AI image generators have been responsible for so much in the last few months. Barely a day goes by without us discovering some new experiment, whether it's resurrecting late celebs or creating a tool so we can turn anyone into a Pokémon. Now someone's used them to enhance what 30 years ago was the cutting edge in video game graphics. An artist has fed the characters of Sega's nineties fighting game Virtua Fighter through an AI image generator, turning the original 3D polygon graphics into photorealistic images (well, almost). To see how this technology works, take a look at our piece on how to use DALL-E 2 (opens in new tab).

LyricJam, a real-time system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate lyric lines for live instrumental music, was created by members of the University's Natural Language Processing Lab. The lab, led by Olga Vechtomova, a Waterloo Engineering professor cross-appointed in Computer Science, has been researching creative applications of AI for several years. The lab's initial work led to the creation of a system that learns musical expressions of artists and generates lyrics in their style. Recently, Vechtomova, along with Waterloo graduate students Gaurav Sahu and Dhruv Kumar, developed technology that relies on various aspects of music such as chord progressions, tempo, and instrumentation to synthesize lyrics reflecting the mood and emotions expressed by live music. As a musician or a band plays instrumental music, the system continuously receives the raw audio clips, which the neural network processes to generate new lyric lines.

In Las Vegas this week you can learn a lot about the exciting potential of artificial intelligence. You can also be left wondering whether AI is a triumph of marketing, yet to deliver real improvements to the economy and the way we live. One of my first stops here was at a University of Las Vegas robotics lab. Sophia is a humanoid robot with a face that strays dangerously close to that "Uncanny Valley" where machines look just a little too human for comfort. She achieved fame and some notoriety when Saudi Arabia named her its first robot citizen, a stunt which saw many question whether machines were now being given freedoms denied to Saudi women.