The most prolific musical artists manage to release one, maybe two, studio albums in a year. Rappers can sometimes put out three or four mixtapes during that same time. However, Auxuman plans to put out a new full-length album, featuring hot up-and-coming artists like Yona, Mony, Gemini, Hexe, and Zoya, every single month. How? The power of artificial intelligence of course.
Continue reading… “A.I. musicians are a growing trend. What does that mean for the music industry?”
An A.I. might also “reduce unconscious bias and promote diversity” in the workplace.
Are you ready to be interviewed by a robot? Well, you better get ready. Artificial intelligence just started being used for job interviews for the first time in England, and it may only a matter of time before this becomes common practice in the United States.
The major consumer goods company Unilever and other companies are now using artificial intelligence designed by an American company called HireVue to assist with with interviews in England. Here’s how it works, according to HireVue: The interviewee uses their phone or laptop to answer a set of predetermined questions, and the AI analyzes their voice, body language, facial expressions and more to determine if the person is a good candidate for the job. This AI was created by analyzing over 25,000 videos of job interviews.
Continue reading… “Robots are conducting job interviews now”
Facebook has teamed up with the Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from Cornell Tech, MIT, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, College Park, and University at Albany–SUNY to build the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC).
Deepfake detection is an enduring arms race that will never end. In case you are wondering… no, this technology will not protect the 2020 election from deepfakes. No science is up to that task.
Facebook’s goal is to commission a realistic data set that will use paid actors, with the required consent obtained, to contribute to the challenge. This “benchmark data” will be used to help developers build better tools to detect deepfakes. Everyone should applaud this effort! As I’ve written about recently, deepfakes will be used extensively by both good and bad people.
Facebook also announced it was bringing its dating service to the U.S. after testing it in roughly 20 countries since its launch last year. These two stories may not seem to have much correlation at first glance. But when combined, they present a potential reality as sinister as it is deceitful. Imagine online dating in a world replete with deepfakes.
Continue reading… “Online dating in a world of deepfakes”
For all your royalty-free photo needs
It’s getting easier and easier to use AI to generate convincing-looking, yet entirely fake, pictures of people. Now, one company wants to find a use for these photos, by offering a resource of 100,000 AI-generated faces to anyone that can use them — royalty free. Many of the images look fake but others are difficult to distinguish from images licensed by stock photo companies.
The project’s Product Hunt page lists the team at Icons8, a designer marketplace for icons and photographs, as the creator of the project. The AI-produced images are intended to be used as design elements in anything from presentations to websites and mobile apps. Everything is free to use with link attribution back to generated.photos.
Continue reading… “100,000 free AI-generated headshots put stock photo companies on notice”
Doctors can detect heart failure from a single heartbeat with 100% accuracy using a new artificial intelligence-driven neural network.
That’s according to a recent study published in Biomedical Signal Processing and Control Journal, which explores how emerging technology can improve existing methods of detecting congestive heart failure.
Led by researchers at the Universities of Surrey, Warwick and Florence, it shows that AI can quickly and accurately identify CHF by analyzing one electrocardiogram (ECG) heartbeat.
CHF is a chronic progressive condition affecting the way in which blood is pumped around the body. Research shows that, in the US alone, around 5 million people live with it.
A fake video featuring former president Barack Obama. A new worry: fake voice recordings that can be used to persuade people that they’re being asked to do something by an authority. (AP/AP)
Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive’s speech and dupe his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, the company’s insurer said, in a remarkable case that some researchers are calling one of the world’s first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists.
The managing director of a British energy company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders one Friday afternoon in March to wire more than $240,000 to an account in Hungary, said representatives from the French insurance giant Euler Hermes, which declined to name the company.
The request was “rather strange,” the director noted later in an email, but the voice was so lifelike that he felt he had no choice but to comply. The insurer, whose case was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, provided new details on the theft to The Washington Post on Wednesday, including an email from the employee tricked by what the insurer is referring to internally as “the false Johannes.”
In a patent application published this week, Google indicated it’s looking into how artificial intelligence can be used to watch for abnormal behavior in babies.
The system would consist of eye tracking and motion detection and could alert a parent if anything is out of the ordinary.
Google’s hefty investment in artificial intelligence might be making its way to the crib.
According to a patent application filed last year and published on Thursday, Google is researching technology that could track a baby’s eyes, movements and sounds using “intelligent” audio and video. If the behavior seems abnormal, the cloud-based system would notify parents on their device.
Continue reading… “Google files patent for using A.I. to track a baby’s body and eye movements”
So AI crimes are a thing now
It seems like every few days there’s another example of a convincing deepfake going viral or another free, easy-to-use piece of software (some even made for mobile) that can generate convincing video or audio that’s designed to trick someone into believing a piece of virtual artifice is real. But according to The Wall Street Journal, there may soon be serious financial and legal ramifications to the proliferation of deepfake technology.
The publication reported last week that a UK energy company’s chief executive was tricked into wiring €200,000 (or about $220,000 USD) to a Hungarian supplier because he believed his boss was instructing him to do so. But the energy company’s insurance firm, Euler Hermes Group SA, told the WSJ that a clever AI-equipped fraudster was using deepfake software to mimic the voice of the executive and demand his underling pay him within the hour.
Continue reading… “Thieves are now using AI deepfakes to trick companies into sending them money”
SAN FRANCISCO — Four years ago, more than 700 computer scientists competed in a contest to build artificial intelligence that could pass an eighth-grade science test. There was $80,000 in prize money on the line.
They all flunked. Even the most sophisticated system couldn’t do better than 60 percent on the test. A.I. couldn’t match the language and logic skills that students are expected to have when they enter high school.
But on Wednesday, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a prominent lab in Seattle, unveiled a new system that passed the test with room to spare. It correctly answered more than 90 percent of the questions on an eighth-grade science test and more than 80 percent on a 12th-grade exam.
Continue reading… “A breakthrough for A.I. technology: Passing an 8th-grade science test”
The skills gap is widening between people and AI.
But many CEOs tell IBM they don’t have the resources needed to close the skills gap brought on by emerging technologies.
Artificial Intelligence is apparently ready to get to work. Over the next three years, as many as 120 million workers from the world’s 12 largest economies may need to be retrained because of advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent automation, according to a study released Friday by IBM’s Institute for Business Value. However, less than half of CEOs surveyed by IBM said they had the resources needed to close the skills gap brought on by these new technologies.
“Organizations are facing mounting concerns over the widening skills gap and tightened labor markets with the potential to impact their futures as well as worldwide economies,” said Amy Wright, a managing partner for IBM Talent & Transformation, in a release. “Yet while executives recognize severity of the problem, half of those surveyed admit that they do not have any skills development strategies in place to address their largest gaps.”
Continue reading… “120 million workers will need to be retrained due to AI, says IBM study”
Tomorrow’s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare.
Wallops island—a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses—is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology.
Continue reading… “Coming soon to a battlefield: Robots that can kill”
As artificial intelligence is increasingly introduced into business, an expert panel – hosted by the Guardian – forecast how it will change our working live
Workplaces should use automation technologies to enhance employees’ jobs rather than to replace humans, according to speakers at an event held by the Guardian on 11 July. However, they saw problems in the introduction of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, the latter including software as well as physical machines.
Will robots replace us?
“Humans should not worry too much about replacement, but need to find new ways to work together with AI,” said Chelsea Chen, co-founder of Emotech, a company which makes a voice-operated device called Olly that aims to recognise users’ emotions as well the content of speech.
Continue reading… “Automatic for the people? Experts predict how AI will transform the workplace”