John Oliver covered the dangers of AI on his weekly HBO show, calling it "worryingly corrosive" for society. On Last Week Tonight, Oliver said that the "spread of AI generation tools has made it very easy to flood social media sites with cheap, professional-looking, often deeply weird content" using the term AI slop to describe it all. He referred to it as the "newest iteration of spam" with weird images and videos flooding people's feeds, with some people having "absolutely no idea that it isn't real". Oliver said that it was "extremely likely that we are gonna be drowning in this shit for the foreseeable future". With content such as this, "the whole point is to grab your attention" and given how easy it has become to make it, the barrier of entry has been reduced. Meta has not only joined the game with its own tool but it has also tweaked the algorithm meaning that more than a third of content in your feed is now from accounts you don't follow.

These programs are NOT AI. They are procedural engines specifically designed to generate output to that parses close to human in order to appear as such, backed up with deliberately misleading, hyperbolic, and breathless venture capitalist PR and equally breathless and incredibly credulous reporting by news media who no longer put in any effort to investigate a story behind regurgitating a press release and getting a few quotes. I suggest you download Dwarf Fortress and run world generation in it. That is an incredibly sophisticated procedural engine that generates an entire world from its geology and climate all the way up to its history, with politics, wars, and even trade that, during generation, is tracked down to individual items in a meaningful way (Check the developer logs on the site for the 15th of May 2019 and the 22nd for a detailed breakdown when tracking a bug). It is a remarkably capable and believable engine, but it is not AI.

Despite what Donald Trump would have you believe, the biggest factor when it comes to American employment is automation, not job theft by Mexico or China or other foreign countries that the president says "you've never even heard of." Although as John Oliver points out, Trump is the same person who reportedly pronounced Nepal and Bhutan as nipple and button, so the list of countries he's never heard of might be higher than average. Elsewhere in the segment, Oliver stopped listing fake countries long enough to explain in detail how machines are replacing jobs in some fields and how that can actually a good thing (unless you want to kill a lumberjack). He also broke the news to some kids who will probably grow up to do jobs that don't already exist, like "crypto-baker" or "snail rehydrater." Good thing that unlike "mermaid doctor," the job of "culture blogger" will never be replaced by BEEP BOOP ERROR 404.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a way to automatically transform the content of one video into the style of another, making it possible to transfer the facial expressions of comedian John Oliver to those of a cartoon character, or to make a daffodil bloom in much the same way a hibiscus would. Because the data-driven method does not require human intervention, it can rapidly transform large amounts of video, making it a boon to movie production. It can also be used to convert black-and-white films to color and to create content for virtual reality experiences. "I think there are a lot of stories to be told," said Aayush Bansal, a Ph.D. student in CMU's Robotics Institute. Film production was his primary motivation in helping devise the method, he explained, enabling movies to be produced more quickly and cheaply.

Deepfakes, ultrarealistic fake videos manipulated using machine learning, are getting pretty convincing. And researchers continue to develop new methods to create these types of videos, for better or, more likely, for worse. The most recent method comes from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who have figured out a way to automatically transfer the "style" of one person to another. "For instance, Barack Obama's style can be transformed into Donald Trump," the researchers wrote in the description of a YouTube video highlighting the outcome of this method. The video shows the facial expressions of John Oliver transferred to both Stephen Colbert and an animated frog, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Obama, and from Obama to Trump.

Deepfakes, ultrarealistic fake videos manipulated using machine learning, are getting pretty convincing. And researchers continue to develop new methods to create these types of videos, for better or, more likely, for worse. The most recent method comes from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who have figured out a way to automatically transfer the "style" of one person to another. "For instance, Barack Obama's style can be transformed into Donald Trump," the researchers wrote in the description of a YouTube video highlighting the outcome of this method. The video shows the facial expressions of John Oliver transferred to both Stephen Colbert and an animated frog, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Obama, and from Obama to Trump.

Videos Using AI to make fake videos look as realistic as possible is all the rage at the moment. Developers aren't deterred by the controversy surrounding deepfakes – videos in which people's faces are digitally pasted onto the bodies of smut stars and other performers using machine-learning software. OK, sure, adding Nicholas Cage's face randomly into movie scenes is pretty funny. Despite all this, many are still pushing for new algorithms that create fake videos that are even more lifelike. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook Reality Lab are presenting Recycle-GAN, a generative adversarial system for "unsupervised video retargeting" this week at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in Germany.

In his biting, much-cheered defense of the work of local newspapers on his show "Last Week Tonight," the red-hot HBO satirist John Oliver had much fun at the expense of the role of "artificial intelligence" in modern journalism. Oliver's highly entertaining piece -- which quickly garnered well in excess of 4 million views -- contrasted the current enthusiasm of some publishing executives, including the ones who currently pay my salary, for various automated manifestations of reporting, editing and news distribution with what you might call the old-fashioned, sentimental view of the profession: the notepad-wielding reporter at the quotidian school board meeting, fighting corrupt politicians and delivering the truth to your stoop. There is a lot to unpack in Oliver's 19-minute segment and various levels of irony at work. For starters, there's this: In decrying the tendency of panicked newspapers to veer toward populist click-bait, Oliver cleverly created, well, his own populist click-bait. Oliver humbly and openly acknowledged how much his show depends on newspapers for its material -- thank you very much on behalf of my hard-working colleagues.