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.

Facebook announced a ban on deepfake videos, on the heels of a crackdown on counterfeit profiles that used AI-generated faces. Facebook declared this week that it will remove deepfake videos it deems deliberately misleading.

Society awakened to the delight, threat, and sheer weirdness of realistic images and other media dreamed up by computers.

Generative networks can embroider sentences into stories and melodies into full-fledged arrangements. A new model does something similar with drawings.

Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night. The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural networks write the books, create the cover art, price the merchandise, even write the reviews.

Will AI fakery erode public trust in the key social institutions? Generative models will flood media outlets with convincing but false photos, videos, ads, and news stories. The ensuing crisis of authority will lead to widespread distrust in everything from the financial system to democracy itself.

Not long ago, text-to-speech systems could read only a sentence at a time, and they were ranked according to their ability to accomplish that limited task. Now that they can orate entire books, we need new benchmarks.

AI’s creative potential is becoming established in the visual arts. Now musicians are tapping neural networks for funkier grooves, tastier licks, and novel subject matter.

Deepfakes threaten to undermine law and order, perhaps democracy itself. A coalition of tech companies, nonprofits, and academics joined forces to counter potential adverse impacts.

Creating a virtual representation of a scene using traditional polygons and texture maps involves several complex operations, and even neural-network approaches have required manual preprocessing. Researchers propose a new deep-learning pipeline that visualizes scenes with far less fuss.

A growing number of companies that sell standardized tests are using natural language processing to assess writing skills. Critics contend that these language models don’t make the grade.

OpenAI raised eyebrows in February when it announced — and withheld — the full version of its groundbreaking language model, GPT-2. Six months later, the company has re-examined the decision.

Theoretical advances can be thrilling, but the excitement can drown out all the ways AI is actually being put to use. DeepIndex provides an up-to-date, well organized, cheeky guide to practical applications culled from news reports.

Less than a month after XLNet overtook BERT, the pole position in natural language understanding changed hands again. RoBERTa is an improved BERT pretraining recipe that beats its forbear, becoming the new state-of-the-art language model — for the moment.

Image-to-image translation, in which stylistic features from one image are imposed on the content of another to create a new picture, traditionally has been limited to translating either shapes or textures. A new network translates both.