An exciting multiplayer Discord game asks you to find things in the multiverse through an AI image generator. The hallucinatory results could mark a new frontier for AI art
The Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration is an unusual workplace. Maude Fletcher’s alright, though she needs to learn how to turn off caps lock in the company chat. But trying to deal with Byron G Snodgrass is like handling an energetic poodle, and Phil is a bit stiff.
Sorry, that was unclear. Byron G Snodgrass is an energetic poodle. Phil is a plant. A peace lily, I think.
… The BMA is the setting, and title, of a … thing, created by game company Aconite, helmed by Nadya Lev and Star St.Germain. I say “thing” because it’s not clear how best to describe what the pair have made. Calling it a video game summons up all the wrong impressions, but it’s hardly an experience or a toy, either. A larp (live-action roleplay) might be closer if it was live action, but it’s not: BMA is played in a Discord channel, the gamer-focused chat app standing in for the Bureau’s internal slack. St.Germain calls it a “Discord game”, which works well enough.
The Multiversal Search Engine at the core of the game is actually a carefully managed version of the Stable Diffusion AI image generator. Players are given assignments – like finding that dessert – which they use as prompts for the image generator, competing with enough others to generate the best responses, with the winning creation, voted on by all players, being stuck on the virtual fridge for everyone to see – and, if you’re lucky, praised by Maude. Read More
Daily Archives: December 1, 2022
Elon Musk’s Neuralink Event: Everything Revealed in 10 Minutes
The Streets Are Watching
The internet is saturated with hyper-targeted advertising that draws on users’ browsing habits, their interactions with the web and assumptions made about them by online advertisers.
Now these personalised online ads are reaching out of our screens and following us onto the streets, as profiling and predictive analytics are used to determine not just the sponsored post in your Twitter feed, but what is shown on a digital billboard on your walk to work. This is the new era of advertising surveillance.
Billboard advertising is becoming increasingly data-driven with high-tech tools beingused to make sure that screens show the right adverts at the right time of day. From facial detection algorithms used to tailor displays to massive data gathering operations that aggregate information collected from our phones with other sources to model exactly who will pass by a billboard and when, the physical advertising space is becoming ever more personalised and intrusive. Read More
Speech-to-speech translation for a real-world unwritten language
We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training data collection, modeling choices to benchmark dataset release. First, we present efforts on creating human annotated data, automatically mining data from large unlabeled speech datasets, and adopting pseudo-labeling to produce weakly supervised data. On the modeling, we take advantage of recent advances in applying self-supervised discrete representations as target for prediction in S2ST and show the effectiveness of leveraging additional text supervision from Mandarin, a language similar to Hokkien, in model training. Finally, we release an S2ST benchmark set to facilitate future research in this field. Read More
San Francisco police can now use robots to kill
The killer robot discussion is no longer strictly the domain of ‘RoboCop’
Last week, we talked about killer robots. That piece was inspired by a proposal that would allow San Francisco police to use robots for killing “when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD.” Last night, that proposal passed the city’s board of supervisors with an 8-3 vote.
he language was included in a new “Law Enforcement Equipment Policy” filed by the San Francisco Police Department in response to California Assembly Bill 481, which requires a written inventory of the military equipment utilized by law enforcement. The document submitted to the board of supervisors includes — among other things — the Lenco BearCat armored vehicle, flash-bang grenades and 15 submachine guns. Read More
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