The next few Tuesdays, The Verge's flagship podcast The Vergecast is showcasing a miniseries dedicated to the use of artificial intelligence in industries that are often overlooked, hosted by Verge senior reporter Ashley Carman. This week, the series focuses on AI for the video world. More specifically, we're looking at how AI is being used as a tool to help people streamline the process of creating video content. Yes, this might mean software taking on a bigger role in the very human act of creativity, but what if instead of replacing us, machine learning tools could be used to assist our work? That's what Scott Prevost, VP of Adobe Sensei -- Adobe's machine learning platform -- envisions for Adobe's AI products. "Sensei was founded on this firm belief that we have that AI is going to democratize and amplify human creativity, but not replace it," Prevost says.

AI increasingly is being used to make artwork, but experts disagree over whether computers truly can be creative. A new website even lets you try your hand at collaborating on art with AI. Artifly gets to know the user's preferences and creates artwork based on what they like. Not everyone thinks this process makes Artifly an artist, however. "Creativity is an innately human characteristic with the power to help us cope, connect, and be inspired," Scott Prevost, software firm Adobe's vice president of engineering, who focuses on AI technology, told Lifewire in an email interview.

Researchers from the University of Texas San Antonio have created an AI-based application capable of observing the actions taking place in a video and creating artificial sound effects to match those actions. The sound effects generated by the program are reportedly so realistic that when human observers were polled, they typically thought the sound effects were legitimate. The program responsible for generating the sound effects, AudioFoley, was detailed in a study recently published in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. According to IEEE Spectrum, the AI program was developed by Jeff Provost, professor at UT San Antonio, and Ph.D. student Sanchita Ghose. The researchers created the program utilizing multiple machine learning models joined together.

AI experts gathered at MIT last week, with the aim of predicting the role artificial intelligence will play in the future of work. Will it be the enemy of the human worker? Will it prove to be a savior? Or will it be just another innovation--like electricity or the internet? As IEEE Spectrum previously reported, this conference ("AI and the Future of Work Congress"), held at MIT's Kresge Auditorium, offered sometimes pessimistic outlooks on the job- and industry-destroying path that AI and automation seems to be taking: Self-driving technology will put truck drivers out of work; smart law clerk algorithms will put paralegals out of work; robots will (continue to) put factory and warehouse workers out of work.