Check out the size of these awesome orbital rings!
Filmmaker Hashem Al-Ghaili has created a micro-budget sci-fi film with amazing visual effects and megastructures in ‘Orbital.’
In artist Miao Ying’s animated film Surplus Intelligence, a cockroach falls in love with the artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring her behavior. There’s only one problem: The AI, personified as a man with movie-star looks, committed a crime in Walden XII, the quasi-medieval fantasyland where the story is set. He stole the village’s power stone, and so the roach sets off to mine bitcoin to save him.
Viewers might see in the plot a metaphor for the conflicted relationship some Chinese people have with social credit scoring, which is meant to nudge citizens toward better behavior. Or it could be a nod to the insidious ways social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook condition our behavior and mine us for data. If the tale itself seems a little ridiculous at times, that’s because Miao had a stealth collaborator: the AI text-generating system GPT-3, which wrote the script for the film. That power stone in the village? GPT-3 determined that it looks like “a burrito from Mexico,” perhaps a side effect of all the advertising copy GPT-3 has been tasked with writing.
The half-hour film is on view through the end of the year at the Asia Society in New York as part of the exhibition Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity. “All of Miao Ying’s work is a satirical look at what digital means in China,” says Barbara Pollack, who curated Mirror Image and wrote the book Brand New Art from China. But, she notes, the works also celebrate the creativity the policies inspire in its citizens. Miao’s Hardcore Digital Detox (2018) challenges viewers to experience the internet behind the Great Firewall—and without the filter bubbles that platforms in the East and West impose. Chinternet Plus (2016) describes how to brand a “counterfeit ideology.” And for 2007’s Blind Spot, Miao manually annotated a Chinese dictionary to indicate all of the words that were censored on Google.cn at the time.
With inspiration pulled straight from movies, Carhartt, and even Kanye West, the Airbnb—designed and built by two friends—went viral on TikTok for being anything but your typical weekend away.
Using GPT-3, Calamity AI developed a short film script called Date Night. GPT-3 is the third generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a neural network ML model trained using internet data to generate any type of text. GPT-3 has been used to create articles, poetry, stories, news reports, and dialogue using just a small amount of input text that can be used to produce large amounts of quality content. Developed by OpenAI, it requires a small amount of input text to generate large volumes of relevant and sophisticated machine-generated text.
Enter Calamity AI, a pair of film students in California collaborating with an AI to write original short films and produce for YouTube. It aims to showcase the results of AI and humans working in tandem. The limitations of artificial intelligence restrict it from doing every element of the filmmaking process.
The End is Nye is streaming August 25th on Peacock: https://pck.tv/3aKJfYf.
Synopsis: The End is Nye sends Bill Nye into the most epic global disasters imaginable – both natural and unnatural – and then demystifies them using science to show how we can survive, mitigate, and even prevent them. Each stand-alone episode takes a hell-bent dive into the mystery and terror of one specific threat. Every catastrophe is abundant with thrills, but also offers hope and a way forward —a scientific blueprint for surviving anything that comes our way. The series is hosted and executive produced by Emmy Award winner and renowned science educator, engineer, author, and inventor Bill Nye. Each episode also features a brief cameo by longtime science advocate and series EP Seth MacFarlane.
Continue reading “The End is Nye | Official Trailer | Peacock Original” »
A team of researchers at DeepMind, London, working with colleagues from the University of Exeter, University College London and the University of Oxford, has trained an AI system to find a policy for equitably distributing public funds in an online game. In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes the approach they took to training their system and discuss issues that were raised in their endeavor.
How a society distributes wealth is an issue that humans have had to face for thousands of years. Nonetheless, most economists would agree that no system has yet been established in which all of its members are happy with the status quo. There have always been inequitable levels of income, with those on top the most satisfied and those on the bottom the least satisfied. In this latest effort, the researchers in England took a new approach to solving the problem—asking a computer to take a more logical approach.
The researchers began with the assumption that democratic societies, despite their flaws, are thus far the most agreeable of those tried. They then enlisted the assistance of volunteers to play a simple resource allocation game —the players of the game decided together the best ways to share their mutual resources. To make it more realistic, the players received different amounts of resources at the outset and there were different distribution schemes to choose from. The researchers ran the game multiple times with different groups of volunteers. They then used the data from all of the games played to train several AI systems on the ways that humans work together to find a solution to such a problem. Next, they had the AI systems play a similar game against one another, allowing for tweaking and learning over multiple iterations.
Spoiler alert: this article explains a key plot point, but we don’t give away anything you won’t see in trailers. Thanks to reader Florence, 7, for her questions.
At the beginning of the new Disney Pixar film, Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear gets stranded on a dangerous faraway planet with his commanding officer and crew.
Continue reading “Is time travel real? What Pixar’s movie Lightyear shows about Einstein’s theory” »
You use your brain’s executive function every day — it’s how you do things like pay attention, plan ahead and control impulses. Can you improve it to change for the better? With highlights from her research on child development, cognitive scientist Sabine Doebel explores the factors that affect executive function — and how you can use it to break bad habits and achieve your goals.
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Joseph DearMinority Report was a matter of policy, not AI. As long as we have the good sense to not try to prosecute for crimes they didn’t do or attempt, and instead use this for prevention, we can have the best of both worlds.
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Continue reading “Minority Report (2002) Official Trailer #1 — Tom Cruise Sci-Fi Action Movie” »
