A digital doppelgänger of Star Trek’s original star will let fans chat with him — possibly well beyond his lifetime. AI startup StoryFile built a lifelike videobot of actor William Shatner, best known for playing Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek.

A new website calls out AI research that may not lend itself to being reproduced. Papers Without Code maintains a directory of AI systems that researchers tried but failed to reproduce.

A language model is helping crisis-intervention volunteers practice their suicide-prevention skills. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that operates a 24-hour hotline for LGBTQ youth, uses a “crisis contact simulator” to train its staff in how to talk with troubled teenagers.

Two new models show a surprisingly sharp sense of the relationship between words and images. OpenAI, the for-profit research lab, announced a pair of models that have produced impressive results in multimodal learning: DALL·E.

Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.

Transformer networks are gaining popularity as a high-accuracy alternative to recurrent neural networks. But they can run slowly when they’re applied to long sequences.

A new report details the role of AI in China’s effort to fight the coronavirus. Researchers at Synced, a China-based AI publication, describe how nearly 90 machine learning products have contributed to the country’s pandemic response.

People granted early access to OpenAI’s latest language model are raving about its way with words — and more. Beta testers of GPT-3 are showing off the model’s ability to write business memos, craft blogs, pen tweets, and even generate computer code.

A chatbot is providing companionship for the locked-down and lonely. Downloads of Replika, a chatbot designed to be a virtual friend, have spiked during the coronavirus pandemic, reports the New York Times.

Facebook recently rolled out its entry in the World’s Biggest Chatbot sweepstakes. In keeping with the company’s social-networking dominance, the bot is designed to excel at chitchat on any subject.

Progress in language models is spawning a new breed of chatbots and, unlike their narrow-domain forebears, they have the gift of gab. Recent research tests the limits of conversational AI.

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.

Androids may not dream of electric sheep, but some crack jokes about horses and cows. Meena, a 2.6-billion parameter chatbot developed by Google Brain, showed impressive conversational ability, discussing a variety of topics.

AI is contributing to paintings, music, and now a whimsical fantasy video. The Squire is an amateur romp through a snowy realm of knights in armor and damsels in distress. The script was composed by AI Dungeon 2, an interactive text-adventure game based on the GPT-2 language model.

Artificial intelligence was everywhere at the biggest, buzziest consumer-technology showcase in the U.S. AI ruled the convention floor at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, as numerous media outlets proclaimed.