Machine learning has come a long way since computer scientists began taking an interest in programming a computer to play chess in the 1940s. It was only in 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer became the first machine to beat then-reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov. Since then researchers have been finding ways to make artificial intelligence (AI) more sophisticated and smarter, which prompts the question: Are humans at risk of being replaced by AI? The future of "static" chatbots, the kind that everyone finds annoying because it gives a set of templated answers, may be a thing of the past, as researchers at OpenAI have trained a model dubbed ChatGPT to interact in a conversational manner. The AI research and deployment company claims that the dialogue-based AI chatbot can provide lengthy answers to various questions, write a song on any topic (try eggs), create slogans and even help to debug programs.

Disney Research Studios explains that it trained FRAN on a database of hundreds of computer-generated synthetic faces. This allowed them to generate thousands of images of people with the same angle, facial expression and lighting conditions; a herculean task if it had to be done with real images. "Our new face re-ageing network (FRAN) incorporates simple and intuitive mechanisms that provide artists with localized control and creative freedom to direct and fine-tune the re-aging effect, a feature that is largely important in real production pipelines and often overlooked in related research work," said Disney Research Studios in a statement. In video examples provided by Disney, the neural network does a good job at ageing the faces of characters in a video, albeit with some artefacts. While it may seem like this algorithm could potentially replace many VFX jobs in the future, it is not likely that it will do so anytime soon.

Making actors look older or younger has been a eternal challenge for movie studios. It used to be achieved through fairly cumbersome and not always convincing prosthetics and makeup effects. That was then largely replaced by time-consuming digital VFX techniques, but it looks like Disney's come up with a game changer. While publicly accessible AI image generators make an impact on the creative fields, Disney has been working on a studio-quality AI model that can age (and de-age) actors in a way that looks so realistic, it's scary (for more on the use of AI in other creative fields, see how to use DALL-E 2). Making actors look older or younger isn't new. Makeup artist have done some incredible jobs on the likes of David Bowie in The Hunger (1983) and Brad Pitt in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) – the latter had 56 people working in hair and makeup.

Disney has hopped into the realm of being play with the knob of time, as the company has developed a new AI tool that is capable of winding back the clock for actors. The new artificial intelligence tool is called the Face Re-aging Network (FRAN), and is capable of automatically changing the age of actors, which will undoubtedly speed up the visual effects editing process that already takes several months to days, depending on the length of the content being altered. Manual de-aging typically involves an individual going through every single frame of the film and painting the appropriate effect onto the actor's skin. Another way is completely replacing the actor with a digital puppet to speed up the editing process. Now, Disney plans on putting the majority of that heavy lifting onto the shoulders of an AI, specifically FRAN, that the company says already complements traditional re-aging techniques that are already widely used in film production.

There are a few limitations, however, and this sort of research isn't unique. Disney noted in its research that FRAN may be unsuitable for significant alterations such as re-aging to and from very young ages and that the graying of scalp hair isn't reflected when aging up an actor, as this wasn't present in the dataset used to train the tool. Given manual VFX work and even practical prosthetic makeup application don't have these restrictions, FRAN is unlikely to be replacing many industry jobs for a good while.

Disney researchers are out to transform Hollywood with a new artificial intelligence tool that could eliminate the need for special effects to alter the age of actors playing a character in a movie. Using the face re-aging network (FRAN), filmmakers can now make actors look as young as 20 or as old as 80 years old just by inputting the person's headshot into the system that then predicts parts of the face should be altered by age. It then adds effects like wrinkles or smoothed skin as a layer on the actor's face in the film or television show without requiring a skilled artist to alter frame-by-frame manually, which typically causes facial identity loss. Disney touts its AI tool as being the first solution of its kind that can automatically alter an actor's age on video despite expressions, lighting conditions and viewpoints. The system was trained on 2,000 synthetically generated images, allowing it to learn different facial expression in order to keep the altered age layer stable as the actor moves in the film.

Disney researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that seemingly makes it far easier to make an actor appear younger or older in a scene. While artists will still be able to make manual adjustments to make sure the effect looks as realistic as possible, the AI tool could take care of most of the heavy lifting. It's said to take the AI just five seconds to apply the aging effects to a single frame. Re-aging an actor is typically an expensive and laborious process that requires artists to go through a scene frame-by-frame to manually change the character's appearance. Attempts have been made in the past to automate the process with neural networks and machine learning. Disney's researchers note that, while they might work well for still images, other systems "typically suffer from facial identity loss, poor resolution and unstable results across subsequent video frames."

Further demonstrating the power of artificial intelligence when it comes to photorealistically altering footage, researchers from Disney have revealed a new aging/de-aging tool that can make an actor look convincingly older or younger, without the need for weeks of complex and expensive visual effects work. When watching a blockbuster movie like 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp, most viewers can easily spot the work of the many visual effects studios that contribute to these films, what with their flashy moments when Ant-Man shrinks or grows to gigantic proportions. But it's sometimes the more subtle VFX work that can be the hardest to achieve photorealistic results with, like the shots featuring younger versions of actors Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas. To get results like those seen in the movie, talented artists either need to spend weeks erasing wrinkles and other telltale signs of age from an actor's face, or entirely replace it with a computer-generated double. Visual effects are a powerful filmmaking tool, but there are plenty of reasons to find ways to make them easier to create; from lightening the load on already over-worked and underpaid artists, to making the tools accessible to filmmakers not working with immense Hollywood-sized budgets.

Frances E. Allen, an American computer scientist, ACM Fellow, and the first female recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (2006), passed away on Aug. 4, 2020--her 88th birthday--from complications of Alzheimer's disease. Allen was raised on a dairy farm in Peru, NY, without running water or electricity. She received a BS degree in mathematics from the New York State College for Teachers (now the State University of New York at Albany). Inspired by a beloved math teacher, and by the example of her mother, who had also been a grade-school teacher, Allen started teaching high school math. She needed a master's degree to be certified, so she enrolled in a mathematics master's program at the University of Michigan.

Since its founding by Elon Musk and others nearly two years ago, nonprofit research lab OpenAI has published dozens of research papers. One posted online Thursday is different: Its lead author is still in high school. The wunderkind is Kevin Frans, a senior currently working on his college applications. He trained his first neural net--the kind of system that tech giants use to recognize your voice or face--two years ago, at the age of 15. Inspired by reports of software mastering Atari games and the board game Go, he has since been reading research papers and building pieces of what they described.