Optical illusions take advantage of shortcomings in the visual system. Certain special designs can trick our brain as it’s trying to process the information that’s coming in. Learning more about what can trick our minds would help us learn more about the human mind itself.
Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center Breakthrough Listen team have deployed new neural net technology to help analyze the reams of data they’ve collection—and they quickly discovered a set of mysterious, as-of-yet unexplained fast radio bursts from a distant galaxy, per…
Robots in factories are really good at picking up objects they’ve been pre-programmed to handle, but it’s a different story when new objects are thrown into the mix. To overcome this frustrating inflexibility, a team of researchers from MIT devised a system that essentially teaches robots how to assess unfamiliar…
We’ve seen lots of machine learning systems create strange new phrases and dreamlike images after being trained on large amounts of data. But a new website lets you do the generating, and the results are just as bizarre as you’d expect:
Photographers already face an uphill battle in trying to preventing people from using their digital photos without permission. But Nvidia could make protecting photos online much harder with a new advancement in artificial intelligence that can automatically remove artifacts from a photograph, including text and…
An instructor of mine once compared mixing a song to baking a cake. The various tracks are the ingredients, and once everything is mixed and baked, as with a cake, those ingredients can’t be deconstructed. Or can they? AI researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created an app…
Photographers who still shoot on film claim they like the lo-fi, grainy aesthetics of the medium. But by that logic, they should be throwing hundreds of dollars at Dan Macnish who created a custom instant camera that converts what the camera’s lens sees into crude, stick figure doodles.
One of the hardest video effects to fake is slow motion. It requires software to stretch out a clip by creating hundreds of non-existent in-between frames, and the results are often stuttered and unconvincing. But taking advantage of the incredible image-processing potential of deep learning, Nvidia has come up with a…
By now, you’ve probably seen the satirical posts where someone claims to have “forced a bot” to watch thousands of hours of video and then write their own script. The posts are funny, but if you haven’t realized, they’re jokes that don’t quite encapsulate how artificial intelligence works.
The information age has generated far more data than humanity can ever hope to manually process, but with the help of artificial intelligence, that avalanche of data is now revealing itself to be far more useful than we ever thought possible. The omnipresent wireless signals that keep us connected can now be used like…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible.
The technical skills of programmer John Carmack helped create the 3D world of Doom, the first-person shooter that took over the world 25 years ago. But it was level designers like John Romero and American McGee that made the game fun to play. Level designers that, today, might find their jobs threatened by the …
Will all the warped images and funny names, it can be easy to forget that machine learning can have important uses in science—specifically, when it comes to categorizing things. Scientists have lately been putting a neural network to good use identifying distant galaxies.
The same way a human only knows as much as they’ve studied or experienced, an artificial intelligence is only as smart as its training. But unlike a child, you can selectively limit what an AI learns and knows, and then conduct fun experiments about how it sees and interprets the real world using its basic…
When you look at fur, the light has taken an extended journey before hitting your eye, bouncing around lots of fur fibers and their microscopic structures. You can imagine that it’s quite difficult for filmmakers to render these structures in CGI.
The sky as a great black ceiling full of blood. Hagrid’s shrieking furniture. Harry dipping Hermione in hot sauce. Instead of just reading the wacky adventure, now you can watch all these moments from the predictive keyboard opus Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash come to life,…
A lot of people are banking on a future ruled by artificial intelligence, but in its current form, AI can still be hilariously dumb.
As you gather round the fireplace this Christmas and your smug second cousin decides it’s time to drunkenly berate everyone about the blockchain market, try drowning him out with this new, technologically-advanced carol: “Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ. Fa la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.”
Last month Nvidia revealed its work on using competing neural networks to generate random, but convincing, photos of non-existent celebrities. A website called MakeGirlsMoe does almost the same thing, but instead of celebs, it churns out never-ending headshots of anime characters.
In 2015, Google released DeepDream, a bonkers, art-generating neural net users put to work rendering everything from disturbing dog collages to even more disturbing psychedelic porn. DeepDream may have just been the prelude to less aesthetically off-putting but much more significant applications of the slightly creepy…
