philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Snap launches augmented reality-powered virtual mall

• The Snap Ramadan Mall will feature brands such as L’Oreal, IKEA, Namshi and Samsung
• Snap’s virtual mall aims to provide retailers with another channel for capturing users’ attention and driving sales 

DUBAI: Snap is launching what it claims to be the first-ever augmented reality-led virtual mall in the Middle East and North Africa region, ...

Ramadan is a critical period for retailers, and Snap’s virtual mall aims to provide retailers with another channel for capturing users’ attention and driving sales. Last year, for instance, Ramadan campaigns for retailers running an AR lens on Snapchat delivered a 4.3 times higher average purchase value compared to other formats. ...

See the full story here: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2066556/media

Deconstructing the virtual influencer

PhilNote: this is a good, short breakdown of the success traits for a v-influencer.

... The virtual influencer may be a futuristic being, but, like today's music, it requires old-school techniques to render and manage.

Already there are over 150 virtual influencers in existence, with this figure expected to increase as influencer marketing spending for 2022 grows to a forecasted US$15 billion. From an organisational standpoint, the formula is simple and no different from managing a celebrity or politician: production + social media management = virtual influencer. ...

Virtual influencers should continuously be seen as a production effort, requiring a skilled team of CGI designers, 3D animators, storyboarding artists, copywriters, production and set designers, clothing and wardrobe producers, music producers, photographers, videographers, and—as with every influencer or model in this day and age—a healthy dose of Photoshop. ...

Besides avoiding scandal and controversy, the virtual influencer behaves on an as-needed basis, unlike a physical influencer which has to produce content almost daily. Rather than sharing every meal they eat in a day, the virtual influencer focuses on content that aligns with their point of view and therefore requires a much lower level of storyboarding, copywriting, and content creation compared to traditional influencers. ...

The core feature that will define a good or bad virtual influencer is its own definition of self. ...

The second feature of the so-called ‘golden ratio’ for virtual influencers is self-awareness. ...

Virtual influencers need to be consistently upgraded to uphold their personalities and worldviews. ...

See the full story here: https://www.campaignasia.com/article/deconstructing-the-virtual-influencer/477317

Rhode Island lawmakers introduce ‘green coin’ in housing bill

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At its core, the bill is aimed at providing state-backed funding for new housing projects that meet certain sustainability standards.

“We have about a shortage of 25,000 units,” said Representative Carlos Tobon ....

While the concept of this “green coin” system is still at a very early stage, Tobon said possible real-world applications could include paying for public transportation and for charging your electric car with these tokens. ...

See the full story here: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/142378/rhode-island-lawmakers-introduce-green-coin-in-housing-bill

The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence

Erik Brynjolfsson
Director
Stanford Digital Economy Lab

... The future is not preordained. We control the extent to which AI either expands human opportunity through augmentation or replaces humans through automation. We can work on challenges that are easy for machines and hard for humans, rather than hard for machines and easy for humans. The first option offers the opportunity of growing and sharing the economic pie by augmenting the workforce with tools and platforms. The second option risks dividing the economic pie among an ever-smaller number of people by creating automation that displaces ever-more types of workers. ...

More and more Americans, and indeed workers around the world, believe that while the technology may be creating a new billionaire class, it is not working for them.  ...

The solution is not to slow down technology, but rather to eliminate or reverse the excess incentives for automation over augmentation. ...

See the full 20 minute read here: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/the-turing-trap-the-promise-peril-of-human-like-artificial-intelligence/?fbclid=IwAR3FnzIYD1E3MWdInpFvJ1dOY0WROVtZ9gDdbvhVCsD5-EnlAaoGcnv4vAI

The Power of Natural Language Processing

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What NLP Can Do

The best known natural language processing tool is GPT-3, from OpenAI, which uses AI and statistics to predict the next word in a sentence based on the preceding words. NLP practitioners call tools like this “language models,” and they can be used for simple analytics tasks, such as classifying documents and analyzing the sentiment in blocks of text, as well as more advanced tasks, such as answering questions and summarizing reports.  ...

The latest version, called InstructGPT, has been fine-tuned by humans to generate responses that are much better aligned with human values and user intentions, and Google’s latest model shows further impressive breakthroughs on language and reasoning. ...

For businesses, the three areas where GPT-3 has appeared most promising are writing, coding, and discipline-specific reasoning. ...

A Language-Based AI Research Assistant

In my own work, I’ve been looking at how GPT-3-based tools can assist researchers in the research process. I am currently working with Ought, a San Francisco company developing an open-ended reasoning tool (called Elicit) that is intended to help researchers answer questions in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months. Elicit is designed for a growing number of specific tasks relevant to research, like summarization, data labeling, rephrasing, brainstorming, and literature reviews. ...

How Can Organizations Prepare for the Future?

Identify your text data assets and determine how the latest techniques can be leveraged to add value for your firm.

You are certainly aware of the value of data, but you still may be overlooking some essential data assets if you are not utilizing text analytics and NLP throughout your organization. ...

Aggressively adopt new language-based AI technologies; some will work well and others will not, but your employees will be quicker to adjust when you move on to the next. And don’t forget to adopt these technologies yourself — this is the best way for you to start to understand their future roles in your organization.

See the full story here: https://hbr.org/2022/04/the-power-of-natural-language-processing?ab=hero-subleft-1

The Boneyard Principle: Why the Next Big Thing will Emerge from a Failed Idea

... Why do some consumer social products finally make it big after a series of misses? Part of the magic often hides within UX details — particularly, those that help people make fewer decisions and take fewer risks. The more opinionated an app is about how it should be used, the easier it is for users to act without fear of rejection. Products benefit from giving people the plausible deniability to say: “I’m not seeking attention, I’m just doing what this app tells me to do!” ...

Vine's UX placed an enormous amount of decision-making baggage upon users. TikTok, on the other hand, gave users just one easy option: open the app and watch entertaining videos. ...

Just as importantly, the app helped new creators—even those without followers!—get attention for their videos, lessening their fear of rejection. When a creator posted a video, TikTok showed it to a sample audience and then expanded to bigger targeted audiences if it did well—a form of a recursive publishing feedback loop. ...

See the full story here: https://every.to/p/the-boneyard-principle?fbclid=IwAR2ZNSSz_-jHlLAwaN-5VG5QiDC3OiSNZdQedDW43XnNDjkfjZzknu0hvIg

Step Into The ‘Art Of The Future’ At Two Sf Augmented Reality Exhibitions

... According to its promotional materials, the "Verse" exhibition is "like a silent disco for holograms," calling out the image of a cluster of dancers in headphones dancing together, even though each is hearing a private feed of music different from the other dancers'. ...

Throughout the exhibition the wearer will encounter hovering yellow bull's-eyes, and when the cursor hits a bull's-eye, it explodes into a shimmering paragraph of highly readable text that explains an exhibit in the collection. ...

'The Unreal Garden' ...

The exhibition "features magic mushrooms, fractal flower beds and a rotating gallery of digital artworks including Android Jones' fractal trees, Scott Musgrove's jellyfish and John Park's hummingbirds." ...

See the full story here: https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/Step-Into-The-Art-Of-The-Future-At-Two-Sf-17087485.php

Bored? Follow the ETH.

On the morning of January 23, 2022, I saw a tweet about purchasing a Bored Ape NFT for 135 ETH that I assumed was completely fake. It turned out to be fake. But the transaction was absolutely real. How do I know? The Ethereum blockchain is a public ledger. Transactions are viewable by anyone (including you and me), so let’s do a little exploring and see who spent $337,500 (1 ETH = $2,500 at the time) to get their Bored Ape. ...

If you feel like you’ve invaded Rob Kapito’s privacy, you haven’t. This Twitter account was a fake and, to my knowledge, Rob Kapito had nothing to do with this. The strength and the weakness of public blockchain transactions is that they are public. If I were slightly more motivated and wanted more information about this wallet’s activity, a company like Chainalysis would be my next stop.

This Is Not the Future, It’s Now

We are used to public records. Deeds to houses, car registrations, driver’s licenses, titles to land, etc. We are less used to public records of our daily transactions. Yet, here we are. Forewarned is forearmed.

See the full article here: https://www.shellypalmer.com/2022/04/bored-follow-the-eth/?ck_subscriber_id=1646162133&utm_source=convertkit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Bored%3F+Follow+the+ETH.%20-%207995063

AI-Generated Characters Are Here, They’re Just Not Evenly Distributed

Sarah Guisto from Aww Inc took the audience through a fast-paced tour of virtual characters that her studio in Tokyo has successfully built and deployed. Perhaps the most famous is Imma, who is now three years old and most well-known for performing at the Tokyo Paralympics closing ceremony. Aww is the leading Asian company in virtual humans combining not just advanced technology but an empathetic approach to design, crafting these beings in a way that not just renders them technical, but also credible and emotional. 

As Asia’s number one influential virtual human with over 1 million followers on Instagram and Tik Tok, Imma has ‘worked with’ brands such as Porsche, Dior, and Nike, regularly appearing on the covers of magazines, and one can see the appeal for brands. These characters are flexible, adaptable, and global. They don’t demand repeat fees in media and they probably turn up on the dot and are never late for a shoot. But the foremost reason is that they can become whoever you want them to be. ...

As Jeanne Lim, CEO of Being AI suggested,... Lim wants to build trust between humans and these virtual beings. What are the required elements to achieve that? According to Lim, it’s a combination of an engaging and consistent personality, a sense of morality and empathy to avoid causing harm, a way to perceive a user’s emotions (by detecting when people are sad or happy through facial expressions as well as through conversation), each being having a specific skill set, and an interoperable approach for real-time interactivity so these beings are not trapped in an app only to be used on certain platforms or in certain spaces. ...

Professor Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University ... in virtual reality (VR), tracking and rendering are used, so the only thing that travels over the network is tracking data rather than any visual information about the world. 

The people you see within your VR headset have been redrawn using that tracking information. ...

Finally, one theme that came up more than once was how deep fakes could help us to anonymize ourselves. For example, if we had an app where we could choose a different face and a new tone of voice, before being connected to a counselor in group therapy, we could speak about our emotional situation without giving away our identity. ...

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceyfollows/2022/04/15/ai-generated-characters-are-here-theyre-just-not-evenly-distributed/?sh=5dd387716b31

DALL-E 2: New AI Technology Generates Astounding Images with Just a Few Words of Text

San Francisco artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI announced last week its image generation AI, DALL-E, has received a major upgrade, reported MIT Technology Review.

DALL-E 2, as the upgraded tool is called, converts text prompts into images like its predecessor. However, the new version is reportedly far more advanced, creating images that more accurately match the text prompt and can even be tweaked to incorporate different styles. ...

See the full story here: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/new-ai-technology-dall-e-2-1234625354/