Tickets to the Willy's Chocolate Experience in Glasgow, Scotland, were marketed based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) images that sold parents on a magical experience, but when they showed up, it was anything but, according to reports. Parents called the police on Saturday because they felt scammed by the "absolute shambles of an event," the New York Post reported. The AI-generated images included giant candy displays and colorful lights, but children were instead greeted by a virtually empty warehouse with a printed AI background, a disappointing bouncy castle and hardly any candy. "Experience captivating live performances featuring charming characters singing original catchy tunes. This event guarantees an immersive and delightful entertainment experience suitable for aged 3 years old," according to the event website.

Adapters present a promising solution to the catastrophic forgetting problem in continual learning. However, training independent Adapter modules for every new task misses an opportunity for cross-task knowledge transfer. We propose Improvise to Initialize (I2I), a continual learning algorithm that initializes Adapters for incoming tasks by distilling knowledge from previously-learned tasks' Adapters. We evaluate I2I on CLiMB, a multimodal continual learning benchmark, by conducting experiments on sequences of visual question answering tasks. Adapters trained with I2I consistently achieve better task accuracy than independently-trained Adapters, demonstrating that our algorithm facilitates knowledge transfer between task Adapters. I2I also results in better cross-task knowledge transfer than the state-of-the-art AdapterFusion without incurring the associated parametric cost.

A concert held at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall to celebrate the opening of the university's new museum included a performer that was invisible to the audience but played a key role in forming the melodic sound: an artificial intelligence (AI) system that responded to the musicians and improvised in real time. In a piece from "Brain Opera 2.0," the system starts by growling to the trumpet, then finds pitches with the trombone, becomes melodic with the sax, and ultimately syncs with the instruments by the time everyone comes in, explains Tod Machover, a music and media professor at MIT and head of the MIT Media Lab, who served as composer/conductor of the two-night concert event. The "living, singing AI" system was designed by Manaswi Mishra, one of Machover's Ph.D. students. "We developed a machine learning-based model that could react to musician input in real time, and then'fed' this model with a vast amount of music from many countries, styles, and historic periods, as well as with all kinds of human voices making every conceivable kind of vocal sound," Machover said. The system also drew from a vast library of percussive instruments and sounds from around the world to then improvise with the performers.

In the next five years, it is likely that AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers. As the technology continues to advance, it will be able to perform tasks that were previously thought to require a high level of education and skill. This could lead to a displacement of workers in certain industries, as companies look to cut costs by automating processes. While it is difficult to predict the exact extent of this trend, it is clear that AI will have a significant impact on the job market for college-educated workers. It will be important for individuals to stay up to date on the latest developments in AI and to consider how their skills and expertise can be leveraged in a world where machines are increasingly able to perform many tasks.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a writer like Tolstoy or Agatha Christie--until I got my first period. I realized then that women must endure much more pain than men to fulfill the human reproduction responsibilities. So, I wanted to become a geneticist who could make men pregnant to share the pain with women. My "ambition" was shattered when I was rejected by the biology department of the university I applied to. Instead, I became a computer science student without ever having seen a computer before.

HARMI (Human and Robotic Musical Improvisation) is a software and hardware system that enables musical robots to improvise with human performers. The goal of the system is not to replicate human musicians, but rather to explore the novel kinds of musical expression that machines can produce. At the same time, the system seeks to create spaces where humans and robots can communicate with each other in a common language. To help achieve the former, ideas from contemporary compositional practice and music theory were used to shape the system's expressive capabilities. In regard to the latter, research from the field of cognitive psychology was incorporated to enable communication, interaction, and understanding between human and robotic performers. The system was partly developed in conjunction with a residency at High Concept Laboratories in Chicago, IL, where a group of human improvisers performed with the robotic instruments. The system represents an approach to the question of how humans and robots can interact and improvise in musical contexts. This approach purports to highlight the unique expressive spaces of humans, the unique expressive spaces of machines, and the shared spaces between the two.

Musicians have been experimenting with artificial intelligence for a few years now. For example, in 2019, an AI trained on Schubert's music completed his Unfinished Symphony and last October the Beethoven Orchestra in Bonn performed an AI-generated version of Beethoven's last symphony. But what are the limits of AI music? Can an AI really be considered creative? And is it possible for an AI to improvise with musicians live on stage?

It seems like there's a never-ending debate about autonomous vehicles and the neural networks that drive them. While opinions vary widely, many fall into the optimist and pessimist camps. The most optimistic of the optimists not only believe that building an autonomous vehicle is possible, but that an autonomous vehicle is conscious and alive in some way, or think that true artificial general intelligence isn't that far off. The pessimists think that not only will Tesla fail at creating Full Self Driving, but that all who try will fail. Even the pessimists who think Tesla and other companies may succeed often point to past failure or current safety concerns.

Fans of games like Dungeons & Dragons know that the fun comes, in part, from a creative Dungeon Master--an all-powerful narrator who follows a storyline but has free rein to improvise in response to players' actions and the fate of the dice. This kind of spontaneous yet coherent storytelling is extremely difficult for artificial intelligence, even as AI has mastered more constrained board games such as chess and Go. The best text-generating AI programs too often produce confused and disjointed prose. So some researchers view spontaneous storytelling as a good test of progress toward more intelligent machines. An attempt to build an artificial Dungeon Master offers hope that machines able to improvise a good storyline might be built.

It was 7:55 p.m. on a Saturday night, and I had just arrived at a small improv workshop and stage space in San Francisco's Mission District. Mere moments after I sat down, someone placed a stool in front of the stage, draped a red cloth over it and placed what would turn out to be an integral part of the evening's performance: an Amazon Echo. It wasn't there to tell jokes -- it's notably not a very good comedian. Instead, it was both prop and participant in a unique improv show called "Alexa, Improvise." From mechanical comics to riffing robots, the integration of artificial intelligence and comedy have been attempted before, with varying degrees of success.