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The 10 giveaways that a picture has been photoshopped, according to experts - amid Princess Kate's doctored family pic scandal

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Everyone from influencers to celebrities - and now, even the British monarchy - have been caught altering their photos shared online. Experts say it is becoming increasingly difficult with AI and photo-editing apps - but there are still 10 giveaways that you should be aware of. These include checking the edges of people and objects, investigating shadows and inspecting the background for curves. The tips comes as multiple major news agencies withdrew Kensington Palace's first photo of Princess of Wales Kate Middleton on Sunday, after picture editors noticed at least 16 different details that did not look right. Kensington Palace yesterday released the first picture of the Princess of Wales since surgery. Major news agencies quickly pulled the photo after editors noticed more than a dozen details that suggested it had been altered.


AI ranks EVERY Christopher Nolan movie - after director took home first-ever Oscar for Oppenheimer... so do YOU agree with ChatGPT?

Daily Mail - Science & tech

'Oppenheimer' swept away the competition at the 2024 Oscars, receiving seven awards including earning renowned director Christopher Nolan his first golden man statuette. While this is the filmmaker's first major award-winning film, he has been producing movies since 1998 when he made Following - and has made 10 more since. We asked ChatGPT to rank his other 11 films dating back to 26 years to the'Following' and 2010 film'Inception' up through his his 2012 film'The Dark Knight Rises' and his 2020 film'Tenet.' Renowned director Christopher Nolan took home his first Oscar for his critically acclaimed film, ' Oppenheimer.' The historic film starred Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos lab that designed and built the world's first atomic bomb during World War II - he is often known as the'father of the atomic bomb' Oppenheimer swept the box office when it was released on July 21, 2023, reeling in a whopping 82.4 million in opening weekend, winning Nolan Best Picture and Best Director during Sunday's award show.


Princess of Wales photo furore underlines sensitivity around image doctoring

The Guardian

At a time when suspicion of manipulated media has reached a new pitch of concern, the Princess of Wales photo furore underlines the sensitivity around image doctoring. Catherine was the subject of an image editing row in 2011 when Grazia adapted a photo of her on her wedding day – but that was before breakthroughs in artificial intelligence put everyone on edge. There has been a deluge of AI-generated deepfakes in recent years, from a video of Volodymyr Zelenskiy telling his soldiers to surrender, to explicit images of Taylor Swift. Historical examples of image manipulation can be clunky – from Argentine footballers clutching handbags to Stalin's missing underlings – but there is now an alarming credibility to AI-generated content. Catherine's attempts to adjust a family photo, amid frenzied social media speculation about her wellbeing, have run straight into widespread concerns about trust in images, text and audio in a year when half the world is going to the polls.


At the "Oppenheimer" Oscars, Hollywood Went in Search of Lost Time

The New Yorker

This wasn't the first year that the Academy Awards fell on the second Sunday in March, forcing the good citizens of Hollywood to manage their hair appointments and limousine pickups around the annual scourge that is daylight-saving time. Even so, the ninety-sixth annual Oscars ceremony wrought more than its expected share of havoc on schedules. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hoping to broaden its reach among those with strict curfews and short attention spans, opted to kick off the show at the previously unheard-of time of 4 P.M. Or, as this year's host, Jimmy Kimmel, quipped in his opening monologue, "The show, as you know, is starting an hour early this year, but don't worry. It will still end very, very late." Such temporal dislocation was surely a good omen, not that any were needed, for Christopher Nolan and "Oppenheimer."


Reddit aims for 6.4bn valuation in shares sale

BBC News

Currently, the biggest shareholders include media company Advance Magazine Publishers, Chinese tech firm Tencent, US investment firm Fidelity, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT makers OpenAI.


Among the A.I. Doomsayers

The New Yorker

Katja Grace's apartment, in West Berkeley, is in an old machinist's factory, with pitched roofs and windows at odd angles. It has terra-cotta floors and no central heating, which can create the impression that you've stepped out of the California sunshine and into a duskier place, somewhere long ago or far away. Yet there are also some quietly futuristic touches. Nonperishables stacked in the pantry. A sleek white machine that does lab-quality RNA tests.


Proliferating 'news' sites spew AI-generated fake stories

The Japan Times

A sensational story about the Israeli prime minister's "psychiatrist" has exploded online, but it was AI-generated, originating on one of hundreds of websites researchers warn are churning out tech-enabled fiction masquerading as news. Propaganda-spewing websites have typically relied on armies of writers, but generative artificial intelligence tools now offer a significantly cheaper and faster way to fabricate content that is often hard to decipher from authentic information. Hundreds of AI-powered sites mimicking news outlets have cropped up in recent months, fueling an explosion of false narratives -- about everything from war to politicians -- that researchers say is stoking alarm in a year of high-stake elections around the world.


Using Fiber Optic Bundles to Miniaturize Vision-Based Tactile Sensors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-based tactile sensors have recently become popular due to their combination of low cost, very high spatial resolution, and ease of integration using widely available miniature cameras. The associated field of view and focal length, however, are difficult to package in a human-sized finger. In this paper we employ optical fiber bundles to achieve a form factor that, at 15 mm diameter, is smaller than an average human fingertip. The electronics and camera are also located remotely, further reducing package size. The sensor achieves a spatial resolution of 0.22 mm and a minimum force resolution 5 mN for normal and shear contact forces. With these attributes, the DIGIT Pinki sensor is suitable for applications such as robotic and teleoperated digital palpation. We demonstrate its utility for palpation of the prostate gland and show that it can achieve clinically relevant discrimination of prostate stiffness for phantom and ex vivo tissue.


AesopAgent: Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Agent and AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technologies have recently made significant progress. We propose AesopAgent, an Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production. AesopAgent is a practical application of agent technology for multimodal content generation. The system integrates multiple generative capabilities within a unified framework, so that individual users can leverage these modules easily. This innovative system would convert user story proposals into scripts, images, and audio, and then integrate these multimodal contents into videos. Additionally, the animating units (e.g., Gen-2 and Sora) could make the videos more infectious. The AesopAgent system could orchestrate task workflow for video generation, ensuring that the generated video is both rich in content and coherent. This system mainly contains two layers, i.e., the Horizontal Layer and the Utility Layer. In the Horizontal Layer, we introduce a novel RAG-based evolutionary system that optimizes the whole video generation workflow and the steps within the workflow. It continuously evolves and iteratively optimizes workflow by accumulating expert experience and professional knowledge, including optimizing the LLM prompts and utilities usage. The Utility Layer provides multiple utilities, leading to consistent image generation that is visually coherent in terms of composition, characters, and style. Meanwhile, it provides audio and special effects, integrating them into expressive and logically arranged videos. Overall, our AesopAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with many previous works in visual storytelling. Our AesopAgent is designed for convenient service for individual users, which is available on the following page: https://aesopai.github.io/.


Linguistic Structure Induction from Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Linear sequences of words are implicitly represented in our brains by hierarchical structures that organize the composition of words in sentences. Linguists formalize different frameworks to model this hierarchy; two of the most common syntactic frameworks are Constituency and Dependency. Constituency represents sentences as nested groups of phrases, while dependency represents a sentence by assigning relations between its words. Recently, the pursuit of intelligent machines has produced Language Models (LMs) capable of solving many language tasks with a human-level performance. Many studies now question whether LMs implicitly represent syntactic hierarchies. This thesis focuses on producing constituency and dependency structures from LMs in an unsupervised setting. I review the critical methods in this field and highlight a line of work that utilizes a numerical representation for binary constituency trees (Syntactic Distance). I present a detailed study on StructFormer (SF) (Shen et al., 2021), which retrofits a transformer encoder architecture with a parser network to produce constituency and dependency structures. I present six experiments to analyze and address this field's challenges; experiments include investigating the effect of repositioning the parser network within the SF architecture, evaluating subword-based induced trees, and benchmarking the models developed in the thesis experiments on linguistic tasks. Models benchmarking is performed by participating in the BabyLM challenge, published at CoNLL 2023 (Momen et al., 2023). The results of this thesis encourage further development in the direction of retrofitting transformer-based models to induce syntactic structures, supported by the acceptable performance of SF in different experimental settings and the observed limitations that require innovative solutions to advance the state of syntactic structure induction.