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AI

ANNOUNCEMENT/GIVEAWAY: The Shoreless Sea, by J. Scott Coatsworth

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The Shoreless Sea

QSFer J. Scott Coatsworth has a new queer sci fi book out, the final book in his Liminal Sky trilogy: “The Shoreless Sea.” And books one and two are on sale! As the epic trilogy hurtles toward its conclusion, the fight for the future isn’t over yet. It could lead to a new beginning, or it might spell the end for the last vestiges of humankind. The generation ship Forever has left Earth behind, but a piece of the old civilization lives on in the Inthworld—a virtual realm that retains memories of Earth’s technological wonders and vices. A being named … Read more

How Will Deepfake AIs Change Our World?

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Deepfake Mona Lisa

Of all the scary powers of the internet, it’s ability to trick the unsuspecting might be the most frightening. Clickbait, photoshopped pictures and false news are some of the worst offenders, but recent years have also seen the rise of a new potentially dangerous tool known as deepfake artificial intelligence (AI). The term deepfake refers to counterfeit, computer-generated video and audio that is hard to distinguish from genuine, unaltered content. It is to film what Photoshop is for images. The tool relies on what’s known as generative adversarial networks (GANs), a technique invented in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow, a Ph.D. … Read more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An AI Created a Model of Our Universe. We Have No Idea How it Works (But it Does)

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universe - pixabay

The first-ever artificial intelligence simulation of the universe seems to work like the real thing — and is almost as mysterious. Researchers reported the new simulation June 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The goal was to create a virtual version of the cosmos in order to simulate different conditions for the universe’s beginning, but the scientists also hope to study their own simulation to understand why it works so well. “It’s like teaching image-recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” study co-author Shirley Ho, … Read more

An AI Animates the Mona Lisa, and It’s freaky – Live Science

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The enigmatic, painted smile of the “Mona Lisa” is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as she moves her lips and turns her head. She was created by a convolutional neural network — a type of AI that processes information much as a human brain does, to analyze and process images. Researchers trained the algorithm to understand facial features’ general shapes and how they behave relative to each other, and then … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Is Creepy-Good at predicting Early Death

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ai - pixabay

Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person’s early death. Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if individuals were at risk of dying prematurely — in other words, sooner than the average life expectancy — from chronic disease, they reported in a new study. The predictions of early death that were made by AI algorithms were “significantly more accurate” than predictions delivered by a model that did … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Sucks at Making Adorable Cat Photos

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Artificial intelligence (AI) recently tried to generate cat photos from scratch, and the results were cat-astrophic. This particular neural network (a type of AI modeled after the workings of the human brain) can produce astonishingly realistic original photos of human faces. In fact, the images of these made-up people were nearly impossible for human viewers to distinguish from photos of real people, programmers of the AI reported in a study that was posted December 2018 to the preprint journal arXiv. Felines, however, proved to be another story. The same algorithm that generated flawless human faces created cats with misshapen heads; … Read more

FOR WRITERS: I’m In Love With an AI

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FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Tam Ames: Could you have a romance between a human and software? Using virtual technology to have sex or communicate, but no physical body? Will we want to? Could a good author really make readers believe it’s “real” romance? Join the chat

AI Can Now Read Your Mind (Sort Of)

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astronaut brains - pixabay

Neuroscientists are teaching computers to read words straight out of people’s brains. Kelly Servick, writing for Science, reported this week on three papers posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in which three different teams of researchers demonstrated that they could decode speech from recordings of neurons firing. In each study, electrodes placed directly on the brain recorded neural activity while brain-surgery patients listened to speech or read words out loud. Then, researchers tried to figure out what the patients were hearing or saying. In each case, researchers were able to convert the brain’s electrical activity into at least somewhat-intelligible sound … Read more

TECH: How Close Are We to 2001’s AI Future?

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Hal - 2001

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Movie audiences first heard these calmly intoned and ominous words in 1968, spoken by a spaceship’s intelligent computer in the science-fiction masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” With that one phrase, the computer named HAL 9000 confirmed that it could think for itself, and that it was prepared to terminate the astronauts who were planning to deactivate it. Fifty years after director Stanley Kubrick released his visionary masterpiece of space colonization, how close are humans to the future that he imagined, in which we partner with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that we ultimately … Read more

SCIENCE: AI is Crossing the Uncanny Valley

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Mica

The tech world’s latest virtual assistant looks so realistic, you might mistake her for an actual human. Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Alexa. But the lifelikeness of both are dwarfed by Mica: a prototype that Magic Leap, a highly regarded augmented-reality startup, unveiled at its conference Wednesday. Mica isn’t just a voice assistant. She’s something you can actually see if you wear the company’s augmented-reality glasses, called Magic Leap One. Mica looks and acts like a human — she makes eye contact and offers a warm smile, along with other human-like expressions. Experts say Mica is a breakthrough in … Read more