‘I’m just a freak’: Andy Warhol’s secret ‘longings’ exposed in ‘Diaries’
Titled “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” the six-parter vocally brings the pop art icon, who died in 1987, back to life — using cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to narrate the most revealing moments from his legendary life. ...
The most intimate parts of the Superstar maker’s life will be brought to light through the use of the robot-like technology that will “honor two hallmarks of Andy’s life and artistic practice, stemming from his desire ‘to be a machine,’ ” director Andrew Rossi told Entertainment Weekly. ...
“Andy admired the fact that ‘machines have less problems,’ saying that, ‘I do have feelings, but I wish I didn’t.’ He even had himself made into a robot and a hologram during his lifetime, and he said, ‘the reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,’ ” Rossi said.
“So I thought that cloning Andy’s voice could function like a Warholian portrait, and the [Andy Warhol] Foundation approved.” ...
Remaking Warhol’s voice to personally confess these influential times — which was done by having actor Bill Irwin record the diaries’ entries before they were morphed in a newly created text-to-speech algorithm — was also the only fitting way to reveal the artist’s deep mysteries to the world, according to Rossi. ...
See the full story here: https://nypost.com/2022/02/23/andy-warhols-freak-romantic-longings-exposed-in-diaries/
Flies in Virtual Reality Arena Prove They’re Smarter Than We Thought
... “This work demonstrates not only that flies are capable of this higher form of trace conditioning, and that the learning is distractible just like in mammals and humans, but the neural activity underlying these attentional and working memory processes in the fly show remarkable similarity to those in mammals,” said Dhruv Grover, a UC San Diego KIBM research faculty member and lead author of the new study. “This work demonstrates that fruit flies could serve as a powerful model for the study of higher cognitive functions. Simply put, the fly continues to amaze in how smart it really is.” ...
See the full story here: https://scitechdaily.com/flies-in-virtual-reality-arena-prove-theyre-smarter-than-we-thought/
Manchester City Partners With Sony to Build the First Football Stadium in the Metaverse
... The football club has signed a partnership with Sony on a three-year initiative, and while the project is still in its early phases, teams of the company's specialists have already visited the Etihad Stadium — Manchester City's home ground — to map it digitally and construct a VR version of it. ...
The seven-time English Premier League champions are also exploring the possibility of fans meeting players in the metaverse and purchasing products unavailable in the physical world. It is likely that purchases will be made using cryptocurrencies. ...
See the full story here: https://gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/manchester-city-sony-etihad-football-stadium-metaverse-epl-english-premier-league-2782873
Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules
The U.S. Copyright Office refused to grant a copyright this month for an image made by an artificial intelligence program called Creativity Machine—ruling that “human authorship is a prerequisite to copyright protection.” The case will now head to federal court as the AI program’s owner, Stephen Thaler, plans to file an appeal, according to Ryan Abbott, a Los Angeles-based attorney representing Thaler.
Thaler, the founder of the Missouri-based AI firm Imagination Engines, tried to copyright “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” a picture that was autonomously created by Creativity Machine’s algorithm without any human help. Thaler listed the program as the artwork’s author and sought a copyright as the machine’s owner. ...
In the most recent request for reconsideration, Abbott argued that the human authorship requirement was unconstitutional and unsupported by case law.
But in ruling against Thaler again, the Copyright Review Board’s three-person panel cited several cases in which courts refused to extend copyright protection to non-human creations. In 1997, a federal appeals court ruled that a book allegedly “authored by non-human spiritual beings” could only gain copyright if a human curated the revelations. Similarly, in a separate 2018 case, a monkey was not awarded a copyright for photos that it took with a camera. ...
Abbott said he plans to appeal the board’s decision in federal court in Washington D.C. ...
“Artists are using AI as a tool [in] the same way [that] artists are using the camera,” he said. “You cannot claim the camera is the artist. Artists are using cameras to create photographs, and that’s how photographs get copyrighted.”
See the full story here: https://dot.la/creative-machines-ai-art-2656764050/particle-2
Kanye West’s $200 Stem Player will be the only way to get his next album, Donda 2
... “Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes. It’s time to free music from this oppressive system. It’s time to take control and build our own. Go to stemplayer.com now to order.” ...
The $200 Stem Player launched last year in a partnership with Kano Computing, shipping with the first Donda album so that you could manipulate any song using the touch-sensitive light sliders embedded in its beige shell. “We currently have 67,000 available and are making 3,000 a day,” said Ye in another post.
It worked well in our testing, allowing owners to easily manipulate different parts of a song while listening, whether for one of the included tracks or any others loaded via its web-based interface. However, adding loops and effects can get more complicated. It has 8GB of storage, connections via USB-C, Bluetooth, or 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 97db speaker. ...
According to Ye, “Tech companies made music practically free so if you don’t do merch sneakers and tours you don’t eat. Jay Z made Tidal and fake media attacked him. ...
See the full story with a video demo here: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/18/22940748/donda-2-stem-player-kanye-west-exclusive-music
Ugh, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Isn’t as Dead as We All Hoped
Mark Zuckerberg and his “Metamates” aren’t the only ones roaming around the metaverse.
The VR platform Meta is staking its future on, Horizon Worlds, has enjoyed 10x growth since it was rolled out to users in the US and Canada last December, as first reported by The Verge. According to a Meta spokesperson, the total number of users is up to 300,000 when you include those in Horizon Venues, a separate app for hosting live events, like concerts, sports, and comedy. The monthly user count does not include Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s other platform for conducting VR meetings. ...
Meta dropped out of the world’s 10 largest companies rankings by market value earlier this month. Once worth more than $1 trillion, the company has lost more than $500 billion in market value since September. Earlier this month, it had $230 billion wiped out in one day after revealing the first-ever sequential decline in Facebook daily active users. ...
See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/meta-horizon-worlds-sees-10x-growth-since-december-1848562017
Talespin raises $20M to train workers using spatial technologies
Talespin has raised $20 million in funding for its task of using virtual reality and augmented reality — or spatial technologies — to train people to do work.
The company became famous a few years ago for a virtual reality demo designed to teach managers how to fire a hapless worker named Barry. While that sounds callous, it was really more about how to emotionally handle difficult tasks at work, and it conveyed how to do it in a gentle way. ...
“We had just raised money going into the pandemic and we had the ability to navigate the uncertainty,” Jackson said. “We immediately started having conversations that [spring of 2020] where everything we had been saying went from frontier tech to more foundational tech. I wasn’t having to sell and convince people of this anymore, as the utility seemed so obvious.” ...
The technology uses 3D virtual humans and environments to help people practice conversational skills and simulate jobs with real-time feedback and skills analytics. ...
“As organizations around the world grapple with unprecedented labor shortages, the need for innovative workforce training solutions has never been greater,” said Austin Noronha, managing director for the U.S. at the Sony Innovation Fund, in a statement. ...
I asked if the company had tapped AI tech like GPT-3 from the OpenAI Foundation, but Jackson said that so far it was proving to be easier to design applications with more limited, hard-wired responses, rather than relying on open-ended dialogue with AI trainers. ...
