Creativity, Ads & AI News #4

In this week’s news round up from the world of artificial intelligence, we’ve looked at AI’s role in the Coronavirus crisis.

AI database helps researchers manage Covid-19 information 

A clever AI-enabled database is helping combat research overload when it comes to Covid-19. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, has been designed to give researchers quicker and more relevant access to resources relating to the coronavirus. It was created in response to a request from the White House, and it takes advantage of AI tools to organize more than 24,000 articles about the COVID-19 disease and the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes it. 

AI saw the coronavirus coming, but can it help? 

AI may have seen the coronavirus coming, according to BlueDot, which uses machine learning to monitor outbreaks of infectious diseases around the world. The company flagged an unusual bump in pneumonia cases in Wuhan nine days before the World Health Organization officially flagged the disease. However, its current use in actually helping with the pandemic is limited, says MIT Technology Review. Instead, we could see AI help more in future crises. 

Tech giants forced to go early with AI moderation 

An interesting impact of content moderation challenges during the crisis - tech giants have been forced to step up their AI efforts. As reported in The Verge: “It’s the long-term goal of every social network to put artificial intelligence in charge. But as recently as December, Google was telling me that the day when such a thing would be possible was still quite far away. And yet on Monday the company — out of necessity — changed its tune.”  YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are now all relying more heavily on AI to pick up the burden of employee distribution combined with a huge uptick in misinformation. Hopefully, the results of this test-on-the-job approach will leave social and tech platforms in a better place long-term.