Sharp Corp. announced Tuesday it will acquire Toshiba Corp.'s once-signature personal computer business in a bid to make a comeback in the PC market. Sharp, controlled by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., will pay ¥4 billion for an 80.1 percent stake in Toshiba Client Solutions Co., a PC-related subsidiary of Toshiba that once held the biggest share of the global laptop market but has since lost out to overseas rivals. The stock transfer is planned for Oct. 1. Sharp also announced it will issue new shares worth up to ¥200 billion to buy back preferred shares from banks, seeking to quickly improve its financial status. Sharp aims to turn Toshiba's money-losing business into a new profit-driver by exploiting its liquid crystal display production and the manufacturing know-how of parent Hon Hai.

In 2015, ad agency McCann Japan's creative planner Shun Matsuzaka set himself a task he called the "creative genome project": he wanted to create the world's first AI creative director, capable of directing a TV commercial. And last week, Matsuzaka showed off his creation at the UK advertiser trade body ISBA's annual conference in London. The creative brief: The type of brand, the campaign goal, the target audience, and the claim the ad should make. Confectionery giant Mondelez was the first client willing to put the AI creative director to the test. McCann pitted the robot against human creative director Mitsuru Kuramoto to create an ad for Clorets Mint Tab that conveyed the message: "Instant-effect fresh breath that lasts for 10 minutes."

In 2015, ad agency McCann Japan's creative planner Shun Matsuzaka set himself a task he called the "creative genome project": he wanted to create the world's first AI creative director, capable of directing a TV commercial. And last week, Matsuzaka showed off his creation at the UK advertiser trade body ISBA's annual conference in London. The creative brief: The type of brand, the campaign goal, the target audience, and the claim the ad should make. They then assembled a database of deconstructed ads from all the winners of some of Japan's biggest award shows from the past 10 years -- mapping and tagging each of the elements of the ads to help determine what made them successful. Confectionery giant Mondelez was the first client willing to put the AI creative director to the test.

It's a non-traditional application of neural networks where the network is used to'hallucinate' a desirable image,

The world's largest ad agency has hired its first artificially intelligent creative director – the rookie at McCann Erickson's Japan office is named AI-CD?. The move reminded me of an episode in the US TV series Mad Men. It is 1969, and the fictional ad agency installs its first computer, a room-filling IBM machine. "Why not let every client who sets foot in that door know that this agency has entered the future?" says one of the partners at the firm, proudly. The creative department stands grimly by, wondering if that future will include them. In 2013, Oxford economists released a widely cited projection that 47 per cent of jobs were at risk of automation.

Staffers at McCann Erickson Japan in Tokyo recently met their new colleague: AI-CD? The concept was sparked by an idea at South by Southwest, and data-driven success stories -- including Netflix's and Buzzfeed's approaches in creating targeted original content -- helped to trigger the development of AI-CD beta. To set AI-CD beta apart as an advertising prodigy (albeit, a robotic one), it initially analyzed and categorized the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation annual CM Festival for the past 10 years, which celebrates creative excellence in TV advertising in Japan. Depending on the creative challenge, it mines patterns including how weather, location or current events have affected an existing campaign, or how related commercials have performed historically on YouTube. This logic-based direction then results in a targeted strategy for a product or brand, which is actually written out using a brush attached to a robotic arm.

Today in Press Releases That Should Be Taken Very Seriously, McCann Japan has finally turned the wildest dreams of holding company executives into reality by automating the creative director role. The AI CD will, in fact, attend the Tokyo office's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1st along with 11 recent college grads who have also joined the McCann team. And yes, that date is pure coincidence. "AI-CD? is artificial intelligence that is able to give creative direction for commercials." Until now, the production of commercials has been dependent on the intangible experience and know-how of human creators." According to McCann's Japanese office, a team called McCANN MILLENNIALS (of course) developed this full-service replacement for your least favorite creative director. These clever whippersnappers analyzed and "deconstructed" a whole bunch of ads including "the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation's annual CM Festival (ACC CM Festival) awards for the past 10 years" in order to give the robot a database from which it can best determine which factors make the perfect ad for "any given product or message." The release calls the resulting process "logic-based creative direction," and we can imagine Sir Martin Sorrell salivating. It's not a stretch to imagine AI-CD making ads for certain categories like, say, auto that are actually better than most of the stuff on TV. "Our team didn't have a creative director, so we thought, why not create one ourselves with artificial intelligence?