Lifeboat Foundation

One of the often-overlooked parts of movie-making is how Hollywood blockbusters are distributed worldwide. While subtitles are common, dubbed audiences more widely embrace films to the point that certain native stars get associated with English-speaking performers. Variety reports that the Italian dubbing workers and voice actors are going on strike over the studios laying the groundwork to replace them with AI dubbing.

Italian voice actors and dubbing workers have been on strike since February 21st and will continue for at least another week. The complaints from the workers sound very similar to those of Marvel’s VFX contractors: low wages, long hours, and an unsustainable pace of work. Now that AI programs are becoming widely available and more cost-efficient than human work, the union worries dubbing will be fully overtaken by machines.

Rodolfo Bianchi, head of Italy’s dubbing director’s organization ADID, explained, “We are forced to sign contracts in which we give away the rights to the use of our voice, this also involves the use of our voice for artificial intelligence purposes.” AI is already capable of realistic deep fakes, including appropriating celebrity voices, and with how far the technology has come in a relatively short period, Bianchi’s fears are well-founded. While a computer program would struggle to match the tone and tenor of a voice during a dramatic performance, it can be done, and it can be done cheaply.

It’s called 2dumb2destroy, and it lives up to its name.

Acting stupid can be fun. So, some developers produced a goofy little chatbot called “2dumb2destroy.” The system is trained on entertaining datasets that emerge from crap like all seven “Police Academy” movies, quotes and lines from the Naked Gun films, Pauly Shore features, the sayings of Homer Simpson, Ralph Wiggum quotes, and a lot more useless but fun stuff.

It was created by the developer of OpenAI’s GPT-3, Craig Shervin and Steve Nass, who met while working at a New York advertising agency.

Continue reading “New ‘dumb’ AI chatbot offers goofy fun replies you can’t ignore” »

In a stunning turn of events, a top-ranking AI system was soundly defeated by a human player in the strategic board game Go. This marks a significant reversal of the 2016 victory by the computer, which was widely celebrated as a landmark achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The victorious player, Kellin Pelrine, holds a rank just below the top amateur level and was able to exploit a previously unidentified vulnerability in the AI system that had been detected by another computer. The games were played without any direct computer assistance, and Pelrine emerged as the clear winner by winning 14 out of 15 games.

Financial Times mentioned that this victory, which has not been previously disclosed, brought to light a flaw in the top Go computer programs that is common to many of today’s prevalent AI systems, including San Francisco-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. The strategy used to win the Go match was proposed by a computer program that investigated the AI systems to discover any weaknesses. Pelrine, who executed the proposed plan with merciless precision, was able to use the tactics to put the human player back on top of the Go board.

LCARS is the fictional computer operating system used by Starfleet starships in several Star Trek TV shows and films. The system is currently displayed in the animated comedy Trek series Lower Decks. Now, one intrepid fan has adapted the Lower Decks version of LCARS into a “crazy fan project:” Project RITOS.

RITOS is a webpage that recreates the LCARS system. It’s a fun little site to poke around on. But, since this is just a recreation, there’s no actual functionality you can incorporate onto your computer. As the RITOS About page states, you just “point & click & watch. There are no goals nor wrong thing to do here. It’s just a mindless site.”

It may be mindless, but it’s also a faithful recreation of the LCARS system as depicted not just in Star Trek: Lower Decks but also in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Users can click around into various displays that show crew quarters, a ship map of the Cerritos (the Federation starship in Lower Decks), JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) images, and a Sick Bay screen. There are plenty of fun things to click on and little easter eggs to uncover for dedicated Trek fans.

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) — U.S. diplomatic communications with China remain open after the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon this month, but contact between the countries’ militaries “unfortunately” remains shut down, the White House said on Friday.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said it was not the “right time” for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to travel to China after he postponed a Feb. 5–6 trip over the balloon episode, but President Joe Biden wanted to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping when it was “appropriate.”

Kirby told a White House news briefing that U.S. and Chinese diplomats can still communicate despite tensions over the balloon incident.

A video about nuclear weapons. The song is “Electric Funeral” by the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath off their 1970 album Paranoid, an extremely influential album for metal and rock music.

After beating humans in video games, AI is now taking on game design.

A team of computer programmers at IT University of Copenhagen has developed a new way to encode and generate Super Mario Bros. levels—called MarioGPT, the new approach is based on the language model GPT-2. The group outlines their work and the means by which others can use their system in a paper on the arXiv pre-print server.

Mario Brothers is a video game first introduced in 1983—it involves two Italian plumbers emerging from a sewer and attempting to rescue Princess Peach, who has been captured and held by Bowser. To rescue her, the brothers must travel (via input from the game player) across a series of obstacles made of pipes and bricks. As they travel, the terrain changes in accordance with the level they have achieved in the game. In this new effort, the team in Denmark has recreated one aspect of the game—the number of levels that can be traversed.

The researchers used Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2)—an open-source language model created by a team at OpenAI, to translate user requests into graphical representations of Super Mario Brothers game levels. To do so, they created a small bit of Python code to help the language model understand what needed to be done and then trained it using samples from the original Super Mario Bros. game and one of its sequels, “Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.”

Inside the mall, customers’ avatars will find Carrefour, VOX Cinemas, THAT Concept Store, Ghawali and Samsung Store, “with many more brands and exciting features in the pipeline”.

Announced at the World Government Summit, the mall is in the initial phase of development as the group looks “closely” at customers’ needs and expectations.

Khalifa bin Braik, CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Asset Management, said the Mall of the Metaverse will be a leading retail and entertainment destination — “and surely a huge attraction for customers who crave digital experiences from their most loved brands”.