A 17-year-old from West Virginia has used an archive of Kanye West lyrics to train a neural network to write rhymes on its own. The results are braggadocious, intermittently obscene, frequently incomprehensible, and laced with nonsensical name-drops. The rapping robot was created by Robbie Barrat, who told Quartz that he put it together in a week, at the urging of his high school programming club, using the open-source software PyBrain and a Linux laptop. Most impressive of all, this is apparently Barrat's first working AI. Here's one choice sequence of Barrat's creation going to work: No more wasting time, you can't roam without Caesar It's not exactly Wallace Stevens--it's hard to find much in the way of consistent themes or narratives in the robot's work.

Online knowledge repositories typically rely on their users or dedicated editors to evaluate the reliability of their content. These evaluations can be viewed as noisy measurements of both information reliability and information source trustworthiness. Can we leverage these noisy evaluations, often biased, to distill a robust, unbiased and interpretable measure of both notions? In this paper, we argue that the temporal traces left by these noisy evaluations give cues on the reliability of the information and the trustworthiness of the sources. Then, we propose a temporal point process modeling framework that links these temporal traces to robust, unbiased and interpretable notions of information reliability and source trustworthiness. Furthermore, we develop an efficient convex optimization procedure to learn the parameters of the model from historical traces. Experiments on real-world data gathered from Wikipedia and Stack Overflow show that our modeling framework accurately predicts evaluation events, provides an interpretable measure of information reliability and source trustworthiness, and yields interesting insights about real-world events.

Rise, a sci-fi short film directed by David Karlak, will be adapted into a feature produced by Filmula's Johnny Lin and Cross Creek's Brian Oliver. The producers picked up the feature film rights from Warner Bros. Karlak's short is about a dystopian future where man's attempt to create artificial intelligence has spun wildly out of control, leading to a war between man and machine. Anton Yelchin starred in the short, which was based on a screenplay Karlak penned with writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (the Saw series). Karlak will direct the feature adaptation as well. Lin, who is an executive producer on the upcoming Tom Cruise-starrer American Made, and Oliver, who produced Hacksaw Ridge and Black Swan, among others, will fully finance and produce the film, and are planning Rise as a driver for a film franchise.

This weekend's arrival of "Ghost in the Shell," the live-action adaptation of the landmark Japanese anime film, is being met with criticism from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), which is condemning what it calls the "whitewashed" casting of Scarlett Johansson in the lead role. The organization's complaint joins the backlash that erupted following the announcement in early 2015 that Johansson had signed on to star in Paramount and DreamWorks' version of Masamune Shirow's manga series that spawned the classic animated film. Many fans of the franchise called the casting of Johansson yet another example of Hollywood "whitewashing" because she plays an Asian heroine named Motoko Kusanagi. When asked about the ongoing flap, Johansson didn't agree with the critics' point of contention. "I think this character is living a very unique experience, in that she is a human brain in an entirely machinate body," Johansson said on ABC's "Good Morning America" earlier this week.

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I don't care if you're tired of hearing it, it bears repeating: The studio behind the new Ghost in the Shell movie got the casting wrong. Nevertheless, if you're among the many longtime fans of the franchise who may be feeling apprehension about spending cash to see the movie, there's a way to get a taste of it for free -- in virtual reality. SEE ALSO: Fans upset about'Ghost in the Shell' casting recruit Rinko Kikuchi on Instagram Paramount Pictures teamed with Oculus to release a short VR experience for the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR that takes you into the mind of Major Kusanagi as played by Scarlett Johansson. The incredibly well-designed futuristic world of the film is recreated in VR, but I have to say that it looks like a rush job, as the visuals simply don't live up to what's currently possible in VR (or what we see in the film version). The fact that it's a passive experience is another disappointment.

April Fools' Day is the only "fake news" day that's almost welcome. And one of the longstanding masters of the tech prank, Google, is at it again with a fresh batch of trickery. This year, the jokes are more obviously fake this time around in what appears to be an effort to avoid anyone actually thinking these products actually exist. SEE ALSO: 15 office prank ideas to show your coworkers who's really the boss Nevertheless, some of these products would be kind of cool, despite how wildly impractical they are. Here's the running list of what Google's "rolled out" today so far: Although the name rhymes with the very real Google Home, this imagined Google digital assistant is instead designed to sit outdoors and help you out with all matters related to weekend backyard lounging and the occasional bit of garden work. Delivering information bits about weather, edible plant life and a surprisingly dark array of opinions, Google Gnome is what Google Home would be like if it showed up in an episode of Black Mirror -- helpful, but just a tad too ominous with its robot apocalypse leanings.

Autonomous drones, lasers, and computer rendering play increasingly vital roles in filmmaking, but what makes Liam Young's moody, futuristic films so unusual is these technologies are not tools, but stars. The Australian architect-turned-filmmaker considers his films In the Robot Skies, Where the City Can't See, and Renderlands Trojan horses bringing these technologies into mainstream consciousness in a positive, even creative, way. If people give, say, LIDAR, any thought, it's probably within the context of autonomous vehicles or that lawsuit against Uber. But Young sees a compelling story. "We tell stories about what these technologies might mean," he says.

For long stretches of its development, "Ghost in the Shell" provoked controversy over its casting, particularly the choice to make Scarlett Johansson the film's lead character, the Major. In the original Japanese manga, the character is an Asian heroine named Motoko Kusanagi. Rupert Sanders' movie hits theaters this weekend, allowing the debate either to be put to rest or intensify. But at least one of the filmmakers remains perplexed by the kerfuffle. "I've found the casting controversy quite weird," said Jess Hall, the cinematographer and longtime Sanders collaborator.

The new Scarlett Johansson movie, "Ghost in the Shell," is upon us, sheathed in controversy. Rupert Sanders's film is adapted from the anime work of the same name, directed by Mamoru Oshii, in 1995. Fans of anime are ferociously purist and loyal, and for them, I suspect, the very notion of converting Oshii's masterpiece (as it is deemed to be) into a live-action Hollywood remake smells of both travesty and sellout. Such scorn is as nothing, however, compared with the wrath that has greeted the casting of Johansson. In the original, which started life as a graphic novel, her character was called Major Kusanagi, but in Sanders's movie she is referred to mostly as Major.