Renowned Visual Effects industry veteran Helena Packer, currently marking her 30th anniversary year working within the VFX arena, is currently working to enhance the next era of the visual effects field by developing new tools which will utilize the powerful advancements in digital technologies offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Packer explains how her new AI path came into play: In 2018, Raja Koduri, Chief Architect at Intel, approached her, asking if she would like to consult with Intel on the company's research and development of AI. For Packer, it felt like a natural fit, as she has been working to bridge technology with art throughout her entire career. During the past two years, Packer has had the opportunity to collaborate with some of the best minds currently working in AI, including Jason Yang, Co-Founder & CTO at Dgene. Packer, who sits on the Executive Committee of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), and also serves as Chair of the Diversity Committee for AMPAS' VFX Branch, is presently seeking new ways to make content creation easier and more gratifying through the incorporation of AI. "On the professional level, there is, at the moment, a huge surge in content production," Packer says.

In an age when artificial intelligence (AI) is touted to take over many jobs across various industries, songwriting would be the last thing coming to our minds -- after all, the best songs are about the human experience and how could a robot replicate that? However, a study by ticket marketplace TickPick analyzed whether AI could, in fact, replace songwriters and their findings might not please many. For the study, the AI software was trained just for five hours with lyrics across various genres, including pop, country, hip-hop and rock. Later, the AI-generated lyrics were then tested among 1,003 music fans via Amazon Mechanical Turk "with the intent of testing human ability to correctly identify AI-generated lyrics, as well as their opinion on creativity, emotionality and favorability of various lyrics presented to them." Models were trained between five and 12 hours after lyrics were taken from genius.com and grouped by genre.

This article has spoilers for just about the entire Star Wars universe. When it comes to fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence technology, the Star Trek universe stands head and shoulders above all others. Series creator Gene Rodenberry's vision for the far future seems just as prescient today, in the era of advanced deep learning, as it did in the 1960s when he unveiled it. Unfortunately, this article is about the AI in Star Wars. Before I go off the rails, I should point out that I'm a light saber-wielding Star Wars fanatic.

OpenAI recently launched Jukebox, a model that generates music with singing in the raw audio domain. As a generative model for music, Jukebox can handle the long context of raw audio using an autoencoder. Jukebox's autoencoder processes the audio files using a multiscale VQ-VAE to compress it to discrete codes and modeling those using autoregressive Transformers. Provided with a genre, artist, and lyrics as input, Jukebox can output a new music sample produced from scratch. This is a type of innovation that expands the boundaries of generative models to a new level.

Facebook has launched a new chatbot that it claims is able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality. "Blender" was trained using available public domain conversations which included 1.5 billion examples of human exchanges. The social media giant said 49% of people preferred interactions with the chatbot, compared with another human. But experts say training the artificial intelligence (AI) using a platform such as Reddit has its drawbacks. Numerous issues arose during longer conversations.

Chances are you like technology but sometimes struggle to use it. It's as if you need a degree in computer science just to understand the latest lingo today – gigahertz this, megapixel that, and terabyte this – so wouldn't it be refreshing if there were quick and easy ways to get the most out of your tech? And so, the following are a dozen or so "tech hacks" to consider, which might especially come in handy during these challenging times, as many of these software or hardware tips, tricks and shortcuts might save you money, time and aggravation. If you own an iPhone or iPad, enable a feature called Speak Screen. After you do so – by going to Settings Accessibility Spoken Content Speak Screen – swipe down from top of the screen with two fingers, on any page, and the onscreen text will be read to you. Now your ebooks are audiobooks you can listen to while multitasking, such as running on a treadmill or cleaning the home.

I (Peter Ranieri) created the "These Lyrics Do Not Exist" website to show you how Artificial Intelligence can be creative by generating original song lyrics. You will never be low on inspiration again, remove writers' block today. Increase your songwriting creativity and productivity.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Deadly hornets from Asia that measure up to 2 inches long and can wipe out entire honey bee colonies within hours have been spotted for the first time in the U.S. These so-called "murder hornets" represent a threat to the honeybee population. The hornets-which have been blamed for 50 deaths a year in Japan--have been spotted in Washington, and according to the New York Times, can rip through a hive, killing a bee every 14 seconds.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) will enable better understanding all around: we'll talk to our computers; our computers will understand us; and we'll have the Star Trek Universal Communicator in our ears translating any language into our native language in real time (and vice versa). Before we get to long, philosophical, and emotional natural conversations with our computers (as in the movie Her, we can build a lot of extremely useful language-enabled applications that help do things like understand whether someone is getting angry on a support call, write better job descriptions, and disambiguating words whose meaning change depending on context (see this Wikipedia page for a fun list of examples including one of my favorite perfectly grammatical sentences: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Scroll down this page to see modern AI services in action figuring out the emotional tilt of a sentence, translating English into Chinese, and more. Let's explore a few of these capabilities by calling real-world APIs, some from the open source community and others from the major public cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Check the"I'm not a robot" box, and hit analyze.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a technology of the future – it's a daily reality for many publishers of all sizes. AI now powers an increasing number of tools that journalists use to gather, produce and distribute content, including Echobox, the social media management platform we built specifically for publishers. With more than 700 publisher clients globally, including 25% of the world's newspapers of record, we have access to a large and unique dataset that describes how AI can change the social media game for publishers. We recently completed an analysis of how these publishers use automation technology to manage their social media. Below are three insights into how they're benefitting from AI, as well as best practices for increasing your own social media traffic.