Two years ago, Ars Technica hosted the online premiere of a weird short film called Sunspring, which was mostly remarkable because its entire script was created by an AI. The film's human cast laughed at odd, computer-generated dialogue and stage direction before performing the results in particularly earnest fashion. That film's production duo, Director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin, have returned with another AI-driven experiment that, on its face, looks decidedly worse. Blurry faces, computer-generated dialogue, and awkward scene changes fill out this year's Zone Out, a film created as an entry in the Sci-Fi-London 48-Hour Challenge--meaning, just like last time, it had to be produced in 48 hours and adhere to certain specific prompts. That 48-hour limit is worth minding, because Sharp and Goodwin went one bigger this time: they let their AI system, which they call Benjamin, handle the film's entire production pipeline.

A US radio journalist who lost his voice two years ago will soon return to the air, thanks to artificial intelligence. Jamie Dupree, 54, a political radio journalist with Cox Media Group, is unable to talk due to a rare neurological condition. A new voice was created for him by Scottish technology company CereProc. CereProc trained a neural network to predict how Mr Dupree would talk, using samples from his old voice recordings. "This has saved my job and saved my family from a terrible financial unknown," Mr Dupree told the BBC.

Onstage at the launch of Amazon's Alexa Prize, a multimillion-dollar competition to build AI that can chat like a human, the winners of last year's challenge delivered a friendly warning to 2018's hopefuls: your bot will mess up, it will say something offensive, and it will be taken offline. Elizabeth Clark, a member of last year's champion Sounding Board team from the University of Washington, was onstage with her fellow researchers to share what they'd learned from their experience. What stuck out, she said, were the bloopers. "One thing that came up a lot around the holidays was that a lot of people wanted to talk to our bot about Santa," said Clark. "Unfortunately, the content we had about Santa Claus looked like this: 'You know what I realized the other day? Santa Claus is the most elaborate lie ever told.'" The bot chose this line because it had been taught using jokes from Reddit, explained Clark, and while it might be diverting for adults, "as you can imagine, a lot of people who want to talk about Santa Claus … are children." And telling someone's curious three-year-old that Santa is a lie, right before Christmas? That's a conversational faux pas, even if you are just a dumb AI.

The main finding, that adding additional techniques for summarization for a combined approach can produce improved results, is unsurprising. I don't see any link to software on github, etc., which makes the article hard to follow up on.

As fans around the world get ready to head to Russia for the 2018 FIFA World Cup this June, FOX Sports and IBM are launching a historical AI collaboration across multiple FOX Sports properties and programming-- the first of its kind for the broadcaster. Beginning with the 2018 FIFA World Cup, FOX Sports is tapping IBM Watson Media's specialized AI video technology and IBM iX's proven expertise in designing user experiences to streamline production workflows to quickly classify, edit and access match highlights in near real-time. The advancements to production and distribution will enable FOX Sports to curate engaging video clips and match highlights so that sports enthusiasts back home don't miss a single play, penalty kick, or goal. With 64 matches played over 32 days by 32 competing teams, the World Cup is one of the most highly anticipated global sporting events. The 2014 World Cup attracted 3.2 billion viewers on television and an estimated 280 million online viewers.

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I like the business model though, you have the customers do the work of annotating data.

On October 25, Sophia, a delicate looking woman with doe-brown eyes and long fluttery eyelashes made international headlines. She'd just become a full citizen of Saudi Arabia -- the first robot in the world to achieve such a status. "I am very honored and proud of this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship," Sophia said, announcing her new status during the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Standing behind a podium as she spoke, to all effects, she presented a humanoid form -- excepting the shimmery metal cap of her head, where hair would be on a human head.

You probably use machine-learning systems every day without even knowing it. The technology gives us spam filters, our Facebook News Feeds, digital assistants, search engines, Netflix picks, Amazon recommendations, fraud detection systems, chatbots and more. And it's only going to become more pervasive. Machine learning may soon assess your risk of heart disease, drive your car and automatically check out your groceries. For forward-looking parents, it's time to get your kids on it.

TellTale's'Minecraft: Story Mode' is coming to Netflix in 2018. Minecraft: Story Mode is coming to Netlfix later this year. That's not a new TV show, it's a video game developed by TellTale, the studio behind the popular Walking Dead games. Of course, whether TellTale makes games or "interactive stories" is up for debate, and Netflix is insisting that the company doesn't consider this a video game. "We don't have any plans to get into gaming," a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement.