“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” - Malcolm X
A Bot Made Frank Sinatra Cover Britney Spears. YouTube Removed It Over Copyright Claims
Months ago, we asked @dadabots to have an AI approximation of Frank Sinatra sing "Toxic." YouTube removed it over copyright claims, beginning an unprecedented legal case initiated by, fought over, and perhaps decided by algorithms. Here's how it went down.
How I Spend My Attention - essay by Kenta Nagamine
"What you pay attention to becomes your life."
"Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
"Examining my life with the measurement of attention tells me who I am. Checking how much time I spend doing things I do in life is one way to see how much attention I am giving to each of them.
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"Similarly, when I try to pay more attention to the good in others, I would be able to enjoy the camaraderie of them more. Trying to be nice makes me nicer."
"Another dimension to attention that's not tied with time is the depth of attention."
"Everything has to be a choice, or else it’s a form of addiction. I always want to 'choose' to use my phone because otherwise, it might be equivalent to doing nothing. "
"You can have more experiences in life by simply paying more attention. What you pay attention to is going to be your life. It's so basic that it hits me."
US Mainstream Media: "Contact tracing is good. Tracing child pornographers is bad." God forbid they ever seriously talk about the rapidly growing use of mass surveillance databases (NSA & friends) for political blackmail, industrial espionage and market front-running - on a global scale.
This essay studies examples of early video art from a new historical perspective focusing on the co-evolution of live media and present-time consciousness from 1960s onwards. Pioneers’ videotapes and installations appear as the first segments of a non-linear sequence of electronic art practices coping with the postmodern crisis of temporality.
Microsoft’s AI generates voices that sing in Chinese and English
Researchers at Zhejiang University and Microsoft claim they’ve developed an AI system — DeepSinger — that can generate singing voices in multiple languages by training on data from music websites. In a prepint paper they describe the novel approach, which leverages a specially-designed component to capture the timbre of singers from noisy singing data.
Types of Media - by Tom Fishburne
DeepFaceDrawing Generates Photorealistic Portraits from Freehand Sketches
A team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the City University of Hong Kong has introduced a local-to-global approach that can generate lifelike human portraits from relatively rudimentary sketches.
How Baidu’s AI produces news videos using just a URL
AI for news production is one of the areas that has drawn contrasting opinions. In 2018, an AI anchor developed by China's Xinhua news agency made its debut. Earlier this month, the agency released an improved version that mimics human voices and gestures. There's been advancement in AI with text-based news with algorithms writing great headlines. Baidu has developed a new AI model called Vidpress that brings video and text together by creating a clip based on articles.
Chinese state news agency unveils 'the world's first 3D AI anchor' after 'cloning' a human
Xinhua reveals its first AI-powered newsreader using 3D modelling technology. Footage shows the lifelike virtual presenter making her debut in a virtual studio. Developers said they 'cloned' the looks and actions of a journalist at the agency.
Context is more powerful than Content
Vocal Synthesis Video of "Jay Z" singing Christian Rap Song (Genesis 1:1 Lyrics)
OpenAI’s Jukebox Opens the Pandora’s Box of AI-Generated Music (waxy) - OpenAI’s Jukebox AI produces music in any style from scratch — complete with lyrics (venturebeat)
Today, research laboratory OpenAI announced Jukebox, a sophisticated neural network trained on 1.2 million songs with lyrics and metadata, capable of generated original music in the style of various artists and genres, complete with rudimentary singing and vocal mannerisms.
"In this example, the Jukebox AI is fed the lyrics from Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and told to generate an entirely new song in the style of Kanye West.":
ByteSing: A Chinese Singing Voice Synthesis System Using Duration Allocated Encoder-Decoder Acoustic Models and WaveRNN Vocoders (Audio Samples)
This paper presents ByteSing, a Chinese singing voice synthesis (SVS) system based on duration allocated Tacotron-like acoustic models and WaveRNN neural vocoders. Different fromthe conventional SVS models, the proposed ByteSing employs Tacotron-like encoder-decoder structures as the acoustic models, in which the CBHG models and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are explored as encoders and decoders respectively.
With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake audio parodies off YouTube
On Friday, I linked to several videos by Vocal Synthesis, a new YouTube channel dedicated to audio deepfakes — AI-generated speech that mimics human voices, synthesized from text by training a state-of-the-art neural network on a large corpus of audio.