It’s 3 p.m.! Let The A.V. Club briefly make use of the waning hours of your productivity with some pop culture ephemera pulled from the depths of YouTube.
We’ve all seen evil machines in The Terminator or The Matrix, but how does a machine become evil? Is it like Project Satan from Futurama, where scientists combined parts from various evil cars to create the ultimate evil car? Or are machines simply destined to eventually turn evil when their processing power or…
Remember in 2016 when everybody was saying, “Can’t wait for this year to be over!” and then 2017 came and everybody was like, “Oh no, it can get worse?” Well, it seems the plan for 2018 is to press the pedal to the metal in the ol’ apocalypse machine and get this thing over with because, as reported by Motherboard,…
There’s plenty of sex in video games, but that does not make talking about video games sexy. Here to change that is @vg_erotica, a Twitter bot designed by game designer Liz England, that “mashes together romance novel excerpts and dank video game memes.” Be forewarned, however: these aren’t n00b cracks about Mario and…
In an interview that sounds suspiciously like that scene in a movie where one misguided person tries to convince everyone else that the monsters are harmless, the head of Facebook’s AI research facility has suggested that we should stop worrying about Terminators trying to wipe out mankind—or, at the very least, that…
Neural networks are fascinating, with their ability to create text that, despite being nonsensical, nevertheless exposes some core truth about whatever data it’s attempting to emulate. We’ve seen them create new paint colors, dating app responses, and even an episode of Friends. Now, Elle O’Brien’s curiosity as to…
With the growth of machine learning and its immediate manifestation in much smarter artificial intelligences, it’s been easy in recent years to make Skynet jokes any time we see a computer do something moderately impressive. Combine this with warnings from people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about our future…
The moment when an artificial intelligence becomes smarter than the humans who created it is usually the turning point in a sci-fi movie, and it often happens just before someone desperately tries to unplug a network cable, whacks at some servers with an axe, or futilely clicks the “cancel robot apocalypse” button on…
Artificial intelligence seems like it’s just around the corner, when our new robot overlords will rule the planet and arrange everything just so, unlike those messy, chaotic humans. But what if artificial intelligence also brings with it the usual array of human neuroses? Can robots become insecure, anxious—even…
For years, scientists have pointed to a day when artificial intelligence finally eclipses the age of man, using its superior intellect to create a world where technology has gained full autonomy, and with it dominion over us all. Today Instagram has taken a step toward that looming existential threat, assigning the…
The conventional wisdom over the past few years is that, while we weren’t looking, the ’50s utopian sci-fi dream of a robot and AI-assisted future has started to look increasingly like a reality. We regularly marvel over the work of Boston Dynamics, which makes frighteningly limber, strong, adaptive robots that could…
Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled Murphy, the latest eerily smart chat bot out of the machine learning labs. Last year, it produced one that guessed how old users were based on a picture. Next came Tay, a “teen girl” who quickly learned, via the magic power of Twitter, to be a Nazi.
An interesting new feature turned up on Taco Bell’s official website back in August: a green bubble in the corner that, once clicked, allows visitors to chat with actual human beings and receive real-time responses to questions and comments. In a piece for Nation’s Restaurant News, Ron Ruggless explains why the…
Ever wanted to play Pictionary with HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey? How about a round of Win, Lose Or Draw with David from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence? None of those may ever happen, but Quick, Draw! comes damn close. Billed as “an A.I. experiment” from Google, this is essentially a drawing game in which the…
“We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” That’s an inspiring phrase, perhaps when applied to a dashing test pilot played by Lee Majors. But what about when it’s applied to an artificial, light-controlled stingray with an elastomer body and a gold skeleton? Thanks to the efforts of applied physicist Kevin Kit…
If there is one thing about which science-fiction films, TV shows, and books have been very clear for decades, it is this: Robots are getting smarter and more powerful by the day, and eventually they will usurp the entire planet, grabbing it away from humanity with their powerful metal claws. Giving human-like…
We don’t need to worry too much about sentient computers taking over the world, at least judging by this new short sci-fi film written completely by an artificial intelligence. The script is virtual jibberish, but that didn’t stop filmmaker Oscar Sharp and actors like Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch from turning…
Microsoft’s slow, stumbling climb toward The Rise Of The Machines continues today, as another one of the tech giant’s vaunted AI bots catches the mocking ire of the social-media hordes. On the plus side, the company’s latest experiment, CaptionBot, has yet to be locked away in online juvie after becoming a …
Microsoft took one small step for artificial intelligence, one giant leap for bigoted mankind when it introduced the Tay chat bot to Twitter last week: The AI program was designed to have “zero chill” in the Twittersphere while replicating the speech patterns of teenage girls, but its repertoire was quickly filled…
In a moment that will surely be cited by future cyborg historians to explain why the polluting influence of human beings had to be eliminated in order to achieve digital Nirvana, Microsoft has aborted its most recent chat-bot experiment after the artificial teen turned into a foul-mouthed, anti-Semitic Trump supporter…