Grok scandal highlights how AI industry is ‘too unconstrained’, tech pioneer says
The scandal over the flood of intimate images on Elon Musk’s X created non-consensually by its Grok AI tool has underlined how the artificial intelligence industry is “too unconstrained”, according to a pioneer of the technology.Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist described as one of the modern “godfathers of AI”, said tech companies were building systems without appropriate technical and societal guardrails.Bengio spoke to the Guardian as he appointed the historian Yuval Noah Harari and the former Rolls-Royce chief executive Sir John Rose to the board of his AI safety lab.X has announced it is stopping Grok from manipulating pictures of real people to show them in revealing clothes such as bikinis, including for premium subscribers, after a public and political backlash.Asked what the furore showed about the state of the AI industry, Bengio said the situation across the sector was “not completely a free for all” but needed to be addressed.
“It is too unconstrained and, because frontier AI companies are building increasingly powerful systems without the appropriate technical and societal guardrails, this is starting to have more and more visible negative effects on people,” Bengio said,Part of the solution was better governance, he said, including placing moral heavyweights on company boards,As well as Harari and Rose, Bengio has appointed Maria Eitel, the founder of the Nike Foundation – a philanthropic wing of the multinational sports group – as the chair of his safety lab, LawZero, which launched last year,Bengio earned the “godfather of AI” moniker after winning the 2018 Turing award, seen as the equivalent of a Nobel prize for computing,He shared it with Geoffrey Hinton, who later won a Nobel, and Yann LeCun, a former chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
The former Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven will be the first member of the NGO’s global advisory council.Harari, the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, has been a prominent voice of caution on AI development and recently published a book, Nexus, outlining his concerns.“It’s not only a technical discussion for companies building frontier AI systems,” said Bengio.“It also comes down to what choices are made about AI that we consider to be morally right.”Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, has secured $35m (£26m) of funding for LawZero.
It is building a system called Scientist AI that will work alongside autonomous systems – knows as AI agents – and flag potentially harmful behaviour.“The whole construction of the board has been guided by the idea that we need a group of people who are extremely reliable in a moral sense, who can help us keep to LawZero’s mission of delivering technical solutions for trustworthy, highly capable, safe-by-design AI systems as a global public good,” said Bengio.Last month, Bengio warned against granting AI rights, saying it was showing signs of self-preservation – a key area of concern for AI safety campaigners – and humans should not be impeded from pulling the plug on such systems.
Jewish American columnist Thomas Friedman says he was uninvited from 2024 Adelaide writers’ week over ‘timing’
A New York Times columnist at the centre of a second controversy engulfing Adelaide writers’ week has said he was uninvited from the event in 2024.Thomas Friedman, who is Jewish, confirmed to Nine newspapers on Thursday that after he agreed to appear in a video link session, he was subsequently notified “that the timing would not work out”.Earlier this week, former festival board member Tony Berg, who is of Jewish heritage, made an extraordinary accusation of “hypocrisy” against the director of Adelaide writers’ week, Louise Adler, saying she had lobbied for the removal of Friedman from the festival lineup.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailAt the time, a group of 10 academics had signed a petition demanding Friedman’s removal due to a controversial column he had written in the New York Times days earlier, which compared the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom. The Palestinian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was uninvited from this year’s writers’ week, was among the group
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy review – Holly Hunter is a transgressive thrill in this horny high-school spinoff
This hormone-fuelled tale of the training college for space voyagers is like Grange Hill, with phasers – and it has a female lead unlike any captain beforeThe original Star Trek TV series debuted in 1966, so trying to get your head round all the sequels, prequels and timeline-splitting spin-offs can often feel like homework. It was only a matter of time before the venerable sci-fi franchise used a school as a setting. But Starfleet Academy, the latest streaming series, is not some random cosmic polytechnic for aliens to study humanities or vice versa. This is the oft-referenced San Francisco space campus sited right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. With James T Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard on the alumni list, it is basically Hogwarts for wannabe starship captains
Adelaide festival apologises to Randa Abdel-Fattah and invites her to participate in 2027 writers’ week
The new Adelaide festival board has issued a public apology to Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has promised she will be invited to Adelaide writers’ week in 2027.Abdel-Fattah immediately accepted the apology, posting on Instagram that it was a vindication “of our collective solidarity and mobilisation against anti-Palestinian racism, bullying and censorship”.She said she was still considering the board’s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.In a statement on Thursday morning, Adelaide Festival Corporation acknowledged they had previously said they would exclude Abdel-Fattah from this year’s event “because it would be culturally insensitive to allow her to participate. We retract that statement”
Churchill’s desk and rare artwork among items donated to UK cultural institutions
Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli’s desk, a painting by Vanessa Bell and a rare artwork by Edgar Degas are among the items of cultural importance saved for the nation this year.The items, worth a total of £59.7m, will be allocated to museums, galleries, libraries and archives around the UK as part of Art Council England’s cultural gifts and acceptance in lieu schemes.Some items were accepted for their outstanding rarity, cultural value or technical skills, while others offer insights into the UK’s history through some of the nation’s most renowned public figures.The Regency mahogany standing desk used by Churchill and Disraeli during their times as prime minister has been allocated to the National Trust’s Hughenden Manor, Disraeli’s former country house
Jimmy Kimmel on ICE shooting of Renee Good: ‘They’re investigating the victims instead of the perpetrator’
Late-night hosts responded to the Trump administration’s escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action in Minneapolis and its criminal investigation into the Fed chair, Jerome Powell.Jimmy Kimmel opened Tuesday’s monologue with a summary of “another bananas speech” by Donald Trump – this time at the Detroit Economic Club, where he tried to convince attenders that the protests in Minneapolis over the ICE shooting of Renee Good were “fake”.“They’re not riots, they’re real,” Kimmel responded. “First they want us to believe that we did not see what we all saw happen to Renee Good. Now he wants us to believe that the protests aren’t real
‘A very tough moment’: how Trump has put museums in jeopardy
From Times Square to the Washington Monument, America saw in the new year with a bigger bang than usual, celebrating the fact that 2026 marks the nation’s 250th birthday. Yet as the US looks back, precious repositories of the nation’s history are facing an uncertain future.Museum attendances are down. Budgets are precarious. Cuts in federal funding are taking their toll
ADHD care needs better regulation and fewer pills | Letters
Religious tradition, child safety and the law on circumcision | Letters
Woman pulled out of UK ultramarathon after death threats over Afghanistan fundraising
Circumcision kits found on sale on Amazon UK as concerns grow over harm to baby boys
One in four UK teenagers in care have attempted to end their lives, study says
Five minutes more exercise and 30 minutes less sitting could help millions live longer