AI Archives - Page 7 of 7 - ROBOPHILOSOPHY

September 9, 2019September 9, 2019

Fighting Deepfakes with Deepfakes

A deepfake (or deep fake) is a picture or video created with the help of artificial intelligence that looks authentic but is not. Also the methods and techniques in this context are labeled with the term. Machine learning and especially deep learning are used. With deepfakes one wants to create objects of art and visual objects or means for discreditation, manipulation and propaganda. Politics and pornography are therefore closely interwoven with the phenomenon. According to Futurism, Facebook is teaming up with a consortium of Microsoft researchers and several prominent universities for a “Deepfake Detection Challenge”. “The idea is to build a data set, with the help of human user input, that’ll help neural networks detect what is and isn’t a deepfake. The end result, if all goes well, will be a system that can reliably fake videos online. Similar data sets already exist for object or speech recognition, but there isn’t one specifically made for detecting deepfakes yet.” (Futurism, 5 September 2019) The winning team will get a prize – presumably a higher sum of money. Facebook is investing a total of 10 million dollars in the competition.

September 5, 2019October 22, 2023

An AI System for Multiple-choice Tests

According to the New York Times, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence unveiled a new system that 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. Is it really a breakthrough for AI technology, as the title of the article claims? This is a subject of controversy among experts. The newspaper is optimistic: “The system, called Aristo, is an indication that in just the past several months researchers have made significant progress in developing A.I. that can understand languages and mimic the logic and decision-making of humans.” (NYT, 4 September 2019) Aristo was built for multiple-choice tests. “It took standard exams written for students in New York, though the Allen Institute removed all questions that included pictures and diagrams.” (NYT, 4 September 2019) Some questions could be answered by simple information retrieval. There are numerous systems that access Google and Wikipedia, including artifacts of machine ethics like LIEBOT and BESTBOT. But for the answers to other questions logical thinking was required. Perhaps Aristo is helping to abolish multiple-choice tests – not so much because it can solve them, but because they are often not effective.

August 11, 2019August 11, 2019

China’s Brain Drain

“China’s AI talent base is growing, and then leaving” – this is what Joy Dantong Ma writes in an article with the same title. Artificial intelligence is promoted in the People’s Republic in various ways. Money is invested in technologies, institutions, and people. “China has been successful in producing AI talent, evidenced by the rapid growth of AI human capital over the last decade.” (MacroPolo, 30 July 2019) This seems to be good news for the country in the Far East. But the study to which the article refers comes to a different conclusion. While “Beijing has cultivated an army of top AI talent, well over half of that talent eventually ended up in America rather than getting hired by domestic companies and institutions”. “That’s because most of the government resources went into expanding the talent base rather than creating incentives and an environment in which they stay.” (MacroPolo, 30 July 2019) According to Joy Dantong Ma, Beijing seems to have recognized its failure in retaining talent. “The well-known New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, released in 2017, vowed to lure top-notch AI scientists in neural network, machine learning, self-driving cars, and intelligent robotics by opening up special channels and offering up competitive compensation packages. Still, it’s not clear that Beijing will be able to reverse the Chinese AI brains from draining to its biggest competitor, the United States.” (MacroPolo, 30 July 2019) Does the USA even want the talents? That is anything but clear in these times.

August 10, 2019August 10, 2019

Unknown Links between Classic Artworks

Can machine vision detect unknown connections between famous or classic artworks? This seems to be the case, as the work of Tomas Jenicek and Ondřej Chum shows. In their paper “Linking Art through Human Poses” they write: “We address the discovery of composition transfer in artworks based on their visual content. Automated analysis of large art collections, which are growing as a result of art digitization among museums and galleries, is an important tool for art history and assists cultural heritage preservation. Modern image retrieval systems offer good performance on visually similar artworks, but fail in the cases of more abstract composition transfer. The proposed approach links artworks through a pose similarity of human figures depicted in images.” (Abstract) Human figures are the subject of many paintings from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age and their unmistakable poses have often been a source of inspiration among artists. Think of “Sleeping Venus” by Giorgione, “Venus of Urbino” by Titian and “Olympia” by Édouard Manet – paintings with similarities and correlations. The method of the two scientists consists of fast pose matching and robust spatial verification. They “experimentally show that explicit human pose matching is superior to standard content-based image retrieval methods on a manually annotated art composition transfer dataset” (Abstract). The paper can be downloaded via arxiv.org/abs/1907.03537.

August 4, 2019August 4, 2019

Could Artificial Intelligence Trigger Wars?

Deep fakes are a young phenomenon. Of course there have been fake videos for a long time. But that artificial intelligence makes the production possible, even in standard applications, is new. On August 1, an article dedicated to the phenomenon was published in the German newspaper Die Welt. It begins with the following words: “It is well known that a picture says more than a thousand words. And moving images, i.e. videos, are still regarded as unmistakable proof that something has taken place exactly as it can be seen in the film. … Powerful artificial intelligence (AI) processes now make it possible to produce such perfect counterfeits that it is no longer possible to tell with the naked eye whether a video is real or manipulated. In so-called deep fake videos, people say or do things they would never say or do.” Among others, the philosopher Oliver Bendel is quoted. The article with the title “Artificial intelligence could trigger wars” can be downloaded via www.welt.de.

July 26, 2019July 26, 2019

Hologram Girl

The article “Hologram Girl” by Oliver Bendel deals first of all with the current and future technical possibilities of projecting three-dimensional human shapes into space or into vessels. Then examples for holograms from literature and film are mentioned, from the fictionality of past and present. Furthermore, the reality of the present and the future of holograms is included, i.e. what technicians and scientists all over the world are trying to achieve, in eager efforts to close the enormous gap between the imagined and the actual. A very specific aspect is of interest here, namely the idea that holograms serve us as objects of desire, that they step alongside love dolls and sex robots and support us in some way. Different aspects of fictional and real holograms are analyzed, namely pictoriality, corporeality, motion, size, beauty and speech capacity. There are indications that three-dimensional human shapes could be considered as partners, albeit in a very specific sense. The genuine advantages and disadvantages need to be investigated further, and a theory of holograms in love could be developed. The article is part of the book “AI Love You” by Yuefang Zhou and Martin H. Fischer and was published on 18 July 2019. Further information can be found via link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-19734-6.