Two cast members, no longer content to trade insults, are flailing at each other with the fervor of a school-yard fight. Camera screen bouncing, the producer sprints over to get footage. It's 1999 and players are producing the latest season of the hot reality show, The Crush House. That job includes picking the cast, capturing the drama, and above all satisfying the ever-changing audience to keep the show on the air. Fail, and you're canceled, in the most traditional sense of the word.

The participants in last week's final of TV show America's Got Talent included a Lebanese dance troupe, a pole dancer, the singer from Hootie & the Blowfish and… two tech entrepreneurs who "build Artificial Intelligence tools and software to create hyper-realistic synthetic media at scale", according to their social media biographies. Tom Graham and Chris Umé are the emerging godfathers of so-called deepfake technology, a mind-bending illusion by which a person in a video is digitally altered so they appear to be someone else. Thus the America's Got Talent final saw four largely unknown singers line up on stage and, thanks to futuristic AI trickery embedded in the cameras in front of them, become deepfake versions of Elvis Presley and judges Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum and Sofía Vergara on the big screen behind them. This all happened in real time, as if the extraordinarily lifelike quartet were singing Devil in Disguise live on stage. Cowell, Klum and Vergara (the real versions) looked on with mouths agape from their judges' seats in the stalls.

And it did so on the set of "America's Greatest Makers," the Intel-funded reality TV show on TBS that wrapped up its first season Tuesday night with a million-dollar prize awarded to the inventors of a gamified toothbrush for kids. There in the middle of the panel, alongside fellow judges like NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal, was Intel's chief geek and visionary, CEO Brian Krzanich [pictured above]. BK, as the 56-year-old Krzanich is known around the office, is the epitome of the "celebritization" trend in high-tech and other industries, a marketing strategy that strives to pump up the personality factor of a company. "The show took Intel's name and gave it a personality," said Dr. Anubha Sacheti, a Boston-area pediatric dentist whose toothbrush team, Grush, took the first season prize. Their invention, which is designed to get kids to brush better, features a kill-the-germs game on a mobile app tied by Bluetooth to a brush, which acts as a joystick.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba has built artificial intelligence that it hopes will be able to correctly predict the outcome of reality TV talent show I'm a Singer. According to Tech in Asia, Alibaba's technology uses performance information such as "voice pitch and energy," and maps that against factors such as song choice and real-time audience response. The results will be shown online, pitching the technology, named'Ai', against the judges as the show is aired. The experiment is being held as a "proof-of-concept" for the technology, with Alibaba suggesting that it'll be used for purposes closer to its core business of online retail in the future. It's not the only internet company to be testing new technology on reality TV shows in Asia.

Artificial intelligence can master the world's most complicated board game, beating South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol in the process. But can it predict the winner of a reality TV singing contest? That is the challenge facing "Ai", an artificial intelligence programme developed by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of China's e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba. This Friday, Ai will attempt to prove that it can perceive something as subjective as the aesthetic beauty of musical notes by predicting the winner of Hunan TV's "I'm a Singer". The broadcaster is named after the southern Chinese province in which it is based.

I have 34 years as an engineer here at Intel. Almost all but about the last, I don't know, four or five has been mainly on the manufacturing side; all of our silicon manufacturing. Which, in many ways makes you a maker because you're producing a million chips a day. When I look at a 3D printer, I look at it as not only what can I build with it, but I understand exactly how that machine works. I could take it apart and put it back together.