A Black man in Detroit was wrongfully arrested and detained by police who mis-identified him with a false facial recognition hit. The case of Robert Williams, an innocent person who was held in police custody for a day, is the first publicly reported case of artificial intelligence resulting in a false arrest in the United States. Read the rest

Funk Turkey used lyrics.rip to scrape the Genius database of Nirvana lyrics and then set a Markov chain bot to work generating lyrics to a new "Nirvana" song. Funk Turkey made the music and sang the bot's poetry. Listen to "Smother" and spot the actual Cobain phrases! From the YouTube description:

All music/vocals performed, mixed, and mastered by me, in my kitchen, on a sparkly red cheap Stratocaster, a crappy mic, and an old copy of ProTools. All lyrics provided by Hal 9000 (AKA lyrics.rip). Guitars are the aforementioned Stratocaster bounced hard left and right. Flanged Stratocaster through a Fender twin is dead center in the mix. Bass is a no-name bass run through amp emulation. Percussion is Superior Drummer 2. I know Dave Grohl hates computer drums but it's the best thing I got, soooo.... Sorry Dave. I still love you.

Vocals are doubled, slightly compressed, and run though an emulated reel-to-reel and tube saturation for a bit of extra warmth and grit. Also the first use of my new pop filter that my wife bought me for early father's day. She's the best.

Well, this isn't creepy at all. Facial recognition search.

A facial recognition website based in Poland claims to offer a service in which you can upload a picture of anyone to the site, and it finds more images of that individual all around the internet. Read the rest

In a letter to members of Congress, IBM says it will abandon the general-purpose facial recognition business, and that the company opposes the use of facial recognition for mass surveillance. Read the rest

Matt Round created an AI-driven face generator specializing in UK Ministers of Parliament: This MP Does Not Exist. The results have the special look of British portrait photography, political culture and nutritional standards, and (unusually for neural-network driven generators) the small pool of source images only heightens the results' inbred luster.

Using MPs’ official photos, we trained a neural network to generate a whole new UK Parliament

"NVIDIA GameGAN is a powerful new AI model created by NVIDIA Research and was trained on 50,000 episodes of PAC-MAN to produce a fully functional version of the classic without an underlying game engine." Read the article about it was done here.

Image: Nvidia Read the rest

• Yay, Clearview AI but for shopping!

Facebook Mark Zuckerberg today announced the launch of Facebook Shops, an e-commerce feature to allows business users to list and sell products on Facebook and Instagram. Read the rest

Clearview AI is reportedly set to cancel client accounts that are not associated with law enforcement or other government entities, as scrutiny grows over abuses of the facial recognition AI app. Read the rest

The young journalists at YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) were curious about "what artificial intelligence means for race, art, and the apocalypse." So they asked the opinion of a a few experts, including tech journalist Alexis Madrigal, engineer Deb Raji of New York University's AI Now Institute, artist/programmer Sam Lavigne, and AI ethicisit Rachel Thomas. You can read (and listen to) bit from the lively conversation at the Youth Media feature "In the Black Mirror." Here's an excerpt:

RACE + BIAS

Deb Raji: There was a study released where we evaluated the commercial facial recognition systems that were deployed. And we said, "How well does this system work for different intersectional demographics?" So, how well does it work for darker skinned woman versus lighter skinned woman versus darker skinned men and lighter skinned men? And it figures that there was a 30 percent performance gap between lighter skinned men and darker skinned men, which is insane. For reference, usually you don't deploy a system that's performing at less than 95 percent accuracy.

Rachel Thomas: Another example of bias comes from some software that's used in many U.S. courtrooms. It gives people a rating of how likely they are to commit another crime. And it was found that this software has twice as high a false positive rate on black defendants compared to white defendants. So that means it was predicting that people were high risk even though they were not being rearrested. And so this is something that's really impacting people's lives because it was being used in sentencing decisions and bail decisions.

📷 Pepper Construction is using Startup SmartVid.io to analyze worksite images for Oracle Industries Innovation Lab in Deerfield, Illinois.

Existing security cameras at retail stores and workplaces are being equipped with articifial intelligence to enforce measures intendded to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, Reuters reports, based on interviews with 16 different machine vision software firms and a number of businesses that are now their clients. Read the rest

DICK-RNN is a recurrent neural network trained with 10,000 doodles of dicks. You start drawing a shape and the AI tries its best to finish it as a penis. Starting with the balls helps a lot.

Try it.

For the technical background and conceptual inspiration: GitHub page for DICK-RNN Read the rest

AI artist Mario Klingemann used Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), one of the primary techniques to create deepfake videos, to make this incredible, unsettling, and wonderful video that facial expressions to music. (Song: "Triggernometry" by Kraftamt, 2014). Check out another deepweirdfake from this series below.

One more of those. This one needs a bit of patience. And to be unmuted.Song: "Dropping out of Lightspeed" by Kraftamt, 2013 #StyleGAN2 #realtime #aiart pic.twitter.com/wMRJdbbbez

— Mario Klingemann (@quasimondo) March 31, 2020

(Thanks, Jeff Cross!) Read the rest

Shimon, the robotic maestro from Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, is releasing an album and going on tour. To write lyrics, the robot employs deep learning combined with semantic knowledge and rhyme and rhythm. Shimon has also had a complete facelift giving it a much more expressive mug for singing. In IEEE Spectrum, Evan Ackerman interviewed Shimon's creators, professor Gil Weinberg and PhD student Richard Savery:

IEEE Spectrum: What makes Shimon’s music fundamentally different from music that could have been written by a human?

Richard Savery: Shimon’s musical knowledge is drawn from training on huge datasets of lyrics, around 20,000 prog rock songs and another 20,000 jazz songs. With this level of data Shimon is able to draw on far more sources of inspiration than than a human would ever be able to. At a fundamental level Shimon is able to take in huge amounts of new material very rapidly, so within a day it can change from focusing on jazz lyrics, to hip hop to prog rock, or a hybrid combination of them all.

How much human adjustment is involved in developing coherent melodies and lyrics with Shimon?

Savery: Just like working with a human collaborator, there’s many different ways Shimon can interact. Shimon can perform a range of musical tasks from composing a full song by itself or just playing a part composed by a human. For the new album we focused on human-robot collaboration so every song has some elements that were created by a human and some by Shimon.

IEEE Spectrum asked pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and former head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the eternal engineering question: "What is a robot?" Inspired by computational neuroscientist Warren McCulloch who enjoyed writing sonnets, Brooks responded to the query in iambic pentameter. Here's the beginning:

What Is a Robot? By Rodney Brooks

Shall I compare thee to creatures of God? Thou art more simple and yet more remote. You move about, but still today, a clod, You sense and act but don’t see or emote.

You make fast maps with laser light all spread, Then compare shapes to object libraries, And quickly plan a path, to move ahead, Then roll and touch and grasp so clumsily.

Read the rest: "What Is a Robot? Rodney Brooks Offers an Answer—in Sonnet Form" (IEEE Spectrum)

image: Brooks led development of the COG robot seen in this photo by Rama (CC BY-SA 3.0 FR) Read the rest

Clearview AI said its facial recognition tool was only for law enforcement, but Buzzfeed News reports they gave accounts to former Trump staffer Jason Miller, as well as various Republican political operatives and a figure known to be a Holocaust denier. Read the rest

“Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich.” That's the title of the New York Times piece, and that's the horrifying reality of how artificial intelligence and facial recognition are already being used in ways that violate your expectations of privacy in the world. Read the rest