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…
Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero,…
Neural networks have important purposes that people are excited about. But that’s not really what I’m interested in, and probably not how you’re familiar with the technology anyway. When I think of neural networks, I think of horrible drawings of cats, trippy visuals, and guinea pig names. That list now also includes…
Artificial intelligence networks have already come to the rescue of craft brewers, metal bands, and guinea pig owners who are looking for wacky new names. Now, digital consultant Dan Hon wants to use those same neural networks to help Britain come up with even more amusing place names.
Craft brewers are running out of beer names. NPR reports that companies are having to compromise over shared a name, or getting in Twitter fights over them. Even lawyers are settling spats over imagery, or hop puns like Hopscotch and Bitter End.
Professional photographers often spend hours painstakingly perfecting their images in Lightroom and Photoshop before sharing them with the world. But researchers at MIT are promising similar results generated so quickly that your smartphone can correct and retouch a photo before you’ve even taken it.
Researchers at MIT have developed deep-learning algorithm that can compile a list of ingredients and even recommend recipes after looking at photos of food. The artificially intelligent system still needs some fine tuning, but this tool could eventually help us learn to cook, count calories, and track our eating…
Imagine the worst case scenario. Dubious filmmakers use artificially intelligent computers to feed raw audio into a simulated version of Barack Obama. The audio is actually Obama’s voice, and the face really is his face. But the lip movements? Totally fake. The filmmakers publish the video on the internet, and it’s…
