Media
AI Can Write Songs, but Is It Creative?
AI can beat humans at chess, power vacuum cleaners, and now it can even compose songs. This year's winner of the AI Song Contest, in which machine learning was used to create music, was recently announced. "Listen To Your Body Choir" was co-written with artificial intelligence and takes inspiration from the song "Daisy Bell," the first song to be sung by a computer in 1961. But is a computer program really capable of being creative? "The short answer, right now, is'no' or at least'not yet,'" Chirag Shah, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, told Lifewire in an email interview.
OpenAI shuts down robotics team because it doesn't have enough data yet
In brief OpenAI has disbanded its AI robotics team and is no longer trying to apply machine learning to physical machines. Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI, who led the robotics group confirmed that the company recently broke up the team to focus working on more promising areas of artificial general intelligence research. "Here's a reveal ... as of recently we changed the focus at OpenAI, and I actually disbanded the robotics team," he said during an episode of the Weights & Biases podcast. Zaremba said a lack of training data was holding the robotics research back: there wasn't enough information on hand to teach the systems to the level of intelligence desired. "From the perspective of what we want to achieve, which is to build AGI, I think there was actually some components missing," he added.
How Artificial Intelligence is transforming our world - Punch Newspapers
The impact of Artificial Intelligence continues to be felt across industries. A McKinsey report after analysing some AI use cases stated that'the impact of artificial intelligence will most likely be substantial in marketing and sales as well as supply-chain management and manufacturing'. The same report argues that AI has the potential to create trillions of dollars of value across the economy if business leaders work to understand what it can and cannot do. Looking at this critically, one would wonder how Africa's manufacturing industries would be able to compete with other continents that are massively adding AI-powered tools and solutions to their production lines? China, for example, has more or less made artificial intelligence a major priority, investing heavily so as to ensure the country stays ahead.
The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice
The documentary "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain," which opened in theatres on Friday, is an angry, elegant, often overwhelmingly emotional chronicle of the late television star's life and his impact on the people close to him. Directed by Morgan Neville, the film portrays Bourdain as intense, self-loathing, relentlessly driven, preternaturally charismatic, and--in his life and in his death, by suicide, in 2018--a man who both focussed and disturbed the lives of those around him. To craft the film's narrative, Neville drew on tens of thousands of hours of video footage and audio archives--and, for three particular lines heard in the film, Neville commissioned a software company to make an A.I.-generated version of Bourdain's voice. News of the synthetic audio, which Neville discussed this past week in interviews with me and with Brett Martin, at GQ, provoked a striking degree of anger and unease among Bourdain's fans: "Well, this is ghoulish"; "This is awful"; "WTF?!" people said on Twitter, where the fake Bourdain voice became a trending topic. The critic Sean Burns, who had reviewed the documentary negatively, tweeted, "I feel like this tells you all you need to know about the ethics of the people behind this project." When I first spoke with Neville, I was surprised to learn about his use of synthetic audio and equally taken aback that he'd chosen not to disclose its presence in his film.