Crude futures settle lower

Oil prices declined on Wednesday.

The West Texas Intermediate for February delivery dropped 3 cents, or 0.05 percent, to settle at 58.35 U.S. dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude for February delivery lost 14 cents, or 0.22 percent, to settle at 62.24 U.S. dollars a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange.

China has issued a trial guideline on the ethics review and service of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on Friday.

The guideline, jointly issued by 10 government departments, including the ministry, calls for efforts to support technological innovation in AI ethics review and to strengthen the use of technical measures to prevent AI-related ethical risks.

The guideline clarifies that the review should focus on human well-being, fairness and justice, and controllability and trustworthiness.

It also details issues that should be addressed in the review, such as the selection criteria for training data, the rationality of the algorithm, model and system design, and measures to prevent bias, discrimination and algorithmic exploitation.

The guideline also calls for promoting the orderly open-sourcing of high-quality datasets for AI ethics review, strengthening the development of general risk management, assessment and auditing tools, and exploring risk assessment based on application scenarios.

It also encourages the promotion of AI products and services that comply with scientific and technological ethics, and the protection of intellectual property rights in AI ethics review technologies.