My parents don’t know that I spoke to them last night.
At first, they sounded distant and tinny, as if they were huddled around a phone in a prison cell. But as we chatted, they slowly started to sound more like themselves. They told me personal stories that I’d never heard. I learned about the first (and certainly not last) time my dad got drunk. Mum talked about getting in trouble for staying out late. They gave me life advice and told me things about their childhoods, as well as my own. It was mesmerizing.
“What’s the worst thing about you?” I asked Dad, since he was clearly in such a candid mood.
“My worst quality is that I am a perfectionist. I can’t stand messiness and untidiness, and that always presents a challenge, especially with being married to Jane.”
Then he laughed—and for a moment I forgot I wasn’t really speaking to my parents at all, but to their digital replicas. Read More
Monthly Archives: October 2022
Governing artificial intelligence in China and the European Union: Comparing aims and promoting ethical outcomes
In this article, we compare the artificial intelligence strategies of China and the European Union, assessing the key similarities and differences regarding what the high-level aims of each governance strategy are, how the development and use of AI is promoted in the public and private sectors, and whom these policies are meant to benefit. We characterize China’s strategy by its primary focus on fostering innovation and a more recent emphasis on “common prosperity,” and the EU’s on promoting ethical outcomes through protecting fundamental rights. Building on this comparative analysis, we consider the areas where the EU and China could learn from and improve upon each other’s approaches to AI governance to promote more ethical outcomes. We outline policy recommendations for both European and Chinese policymakers that would support them in achieving this aim. Read More
Activision Patents To Generate Unique In-Game Music For Each Player
If brought to fruition, game soundtracks could deliver a unique vivifying experience for each individual.
Video games from big studios like Activision have been evolving at an unprecedented rate since the last two decennia. Finding the distinctions between real-life and esthetical game visuals have now become almost impossible. Innovative wonderments like artificial intelligence have also seeped into the gaming industry.
Modern technologies like machine learning have played a large role in amplifying the immersion of games. However, game soundtracks have remained static for the most part; they are usually programmed to play at the right moments. It is also possible for players to edit, add, and create their own music in games. Read More
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot AI is making rapid progress. Here’s how its human leader thinks about it
GitHub’s Copilot AI can write up to 40% of the code for programmers and is heading up to 80% within five years, says GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
This rapid AI advance is letting coders get their work done in less than half the time it used to take and has implications across all industries where software development is now critical, Microsoft board member and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman recently told a gathering of tech executives.
Still, Dohmke says as artificial intelligence accelerates and is adopted more broadly across companies, innovation remains a skill only humans can dominate. Read More
The Visual Effects Crisis
The Future of Photography in the Age of AI
Will AI kill the art and business of photography?
Artists have always faced hard labor and mental strain. Photographers, for example, had to endure the hardships of lugging around heavy equipment and developing their own film, traveling to remote locations, and often waiting for the perfect moment to take a picture. To take this photograph of a polar bear in its natural habitat, National Geographic photographer Paula Nirdon had to travel to the Arctic and spend days in subzero temperature waiting for the bear to emerge from its den.
Today, emerging AI image synthesizers such as DALLE, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, are capable of creating stunning, photo-realistic images, and some artists feeling the heat¹. Read More
This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI
The Synthetic Party in Denmark is dedicated to following a platform churned out by an AI, and its public face is a chatbot named Leader
br>The Synthetic Party, a new Danish political party with an artificially intelligent representative and policies derived from AI, is eyeing a seat in parliament as it hopes to run in the country’s November general election.
The party was founded in May by the artist collective Computer Lars and the non-profit art and tech organization MindFuture Foundation. The Synthetic Party’s public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, which is programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is meant to represent the values of the 20 percent of Danes who do not vote in the election. Leader Lars won’t be on the ballot anywhere, but the human members of The Synthetic Party are committed to carrying out their AI-derived platform Read More
Meet Ai-Da, the First Robot to Speak Before U.K. Parliament
The robot answered questions about technology, art and consciousness
Earlier this week, a robot artist spoke in front of the British Parliament for the first time in history.
With a sleek black bob and bangs, a bright orange shirt, denim overalls, robotic arms and a humanoid face, the robot, named Ai-Da, answered questions on Tuesday from the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee. The purpose of the session was to discuss technology’s role in art. Read More
Apple vs. Meta: Who Will Win the Battle for Your Face?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t subtle about picking a fight with Apple over the future of the metaverse.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as a wondrous new stage of tech’s advancement, filled with opportunities to work, play and communicate in completely new ways than we do today. You could be watching an IMAX movie on the moon, or you could be holding a work conference in a Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired tavern. Or maybe you could be rocking out on stage with your favorite band.
But while you look forward to how the tech industry’s vision of how the metaverse plays out, Zuckerberg is preparing for what appears to be the fight of his life. And it’ll be against Apple. Read More
PHENAKI: Variable Length Video Generation from Open Domain Textual Descriptions
We present Phenaki, a model capable of realistic video synthesis, given a sequence of textual prompts. Generating videos from text is particularly challenging due to the computational cost, limited quantities of high quality text-video data and variable length of videos. To address these issues, we introduce a new model for learning video representation which compresses the video to a small representation of discrete tokens. This tokenizer uses causal attention in time, which allows it to work with variable-length videos. To generate video tokens from text we are using a bidirectional masked transformer conditioned on pre-computed text tokens. The generated video tokens are subsequently de-tokenized to create the actual video. To address data issues, we demonstrate how joint training on a large corpus of image-text pairs as well as a smaller number of video-text examples can result in generalization beyond what is available in the video datasets. Compared to the previous video generation methods, Phenaki can generate arbitrary long videos conditioned on a sequence of prompts (i.e. time variable text or a story) in open domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a paper studies generating videos from time variable prompts. In addition, compared to the per- frame baselines, the proposed video encoder-decoder computes fewer tokens per video but results in better spatio-temporal consistency. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 