An art prize at the Colorado State Fair was awarded last month to a work that – unbeknown to the judges – was generated by an artificial intelligence system. Social media have also seen an explosion of weird images generated by AI from text descriptions, such as "the face of a shiba inu blended into the side of a loaf of bread on a kitchen bench, digital art". You may be wondering what's going on here. As somebody who researches creative collaborations between humans and AI, I can tell you that behind the headlines and memes a fundamental revolution is under way – with profound social, artistic, economic and technological implications. You could say this revolution began in June 2020, when a company called OpenAI achieved a big breakthrough in AI with the creation of GPT-3, a system that can process and generate language in much more complex ways than earlier efforts.

The historical evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dates back to the year 1996 when Deep Blue AI defeated the then world chess champion. Garry Kasparov The year 2019 witnessed geopolitical paradigm where there was a race for technological supremacy between superpowers. It is estimated that by 2034-40, 50 per cent of the jobs would be automated in United States i.e.; within the next 15 years (Lee Kai Fu, AI Superpowers). Also majority of researchers predict singularity by 2045 -- a stage where machines become more advanced than human beings. This necessitates one to understand AI, its benefits, its major issues and its implications on government and social order.

Click here to read the full article. The following essay was produced as part of the 2019 Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Artificial intelligence is everywhere: It can drive a car, chat with customers, or help patients with neuronal damage to recover their potential. But if data-assisted moviemaking can help predict a movie's outcome, what room is there left for artistic freedom? At this year's Locarno Film Festival, Sami Arpa, CEO and co-founder of Largo Films, a startup based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and creator of the LargoAI technology, shared his insight about the evolution of this maybe-not-so-unnatural union.

The following essay was produced as part of the 2019 Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Artificial intelligence is everywhere: It can drive a car, chat with customers, or help patients with neuronal damage to recover their potential. But if data-assisted moviemaking can help predict a movie's outcome, what room is there left for artistic freedom? At this year's Locarno Film Festival, Sami Arpa, CEO and co-founder of Largo Films, a startup based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and creator of the LargoAI technology, shared his insight about the evolution of this maybe-not-so-unnatural union. At Locarno last year to present sofy.tv, a VOD service for short films, Arpa recalled, "I was approached by industry professionals, mostly producers and distributors, who asked me if the AI developed for sofy could be used for their own purposes, to help them predict a movie's outcome. A few directors also approached me, although they were much more skeptical at first."