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AI

News: An AI Christmas Carol

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AI Christmas Carol

The carol is a lie — and it’s an extremely unsettling one. University of Toronto researchers tasked an A.I. with looking at a picture of a Christmas tree, writing a song about it, and then singing the results for the world to hear. The song that came out of it is definitely a Christmas song, but it’s an extremely unsettling one. It’s no “Santa Baby,” but it does show just how far A.I. has come. Nvidia revealed some more details about the project, which runs on its hardware, on Wednesday. The company said the neural network used to create the … Read more

For Readers: The Uncanny Valley

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Uncanny Valley

Today’s reader topic comes from QSFer Aidee Ladnier: Why aren’t there more depictions of the uncanny valley? Do we really want AI and robots that we can’t distinguish from humans? OK, there are a couple ideas here, so let me unpack this a little. For those who are unaware, the “uncanny valley” is an idea of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. Basically, people can feel an affinity for robots that are not too human. But there comes a point where a robot approaches humanlike appearance, movement, etc, but is not quite there, that becomes quite disturbing. Wikipedia describes it this way: … Read more

Microsoft Created an AI, But She’s a Racist Homophobic Trump Supporter

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Tay Tweets

Microsoft has created a new chat bot to “learn” from the internet… but she picked up a lot of bad habits. The tech company announced the launch of Tay this week, an artificial intelligence bot that is learning to talk like millennials by analysing conversations on Twitter, Facebook and the internet… Unfortunately, when you make an AI bot that is designed to imitate the behaviour of other people on the internet… you probably need a filter of some kind. Tay was originally doing okay, learning how to have polite conversations… but after getting influenced by a few too many people … Read more