Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important tool within the artistic community to foster visual creativity. Two frequently used techniques are generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can generate visually realistic images, and style transfer, which can turn photos or videos into works of art by applying the artistic qualities of one image style -- such as a painting -- to other images and videos. At Facebook AI Research (FAIR), we wanted to investigate further how artists and professionals typically trained to work with CGI special effects can use these types of tools. Specifically, we set out to answer the following question: Can AI-generated imagery be relevant in the context of directing and producing an immersive film in VR? The goal of our collaboration was to study whether we could generate special effects with AI techniques that were good enough to be part of the final film.

When Jérôme Blanquet set out to make his new virtual reality film, Alteration--which, among other things portrays an artificial intelligence diving into a man's dreams to steal them--he felt strongly that AI should play a big part in the project. "As a filmmaker, I would like to represent…using AI in the dreams of a human," Blanquet says. "For me, only AI can represent what AI can [represent] in the human brain." Alteration, which was launched yesterday for the Oculus Rift and Samsung's Oculus-powered Gear VR, centers on Alexandro, who volunteers to take part in a dream experiment, unaware that the researchers running it are going to inject, digitize, and take over his subconscious with an AI in the guise of a woman named Elsa. The story progresses through scenes representing Alexandro's memories, the AI always hovering nearby. His wife, Nadia, who plays a central role in some of those memories, objects to Elsa's presence, leading Alexandro to pull the plug on the experiment–with disastrous results.

According to sophisticated machine-learning calculations, the Queen of Dragons will soon meet her demise. In early July, a computer scientist at Central European University's Center for Network Science, Milan Janosov, predicted the fates of the Game of Thrones characters that have yet to be impaled, poisoned, or have their brains bludgeoned. He quantified their social significance on the show, and then entered these numbers into a machine-learning algorithm. To create his algorithm, Janosov first built a network of the realm's social system based on how often characters interacted with each other. He pulled this data from the show's subtitles, which provided nearly 600 scenes worth of information about how often characters appeared in the same scene.

Before breakfast, I check my Facebook and LinkedIn newsfeeds for a quick synopsis of the day. As I jump in the shower, I hit "download" on a recommended movie on Netflix, knowing I have a long flight this evening. While wolfing down my cereal, I click once to buy a gift for a friend's birthday next week. My iPhone pings to tell me that I need to leave now if I want to make that early meeting 54 miles away. And as I get in my car, I use voice activation to play my favorite Spotify playlist, and Apple Maps informs me it will take five minutes to drive to the train station this morning.

Not all of your college fun will involve keggers or games of ultimate frisbee. As the weather gets colder, you might have difficulty tearing yourself out of your dorm, in which case your entertainment options are limited: Host an in-room dance party, Netflix and chill or settle in for a little gaming. In addition to our favorite consoles (no, we couldn't choose just one), we've selected a handful of accessories and must-have titles for our back-to-school guide. Enjoy, and may you do a better job making friends with rival fanboys in real life than you do online. Engadget is the original home for technology news and reviews.

Xiaomi's Mi division, which sells some accessories in the US but still no phones, is getting into smart speakers. It just unveiled the Mi AI Speaker, its equivalent to Amazon's Alexa, Google Home and other personal assistant-type models. However, it play music and take voice commands for a lot less, costing just 299 RMB or around $45 when it hits shelves in China starting next month. It features "high-quality" sound and a six microphone array to detect voice commands from any direction and distance like its rivals. More importantly, it has artificial intelligence built-in, so you can order it to play streaming music and act as a personal assistant, giving you weather, calendar reminders, news and so on.

Scientists at IBM Research – Almaden have demonstrated that the TrueNorth brain-inspired computer chip, with its 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses, can efficiently implement inference with deep networks that approach state-of-the-art classification accuracy on several vision and speech datasets. This will open up the possibilities of embedding intelligence in the entire computing stack from the Internet of Things, to smartphones, to robotics, to cars, to cloud computing, and even supercomputing. The novel architecture of the TrueNorth processor can classify image data at between 1,200 and 2,600 frames per second while using a mere 25 to 275 mW, which is effectively greater than 6,000 fps per Watt. Like that kung fu master in the movies who simultaneously fights assaults from many opponents, this processor can detect patterns in real time from 50-100 cameras at once – each with 32 32 color pixels and streaming information at the standard TV rate of 24 fps – while running on a smartphone battery for days without recharging. The breakthrough was published this week in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In June 2016, Antoine Balaresque, the cofounder and CEO of the hot new startup Lily Robotics, stood before a room of business students at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, ready to reveal the PowerPoint slides that had made him an instant startup celebrity. Wearing the ubiquitous Silicon Valley uniform of a T-shirt and jeans, he appeared slightly bashful, with unruly hair and a boyish face still round in the cheeks. He seemed self-conscious about being feted by the room of business school students. Jessica Pishko is a San Francisco-based journalist who writes frequently about incarceration and social justice issues. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. The presentation began like most of Balaresque's talks, with the Lily Drone promotional video: A slick film showed the drone swooping through the air, capturing footage of users engaged in a series of outdoor adventures. When the video finished, Balaresque began to recount the origin story of his "flying camera." It started in 2013, with a family trip to Yosemite National Park, during which Balaresque's mother took a group photo.

In an age of Photoshop, filters and social media, many of us are used to seeing manipulated pictures – subjects become slimmer and smoother or, in the case of Snapchat, transformed into puppies. However, there's a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, that will allow for the creation of realistic looking footage of public figures appearing to say, well, anything. Hillary Clinton describing the stolen children she keeps locked in her wine cellar. Tom Cruise finally admitting what we suspected all along … that he's a Brony. This is the future of fake news.

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. What does it feel like to stand here? It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything.