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…
Is there nothing neural networks can’t do? And while the paint colors, metal bands, recipes, and so on were fun, a computer’s attempt to learn about fanfic and reproduce its summaries has filled me with a joy greater than anything else on Earth.
Remember when metal band names were good? Names like RATT and Poison and Mötley Crüe elicited the perfect image: slick, sweaty men licking their guitars while wearing tight leather pants and acid washed jeans, wagging their hair-sprayed manes and rocking out harder than any of us so-called millennials could even…
Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Instagram feeds have been flooded with creepily realistic facial transformations produced by “FaceApp,” a free app for iOS and Android whose filters add smiles to photos, alter faces to make them older or younger, and even make them “male” or “female.” The app’s startling…
Human character animation has gotten much better over the years, but it’s still one of the most recognizable issues when enjoying video games. Animations are normally a predetermined set of canned motions, and while real enough looking in the right setting, can totally break the immersive experience when they stray…
By now we’ve seen everything from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Donald Trump to popular memes processed by neural networks like Google’s Deep Dream. They’re like bizarre drug trips, but without the drugs. But it was only recently that Alexander Reben was curious enough to see what a neural network would make of…
If you’re a miserable drawer, have no fear—a new website takes your doodles and, using a machine learning algorithm, turns them into cats. Or nightmares.
The team at Google Brain has made an impressive breakthrough for increasing the resolution of images. They’ve managed to turn 8x8 grids of pixels into monstrous approximations of human beings.
Behold the glorious future of neural networks: disembodied faces rotating in the darkness. Research submitted to Cornell University uses deep neural networks to create detailed 3D models of faces using a single 2D picture.
When an app claims to be powered by “artificial intelligence” it feels like you’re in the future. What does that really mean, though? We’re taking a look at what buzzwords like AI, machine learning, and neural networks really mean and whether they actually help improve your apps.
Is that a baby or the blob? It’s actually just the sick and twisted result of a neural network predicting what a still photo of a baby would look like if it were moving. Researchers at MIT have published demonstrations of their work on generative video, and the “hallucinated” outcomes of are both impressive and…
This creep machine, called Alter, runs entirely off a neural network. That means all its incoherent and erratic movements are 100 percent free of any human control. It’s basically alive.
We’re getting A.I. to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things these days, whether its on the small-scale of text prediction or captioning photos, to driving cars for us and beating people at board games. But what if we turned a neural network into a science fiction writer? The answer is that you’d get a complete…
Microsoft just launched a new online app that offers to try and understand the contents of your photographs and write captions for them. And it’s surprisingly impressive—most of the time.
