Media
Paul Mpagi Sepuya on the Inherent Intimacy of Photography
In the interview, Paul breaks down the difference between artist and photographer, shares what it was like to get recognized for his work at an early age, and explains why critical praise doesn't always translate to monetary success. After the interview, Rumaan and co-host Isaac Butler talk about why it's so difficult to sum up visual art with language. Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com
China's AI-Fueled Propaganda Army -- AI Daily - Artificial Intelligence News
Identifiable by blurry backgrounds and a never-changing eye-position, these profile pictures are not ones taken of real people, but instead created by a machine learning technology, thus allowing the group creating this AI-fueled campaign to pump out an army of convincingly-human social media accounts. General Adversarial Networks, the specific technology behind these manufactured profile pictures, create fake humans that can fool our own eyes by pitting two machine-learning algorithms against each other. One generates these faces while the other tries to spot if the face is genuine or AI-generated, till the face produced is almost impossible to tell apart from a real one, even by our own algorithms.
Facebook's A.I. takes image recognition to a whole new level
"If you can." Neo adopts a martial arts fighting pose, then launches a furious flurry at his mentor, flailing at him with high-speed strikes. Morpheus blocks every attempted attack effortlessly. The scene is, of course, the training sequence from 1999's The Matrix, a movie that blew minds at the time with its combination of artificial intelligence-focused storyline and cutting-edge computer graphics. More than 20 years later, the scene is being used as part of a Facebook demo to show me some of the company's groundbreaking A.I. image recognition technology. On the screen, the scene plays out as normal.
Computer-Generated Music for Tabletop Role-Playing Games
Ferreira, Lucas N., Lelis, Levi H. S., Whitehead, Jim
In this paper we present Bardo Composer, a system to generate background music for tabletop role-playing games. Bardo Composer uses a speech recognition system to translate player speech into text, which is classified according to a model of emotion. Bardo Composer then uses Stochastic Bi-Objective Beam Search, a variant of Stochastic Beam Search that we introduce in this paper, with a neural model to generate musical pieces conveying the desired emotion. We performed a user study with 116 participants to evaluate whether people are able to correctly identify the emotion conveyed in the pieces generated by the system. In our study we used pieces generated for Call of the Wild, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign available on YouTube. Our results show that human subjects could correctly identify the emotion of the generated music pieces as accurately as they were able to identify the emotion of pieces written by humans.