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AI

AI Scientist Interviews Philip K. Dick – 38 Years After His death

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Philip K. Dick AI Deepfake

Dr. Ben Goertzel (one of the world’s leading AI scientist) has a conversation with the simulacrum of Philip K. Dick robot by Hanson Robotics. Aside from the mind bending idea of an AI scientist in conversation with the deepfake of a robot reproducing a dead sci-fi author, this is pretty cool also because everything that PKD says, is generated by an artificial intelligence trained using his writings. Also, PKD’s voice is generated by an AI trained using PKD original interviews. Original on YouTube

FOR READERS & WRITERS: The Ethics of AI

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Artificial Intelligence AI - pixabay

FOR READERS & WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Amy Leibowitz Mitchell: What are some of the ethics around the use of AI? Are we using it in ways we shouldn’t? How have you explored this, or seen it explored in queer lit? Writers: This is a writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part of a discussion about the topic. Join the chat: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABVMeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

SCIENCE: First Living Machine Constructed With AI and Frog Cells

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What happens when you take cells from frog embryos and grow them into new organisms that were “evolved” by algorithms? You get something that researchers are calling the world’s first “living machine.” Though the original stem cells came from frogs — the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis — these so-called xenobots don’t resemble any known amphibians. The tiny blobs measure only 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) wide and are made of living tissue that biologists assembled into bodies designed by computer models, according to a new study. These mobile organisms can move independently and collectively, can self-heal wounds and survive for … Read more

FOR READERS & WRITERS: Loving an AI?

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AI - pixabay

FOR READERS & WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Jim Comer: Will people will stop having “real” relationships if AIs become so sophisticated at learning that they can get to know people and meeting their needs better than other humans ever could? Writers: This is a writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part of a discussion about the topic. Join the chat: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

ANNOUNCEMENT/GIVEAWAY: The Shoreless Sea, by J. Scott Coatsworth

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The Shoreless Sea

QSFer J. Scott Coatsworth has a new queer sci fi book out, the final book in his Liminal Sky trilogy: “The Shoreless Sea.” And books one and two are on sale! As the epic trilogy hurtles toward its conclusion, the fight for the future isn’t over yet. It could lead to a new beginning, or it might spell the end for the last vestiges of humankind. The generation ship Forever has left Earth behind, but a piece of the old civilization lives on in the Inthworld—a virtual realm that retains memories of Earth’s technological wonders and vices. A being named … Read more

How Will Deepfake AIs Change Our World?

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Deepfake Mona Lisa

Of all the scary powers of the internet, it’s ability to trick the unsuspecting might be the most frightening. Clickbait, photoshopped pictures and false news are some of the worst offenders, but recent years have also seen the rise of a new potentially dangerous tool known as deepfake artificial intelligence (AI). The term deepfake refers to counterfeit, computer-generated video and audio that is hard to distinguish from genuine, unaltered content. It is to film what Photoshop is for images. The tool relies on what’s known as generative adversarial networks (GANs), a technique invented in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow, a Ph.D. … Read more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An AI Created a Model of Our Universe. We Have No Idea How it Works (But it Does)

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universe - pixabay

The first-ever artificial intelligence simulation of the universe seems to work like the real thing — and is almost as mysterious. Researchers reported the new simulation June 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The goal was to create a virtual version of the cosmos in order to simulate different conditions for the universe’s beginning, but the scientists also hope to study their own simulation to understand why it works so well. “It’s like teaching image-recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” study co-author Shirley Ho, … Read more

An AI Animates the Mona Lisa, and It’s freaky – Live Science

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The enigmatic, painted smile of the “Mona Lisa” is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as she moves her lips and turns her head. She was created by a convolutional neural network — a type of AI that processes information much as a human brain does, to analyze and process images. Researchers trained the algorithm to understand facial features’ general shapes and how they behave relative to each other, and then … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Is Creepy-Good at predicting Early Death

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ai - pixabay

Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person’s early death. Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if individuals were at risk of dying prematurely — in other words, sooner than the average life expectancy — from chronic disease, they reported in a new study. The predictions of early death that were made by AI algorithms were “significantly more accurate” than predictions delivered by a model that did … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Sucks at Making Adorable Cat Photos

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Artificial intelligence (AI) recently tried to generate cat photos from scratch, and the results were cat-astrophic. This particular neural network (a type of AI modeled after the workings of the human brain) can produce astonishingly realistic original photos of human faces. In fact, the images of these made-up people were nearly impossible for human viewers to distinguish from photos of real people, programmers of the AI reported in a study that was posted December 2018 to the preprint journal arXiv. Felines, however, proved to be another story. The same algorithm that generated flawless human faces created cats with misshapen heads; … Read more