Chatbot asking for Covid-19 symptoms
AI & Society

Chatbots Disagree on Covid-19: Medical chatbots offered conflicting Covid advice.

Chatbots designed to recognize Covid-19 symptoms dispense alarmingly inconsistent recommendations. Given the same symptoms, eight high-profile medical bots responded with divergent, often conflicting advice.
15.ai screen capture with a character from My Little Pony
AI & Society

Voice Cloning for the Masses: An AI project clones cartoon character voices.

Are you secretly yearning to have a My Little Pony character voice your next online presentation? A new web app can make your dreams come true. 15.ai translates short text messages into the voices of popular cartoon and videogame characters.
Women in AI in academia and industry chart
AI & Society

AI’s Gender Imbalance: The data behind deep learning's gender gap

Women continue to be severely underrepresented in AI. A meta-analysis of research conducted by Synced Review for Women’s History Month found that female participation in various aspects of AI typically hovers between 10 and 20 percent.
Heat treatment on metal
AI & Society

Satellite Data Hints at China Upswing: AI analysis showed how Covid impacted the Chinese economy.

Neural networks revealed both how hard Covid-19 has hit the Chinese economy, and hopeful signs that a renaissance may be underway. Researchers analyzed satellite imagery, GPS signals, and social media to get a multifaceted view of the pandemic’s impact.
Excerpts from promotional video for music-composing robot named Shimon
AI & Society

Algorithm and Blues: Shimon is a musical robot that writes its own lyrics.

Bored with your Spotify playlists? Let this robot singer/songwriter take you on a trip “Into Your Mind.” A music-composing, marimba-playing robot named Shimon has learned to write and sing its own lyrics, IEEE Spectrum reports.
Workers in office cubicles
AI & Society

Workers Get the Jump on Automation: How the Philippines prepared its workforce for automation

Businesses around the world outsource their customer service work to the Philippines. Now the Philippines is preparing its workers to outsource some tasks to AI.
Animated symbol of Covid-19 virus structure
AI & Society

AI Takes on Coronavirus: CORD-19 is a free dataset of 30,000 coronavirus articles.

Machine learning thrives on data, but information about the novel coronavirus and the illness it produces has been either thin or hard to access. Now researchers are pooling resources to share everything we do know.
Robotic hand controlled by an amputee taking a can
AI & Society

AI Gets a Grip: AI helps amputees control robotic hands.

Amputees can control a robotic hand with their thoughts — plus machine learning. University of Michigan researchers developed a system that uses signals from an amputee’s nervous system to control a prosthetic hand.
Examples of original and cloaked portrait photos
AI & Society

Secret Identity: Invisible patterns hide faces from AI.

Hoping to keep surveillance capitalists from capitalizing on your face? Safeguard your selfies with a digital countermeasure. Researchers devised a program that subtly alters portrait photos to confuse face recognition models without distorting the image to the human eye.
Male models during the Paris Fashion Week
AI & Society

Clothes Make the GAN: Acne Studios creates high fashion using GANs.

Fashion models recently sashayed down Paris Fashion Week catwalks in outfits designed by deep neural nets. Swedish design firm Acne Studios based its 2020 fall/winter men’s line on output from a generative adversarial network.
Text "You only live once. #YOLO" written over an orange background
AI & Society

Code No Evil: Why YOLO's co-creator no longer works on computer vision.

A prominent AI researcher has turned his back on computer vision over ethical issues. The co-creator of the popular object-recognition network You Only Look Once (YOLO) said he no longer works on computer vision because the technology has “almost no upside and enormous downside risk.”
Film from 1911 colored
AI & Society

History in Hi Res: How machine learning can enhance archival footage

While deep learning is taking us into the future, it’s also opening windows into the past. A Redditor brought 100-year-old silent film footage of New York City into the 21st century by automatically sharpening the picture, boosting the frame rate, and adding color.
Exercise training system working
AI & Society

Personal TrAIner: How AI is helping home workouts

No more sloppy workouts: AI can correct your form. A home exercise system uses neural nets to analyze your motions and tell you when you perform a move properly, reports The Verge.
Example of a deepfake
AI & Society

. . . And I Approve of This Deepfake: How India's BJP used AI to create campaign videos

Deepfake tech reared its digitally altered head in Indian politics, but with a twist: Altered images of a politician were produced by his own campaign.
Rendering of simulated environment
AI & Society

OpenAI Under Fire: Critics claim OpenAI lost its founding ideals.

An icon of idealism in AI stands accused of letting its ambition eclipse its principles. Founded in 2015 to develop artificial general intelligence for the good of humankind, OpenAI swapped its ideals for cash.

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