Synthetic Media & Generative AI News and Discussions

[raklian]

[wjfox]

AI-Generated George Carlin Drops Comedy Special That Daughter Speaks Out Against: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’

Jan 10, 2024 7:32pm PT

More than 15 years after his death, stand-up comedian George Carlin has been brought back to life in an artificial intelligence-generated special called “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.”

The hour-long special, which dropped on Tuesday, comes from Dudesy, a comedy AI that hosts a podcast and YouTube show with “Mad TV” alum Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen.

“I just want to let you know very clearly that what you’re about to hear is not George Carlin. It’s my impersonation of George Carlin that I developed in the exact same way a human impressionist would,” Dudesy said at the beginning of the special. “I listened to all of George Carlin’s material and did my best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today. So think of it like Andy Kaufman impersonating Elvis or like Will Ferrell impersonating George W. Bush.”

In the stand-up special, the AI-generated impression of Carlin, who died in 2008 of heart failure, tackled prevalent topics like mass shootings, the American class system, streaming services, social media and AI itself.

“There’s one line of work that is most threatened by AI — one job that is most likely to be completely erased because of artificial intelligence: stand-up comedy,” AI-generated Carlin said. “I know what all the stand-up comics across the globe are saying right now: ‘I’m an artist and my art form is too creative, too nuanced, too subtle to be replicated by a machine. No computer program can tell a fart joke as good as me.'”

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/g ... 235868315/

[firestar464]

If it's so crappy, then why feel threatened by it? HMMMM

[wjfox]

Formula E Team Fires Its AI-Generated Influencer after Fans Balk

By Benjamin Hunting
Published: Jan 11, 2024

It's no secret that it's difficult for women to gain traction in motorsports, whether it's as a driver (fewer than 5 percent of elite-level pilots identify as female), or as an engineer or racing team member (between 10 percent and 20 percent in a top series like Formula 1). This week, Formula E team Mahindra underscored this gap by launching something it called "Ava Beyond Reality," an artificially created, female-presenting "AI Ambassador" that was met with such negativity from the team's fanbase that the entire program was wiped from the internet in less than 48 hours.

Is racing so uninterested in welcoming women onto pit lane that it will literally create an artificial person entirely out of computer code in order to avoid hiring a living, breathing woman? That was the overwhelming tone of the outcry from both Formula E fans and motorsports enthusiasts worldwide when confronted with the (now deleted) Instagram profile belonging to "Ava Rose," a synthetic creation described as a "Sustainable Tech Queen" and "Racing Rebel Robot."

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a4635 ... nfluencer/

[weatheriscool]

Chameleon AI program classifies objects in satellite images faster
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-chameleon ... aster.html
by Cécilia Carron, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

A new AI program can train neural networks using just a handful of images to rapidly characterize in satellite and drone data new objects such as ocean debris, deforestation zones, urban areas and more.

Images taken by drones and satellites give scientists a wealth of information. These snapshots provide crucial insight into the changes taking place on the Earth's surface, such as in animal populations, vegetation, debris floating on the ocean surface and glacier coverage.

In addition, experts can train neural networks to sort through the images at dizzying speed and spot and classify individual objects. "However, none of the AI programs currently available can immediately switch from recognizing one type of object to another—like from debris to a tree or building," says Prof. Devis Tuia, the head of EPFL's Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation Laboratory.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Google unveils phenomenal new Lumiere video creation AI
By Loz Blain
January 23, 2024
https://newatlas.com/technology/google- ... -ai-video/

We've come a long way from Will Smith eating spaghetti in the last 10 months. AI-generated video is advancing at a jaw-dropping rate – and Google's extraordinary new space-time diffusion model Lumiere shifts the goalposts yet again.

Lumiere can create remarkably realistic – or high quality surrealistic – video clips up to five seconds in length. It can animate still images, or just portions of them, in response to natural language text prompts about what you'd like to see.

It can take an image, clone the style of that image, and then use that style to create a bunch of videos on other topics that look and feel so similar they could've come out of a branding agency.

It can take your own source video, and turn everything into Lego, or origami, or flowers – you just have to tell it to.

[Powers]

Midjourney (pre v4) moment?

[weatheriscool]

New Tool That Protects Images From AI Nets 250,000 Downloads In Just 5 Days
Artists are clearly resonating with Nightshade’s campaign against AI ripoffs.
By Adrianna Nine January 30, 2024

https://www.extremetech.com/internet/ne ... ust-5-days
Nightshade, a tool that prevents AI art generators from plagiarizing publicly viewable content, became available on Jan. 18 after several months of development and peer review. Since then, it’s become clear that artists, photographers, and others sharing images online are eager to protect their work from generative AI. The team behind Nightshade reports that in the five days following its release, Nightshade received a quarter of a million downloads.

“I expected…extremely high enthusiasm,” Ben Zhao, Nightshade’s project lead and a University of Chicago computer science professor, told VentureBeat. “But I still underestimated it…The response is simply beyond anything we imagined. Based on reactions on social media, the downloads come from all over the globe.”

[wjfox]

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’

Published 2:31 AM EST, Sun February 4, 2024

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/asia ... index.html