Jaw-dropping tech demo shows off the amazing (and, frankly, worrying) power of artificial neural networks. Regardless of which side of the political aisle you sit on, chances are you've got some strong opinions on "fake news." Whether it's comments taken out of context, or quotes being outright fabricated, fake news is a frustrating byproduct of today's twenty-first century news cycle. Well, we're sorry to tell you that things are about to get much, much worse! At least, that's based on a frankly crazy demonstration of artificial intelligence carried out by computer scientists at the University of Washington.

Google's latest artificial intelligence experiment is taking in Street View imagery from Google Maps and transforming it into professional-grade photography through post-processing -- all without a human touch. Hui Fang, a software engineer on Google's Machine Perception team, says the project uses machine learning techniques to train a deep neural network to scan thousands of Street View images in California for shots with impressive landscape potential. The software then "mimics the workflow of a professional photographer" to turn that imagery into an aesthetically pleasing panorama. The research, posted to the pre-print server arXiv earlier this week, is a great example of how AI systems can be trained to perform tasks that aren't binary, with a right or wrong answer, and more subjective, like in the fields of art and photography. Doing this kind of aesthetic training with software can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, as it has traditionally required labeled data sets.

Will I Survive the Artificial Intelligence Summer of Love? Abstract After a very long winter, it came the summer. A summer when everyone is in mad love with Artificial Intelligence. This has pros and cons but at the moment I see more cons than pros I have been around the block for a while and I have seen this happening already in a form or another but this time is big. This time is crazy big. I am talking about the machine learning madness that took over everything.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We could watch these water drones swim and dive all day. They were developed by APIUM Swarm Robotics, which took them for a swim off of Catalina Island in California.

Both humans and robots make mistakes, but bots are quicker, cheaper, and don't require 401K retirement plans or medical insurance. As part of an international trend toward machine-written news reporting, Google is giving the United Kingdom's Press Association an $800,000 award to create robot journalists. The use of artificial intelligence is expected to help the overseas Press Association to churn out 30,000 additional articles every month. The award was announced on July 6. Lucy A. Dalglish, dean and professor at the University of Maryland journalism school, said that robots are spreading to newsrooms around the globe, especially to write stories about sporting events, which are data-driven stories.

We talked yesterday of an example of how deep learning and artificial intelligence can be used to put words in people's mouths, creating video proof of something someone said, even if they didn't really say it. Prospects like that are downright scary, but so too are the realities of the jobs AI will be able to take away from humans.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, "Matrix"-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb?

Landscape photography is hard, no matter how beautiful an environment you're shooting in. You need to be well-versed in composition, deal with weather conditions, know how to adjust your camera settings for the best possible shot, and then edit it to come up with a pleasing picture. Google might be close to solving the last part of that puzzle: a couple of its Machine Perception researchers have trained a deep-learning system to identify objectively fine landscape panorama photos from Google Street View, and then artistically crop and edit them like a human photographer would. The results don't just speak for themselves: Google showed a bunch of these photos, along with others from various sources, and asked several pro photographers to grade them for quality; about 40 percent of Google's submissions were perceived as being created by'semi-pro'- or'pro'-level photographers. What's especially interesting is that the AI is capable of applying contextually meaning adjustments in different parts of each photograph, making for dramatic lighting and more compelling images – as opposed to simply applying a filter to the entire picture or adding something predictable like a vignette.

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, 'Matrix'-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. One leading expert say he would'appeal to the compassion and empathy that the superintelligence has to keep me, a compassionate and empathetic person, alive' Why should a superintelligence keep us around? I would argue that I am a good person who might have even helped to bring about the superintelligence itself.

When I was writing books on networking and programming topics in the early 2000s, the web was a good, but an incomplete resource. Blogging had started to take off, but YouTube wasn't around yet, nor was Quora, Twitter, or podcasts. Over ten years later as I've been diving into AI and machine learning, it is a completely different ballgame. There are so many resources -- it's difficult to know where to start (and stop)! To save you some of the effort I went through in researching all the different nooks and crannies of the web to find the best content; I've organized them into a big collection here.