A South Carolina college professor is sounding the alarm on the use of advanced chatbots powered by artificial intelligence by students to complete various assignments.

Darren Hick, an assistant philosophy professor at Furman University, claims that one of his students used ChatGPT, an advanced AI-powered chatbot recently released by OpenAI and freely available to the public, to create a philosophy essay. While checking the essays turned in by his students, one caught his eye because of the unusual wording. It wasn’t grammatically incorrect, but it wasn’t language that a human college student would use. Hick compared it to the work “of a very smart 12th grader,” adding that the chatbot’s capacity to produce original works both terrorized and fascinated him.

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HuggieBot 3.0 is the third iteration of a robot designed by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems to deliver the perfect hug.

Hugging probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about things that robots could help humankind with, but a team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems disagrees. Alexis E. Block and her colleagues have been involved in the HuggieBot project for years, trying to create a robot that could deliver human-like hugs and thus replace actual people in various scenarios like providing comfort to the lonely, or replacing someone who just can’t deliver a hug in person for some reason. Their third iteration, the HuggieBot 3.0, is apparently quite the hugger…

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A young Chinese woman who lost an eye in a serious car accident dedicated her life to creating prosthetic eyes that glow different colors.

In 2013, Xia Tong lost one of her eyes in a car accident. She was only 18 at the time, and she had it replaced with a prosthetic eye. Instead of losing confidence in herself and shying away from people because of her appearance, the young woman decided to turn her situation to make herself stand out. After studying to become a prosthetic eye technician (ocularist), Xia Tong started making all sorts of unique prosthetics for herself, which she showed off on social media, slowly building up a loyal following.

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A Taiwanese man has been getting a lot of attention on social media after getting a payment app barcode permanently tattooed on his forearm.

The unnamed man recently took to the Taiwanese social media platform Dcard to share a functional barcode tattoo. Apparently, they had been contemplating getting a tattoo for a while, but they wanted something special instead of the artsy things people get inked. One day, while thinking about how cumbersome it was to constantly have to pull out his smartphone to pay for stuff, it hit him: why not get a functional tattoo to solve that problem? So he had a tattoo artist ink his payment app barcode on his forearm so he wouldn’t have to use his phone anymore.

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TinyCircuits, a hardware company specializing in creating tiny electronic devices, recently unveiled the world’s smallest television sets.

When it comes to modern TVs, the general consensus is that bigger is better, but one company is trying to prove that it can be successful by going against the trend. TinyCircuits, an open-source hardware company that makes all sorts of tiny electronic devices, has created the world’s smallest television sets – the TinyTV 2 and TinyTV Mini. While these retro-looking devices may be the size of postage stamps, they actually work about as well as regular-size TVs, featuring channel and volume-adjusting knobs, remote control, 8Gb of storage, and PC connectivity for uploading videos.

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A Pittsburgh-based robotics and engineering startup recently unveiled Moonwalkers, a pair of battery-powered shoes that it claims can boost walk speeds by up to 250%.

At first glance, Moonwalkers look like a pair of futuristic rollerskates, but there is actually a lot more to them than that. You’re actually meant to walk with them the way you would regular shoes or sneakers, letting the motorized wheels put a spring in your step. Powered by a state-of-the-art brushless DC motor, this ingenious contraption is actually a platform that can be attached to a wide variety of footwear to significantly increase your walking speed up to a reported 7mph/11kph. For comparison, humans’ average walking speed ranges from 2.5 to 4 mph. The sensation of walking with the world’s fastest shoes has been compared to that of walking on a ‘moving walkway’ in an airport.

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The Synthetic Party is a new political group in Denmark that is committed to following the platform thought up by an AI entity known as Leader Lars.

Out of all the political parties eyeing a seat in the Danish Parliament this year, the Synthetic Party has to be the most intriguing, by far. Founded in May by artist collective Computer lars and non-profit art and tech organization MindFuture Foundation, the new political party is dedicated to following the policies of an AI programmed on the policies of all Danish fringe parties since the 1970s that have never obtained a seat in the parliament. Apart from promoting the presence of AI in politics, the Synthetic Party also aims to become an alternative for the 20 percent of the Danish population that never votes in elections.

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Photos and videos of people walking futuristic robot dogs instead of actual canines have been going viral in China lately, signaling a trend among the younger generations.

Robotic dogs inspired by the impressive creations of Boston Dynamics have been available on Chinese shopping platforms for a while now, but they’ve only recently started actually becoming popular. Although they are sometimes being described as soulless machines that can never compare to real dogs who love their owners unconditionally, there is no denying the advantages of robot pets, and judging by the increasing number of people spotted walking their robot dogs in China lately, they may one day rival the animals they emulate.

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Japanese researchers have created smart kitchenware that relies on electricity to make food saltier and tastier without adding any extra salt.

Salt makes food taste so much better, but it’s also a very dangerous ingredient that, consumed in excess, can cause serious health problems like high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. But what if we could make food taste salty without using any salt? That’s what scientists at Meiji University and developers Kirin Holdings have been working on for several years now. Back in April, we featured their first breakthrough creation – a pair of smart chopsticks – but now they have a couple of commercial products ready to hit the shelves.

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Chinese metaverse company NetDragon Websoft recently made history by appointing an AI-powered virtual humanoid robot as its CEO.

The new AI-powered CEO, known as ‘Ms Tang Yu’, will reportedly be at the forefront of  Fujian NetDragon Websoft’s “organizational and efficiency department”, overseeing operations at the technology company valued at almost $10 billion. The board of NetDragon Websoft apparently believes that artificial intelligence is the future of corporate management, and the appointment of Ms. Tang Yu is a symbolic commitment to embrace the use of AI and change the way the company does business.

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Family Mart, Japan’s second-largest convenience store chain, recently started using AI-powered robots to restock shelves, as a way to deal with the country’s fast-shrinking workforce.

The decline in labor population is one of the biggest threats to businesses operating in Japan, and some have already started looking for ways to replace human workers. Case in point, major convenience store chain Family Mart, a company has recently teamed up with Tokyo-based robotics company Telexistence to introduce AI-powered robots in hundreds of its stores across the country. The new “employees” will be in charge of replenishing drinks in refrigerators and are expected to make human workers’ jobs easier and, in some cases, replace them completely.

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Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a new algorithm that forecasts crime with up to 90% accuracy by analyzing data and learning patterns.

Minority Report is a very popular sci-fi film about a special police unit that can arrest murderers before they commit their crimes with the help of three clairvoyant humans called Precogs, which can visualize impending homicides. It’s a brilliant film, if you like sci-fi murder mysteries, or you’re simply a fan of Tom Cruise, but the reason we bring it up in this story is that a team of researchers claims to have come up with a real-world, AI-powered system that is also able to predict crimes with an accuracy of 90%. And their systems doesn’t require Precogs, just past data so it can predict the future.

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You may think that wheels are essential when it comes to bicycles, but one resourceful engineer’s recent invention demonstrates that two half wheels are just as good as one full wheel.

Sergii Gordieiev, engineer and YouTuber extraordinaire, is known for his ingenious inventions – including a chainless bike and a drill-powered ice bike – but his latest creation undoubtedly takes the cake as the most unusual. This bizarre contraption basically has two half rear wheels instead of a complete one, and they work in tandem to do the job of a regular one. As weird as it sounds, this crazy bike shows that two half wheels, when used correctly, are just as good as one full wheel.

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Prism Courage, a 134,000-tonne commercial tanker, recently sailed from the Gulf of Mexico to South Korea while controlled mostly by an artificial intelligence system called HiNAS 2.0.

Avikus, a subsidiary of South Korean technology giant Hyundai, recently announced that Prism Courage, a tanker designed to transport natural gas, had become the first large ship to make an ocean passage of over 10,000 km (6,210 miles) autonomously. The key to this incredible achievement was HiNAS 2.0, an AI-powered system capable of analyzing different kinds of sensor readings in real-time and responding to them swiftly, efficiently, and, most importantly, in accordance with the rules of maritime laws.

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Speech2Face is an advanced neural network developed by MIT scientists and trained to recognize certain facial features and reconstruct people’s faces just by listening to the sound of their voices.

You’ve probably already heard about AI-powered cameras that can recognize people just by analyzing their facial features, but what if there was a way for artificial intelligence to figure out what you look like just by the sound of your voice and without comparing your voice to a database? That’s exactly what a team of scientists at MIT has been working on, and the results of their work are impressive, kind of. While their neural network, named Speech2Face, can’t yet figure out the exact facial features of a human just by their voice, it certainly gets plenty of details right.

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