Registration of AI-assisted comic comes amid fierce online debate about AI art ethics.
In what might be a first, a New York-based artist named Kris Kashtanova has received US copyright registration on their graphic novel that features AI-generated artwork created by latent diffusion AI, according to their Instagram feed and confirmed through a public records search by Ars Technica.
The registration, effective September 15, applies to a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. Kashtanova created the artwork for Zarya using Midjourney, a commercial image synthesis service. Read More
Monthly Archives: September 2022
Student Sparks Debate by Revealing That They Use AI to Write Essays
Artificial intelligence has improved at an alarming rate over the past few years. Anybody with the most basic of technical knowledge is only a few clicks away from all kinds of weird and wonderful tidbits brought to us by the wonders of robotic thinking. While there’s no doubt that there are benefits to these advancements, we are also getting to a point where they are upending some of the things that we take for granted.
This trend has been revealed in a recent Reddit post, in which a high school student claims that they have started to write their homework assignments using AI — and that they were even making money by doing it for their classmates. Not everybody was as much of a fan of this new method for school work as they were, not least because it has some bad implications for what they are actually learning. Who needs an education anyway? Read More
Chipotle announces Chippy, an A.I. kitchen assistant
The robot, designed by Miso Robotics, will be able to cook and season the chain’s popular chips
Chipotle announced that it’s testing a chip-making robot at its innovation hub in Irvine, California. The device will be integrated at one of the chain’s restaurants in southern California later this year. Read More
EU draft rules to make it easier to sue drone makers, AI systems
Individuals and companies that suffer harm from drones, robots and other products or services equipped with artificial intelligence software will find it easier to sue for compensation under EU draft rules seen by Reuters.
The AI Liability Directive, which the European Commission will announce on Wednesday, aims to address the increasing proliferation of AI-enabled products and services and the patchwork of national rules across the 27-country European Union. Read More
Security in the billions: Toward a multinational strategy to better secure the IoT ecosystem
The explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services worldwide has contributed to an explosion in data processing and interconnectivity. Simultaneously, this interconnection and resulting interdependence have amplified a range of cybersecurity risks to individuals’ data, company networks, critical infrastructure, and the internet ecosystem writ large. Governments, companies, and civil society have proposed and implemented a range of IoT cybersecurity initiatives to meet this challenge, ranging from introducing voluntary standards and best practices to mandating the use of cybersecurity certifications and labels. However, issues like fragmentation among and between approaches, complex certification schemes, and placing the burden on buyers have left much to be desired in bolstering IoT cybersecurity. Ugly knock-on effects to states, the private sector, and users bring risks to individual privacy, physical safety, other parts of the internet ecosystem, and broader economic and national security.
In light of this systemic risk, this report offers a multinational strategy to enhance the security of the IoT ecosystem. It provides a framework for a clearer understanding of the IoT security landscape and its needs—one that focuses on the entire IoT product lifecycle, looks to reduce fragmentation between policy approaches, and seeks to better situate technical and process guidance into cybersecurity policy. Principally, it analyzes and uses as case studies the United States, United Kingdom (UK), Australia, and Singapore, due to combinations of their IoT security maturity, overall cybersecurity capacity, and general influence on the global IoT and internet security conversation. It additionally examines three industry verticals, smart homes, networking and telecommunications, and consumer healthcare, which cover different products and serve as a useful proxy for understanding the broader IoT market because of their market size, their consumer reach, and their varying levels of security maturity. Read More
Turn anyone into a pokémon with this AI art model
A fun little AI art widget named Text-to-Pokémon lets you plug in any name or description you like and (you guessed it) generate a pokémon matching your prompt.
The model’s output isn’t flawless, but it’s incredibly entertaining all the same. You can try punching in the names of celebrities or politicians (see “Boris Johnson” and “Vladimir Putin” in the image above) or just general descriptions of the sort of pokémon that would tickle your personal fancy (the one below is my “skeleton priest”). Read More
An AI program voiced Darth Vader in ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ so James Earl Jones could finally retire
A startup called Respeecher recreated the actor’s voice as it was in 1977.
After 45 years of voicing one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, James Earl Jones has said goodbye to Darth Vader. At 91, the legendary actor recently told Disney he was “looking into winding down this particular character.” That forced the company to ask itself how do you even replace Jones? The answer Disney eventually settled on, with the actor’s consent, involved an AI program.
If you’ve seen any of the recent Star Wars shows, you’ve heard the work of Respeecher. It’s a Ukrainian startup that uses archival recordings and a “proprietary AI algorithm” to create new dialogue featuring the voices of “performers from long ago.” In the case of Jones, the company worked with Lucasfilm to recreate his voice as it had sounded when film audiences first heard Darth Vader in 1977. Read More
Star Wars: James Earl Jones steps back from Darth Vader role
James Earl Jones is the voice behind legendary Star Wars’ villain Darth Vader, but it seems the 91-year-old has finally hung up his helmet.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Star Wars sound supervising editor Matthew Wood said Jones “was looking into winding down this… character”.
Jones’s voice was remastered from the original Star Wars films for recent Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Some of Jones’s archival voice recordings were also used.
For future Star Wars projects, Jones has reportedly granted permission for Disney and Lucasfilm to use artificial intelligence and archival recordings to recreate his voice. Read More
This guy is using AI to make a movie — and you can help decide what happens next
CNN — “Salt” resembles many science-fiction films from the ’70s and early ‘80s, complete with 35mm footage of space freighters and moody alien landscapes. But while it looks like a throwback, the way it was created points to what could be a new frontier for making movies.
“Salt” is the brainchild of Fabian Stelzer. He’s not a filmmaker, but for the last few months he’s been largely relying on artificial intelligence tools to create this series of short films, which he releases roughly every few weeks on Twitter.
Stelzer creates images with image-generation tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E 2. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. And he uses GPT-3, a text-generator, to help with the script writing.
There’s an element of audience participation, too. After each new installment, viewers can vote on what should happen next. Stelzer takes the results of these polls and incorporates them into the plot of future films, which he can spin up more quickly than a traditional filmmaker might since he’s using these AI tools. Read More
Meta’s AI guru LeCun: Most of today’s AI approaches will never lead to true intelligence
Fundamental problems elude many strains of deep learning, says LeCun, including the mystery of how to measure information.
Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist of Meta Properties, owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is likely to tick off a lot of people in his field.
With the posting in June of a think piece on the Open Review server, LeCun offered a broad overview of an approach he thinks holds promise for achieving human-level intelligence in machines.
Implied if not articulated in the paper is the contention that most of today’s big projects in AI will never be able to reach that human-level goal. Read More
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