed in the 1990s to prevent automated bots creating mass fake accounts on websites, or buying loads of limited tickets at retail price for later scalping at much higher rates. With the number of ways that letters can be rendered and jumbled together, CAPTCHAs have been a test intended to be trivial for a human, but difficult for a machine.

Over the years, CAPTCHAs have intentionally become more difficult to solve to outsmart the machines — too much so in some cases. Google boasts its reCAPTCHA test, which is one that asks users to select the blocks containing specific features such as street signs, can only be solved by humans 87 percent of the time.

A company like Google, which has spent vast amounts of resources on building neural networks analysing millions of images, could probably build a bot to bypass even its own reCaptcha test — but it’s unlikely Google would let others have access to such software, or go down the ticket scalping route themselves (but you never know, perhaps keep an eye on their eBay page for Bieber tickets.)

Vicarious cracked basic CAPTCHA tests back in 2013 with a 90 percent accuracy rate. Since then, CAPTCHA designers went back to the drawing board and made them more difficult. Vicarious returned to their labs, and the paper claims their AI can now beat even Google’s reCAPTCHA test 66.6 percent of the time.

The AI is based on what Vicarious calls a Recursive Cortical Network. This network is supposed to mimic processes in the human brain while requiring less computing power than a full neural network; so it can identify objects even if they are obscured by other objects.

Your ball, CAPTCHA designers.

Do you think it will remain possible to fool automated bots? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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The chatbot will butt into your conversations if it feels it can be of assistance. For example, when discussing making plans it could find you nearby places, create a poll about where to go, and find time in participants’ diaries.

When you arrive you could follow up with a question like “Where are you?” and the chatbot will prompt the other person to send their real-time location. Hopefully, Facebook has reminded them about the arrangement and you’ll see them on their way. If they’re not, remember a certain nostalgic video game has just come out…

The nostalgia! #SonicMania pic.twitter.com/LpZ847TJ0n

— (@Gadget_Ry) August 15, 2017

Facebook was hyping up chatbots as the next big thing last year but they’re yet to find much traction. In its latest Hype Cycle report, Gartner has ‘Conversational User Interfaces’ as being in the ‘Innovation Trigger’ and still 5-10 years from mainstream adoption. Some even believe they hold “the future of conversational commerce”.

With its fairly unobtrusive assistance, M will help consumers ease into the realm of chatbots while capitalising on the popularity of Messenger. Google has a similar feature in its Allo chat app which taps into the power of the search engine, but the app has far fewer users.

Can I start using Facebook’s chatbot?

Facebook’s chatbot in the UK appears to still be rolling out. We’ve been able to confirm its existence through other users but we’re yet to see it live in our Messenger apps to fully test.

The chatbot responded to a query of “Where are you?” with an option to send a live location. Asking “Shall we grab some coffee somewhere?” did not prompt any help to create plans. This indicates it hasn’t fully rolled out yet, its functionality in the UK is limited, and/or M needs to improve its contextual awareness.

You can find more of our coverage on bots here.

Have you tried Facebook’s AI-based M chatbot yet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

To learn more about Bot & Virtual Assistant Development attend the AI Conference in Silicon Valley this fall (29-30th November 2017).

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