The new effects-driven science-fiction thriller "Alita: Battle Angel" stages a behind-the-scenes tussle for the ages: it is a collaboration between Robert Rodriguez, a filmmaker known for such neo-pulp action films as "From Dusk till Dawn" and "Sin City," and James Cameron, a filmmaker whose technological sophistication is matched by a simplistic emotionalism. Here they are thrown together in a virtual video ring and try to collaborate. And, however sincere and earnest their alliance may be, the movie itself tells a different tale: Cameron's sensibility wins, hands down. Not only does Rodriguez give up most of the fun, but Cameron also runs away with the substance. And that's all the more unfortunate, as the two are evenly matched early on in the film and the outcome of their efforts appears, at first, promising.

AI is getting better and better at writing convincing material, and that's leading its creators to wonder whether they should release the technology in the first place. Elon Musk's OpenAI has developed an algorithm that can generate plausible-looking fake news stories on any topic using just a handful of words as a starting point. It was originally designed as a generalized language AI that could answer questions, summarizing stories and translating text, but researchers soon realized that it could be used for far more sinister purposes, like pumping out disinformation in large volumes. As a result, the team only plans to make a "simplified version" of its AI available to the public, according to MIT Technology Review. The technology thankfully has some rough edges at the moment. It frequently writes stories that are either plagiarized or are only cohesive on the surface, and only occasionally hits the jackpot.

When Netflix said that David Fincher and Tim Miller's Love, Death and Robots was an animated series for mature audiences, it wasn't kidding around. The streaming giant has posted the trailer for the 18-story anthology, and you definitely won't be watching this with younger viewers. The title is not only apt, but can sometimes describe one scene -- there are multiple displays of robot sexuality, for starters. The trailer doesn't show enough to indicate whether these will be thought-provoking tales or simply a bit risqué, but it's certainly enough to raise eyebrows (and ears, given the thumping industrial soundtrack). And even if you don't care for it, look at it this way: it might open the door for more adult-oriented animation on Netflix.

Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air. Russia said it had "identified the missile's trajectory and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the Russian population and the country's strategic nuclear forces." The White House said it was "extremely concerned by the Russian violation" of a treaty banning intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The US and Russia have had an uneasy relationship since 2014, when Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimea region and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. That story is, in fact, not only fake, but a troubling example of just how good AI is getting at fooling us.

The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed "deepfakes for text" – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse. OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough. At its core, GPT2 is a text generator. The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next. The system is pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible, both in terms of the quality of the output, and the wide variety of potential uses.

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In 2015, car-and-rocket man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute's researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won't release it to the public. The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well--scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system.

So read the T-shirt sported by Ben Recht, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as he collected an award at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference this week. Dr Recht, pictured above in lecture mode, was protesting against the flood of corporate money pouring into NIPS, aping the words Kurt Cobain wrote on a T-shirt when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992. "It's not an academic conference anymore," Dr Recht says wistfully, perched in the Californian sun on the steps of the Long Beach Convention Centre. He complains that folk would rather go to corporate-sponsored parties these days (Intel's featured Flo Rida, a rapper), than poster sessions. AI, it seems, is the new rock and roll.

This Valentine's Day, an AI has collaborated with humans to write a beautiful love song for you. Just think of it as a little computer love. "Love Song" was written with the help of Amadeus Code, the AI songwriting assistant that takes data from centuries of music to inspire songwriters with melodic ideas. While Amadeus Code can assist in the creative process, like any AI, it cannot feel love. This is why collaboration with the Amadeus Code team was necessary to fully bring the track to life.

Companies nowadays use music classification, either to be able to place recommendations to their customers (such as Spotify, Soundcloud) or simply as a product (for example Shazam). Determining music genres is the first step in that direction. Machine Learning techniques have proved to be quite successful in extracting trends and patterns from the large pool of data. The same principles are applied in Music Analysis also. In this article, we shall study how to analyse an audio/music signal in Python. We shall then utilise the skills learnt to classify music clips into different genres.