Star Trek actor William Shatner recording his own deepfake images
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Star Trek And The Videobot Generation: William Shatner creates his own deepfake.

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.
Square brackets with lines disappearing inside
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Spotlight on Unreproducible Results: Papers Without Code collects unreproducible AI research.

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.
Commercial about The Trevor Lifeline
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Chatbots Against Depression: The Trevor Project used GPT-2 to train crisis counselors.

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.
AI-generated images with the model DALL-E
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Tell Me a Picture: OpenAI's two new multimodal AI models, CLIP and DALL·E

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.
Bookstack and wrapping paper
Conversation

Writer’s Unblock: Language models keep getting bigger and better.

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.
Graphs and data related to transformer networks
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The Transformation Continues: Technique boosts transformer performance on long sequences.

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.
Map of China pointing specific places in red
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AI Against Covid Progress Report: How Chinese authorities used AI to fight Covid

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.
Information related to OpenAI's model GPT-3
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Generation Text: How beta testers reacted to GPT-3

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.
Virtual bot speaking
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Bots Don’t Need Social Distancing: Covid-19 drove demand for Replika, an AI chatbot.

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.
Generative BST example and graph
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Big Bot Makes Small Talk: A research summary of Facebook's Generative BST chatbot

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.
A chatbot called Meena and a graph comparing it with other chatbot services
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Toward Open-Domain Chatbots: Meena Scores High on System for Grading NLP Chatbots

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.
Chatbot asking for Covid-19 symptoms
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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.
Capture of a chatbot telling jokes developed by Google Brain
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Bot Comic: How Google's Meena chatbot developed a sense of humor

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.
Excerpt from The Squire, an AI written short film
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Here Be Dragons: AI Dungeon 2 generated the script for a short movie.

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.
Lifelike video imagery of virtual people made by NEON
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AI Steals CES: A roundup of the AI products showcased at CES 2020

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.

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