Media
Microsoft pulls 'teen girl' chatbot after it learned to become a racist in just a day
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First look: Netflix's 'Voltron' builds a better giant robot
The first teaser trailer for the Netflix animated series "Voltron: Legendary Defender." Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos are the creative team behind Netflix's "Voltron: Legendary Defender." The mechanized lions of Voltron are roaring back to life. The popular 1980s cartoon fantasy franchise with one really cool giant robot is being introduced to a new generation with the Netflix's animated series Voltron: Legendary Defender. Produced by DreamWorks Animation, the first 13 22-minute episodes will drop on June 10.
The robot chef coming to a kitchen near you - Telegraph
The result is uncanny โ the robo-kitchen appears to pause and think between stages, just as a human chef would do. Yet it is not unsettling. "Many people who watch the robot have an emotional reaction to it," says Alina Isachenka, Moley's operations manager. "It was really important to make sure it wasn't scary. It would have been more cost-efficient to use a two or three-fingered gripper, but people may be scared by that โ they don't want a two-fingered robot in their kitchen.
New on DVD: 'The Hateful Eight' is Quentin Tarantino at his worst (but the acting, music and vistas are swell)
Quentin Tarantino indulges in some of his worst impulses in this widescreen western, loading it up with violence and vulgarity to an almost nihilistic degree. Yet as tone-deaf and ugly as the film often is, it's also beautifully shot (by Robert Richardson) and masterfully acted (by an all-star cast that includes Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins and an Oscar-nominated Jennifer Jason Leigh), with a stirring Oscar-winning score from Ennio Morricone. And it's always a pleasure to listen to Tarantino's dialogue, with its winding speeches and stories within stories. He bites off more than he can chew with this claustrophobic tale of post-Civil War animus, boiling over at a snowed-in Wyoming trading post, but while the movie is uneven, it's often thrilling. Buyer beware, though: While the film itself is certainly worthy, this first DVD and Blu-ray release contains the shorter, nonroadshow cut, with just a couple of featurettes.
Microsoft's AI robot became a hitler loving sex-addict in less than 24hours, forced to shutdown
A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, 'Bush did 9/11?-proclaiming Developers at Microsoft created'Tay', an AI modelled to speak'like a teen girl', in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as'The AI with zero chill' โ and that she certainly is. To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe. She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being'creepy' or'super weird'.
Feature and TV films
The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997 AMC Sun. Tomorrow Never Dies 1997 EPIX Wed. 10 p.m., Thur. The X-Files: Fight the Future 1998 IFC Thur. Hard to Kill 1990 Sundance Mon. 8 p.m., Tue. A scientist gives his bodyguard superhuman powers in order to fight racists. A lawyer unwittingly becomes friends with an unstable woman who has a criminal history. A successful businesswoman puts her family, career and life on the line to satisfy her addiction to sex. With his father trapped in the wreckage of their spacecraft, a youth treks across Earth's now-hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon and signal for help. In the future a cutting-edge android in the form of a boy embarks on a journey to discover his true nature. An 11-year-old boy experiences the worst day of his young life but soon learns that he's not alone when other members of his family encounter their own calamities. A struggling writer falls in love with a stenographer while trying to finish his new novel in 30 days.
Mycroft โ The World's First Truly Open Home AI - Freedom Penguin
If you haven't heard of Mycroft, there's a good chance you've been living under a rock. Mycroft is a project over at Indiegogo and Kickstarter that has the distinction of being the first truly open source, open hardware home AI to grace the technological landscape. And, of course, it runs GNU/Linux. Mycroft is designed to respond to natural human language and execute functions based on what you say/it hears. This allows it to integrate with an array of online sites like YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify (along with many others) so you can find content/control those sites with the ease of voice.
Microsoft launches AI chatbot on Twitter and it turns racist within hours
Microsoft introduced a chat robot designed to interact in the style of a "teen girl" on Twitter, and it went rogue almost immediately, spouting racist opinions, conspiracy theories and a fondness for genocide. The artificial intelligence (AI) named "Tay" - @Tayandyou on Twitter - was intended chat to with 18-24 year olds with the idea being that she would learn from each tweet and get progressively smarter. Clearly Microsoft had forgotten that Twitter is home to a huge amount of trolls, racists and general troublemakers who jumped at the chance to'teach' the teenaged AI about life. In one widely circulated tweet, Tay said: "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. She also went on to deny the existence of the Holocaust, and agreed with white supremacist propaganda that was tweeted at her. Microsoft apparently didn't put any kind of filters on the AI, which meant Tay was able to tweet a number of atrocious racial slurs. The troublesome cyber-teen has since been taken offline for'upgrades' and Microsoft has deleted some of her more offensive tweets. "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement.
Get ready for robots to become part of the family
For decades robots have won the affection of humans in pop culture -- whether it was R2-D2 in Star Wars or Rosie the Robot in the Jetsons. But as popular as these machines have been on screen, we haven't seen similar robots enter our everyday lives. Now that appears on the verge of changing as the technology sector increasingly invests in robotics. Funding to private robotics companies doubled in 2015 to reach a record high of 587 million, according to CB Insights. And robots were the dominant theme at a conference Amazon held earlier this week to encourage inspiration and creativity in tech's hottest fields.
Google's A.I. program might save the day for digital media
Reinforcement learning, a key Google DeepMind algorithm, could overhaul news recommendation engines and greatly improve users' stickiness. After beating a Go Grandmaster, the algorithm could become the engine of choice for true personalization. My interest for DeepMind goes back to its acquisition by Google, in Jan. 2014, for about half a billion dollars. Later in California, I had conversations with artificial intelligence and deep learning experts; they said Google had in fact captured about half of the world's best A.I. minds, snatching several years of Stanford A.I. classes, and paying top dollar for talent. Acquiring London startup DeepMind was a key move in a strategy aimed at cornering the A.I. field.