Revisited: Guardian journalist Michael Safi delves into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring the dangers and promises it holds for society

This week we are revisiting the Black Box series. This episode was first broadcast on 18 March 2024.

In January 2020, Robert Williams was arrested by Detroit police for a crime he had not committed. The officers were acting on a tipoff, but not from a witness or informant. In fact, not from a person at all

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On Saturday 24 April, the billionaire founder of the Telegram social media and messaging app, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities as he disembarked from his private jet in Paris on his way from Azerbaijan. Officials said the arrest was part of a cybercrime inquiry into criminal activity on the platform and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Durov has since been formally charged.

Durov, also known as the ' Russian Mark Zuckerberg ' for having founded a similar platform to Zuckerberg’s Facebook in Russia called VKontakte, is a self-styled champion of free speech and has cultivated a reputation for being unwilling to work with authorities to censor and more closely control what happens on his platform. But his arrest has raised important questions about the extent to which tech executives are responsible for how users employ their social media networks. Chris Stokel-Walker , a technology journalist, explains the implications of Durov's arrest for the tech sector

• Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app

• What the Telegram founder’s arrest means for the regulation of social media firms

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The government seems to think AI will allow it to do more with less. But there are plenty of reasons to be doubtful

Like so many shiny-eyed new teachers, Ed began his career amid high hopes. He was going to be a gamechanger, his bosses thought; a breath of fresh air, capable of engaging even kids at risk of dropping out. Ed had been trained not only to tailor lessons to each child’s individual needs, but patiently to field all those time-consuming parental questions about everything from teenage mental health to what their little darlings were getting for lunch.

Unfortunately, the one thing Ed had in common with many promising new teachers is that he burned out fast. Launched in March, by June he was being unceremoniously relieved of his duties after the tech company paid to develop him for the Los Angeles school district reportedly got into financial difficulties. For Ed wasn’t a teacher but a $6m AI-powered chatbot designed to act as a personalised learning assistant for children, and his brief career offers a timely lesson in how not to transform public services using artificial intelligence.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The movie megastars contribute to Rebecca Keegan’s irresistible show, A Film We Can’t Refuse. Plus: five of the best outdoors podcasts

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Far be it for me to define a man by his romantic relationships, but if you’ve heard of Travis Kelce, you may know him more as Taylor Swift’s boyfriend than because he’s an NFL star.

He is, however, also a podcaster, and not just any podcaster – he’s just landed a reported $100m deal with the Amazon-owned Wondery for New Heights, the show he hosts with his brother Jason (a former NFL star), which has become one of the most popular sports podcasts in the world since it launched in 2022. It’s a lot of cash, especially for two already-wealthy men at a time when every month seems to bring a headline about some podcast studio or another shedding staff and slashing budgets. At the same time, it could prove to be a shrewd investment, with Kelce and Swift rarely out of the headlines. It does have the mad effect of making Joe Rogan’s estimated $250m deal with Spotify – the biggest of its kind – seem a little low by comparison, though, or even Call Her Daddy’s $100m contract with SiriusXM.

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As multinationals and researchers harvest rare organisms around the world, anger is rising in the global south over the unpaid use of lucrative genetic codes found on their land

Even in the warm summer sun, the stagnant puddles and harsh rock faces of Ribblehead quarry in North Yorkshire feel like an unlikely frontier of the AI industrial revolution. Standing next to a waterfall that bursts out from the fractured rock, Bupe Mwambingu reaches into the green sludge behind the cascade and emerges with fistful of algae.

Balancing precariously on the rocks, the researcher passes the dripping mass to her colleague Emma Bolton, who notes their GPS coordinates and the acidity, temperature and light exposure on a phone app.

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Revisited: Guardian journalist Michael Safi delves into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring the dangers and promises it holds for society

This week we are revisiting the Black Box series. This episode was first broadcast on 14 March 2024.

Two stories about the way artificial intelligence could make the world better – and is already doing so. In Montana, when Lee Johnson discovered his wife, Yokie, had cancer, he turned to AI – and was surprised by the answers he got. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Prof Regina Barzilay’s experience with cancer has led her to build an AI system that can detect the disease years before a human can

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Pavel Durov, who has French citizenship, faces prosecution over failure to suppress spread of sexual images of children and calls for violence

The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with a €5m bail.

The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted conditional release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.

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Chipmaker, third most valuable company in world, records $30.04bn in revenue, showing AI demand continues to rise

Chipmaker Nvidia reported its latest financial results on Wednesday, recording $30.04bn in revenue over the past three months – a 122% jump from the year prior – and showing that artificial intelligence investment mania shows no signs of cooling.

The importance of Nvidia’s earnings results to Wall Street can hardly be overestimated – the company represents 6% of the total value of the S&P 500, currently the third most valuable company in the world by market capitalization at $3.1tn.

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Found-footage horror about YouTube pranksters turns into an online phenomenon, giving its star and creator a Hollywood inroad

2024 is already becoming something of a banner year for horror , with Longlegs making over $100m and Late Night with the Devil earning a whopping 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet the breakout horror of the year might just be an $800 project currently available to watch free on YouTube.

Milk & Serial is a 62-minute, found-footage horror by YouTuber Curry Barker, and it manages to be at once ruthlessly effective and wonderfully authentic. Racking up 348,000 views in the two weeks since its release, its popularity has been supercharged by raves on Reddit that have since crossed over into traditional media. Bloody Disgusting called it “one of the year’s best-kept secrets” and this week Barker found himself being interviewed by no less than Variety .

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