For those who love Pixar’s Luxo Jr., Apple’s engineers developed a lamp that swivels with excitement as it obeys your every whim. Thirty nine years ago, the CG wizards at Pixar made us all believe a faceless desk lamp could be enormously expressive and incredibly cute. Apple, with its mind set on home robotics, shows […]
Ha Ha, The Simpsons Has to End One Day, Right? Right??
In a moving essay in The New York Times, voice actor Hank Azaria expressed his fear that AI would one day be used to keep The Simpsons going forever. With almost 40 years of episodes under its belt, The Simpsons could provide a system with a lot of training data. What’s to stop corporations from […]
DeepSeek Gets an ‘F’ in Safety From Researchers
Usually when large language models are given tests, achieving a 100% success rate is viewed as a massive achievement. That is not quite the case with this one: Researchers at Cisco tasked Chinese AI firm DeepSeek’s headline-grabbing open-source model DeepSeek R1 with fending off 50 separate attacks designed to get the LLM to engage in […]
There Will Be More AI Ads and Fewer Movie Trailers in the Super Bowl
You didn’t think AI ads were going to end at those uncanny valley Coca-Cola polar bear commercials, did you? No, that’s just the start, and the deluge will begin on Super Bowl Sunday. Per a report in the The Hollywood Reporter, AI companies are getting ready to pour their seemingly endless piles of venture capital […]
We’re Doing AI Phrenology Again
Every few months, another highly educated academic asks: What if I tried doing debunked 18th-century race science, but with AI? The latest entry into the AI phrenology portfolio comes from a group of economics professors who say they’ve developed a method for algorithmically analyzing a single photo of a person’s face in order to calculate […]
Being a Manga Letterer Is More Than Having a Fun Job
When people read manga, they often focus on the Instagram caption-worthy one-liners and larger-than-life illustrations that fill their pages. What usually goes unnoticed in picking up a manga is the work that goes into its lettering and graphic design, done by the folks who pour their craftsmanship into typesetting popular Japanese manga for Western audiences. […]
Fearing AI Will Take Their Jobs, Workers Strategize for a Long Battle Against Tech
The current frenzy around artificial intelligence has spread like a shockwave. It started among engineers inspired by a 2017 research paper. Next came venture capitalists eager to profit from a new boom. They were followed by government officials racing to impose regulations. Now it’s labor’s turn. More than 200 trade union members and technologists gathered […]