From fantasy to reality: Misunderstanding the impact of AI

The prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly grown in pop culture and science fiction over the years. It has speculated on how AI can change people’s lives, the places we live and our day-to-day activities. However, despite the increase of AI in popular films such as I, Robot, Star Trek and WALL-E, it’s continued depiction and futuristic tendencies throughout the years have altered individual perceptions about the true meaning of AI and how it is already playing a...

9 December 2020 | Adoption

AI enables Star Trek: Voyager to be remastered in 4K

AI is helping to overcome difficulties with older filming techniques and enabling Star Trek: Voyager to be remastered in 4K.

Older shows like Voyager shot their effects during filming rather than adding them digitally after the fact. Remastering these scenes in a higher resolution is incredibly difficult, to say the least.

Star Trek fan Billy Reichard has employed AI to do the painstaking work that upgrades the image quality as much as possible. For some idea of how long...

30 March 2020 | Entertainment

AI is now creating sports for puny humans to play

A benevolent AI has begun creating some new sports for humans to keep their puny selves occupied with.

Most sports have been established for some time and ‘new’ ones are generally just similar but with some tweaked rules.

Design agency AKQA set out to create a truly new sport with help from an AI – meet, Speedgate.

Speedgate features six-player teams (take that, five-a-side lovers...) which compete on a field with three open-ended gates.

To...

15 April 2019 | Entertainment

AI hunts illegal password sharers of video services

Synamedia has developed an AI which can track down the many users who share video streaming passwords with friends and family.

The solution, Credentials Sharing Insight, helps to source missing income for services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

Media research firm Magid claims 26% of millennials share passwords for video streaming services. Parks Associates, meanwhile, predicts that in 2021, $9.9 billion of pay-tv revenues and $1.2 billion of OTT revenues will be...

9 January 2019 | Entertainment

Nvidia’s AI can turn real-life videos into 3D renders

Nvidia has developed an AI which can turn real-life videos into 3D renders – making creating games and VR experiences simpler. Creating 3D renders is a painstaking and time-consuming process requiring specific skills and can be incredibly costly. By reducing the barriers, Nvidia could enable more ideas to move from concept into reality. During the NeurIPS AI conference in Montreal, Nvidia set up a dedicated area showing its technology. The company used its DGX-1 supercomputer for the...

4 December 2018 | Entertainment

AI is creating spooky tales and music this Halloween

The possibilities of AI are far-reaching but perhaps few would have expected it to be creating otherworldly tales and sounds. A pair of AIs could help to make your Halloween festivities this year spookier by auto-generating some creepy material. The first AI, created by Botnik Studios, uses stories from the ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’ book series to create a brand new interactive story. Nicky Martin, Managing Editor at Botnik, explained:

“We took...

31 October 2018 | Entertainment

Netflix wants to feed your binge with personalised, AI-powered trailers

Researchers at Netflix are experimenting with using AI to create personalised trailers for its growing library of content. I don’t know about you, but it will already take me years to get through my existing backlog. The current amount of content is staggering. Netflix has distribution rights from studios around the world and reinvests its profits into creating lauded original content such as ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Orange Is The New Black’ which cannot be found...

6 December 2017 | Entertainment