MIT trained an AI to spot fake and biased news stories

MIT trained an AI to spot fake and biased news stories

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to detect and weed out fake news is quickly rising up the political agenda, and companies are in an arms race to try to find solutions fast.   Any fact-checker who works in the media has a straightforward but challenging job – make...

Read more
An AI just wrote, directed and produced its own appalling film, but it’s the future

An AI just wrote, directed and produced its own appalling film, but it’s the future

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Today AI’s that are involved in film production are, for the most part, really awful, but over time they’ll improve and one day they’ll go head to head with the best human directors.   Benjamin is a genius who may have created a film that’s...

Read more
US military and DARPA team up to develop tech to uncover fake news

US military and DARPA team up to develop tech to uncover fake news

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The advent of powerful AI tools, adaptable neural networks and the democratisation of hi definition rendering have taken fake news to a new level and this program aims to unmask the fakes.   We’ve all seen that video where Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered algorithms make it seem like Barack...

Read more
CGI “Virtual influencers” on Instagram battle it out in public, snag real ad cash

CGI “Virtual influencers” on Instagram battle it out in public, snag real ad cash

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Today we are used to the majority of our influencers, and contacts, being human, but as we progress into the future more of the encounters we have will be with virtual entities, in the form of avatars, bots and virtual vloggers like these.   It...

Read more
Researchers use duelling AI’s to defeat facial recognition technology

Researchers use duelling AI’s to defeat facial recognition technology

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As both our online, as well as our offline privacy, continue to be eroded, scientists are using AI to fight back.   Most of us probably don’t like the idea of some stranger finding out who we are, and then where we live, or what...

Read more
Google’s lifelike sounding AI assistant, Duplex, blows past uncanny valley

Google’s lifelike sounding AI assistant, Duplex, blows past uncanny valley

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF I’ve been saying this for a long time, very soon you won’t know whether the content you’re consuming was generated by a human or a machine, and Google’s latest product, Duplex, moves us all one step closer to that time.   At Google’s I/O developer...

Read more
Creative AI’s generate video from plain text

Creative AI’s generate video from plain text

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Imagine not being able to program or code, but still being able to write a description or a script and have an AI create an HD image or video of it for you, this is the technology that’s now arriving.   In 2016 an Artificial...

Read more
Baidu’s AI can clone anyone’s voice in under a minute

Baidu’s AI can clone anyone’s voice in under a minute

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to clone people’s voices, and mimic them, opens up a range of well meaning opportunities, but it also paves the way for fake news chaos and everything in between…   In the near future, just as it is today, fake news will become...

Read more
Futurist keynote, London: The Future of Trust, Battle of the Quants

Futurist keynote, London: The Future of Trust, Battle of the Quants

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Algorithmic traders, like many of us, have a nascent reliance on being able to trust the information they ingest, but a new breed of AI is about to push fake news, and, by association our trust in each other and society, to the limits.  ...

Read more
Nvidia’s newest AI is creating scarily realistic photos of fake celebrities

Nvidia’s newest AI is creating scarily realistic photos of fake celebrities

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Artificial Intelligence is getting more creative and better at creating realistic images and photos that fool even the most cynical experts, and it will bring about a new era in content creation.   One of the more unexpected outcomes of today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution...

Read more
AI is helping create realistic “Fake news!” videos and it’s going to be a problem

AI is helping create realistic “Fake news!” videos and it’s going to be a problem

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The ability of “unethical actors” to create realistic looking video and audio of famous people to generate “Fake news!” is accelerating exponentially and politicians are already way behind the curve.   Over the past couple of years, even before “Fake news!” became the monster topic...

Read more
Brace yourselves AI is about to make the “Fake News!” problem a whole lot worse

Brace yourselves AI is about to make the “Fake News!” problem a whole lot worse

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF We are approaching a dangerous threshold where one day, in the next few years, you won’t be able to trust what you see, or easily distinguish fake news from real news, and it could have big consequences on democracy and society.   Over the past...

Read more
Humans come up trumps as Facebook rolls out its solution for fake news

Humans come up trumps as Facebook rolls out its solution for fake news

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Fake news is now regarded as one of the most politically destabilising developments in recent years, Facebook’s new solution hopes to turn the tide on the fakers   Ironically, for all the amazing things that artificial intelligence (AI) can do, from running Wall Street hedge...

Read more
Adobe’s new software lets you Photoshop voices on demand

Adobe’s new software lets you Photoshop voices on demand

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The ability to perfectly “Photoshop”, edit and manipulate people’s voices opens up new opportunities for media companies but it could also create problems for companies who rely on biometric authentication, such as banks.   I love Photoshop – I’ve been using it for the past...

Read more
DeepMinds AI based WaveNet tech makes computers sound human

DeepMinds AI based WaveNet tech makes computers sound human

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Allowing people to converse with machines is a long standing dream of human computer interaction, now it’s a lot closer.   Is that the President of the United States you’re talking to!? No, it’s WaveNet. Computer systems that sound like the real deal are edging...

Read more