AI Stories That Write Themselves

AI Stories That Write Themselves
Number	3832
Broadcast Date	JULY 28, 2020
Episode Length	30:32
Hosts	Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang
Guests	Andrew Mayne

Andrew Mayne incorporated OpenAI’s latest GPT-3 model into a project to help him develop dialogue for characters real and fictitious called AI|Writer.

Guest

• Andrew Mayne
  • @AndrewMayne
  • The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit Book 1)

Quick Hits

• Spotify Premium users can now host a listening party with up to five friends — even if they live far away

Spotify updated its Group Sessions beta feature to let up to five premium subscribers listen to music or podcasts together. All members of the listening party's host and guests can control playback, skip tracks or episodes, and add items in the queue. Spotify first launched Group Sessions in May.

• Google's new transatlantic data cable to land in Cornwall

Google announced plans to build an undersea cable to connect the UK, Spain and the US. It's Google's fourth privately owned undersea cable. While it will help Google save money, an industry insider told DTNS "The average user will see nothing from this, although it is nice to see new fiber in the water." An example of a cable that will impact general users is the Oman to Perth cable to be completed in December 2021. That will be the only cable directly connecting Europe, Middle East and Africa to Australia, avoiding routes through the South China Sea.

• Intel’s hardware chief is leaving the company

Intel announced Monday that that its Chief Engineering Officer Dr. Venkata (Murthy) Ren-du-chin-tala will leave the company August 3. His Technology Systems Architecture and Client Group will be split into five teams -- technology development, manufacturing, design engineering, architecture, and supply chain management --all reporting to Intel CEO Bob Swan.

• Tech companies are cleaning up Emmy nominations — even Quibi

Netflix received the most Emmy nominations of any studio, digital or otherwise with 160. Ozark alone had 18. Amazon got 31, Hulu 26, Apple TV+ 20, Disney+ 19, mostly for The Mandalorian, Quibi got 10, Oculus 3 and YouTube 2.

• Folding@home ARM support lets Android devices crunch COVID-19 research data

Folding@Home and Rosetta@Home both now support ARM64 devices meaning you can run them on Android devices, Raspberry Pi and more. Both projects are being used for research on the coronavirus. Good Day Internet has a Folding at home team you can join.

• First US Phase III trial for COVID-19 vaccine begins

Let's check in on SARS-COv2 vaccine progress. Phase 3 vaccine trials are used to demonstrate effectiveness in a large group of people and are usually the last step before a vaccine can be submitted for approval for use. Vaccines from AstraZeneca, SinoVac, China National Biotec are all in Phase 3. Monday a vaccine from Moderna began its 30,000 person phase 3 trial at more than 100 sites in the US. A vaccine from CanSino is approved for use by the Chinese military and in negotiations with several countries to begin a Phase 3 trial.

Top Stories

• CES is going online-only in 2021

The Consumer Technology Association announced there will be no physical event in January, after initially planning a hybrid in-person and virtual show. Instead, an all-virtual format will let exhibitors, attendees and the press engage through online talks and meetings. The CTA says it consulted with more than 10,000 attendees and other stakeholders and found that many didn't want to physically attend due to health concerns about the virus. Shapiro said “We realized with no vaccine it’s just not possible to have a physical CES. Our event has been primarily an indoor event. If it were a financial decision, we would go forward." He cited a shortage of physical tests as one element of the decision as well. And the 2022 CES is planned as a hybrid physical and digital event based on what the CTA learns from this coming one.

• Iter: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
• Fusion Energy Era: ITER Assembly Begins – World’s Largest Science Project to Replicate the Fusion Power of the Sun

Nuclear fusion is different than nuclear fission. Fission splits atoms and releases radioactivity. Fusion combines atoms releasing a lot of energy with little radioactivity. If you can get fusion to work the idea is you have an abundant source of energy with no carbon emissions, using very small amounts of fuel and no physical possibility of a meltdown.. The world's biggest nuclear fusion project Iter has entered its five-year assembly phase in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. Iter is a collaboration between 35 partner countries including Switzerland the UK and the EU providing 45% of the funding as well as funding and other contributions from China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. Iter will confine hot plasma in a structure called a tokamak to control fusion reactions. If all goes on schedule it would go online in December 2025 and produce 200 megawatts of power, enough to power about 200,000 homes. So essentially this is a very expensive proof of concept. The hope is more affordable commercial designs can be made based on Iter.

• Face masks are breaking facial recognition algorithms, says new government study

A study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found that wearing face masks that adequately cover the mouth and nose causes the error rate of many facial recognition algorithms to rise between 5 percent and 50 percent. Black masks were more likely to cause errors than blue masks, and the more of the nose covered by the mask, the more the algorithms struggled to correctly identify a face. However, the NIST’s report only tested a type of facial recognition known as one-to-one matching, where an algorithm checks to see if the target’s face matches the face on an ID, such as a passport. These are often used at border control and airline boarding. The study didn't examine the kind of facial recognition used to unlock phones, which uses depth sensors. NIST also didn't evaluate one-to-many algorithms used in mass surveillance, where a crowd is scanned to find matches with faces in a database. NIST plans to evaluate one-to many systems later this year as well as algorithms designed to recognize mask wearers.

• Google's web app plans collide with Apple's iPhone, Safari rules

CNET's Stephen Shankland has a great write up on Progressive Web Apps causing a conflict between Apple and Google. Progressive Web Apps or PWA are websites that can be saved to a desktop, work without a network and do app-like things like synchronize data and deliver push notifications. Web apps are meant to work in any browser no matter what operating system you use. Google's Fugu project is adding PWA capabilities to Chromium which then show up in Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave and others. But Apple's Safari is not Chromium-based, and on iOS, you can only use browsers based on Safari's WebKit engine. So PWA features only show up in Safari or any iOS browser (even Chrome for iOS) if Apple adds the function to WebKit. Apple recently published 16 web programming abilities it will not add to Safari because of privacy and security concerns. Among the features Apple doesn't support are notifications and prompts to install a PWA. Also data sync and access to the file system are restricted because of security concerns.

Discussion

• AI|Writer
• Acquisition blog post generator
• Vocodes. Vocal playground.
• Are we in an AI overhang?

Mailbag

Fake crowds have been getting a lot of attention lately but faked sounds in live sports is not new. Pre-recorded and video game sounds have been part of live sports broadcast for a decade. Your chat with Andy Ihnatko about the virtual fans reminded me that BBC Radio 4 did a show in 2011 called “The Sound of Sports” that is a great backgrounder on how live sports and video games are merging and influencing one another. I first heard this show courtesy of the podcast "99% Invisible" (99PI). (Brian also mentioned this ep)

As an aside, since you mentioned them in yesterday’s show, I was involved in early experiments to add virtual down markers in NFL broadcasts. It was a partnership between the NFL, the technology developer, and the Canadian broadcaster I was with at the time. We tried all sorts of things to test the tech and things that worked well in testing would invariably go wrong when we were live on air. BUT, if you’re going to mess up a live NFL broadcast, better to mess up in Canada where only 5% of the audience will be upset rather than in the US where NFL takes on an almost religious importance.

Sent by Greg

• The Sound of Sport
• The Sound of Sports

Links

• This episode on dailytechnewsshow.com
• Support DTNS on Patreon
• DTNS subreddit
• DTNS Facebook Group

Preceded by: "Unreal Fans"

AI Stories That Write Themselves

Followed by: "Can You Hearing Me Now?"