On Thursday, May 11 at 19:30 GMT: Popular AI image generators are able to produce seemingly endless amounts of stunning visual art in just a matter of seconds. So where does the technology leave professional artists? AI image generators are trained on datasets made up of billions of images collected online and generally without the artists' knowledge or approval. Users can then prompt the AI to create new artwork in the style of a specific artist. For many digital artists, the technology represents a threat to their livelihoods.

Jung_E (now on Netflix) is the new film from director Yeon Sang-ho, who made a name for himself outside his native Korea with 2016 zombie action movie Train to Busan. As he offered a new angle on a familiar subgenre with Busan, he surely hopes to do the same for artificial intelligence science-fiction (AI-SCI-FI?!?) with his latest work, which is set in a sort-of-post-apocalyptic dystopia where robots fight wars for us, and the side with the best AI sure seems ripe for victory. The movie is also notable for being the final role of Korean film star Kang Soo-yeon, who sadly passed away in 2022 at age 55 after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. The Gist: IN A WORLD where severe climate change has forced humanity to mostly abandon Earth for the Moon; where subsequent civil war has raged for decades; where artificial intelligence is a primary component of war technology; where human brains can be uploaded from diseased bodies to new ones and if you have enough money you can enjoy a terrific Type A existence, or a so-so Type B, or possibly a horrific, but no-cost Type C where your consciousness is under the control of corporations and shit; where people take ethics tests to determine that they're indeed human and not AI – in this world, a woman leaps around a bona-fide Dystopian Hell of a set piece, fighting robots, some more diabolically advanced in their ability to withstand bullets and such. She is the famed kickass warrior Yun Jung-yi (Kim Hyun-joo), but she really isn't Yun Jung-yi – she's Jung_E, a clone of Yun Jung-yi, and she keeps failing the same battle simulation. The simulation reinvents the very scene of her defeat many years prior, which left her body in a coma, the contents of her brain as the key element of weapons-development research firm Kronoid and her daughter kind of almost orphaned.

On Wednesday, December 14 at 19:30 GMT: For decades, scientists have been developing brain-computer interfaces – technology that allows humans to control computers via the power of thought alone. Researchers have found some success in using BCI technology with brain implants that help people with mobility disorders control prosthetic limbs. In other research settings, implanted microchips have also been used to help people with disabilities or neuromuscular diseases manage seizures and communicate through text messages. Now private companies like Elon Musk's Neuralink are growing their presence in the neurotech field, and with that growth comes the prospect of creating brain implant devices for a broader market beyond those with disabilities. The neurotech company Synchron is currently testing a surgically implanted device that allows a person to control an iPhone using only thoughts.

Logical rules, both transferable and explainable, are widely used as weakly supervised signals for many downstream tasks such as named entity tagging. To reduce the human effort of writing rules, previous researchers adopt an iterative approach to automatically learn logical rules from several seed rules. However, obtaining more seed rules can only be accomplished by extra human annotation with heavy costs. Limited by the size and quality of the seed rules, the model performance of previous systems is bounded. In this paper, we develop a novel framework STREAM to distill task-specific logical rules from large pre-trained models. Specifically, we borrow recent prompt-based language models as the knowledge expert to yield initial seed rules, and based on the formed high-quality instance pool that acts as an intermediary role, we keep teaching the expert to fit our task and learning task-specific logical rules. Experiments on three public named entity tagging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. With several predefined prompt templates, our system has gained significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods.

On Wednesday, July 27 at 19:30 GMT: In the past decade, artificial intelligence technologies have spread into almost every field. From healthcare and job hiring, to law enforcement and transportation, AI software is advancing our lives through automation. But there's also growing concern over some of the unintended consequences of AI – including privacy issues, algorithms that discriminate against race and gender, and flawed code that could threaten people's safety and civil liberties. More governments are now looking towards regulations for AI technology. In March, China's AI regulatory system went into effect, while nations like the UK and Canada have released proposals in recent weeks. Some technologists worry that more legal hurdles could stifle innovation, while proponents for regulation say the laws aren't keeping up with rapid movements in the industry.

The past few years have proven that human intelligence has failed us fucking big time. It's an insult to the term intelligence to even call it intelligence. Does that sentence make any sense? I don't know--I'm becoming increasingly dumber just being around y'all. Maybe artificial intelligence is the answer, even though movies from Blade Runner to The Matrix to Ex Machina have served up mixed outcomes for humanity.

There is a church that worships artificial intelligence (AI). Zealots believe that an extraordinary AI future is inevitable. The technology is not here yet, but we are assured that it's coming. We will have the ability to be uploaded onto a computer and thereby achieve immortality. You will be reborn into a new, immortal silicon body.

Valve is launching a new Steam event tabletop gaming fans might love, especially now it's not wise to play in person with a bunch of people. The first ever Steam Digital Tabletop Fest, a joint project between Valve and Auroch Digital, centers around games that "run across the lines between digital and physical." By that, they mean its featured titles will include digital ports of physical games and digital games that have produced physical versions. They also include digital games that simulate the physical play experience and those that feature aesthetics inspired by tabletop games. Valve and Auroch are still in the midst of finalizing the panels and talks for the event, but they listed a few of their planned activities to give fans an idea of what they can expect.

We are surrounded by AI, it analyzes our pictures, answers our questions and recommends new shows. The next logical step is an AI that learns directly from us. Something wonderful always happens when a technology reaches the hands of a large amount of people. Digital Photography and Video are great examples. The endless creativity of the global community is always finding new uses, changing lives, having fun and more importantly: empowering people.

DeepMind's foray into digital health services continues to raise concerns. The latest worries are voiced by a panel of external reviewers appointed by the Google-owned AI company to report on its operations after its initial data-sharing arrangements with the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) ran into a major public controversy in 2016. The DeepMind Health Independent Reviewers' 2018 report flags a series of risks and concerns, as they see it, including the potential for DeepMind Health to be able to "exert excessive monopoly power" as a result of the data access and streaming infrastructure that's bundled with provision of the Streams app -- and which, contractually, positions DeepMind as the access-controlling intermediary between the structured health data and any other third parties that might, in the future, want to offer their own digital assistance solutions to the Trust. While the underlying FHIR (aka, fast healthcare interoperability resource) deployed by DeepMind for Streams uses an open API, the contract between the company and the Royal Free Trust funnels connections via DeepMind's own servers, and prohibits connections to other FHIR servers. A commercial structure that seemingly works against the openness and interoperability DeepMind's co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has claimed to support.