Last week, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS), one of the world’s largest annual AI research conferences, updated their policy for paper submissions to require what they’re calling a reproducibility checklist. It’s a small shift in a grander fight to curb the growing “reproducibility crisis” in science, where a disconcerting number of research findings are not successfully being replicated by other researchers, casting doubt on the validity of the initial findings.
In February, a statistician from Rice University warned that machine-learning techniques are likely fueling that crisis because the results they produce are difficult to audit. It’s a worrying problem as machine learning is increasingly being applied in important areas such as health care and drug research.
As the “world's most significant AI conference,” wrote Jack Clark, the policy director of the nonprofit OpenAI, in his weekly newsletter Import AI, “NeurIPS 2019 policy will have [a] knock-on effect across [the] wider AI ecosystem.”
Overcoming the uncanny valley of emotion is the major challenge of AI when creating a virtual human, according to Armando Kirwin, co-founder of Artie. He spoke at the NAB panel titled “AI in Media and Entertainment: Driving the Future, New Content Formats – Immersive.” HP’s Joanna Popper moderated the panel that also included Digital Domain’s John Canning, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl from Butcher Bird Studios, and Baobab Studios’ Kane Lee. The panel discussion ranged from synthetic characters and evolving views on acceptable versus realistic behavior, to what happens when your smart speaker becomes a virtual character.
Kirwin said that a great deal of research has already been done related to gaze and gaze awareness, pupil dilation, natural language processing and natural response, micro-emotions, and other human behaviors and emotion-indicators. He and others are now working on putting the pieces together to create credible behavior in synthetic beings; both human and animal.
When it comes to simulating emotions, Kirwin noted that AI implementations have major holes to fill. For example, most AI is not trained to recognize laughter, so it tries to understand it as words, which he describes as delivering a very dystopic response.
Digital Domain’s Canning discussed using AI to create the Thanos character for Avengers: Infinity War. The workflow still relied on Josh Brolin to bring human emotion to the CGI character’s performance. AI systems can fool people, but we are years away from the specific duplication of Josh Brolin, Canning said.
Kirwin responded that last month all 10 of the top Billboard music videos in Japan were performed by synthetic characters. As we blend the real and virtual worlds, there is growing acceptance of synthetic or virtual characters like Lil Miquela on Instagram as talent and influencers, especially among young people. Instagram is already a network of fake people, said Kirwin, so Lil Miquela is acceptable there. Diaz-Przybyl called this “acceptable artificiality.”
Thanos can pull you through the narrative, said Kirwin. He can hide the shortcomings of AI. How soon before you don’t need Josh, Armando asked? Kane Lee added that “animators are our actors” at Baobab.
Diaz-Przybyl is much less interested in photo-realistic characters than animated ones. Animation lets you do things beyond human capabilities in ways that the audience can accept. It is a more interesting direction, she said.
Lee mentioned that they have incorporated AI research into their character performances. He referenced a Stanford study that found that a person’s emotional connection to a synthetic character greatly increases if the character mirrors the person’s head and body movements with a 3-5 second delay. Kirwin referred to other research that found that placing eyes on a tip jar in a coffee shop significantly increased the number of tips left.
Diaz-Przybyl would also like an AI that can speed up the creative process of branching narratives. She is interested in what kind of story the computer tells, but that doesn’t replace what humans create. We need the surprise in the narrative, she said, and computers are not there yet.
Canning raised the issue of the impact of infinitely branching narrative on production cost. Kane added that it would be nice to have choices at key points at the narrative, but that everyone should get the same basic experience in order for it to be scalable.
The conversation turned to the role of data. Diaz-Przybyl mentioned market research that found, counter-intuitively, that people who watch a lot of YouTube videos are more likely to go to movies in theaters than people who don’t. “It will be an interesting journey for the creators to see the data,” Kirwin said. It will change the role of writers.
Earlier in the day, at a panel on extreme sports video production and distribution, extreme biking champion and video producer Mike Steidley said that he re-edits his 2 minute YouTube videos when he sees audience drop-off at 1 minute 45 seconds, and he front-loads the action in his Facebook edit of the same material because the first 6 seconds are key to hold the Facebook audience. It may be that, for AI-driven content, the writer will have an ongoing relationship with the content as the distribution platforms evolve and data analytics are incorporated into the creative process.
Finally, the panel turned the discussion to smart speakers and personal assistants. Canning pointed out that it is one thing for the personal assistant to be a disembodied voice, but quite another for it to have a face. He asked: How will that change our relationship to Alexa?
Kirwin responded that, in a study he conducted with Google, they found that people spend 5 minutes with an avatar assistant versus 5 seconds with a speaker-based assistant. Moving your personal assistant from a smart speaker to a synthetic character will apparently have a significant impact on your relationship with it.
At the dawn of the wireless age 30 years ago, U.S. companies jostled for primacy in wireless networking. Companies such as Motorola and Lucent — an offshoot of the old AT&T monopoly — were sources of innovation, exploring new ways of delivering voice and data wirelessly. It was Lucent, for example, that helped introduce Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, a mobile technology that promised to improve the capacity of wireless carriers.
But their fortunes declined around the turn of the century as they failed to keep pace with a changing market. No U.S. company stepped in to fill the gap as those companies faded — partly because of the growing strength of foreign alternatives and partly because of the immense scale required to survive in that line of business, according to industry experts.
“Lucent basically collapsed because they didn’t have a big enough wireless arm to keep them afloat when the Internet backbone [business] collapsed” in the dot-com bust, said Roger Entner, a telecom analyst at Recon Analytics. “Motorola, over time, simply became less competitive because the other vendors had more economies of scale.”
Today, Nokia and Ericsson are the top providers of telecommunications networking gear in North America and are No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in the world. The two companies each recorded revenue of about $25 billion last year.
But both have been surpassed by Huawei, which in the span of three decades has become the world’s largest provider of telecom equipment.
“I do think the Western companies did underestimate how credible Huawei was,” said Paul de Sa, a telecom industry analyst and co-founder of the advisory firm Quadra Partners. “There were executives who basically laughed [at the idea] that Huawei or ZTE could compete.”
With the support of China’s state-owned development bank, Huawei also has been able to undercut competitors with attractive financing for its products. In February alone, Huawei announced partnershipswith wireless carriers in eight countries, including Iceland, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
It doesn’t hurt that Huawei serves a massive domestic market in China, which grants it tremendous advantages of scale that many tech companies, including American ones, are hungry to access themselves.
In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.
We can’t know for sure which of these is the case, Bostrom concludes, but they’re all possible — and the third option might even be the most probable outcome. It’s a difficult argument to wrap your head around, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist and video game designer, has just released a new book, The Simulation Hypothesis, that explores Bostrom’s argument in much greater detail and traces the path from today’s technology to what he calls the “Simulation Point,” the moment at which we could realistically build a Matrix-like simulation.
Augmented reality startup Magic Leap and AT&T have been showing a “Game of Thrones” experience ahead of the premiere of the show’s final season at select AT&T stores this month. “The Dead Must Die: A Magic Leap Encounter” isn’t necessarily breaking ground in location-based entertainment, but it’s a fun little teaser for the show, and a device that most consumers haven’t had a chance to play with until now.
The experience, produced by Framestore in partnership with HBO, AT&T and Magic Leap, is currently showing in the telco’s so-called flagship stores in San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. Later this month, it is scheduled to come to select stores in Los Angeles and Dallas as well. Ultimately, there will also be a home-based version of Magic Leap owners, according to a Magic Leap spokesperson.
All of this just takes five minutes or less, depending on how well-versed participants are in slaying the undead. The experience is single-player, and while there are physical props, players don’t actually get to interact with them. For instance, you use the Magic Leap controller to pick up the AR torch, as well as any other objects, instead of handling physical representations of such objects, as one might in a more advanced location-based VR experience from a company like The Void.
The game is an immersive experienced designed for “mixed reality,” where players play in virtual reality headsets in a physical location that is designed to be like a spooky landscape.
Zuckerberg said incidents like the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque attacks were the result of “bad actors”; not bad technology and a time delay would disrupt the enjoyment of users who broadcast events like birthday parties or group hangouts.
In a later interview with RNZ on Monday, Edwards described Zuckerberg’s comments as “disingenuous”, and said the company had refused to tell his office how many murders, suicides and sexual assaults had been broadcast using the platform.
“The show ended, the lights came on, and the guests are lying on their backs, holding hands, shaking, sweating – tears, snot, drool – vibrating, unable to move for about 45 minutes,” says Sean Rogg. Surprisingly, Rogg isn’t describing the scenes of an internment camp or some other unspeakable horror. He’s talking about his latest art piece, Barzakh, an immersive experience like no other.
Staged within an old factory in Welwyn Garden City, a misleadingly idyllic town north of London, entrants will be grilled through a four-hour-long trial of reverence and rebirth. Their clothes exchanged for uniforms, the willing group will be subjected to blinding light, chilling darkness, biting sound, and, ultimately, a palpable sense of a higher power. This is not a pleasant trip to the gallery.
“We use every phobia you can imagine: suffocation and isolation and degradation, just one after the other, slapping the outside world out of them; cleansing them, and then preparing them for the final moment,” says Rogg. Indeed, given its hellish toll, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to experience Barzakh at all. But Rogg insists that entrants experience far more than just distress; they achieve true empathy.
And this newfound fellowship wasn’t just a surprise to Rogg, but to psychologists, too. Startled by Rogg’s results, and unable to replicate them in their own regulated workplace, some scientists are now turning to the artist for answers.
#1. The Chinese- and English-speaking AI communities have an asymmetrical understanding of each other. Most Chinese researchers can read English, and nearly all major research developments in the Western world are immediately translated into Chinese, but the reverse is not true. Therefore, the Chinese research community has a much deeper understanding than the English-speaking one of what’s happening on both sides of the aisle. As China’s AI industry continues to grow, this could prove a major disadvantage for people in the West.
#5. Chinese people care about AI ethics. While it may be true that Chinese and American citizens have differing views on privacy, it’s false to say that the former don’t care about it at all. Tech giants have been mired in privacy infringement controversies, and local governments have filed suits against companies for violating data protections. Chinese philosophers and academics have also elevated broader conversations on ethics into the national discourse.
