Fox News anchor and executive editor Bret Baier has the latest on fears over the'darker side' of artificial intelligence on'Special Report.' Generative Artificial Intelligence can create lifelike imaging and audio, which is likely why an increasing number of film studios are incorporating A.I. into special effects. It comes just two years after Hollywood's largest union went on strike, in part over the impact A.I. would bring. "Popular culture movies like The Terminator have created a very dark dystopian version of what this could look like," White House A.I. and Crypto Czar David Sacks said. "The version of the future of A.I. that I think is probably most accurate if you want to pop cultural references is Star Trek Enterprise. Think about the ship computer in that. It can perform tasks for you. But it doesn't have a will of its own, it doesn't' have a mind of its' own. It's there to help the crew, and it needs to be supervised by humans."

Near the end of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Nazis attempt to pull off one of the oldest tropes in entertainment: using the movie's titular dial, the Antikythera, to travel back to 1939 and assassinate Adolf Hitler. As their Luftwaffe aircraft bears down on a time warp, the scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who hopes to install himself as the führer and win the war, turns to Indiana Jones and demands he witness "history's greatest moment--its end." To enter the past, then, is to end history. It's Voller's motto, but also the movie's--a nod to the de-aging technology that has made it possible. Thanks to several tools--AI, CGI, other acronyms--80-year-old Harrison Ford spends roughly 25 minutes of the film looking like the Indiana Jones of the early 1980s.

Craggy, grey-haired and 80 years old, Harrison Ford might seem a bit old to don his brown Fedora-style hat or crack his whip as Indiana Jones. But a trailer for his upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny offers a flashback to Indy in his swashbuckling glory days. "That is my actual face at that age," the actor explained on CBS's The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "They have this artificial intelligence (AI) programme. It can go through every foot of film that Lucasfilm owns because I did a bunch of movies for them and they have all this footage including film that wasn't printed: stock. They could mine it from where the light is coming from, the expression. Then I put little dots on my face and I say the words and they make it. Having discovered the secret of eternal youth, Ford joked: "That's what I see when I look in the mirror now." He is not the only actor to get a digital facelift with an assist from AI. Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and other cast members will play younger versions of themselves in Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis, thanks to a tool that the AI company Metaphysic says can create "high-resolution photorealistic faceswaps and de-ageing effects on top of actors' performances live and in real time without the need for further compositing or VFX work". Metaphysic's website proclaims: "We are world leaders in creating AI generated content that looks real" and suggests: "Use AI to create your own hyperreal avatar". The company has just struck a deal with the Creative Artists Agency "to develop generative AI tools and services for talent", according to the Hollywood Reporter. Just as the buzzy AI chatbot ChatGPT threatens to upend journalism, speechwriting and school essays, so AI could turn digital de-ageing from something that requires many months of highly skilled artists to something that many people can do in their bedrooms. And as the technology becomes ever more sophisticated, there are fears that deepfake technology could fall into the wrong hands and be weaponised. Olcun Tan, a German-born visual effects supervisor based in Los Angeles, reflects: "We're going through a big revolution.

"Hell is when other people are fake" -- Jean-Paul Sartre writing in 2020. Have you ever read Jean-Paul Sartre's famous play No Exit? The main character, Garcin, cries out "Hell is--other people!" after realizing hell is not torture racks and fire, but interpersonal strife manufactured by Lucifer to push sufferers to the brink of psychological collapse. Physical torture would be infinitely easier to bear, Garcin declares, than the vicissitudes of continuous socialization. If you had roommates in quarantine, you might relate.

According to the film's VFX supervisor, Pablo Helman, who stated that 1,750 shots were required for two and a half hours of shooting, the carefully placed on-set lighting captured the actor's facial performances from different angles, while at the same time shining infrared light on the actors' faces without being seen on the production camera. Thus, the system was able to analyze the lighting and texture information and created a machinable geometry network for each frame. Working with multiple cameras is indispensable in the process. While shooting, they work with a three-camera rig with a central camera, which also has a director's camera. The other two cameras are there to record data.

Artificial images have been around almost as long as movies. As computing power has grown and digital photography has become commonplace, special effects have increasingly been created digitally, and have become much more realistic as a result. ACM's Turing Award for 2019 to Patrick M. Hanrahan and Edwin E. Catmull reflected in part their contributions to computer-generated imagery (CGI), notably at the pioneering animation company Pixar. CGI is best known in science fiction or other fantastic settings, where audiences presumably already have suspended their disbelief. Similarly, exotic creatures can be compelling when they display even primitive human facial expressions.

Anonymous sources in documentaries have often been reduced to a shadowy, voice-distorted figure -- or worse, a pixelated blur. But a new documentary premiering Tuesday on HBO has, with the aid of advanced digital technology, gone to greater lengths to preserve the secrecy of its sources while still conveying their humanity. "Welcome to Chechnya," directed by David France, is about an underground pipeline created to rescue LGBTQ Chechens from the Russian republic where the government has for several years waged a crackdown on gays. In the predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia ruled by strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, LGBTQ Chechens have been detained, tortured and killed. France, the filmmaker behind "How to Survive a Plague" and "The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson," worked in secrecy with the Russian LGBT Network, a group formed to help save gay Chechens and find them asylum abroad.

If it's true that no amount of money can prevent aging, a little-known YouTuber has just hammered home that truth in style. The YouTuber, a deepfake specialist known as iFake, has caused embarrassment for Netflix after using free deepfake tech to de-age characters from "The Irishman" more convincingly than the streaming giant – despite Netflix reportedly spending millions of dollars attempting to de-age them. The YouTuber claims it took just seven days to create the new effects. Commenters on YouTube have also lavished the deepfaker with praise. One, going by the name "JRX." urged iFake to "do the whole movie and release it," and another, Fernando Maron, claiming that "De Niro [looks] like his Taxi Driver, Once Upon in America days."

Without further adieu, let's predict the 2020 winners! For each category, we predict the most likely winner along with other nominees sorted by decreasing scores. Keep in mind that these scores aren't supposed to add up to 100. Rather, they are "points" given to the nominee by the underlying Deepnet model on a scale of 0 to 100. Another way to look at this is that the model is telling us how a movie/artist with a given set of characteristics will do in a given award based on 19 years of historical data on that award AND independent of the other nominees for the same award this year.

In the fall of 2015, celebrated visual effects whiz Pablo Helman was in Taiwan celebrating Thanksgiving with Martin Scorsese. The 24-year veteran of Industrial Light & Magic, the company founded by George Lucas at the onset of the Star Wars franchise, was midway through production on the director's Jesuit missionary saga, Silence, for which Helman had to digitally re-create the enormity of St. Paul's College of Macau. But over holiday dinner, Scorsese began pitching Helman on a different film entirely. It was another adaption, this one based on I Heard You Paint Houses, Charles Brandt's biography of mob hit man and supposed Jimmy Hoffa murderer Frank Sheeran. Much like Silence, the story was expansive, though instead of spanning geography (Portugal to Japan), the movie would stretch across years (approximately seven decades).