Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryArts & Culture

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Still from the movie Alita, Battle Angel

Alita: Battle Angel: A Mind Matters Review

If you love anime and felt betrayed by the flop of Ghost, I would highly recommend Alita

Although it doesn’t strictly feature AI, Alita invites us to ponder what it means to be human. Are we defined by a human brain? Or are there aspects of being human that are not solely associated with the brain?

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Character from Detroit: Become Human with blue chemical on face disintegratingn

A Closer Look at Detroit: Become Human, Part I

Gaming culture provides a window into our culture’s assumptions about artificial intelligence

In the game, Detroit has transcended its current economic despair, emerging as the epicenter of the android revolution. Cyberlife, headquartered there, has become the first company to engineer and produce fully autonomous, general purpose AI androids for consumers.

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Does AI Art Spell the End of the Artist’s Way of Life?

An AI-produced painting sold at auction for $432,500. But is it a trend or just a novelty?

Rather than announce that human artists are now doomed, software engineer Ben Dixon interviewed a number of them and came away with a rather different picture, that “AI-generated art will improve, but artistic creativity will remain a human discipline.”

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Scene clapperboard in front of two actors

2: AI Can Write Novels and Screenplays Better than the Pros!

AI help, not hype: Software can automatically generate word sequences based on material fed in from existing scripts. But with what result?

“AI rites reel gud!” Seriously, the idea is not new. Back in the 1940s, George Orwell (1903–1950) thought that a machine could write popular novels so long as no creative thinking was involved. Thus, in his 1984 police state world, one of the central characters has a job minding a machine that mass produces them. In the 1960s, some film experiments were done along these lines, using Westerns (cowboy stories). At the time, there were masses of formula-based film material to work with in this popular genre. But what does the product look and sound like? In 2016, Ars Technica was proud to sponsor “the first AI-written sci-fi script:” As explained in The Guardian, a recurrent neural network “was fed the Read More ›

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Advertising billboards at Times Square

The Death of the Ad Agency Was Widely Publicized

But, like so many industries, advertising turned out to be weathering the digital storm after all

A recent surge in jobs could be temporary. But it’s beginning to look as though the iconic ad culture is adjusting to the digital age. There's a film in that too. Probably a lot of them.  

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Screenwriters’ Jobs Are Not Threatened by AI

Unless the public starts preferring mishmash to creativity

An AI-generated film is not an altogether new idea. Rule-based expert systems were used to write short plays over a half century ago, in the early 1960's. Then, as now, don’t expect creativity. That is not what AI does.

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