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

These Lyrics Do Not Exist differs from similar projects involving human faces, cats, etc., in that the AI-created results are no more uncanny than the real thing. You give it a topic, and select a mood – very sad, sad, neutral, happy, very happy – and a genre – country, metal, rock, pop, rap, EDM – and tell it to get cracking.

Here is the chart-busting hit, "Boing Boing", exactly as generated by the AI:

Verse 1 You came along you showed me My many seasons of different Boing, autumn, winter, boing You touch my boing

Pre-Chorus And oh, the rain it falls on me Soft boing rain on my skin

Chorus So beautiful with you, oh All of boing I look at you, wonder It was the boing of a boing

Verse 2 Take a walk on my heart Far away from all this Take a walk on my mind Fall in the boing of my life

Pre-Chorus So I am autumn, winter and boing And every month brings a new love

Chorus So beautiful with you, oh All of boing I look at you, wonder It was the boing of a boing

Bridge Gotta have a boing in my step, a dawn in my eye Gotta have genuine devotion

Chorus So beautiful with you, oh All of boing I look at you, wonder It was the boing of a boing Read the rest

Creative technologist Nicole He modified OpenAI's GPT-2 language model to generate questions for happy mutant pop star Billie Eilish and also write Eilish-esque lyrics. Vogue Magazine published Eilish's answers to the AI's wonderfully odd questions like: "Who consumed so much of your power in one go?" and "Have you ever seen the ending?" Read the rest

You've seen This Cat Does Not Exist, now behold Hopefully This Cat Does Not Exist, whereby the failings of generative adversarial networks become their horrifying strengths.

I'm a big fan of the ones where GANs try to write meme captions and ends up with this ... abyssal syllabary. AI text generation naturally focuses on creating readable phrases, but training it on the appearance of text is where the cold magic springs.

Read the rest

In 2012, Chicago PD collaborated with the RAND Corporation and the Illinois Institute of Technology to automatically generate "risk scores" for people they arrested, which were supposed to predict the likelihood that the person would be a "party to violence" in the future (this program was called "TRAP" -- Targeted Repeat-Offender Apprehension Program" -- seemingly without a shred of irony). Now, that program has been shut down, and the City of Chicago's Office of the Inspector General has published a damning report on its eight-year reign, revealing the ways in which the program discriminated against the people ensnared in it, without reducing violent crime. Read the rest

• Hoan Ton-That, founder of facial recognition tech firm Clearview AI, previously connected to Trump world figures and online hate extremists, reports Buzzfeed News

• Chuck Johnson, Mike Cernovich, and Rudy Giuliani are among the linked figures named in Buzzfeed report

• NYPD disputes facial recognition firm Clearview AI's claim that it identified a terrorism suspect Read the rest

Clearview AI app used by 600+ law enforcement agencies, from local police departments to FBI, DHS

Twitter told law enforcement app maker Clearview AI that its scraping of Twitter images for facial recognition databases violated Twitter policies. Read the rest

Artist Refik Anadol, who has appeared on Boing Boing before, designs dreamy installations using artificial intelligence. Some of them he calls 'data paintings.' Read the rest

Writing in Wired, Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson discusses the rise and rise of "Edge AI" startups that sell lightweight machine-learning classifiers that run on low-powered chips and don't talk to the cloud, meaning that they are privacy respecting and energy efficient. Read the rest

If you are trying to find work in South Korea, you are likely to be interviewed by a bot that uses AI to scan your facial expressions to determine whether or not you are right for the job. Read the rest

Yesterday's column by John Naughton in the Observer revisited Nathan Myhrvold's 1997 prediction that when Moore's Law runs out -- that is, when processors stop doubling in speed every 18 months through an unbroken string of fundamental breakthroughs -- that programmers would have to return to the old disciplines of writing incredibly efficient code whose main consideration was the limits of the computer that runs on it. Read the rest

Machine learning systems are notorious for cheating, and there's a whole menagerie of ways that these systems achieve their notional goals while subverting their own purpose, with names like "model stealing, rewarding hacking and poisoning attacks." Read the rest

Rodney Brooks (previously) is a distinguished computer scientist and roboticist (he's served as as head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and CTO of Irobot); two years ago, he published a list of "dated predictions" intended to cool down some of the hype about self-driving cars, machine learning, and robotics, hype that he viewed as dangerously gaseous. Read the rest