philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A Patent by Sony Hints at the Implementation of AI-Powered Gameplay Assistance Mechanism in PlayStation Consoles

A patent registered by Sony Interactive Entertainment titled AUTOMATED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) CONTROL MODE FOR PLAYING SPECIFIC TASKS DURING GAMING APPLICATIONS suggests that the company is developing a new AI technology for gameplay assistance for the players that can play and control games for the players based on their specific play style that will be saved in a default player profile for that player. 

The patent was applied for registration on 4th December 2020 and was published on 15th April 2021, which indicates that Sony has been working on this AI technology for a while now. The description of the patent further clarifies that this new system will help the players to perform difficult tasks in the game, or more simply, it will assist the players in clearing the hard difficulty stages of a game on their PlayStation console, which includes both the single player and multiplayer games. ...

See the full story here: https://appuals.com/sony-new-patent-ai-assistance-technology-in-games/

Virtual reality tools offer escape to blockaded Gaza youth

... According to Al-Khodary, virtual action and combat games are the most popular among young men, while young women tend to favour sports, music and travel.

"Since we are blockaded and it is difficult to travel and move from one place to another, we come to VR and make up for all these things and we live it in the virtual reality," said 16 year-old Nisreen Shamalakh as she put on her headset.

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/technology/virtual-reality-tools-offer-escape-blockaded-gaza-youth-2022-11-24/

Artists Equity Is Launched to Share the Wealth with Creatives

... “Not just writers and directors and stars, but also cinematographers, editors, costume designers and other crucial artists who, in my view, are very underpaid,” Affleck told NYT. The partners “have worked on films that have generated $10.7 billion at the global box office” with “three Oscars between them.” ...

Comparing Artists Equity to the 1919 founding of United Artists by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith “as a way to exert greater control over their creative and financial destinies,” NYTwrites that “more recently, the horror film producer Jason Blum has used — to spectacular effect — a business model in which established directors and stars work for union scale pay upfront in return for creative freedom and a stake in the financial success of the resulting film.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/artists-equity-is-launched-to-share-the-wealth-with-creatives/

Three key takeaways from Meta’s Galactica AI

1- Be careful how you present your model

... What is clear is that even if we want to attribute some form of intelligence to LLMs, we must acknowledge that it is fundamentally different and largely incompatible with human intelligence—even if on the surface, it produces very convincing output. ...

2- Benchmarks are often misleading

... while benchmarks are a good tool to compare machine learning models against one another, they are not anthropomorphic measures of cognitive skills in machines.

3- Recognize the limits and powers of LLMs

One of the big challenges of large language models is that they can create output that is convincingly human but not based on human cognition. Models like Galactica can be extremely powerful but also dangerously misleading. ...

See the full story here: https://bdtechtalks.com/2022/11/21/meta-ai-galactica/

Few-shot learning AI accurately ‘senses’ home appliances

NIALM (Non-Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring) can "sense" appliances using electrical power. NIALM is used in homes and small buildings. For this, NIALM can require hundreds of labeled power signal images from each appliance type to train on. But there is a much faster and more cost-effective approach than "traditional" machine learning.

Researchers from the University of Johannesburg deployed Few Shot Learning (FSL) for NIALM. Classical FSL needs only 10 labeled, classified images to recognize appliances with very high accuracy. ...

See the full story https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-few-shot-ai-accurately-home-appliances.html

The Creator Economy is the future of the economy

... Though Creator Economy startups can be found in 65 global cities, just three city-regions—the San Francisco, Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York—account for nearly two-thirds of all global venture capital investment in them.

The same three city-regions that lead in venture capital investment also have the largest numbers of startups—Los Angeles with 63, New York with 60, and San Francisco with 48. Next in line is London with 14 Creator Economy startups, followed by Chicago (seven), and Atlanta and Bangalore (with six each). Four cities, Austin, Miami, Denver-Boulder, and Tel Aviv, are home to five Creator Economy startups, and San Diego is home to four.  ...

TALENT MIGRATION—AND RISING POWER—IN THE CREATOR ECONOMY

While creators themselves are much more widely distributed than the platforms and startups that support their work, our interviews with leading creators and executives from Creator Economy companies, as well as our analysis of relevant data, identify Los Angeles and New York as by far the leading locations for Creators. ...

INEQUALITY IN THE CREATOR ECONOMY 

In fact, the distribution of economic rewards in the Creator Economy is as uneven as in the traditional economy. A vanishingly small percentage of Creator Economy superstars, such as YouTube’s MrBeastand TikTok’s Khaby Lame (the Senegalese-Italian factory worker who lost his job during the pandemic and then rose to fame on the strength of his quirky videos), earn tens of millions annually, but they are exceptions that prove a rule. ... Fully two-thirds of creators earn less than $25,000 annually, and more than a quarter earn less than $1,000. ...

When asked about their most important motivations in a 2022 survey, larger shares of creators listed self-expression (48%), fun (43%), passion (40%), and challenge (34%) than money-making (26%). Twenty percent said they were primarily motivated by a desire to advance a social issue or cause. ...

A PRESCRIPTION FOR A HEALTHY CREATOR ECONOMY

Digital platforms can promote less-established creators by tweaking their algorithms to introduce more discovery into users’ feeds.  ...

Public policy can help support creators as well. Federal, state, and local governments can identify, organize, and support clusters or networks of creators, much like their long-standing efforts to support high-tech and arts clusters. ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90812387/the-creator-economy-is-the-future-of-the-economy

Neal Stephenson Joins Judges for $1M Inworld AI Character Grants

Virtual being platform Inworld AI is offering $1 million in development funding to AI character creators for games and other digital experiences. Snowcrash author Neal Stephenson and other leaders in AI and entertainment will serve as judges for the new Inworld AI Character Grants.

Inworld’s character grants will disburse up to $50,000 to those designing AI characters built with Inworld’s platform for use in current and upcoming video games, metaverse worlds, or other digital interactions. Inworld Studio’s engine constructs virtual beings out of what the user writes in the text fields, supplemented by the slider bars. That gives creators a huge amount of flexibility to define their AI personality to the smallest detail. They can fill in a whole history for the virtual character; their history, family, interests, experience, and knowledge. ...

Developers interested in the grants can submit gaming NPCs, virtual world populations, AI influencers or brand representatives, and other virtual beings. The AI Character Grant program follows Inworld receiving an Epic MegaGrant from Unity creator Epic Games as well as graduating from this year’s Disney Accelerator program, where it demonstrated a prototype ‘Droid Maker’ for designing the look and personality of an interactive droid from the Star Wars universe, ...

See the full story here: https://voicebot.ai/2022/11/17/neal-stephenson-joins-judges-for-1m-inworld-ai-character-grants/

Opera Hack: San Diego Opera – Think opera’s old-fashioned? Could arias with virtual reality and 360-degree cameras be on the horizon?

In 1597, the world’s first opera was performed in Florence, Italy. More than 400 years later, the venerable art form is still being presented in largely the same form, with the world’s best-trained singers and symphony musicians performing without amplification in large theatrical halls. ...

...Opera Hack, an “ideation summit” created by San Diego Opera in 2019. ...

On Nov. 8, San Diego Opera announced the winners of its third Opera Hack contest. Three ideas created by experts from the arts and technology industries won $5,000 grants to continue developing their ideas. These winning concepts could someday lead to opera productions featuring technology used in role-playing and virtual reality video games, as well as the motion-capture techniques used in movies. ...

Baroque Reality: Accessible Augmented Reality Stagecraft

The Baroque Reality team, which includes three opera singers, aims to produce an abridged and female-centric version of Handel’s 1735 baroque opera “Alcina” that would use both mixed and augmented reality technology to enhance storytelling. ...

Metropolis 3.0

The opera will feature technological tools that include motion capture, augmented reality, production mapping, motion tracking and live video. 

PO(pera)V

Mechanical engineer Nam Nguyen’s immersive performance-capture concept would allow audience members to watch an opera from multiple perspectives, ranging from a technology-free view from their seat in the auditorium to the perspectives of what the singers are seeing from the stage.

See the full story here: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/theater/story/2022-11-15/think-operas-old-fashioned-could-arias-with-virtual-reality-and-360-degree-cameras-be-on-the-horizon

Chinese-born AI specialist Ma Yi to swap California for Hong Kong to lead data research institute

• Scientist is expected to take a year-long sabbatical from University of California, Berkeley to lead the new Institute of Data Science at Hong Kong University
• Ma, who says he likes to challenge himself ‘every 5 years’, will head the body which is looking to become a global leader in the field

See the full story here: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3199686/chinese-born-ai-specialist-ma-yi-swap-california-hong-kong-lead-data-research-institute

How Generative AI Is Changing Creative Work

Generative AI also raises numerous questions about what constitutes original and proprietary content. Since the created text and images are not exactly like any previous content, the providers of these systems argue that they belong to their prompt creators. But they are clearly derivative of the previous text and images used to train the models. Needless to say, these technologies will provide substantial work for intellectual property attorneys in the coming years. ...

It may soon be standard practice, for example, for such systems to craft most or all of our written or image-based content — to provide first drafts of emails, letters, articles, computer programs, reports, blog posts, presentations, videos, and so forth. No doubt that the development of such capabilities would have dramatic and unforeseen implications for content ownership and intellectual property protection, but they are also likely to revolutionize knowledge and creative work. ...

See the full story here: https://hbr.org/2022/11/how-generative-ai-is-changing-creative-work