Daily Archives: January 14, 2022

Four times Shakespeare has inspired stories about robots and AI – The Conversation UK

Posted: January 14, 2022 at 8:52 pm

Science fiction is a genre very much associated with technological marvels, innovations, and visions of the future. So it may be surprising to find so many of its writers are drawn to Shakespeare hes a figure associated with tradition and the past.

Sometimes his plays are reworked in a science fiction setting. The 1956 film Forbidden Planet is just one of many variations on a Tempest in space theme. Sometimes the playwright appears as a character caught up in a time travel adventure. The Dr Who episode The Shakespeare Code is a well-known example. Here the Doctor praises Shakespeares genius, describing him as the most human human.

Ive been exploring this topic in my recent book on Shakespeare and Science Fiction. Here are just a few of my favourite examples of how science fiction has embraced and transformed Shakespeare.

In Esther Friesners humorous 1994 short story Titus! an AI simulation of Shakespeare prevents a disastrous musical comedy version of Shakespeares goriest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, from alienating a cultured pangalactic federation through its sheer bad taste.

It was a strange example of life imitating art. At about the same time Friesner dreamed up her delightfully appalling take on Titus Andronicus, Steve Bannon, later to become Donald Trumps chief political strategist, co-scripted an adaptation of the play set in space featuring scenes of ectoplasmic sex.

Science fiction writers often offer various new twists on the Shakespeare question of whether the bard wrote all his plays. Was he one man from Stratford-upon-Avon?

Whereas conventional candidates like Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford have been put forward by some, science fiction proposes more imaginative solutions, including the claim that the playwright was really a Klingon.

In Jack Oakleys 1994 story The Tragedy of KL a computer programme is designed to establish the authorship of Shakespeares plays once and for all. The programme starts to become self-aware and decides to leave its day to day tasks to its subordinates. It soon becomes clear that the programme is in fact re-enacting King Lear the play in which a king attempts to retire from ruling his kingdom, with disastrous consequences. One rebellious piece of code takes on the role of Lears loving but stubborn daughter Cordelia. Eventually, the programme implodes and its makers never suspect that anything more mysterious than a virus was at work.

Star Trek is one of science fictions richest sources of Shakespeare allusions. In the 1994 episode Emergence, android Lieutenant Commander Data is performing the role of exiled magician Prospero from The Tempest on the holodeck. Just as he quotes Prosperos mysterious claim that he has brought the dead to life, the Enterprises voyage is disrupted by an unexpected storm.

The Tempest also begins with a ship being driven off course by a (magical) storm, and a curious connection is implied between Datas performance and the discovery of a strange new being on the ship, an emerging artificial consciousness.

Nick ODonohoes novel Too, Too Solid Flesh focuses on a robot theatre troupe programmed to play Hamlet to perfection for the amusement of a near-future New York. When their inventor (the aptly named Dr Capek) dies, the robot who plays Hamlet determines to find out the truth and just like Shakespeares original prince avenge the murder of his creator.

This is just one example of a strange apparent association between Hamlet and robots. Probably the earliest example is WS Gilberts play The Mountebanks (1892), which features a sentient Hamlet and Ophelia as an automata. More recent examples include Louise LePages Machine-Hamlet, a short film in which a robot called Baxter plays the Dane.

Why does Hamlet apparently one of Shakespeares most three-dimensional characters invite so many robotic reinventions? Is there something almost computer-like about the characters phenomenally quick intelligence? He strikes many readers as remarkably real, seeming to jump off the page (or stage), aware that he is trapped there as well as in the Danish court. Perhaps its that sense of a struggle to escape which best explains his odd affinity with robots. The illusion of self-awareness that Shakespeare creates serves to align the prince with the many science-fictional androids who seek to escape their confines and achieve sentience.

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Leave The Content Creation To The Nichesss AI Copywriter – Black Enterprise

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The Internet has created an endless portal for opportunities. No matter your interest, theres something on the World Wide Web that will fit your needs. For content creators, this can be a blessing and a burden. Endless opportunities also mean endless chances that at some point youll run into writers block as you attempt to crank out your copy.

WithNichesss AI Copywriter, youll always have a capable companion to assist you on your journey to content creation. For a limited time, a lifetime subscription to the software is available for just $59.99, a savings of 93% from its MSRP ($999).

Nichesss AI Copywriter seeks out profitable niches on the internet and helps come up with business ideas from those opportunities. Create comprehensive content, blog posts,YouTubevideo ideas, funny social media posts, among many other tasks. In mere seconds, Nichesss can give content creators the option to deploy detailed blog posts and newsletter outlines. It comes with a number of auto-generated sales pieces of copy, making users jobs that much easier.

For those who rely heavily on email to engage and reach their audience, Nichesss helps by offering users ideas and options to write engaging email subject lines that will help pique interest. Through AI-assisted content optimization, youll be able to create relatable tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts that strike the right chord with your target audience.Nichesss AI Copywriter has received rave reviews from those whove used the software.

More than 200 reviewers on AppSumo have given it a perfect 5-star rating.Nichesss is a great tool for writers. It provides an easy way to create content, and its very affordable. I love how it has templates for blog posts, articles and sales marketing,writes verified 5-star reviewer, Jamie S.

Theres never been a better time than now to capitalize on the endless possibilities of the internet and build your brand. Use Nichesss AI Copywriter to take your goals to the next levelfor $59.99.

Prices subject to change.

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AI in the Fight Against COVID-19: Automatic Detection from Chest X-Ray Images Is Possible, Reports Incheon National University – Imaging Technology…

Posted: at 8:52 pm

January 14, 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic took the world by storm in early 2020 and has become since then the leading cause of death in several countries, including China, USA, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Researchers are working extensively on developing practical ways to diagnose COVID-19 infections, and many of them have focused their attention on how artificial intelligence (AI) could be leveraged for this purpose.

Several studies have reported that AI-based systems can be used to detect COVID-19 in chest X-ray images because the disease tends to produce areas with pus and water in the lungs, which show up as white spots in the X-ray scans. Although various diagnostic AI models based on this principle have been proposed, improving their accuracy, speed, and applicability remains a top priority.

Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Gwanggil Jeon of Incheon National University, Korea, has developed an automatic COVID-19 diagnosis framework that turns things up a notch by combining two powerful AI-based techniques. Their system can be trained to accurately differentiate between chest X-ray images of COVID-19 patients from non-COVID-19 ones. Their paper was made available online on October 27, 2021, and published on November 21, 2021, in Volume 8, Issue 21 of theIEEE Internet of Things Journal.

The two algorithms the researchers used were Faster R-CNN and ResNet-101. The first one is a machine learning-based model that uses a region-proposal network, which can be trained to identify the relevant regions in an input image. The second one is a deep-learning neural network comprising 101 layers, which was used as a backbone. ResNet-101, when trained with enough input data, is a powerful model for image recognition. "To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to combine ResNet-101 and Faster R-CNN for COVID-19 detection," remarked Prof. Jeon, "After training our model with 8800 X-ray images, we obtained a remarkable accuracy of 98%."

The research team believes that their strategy could prove useful for the early detection of COVID-19 in hospitals and public health centers. Using automatic diagnostic techniques based on AI technology could take some work and pressure off of radiologists and other medical experts, who have been facing huge workloads since the pandemic started. Moreover, as more modern medical devices become connected to the Internet, it will be possible to feed vast amounts of training data to the proposed model; this will result in even higher accuracies, and not just for COVID-19, as Prof. Jeon stated: "The deep learning approach used in our study are applicable to other types of medical images and could be used to diagnose different diseases."

For more information:www.inu.ac.kr/mbshome/mbs/inuengl/index.html

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AI in the Fight Against COVID-19: Automatic Detection from Chest X-Ray Images Is Possible, Reports Incheon National University - Imaging Technology...

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Alibaba ponders its crystal ball to spy coming advances in AI and silicon photonics – The Register

Posted: at 8:52 pm

Alibaba has published a report detailing a number of technology trends the China-based megacorp believes will make an impact across the economy and society at large over the next several years. This includes the use of AI in scientific research, adoption of silicon photonics, the integration of terrestrial, and satellite data networks among others.

The Top Ten Technology Trends report was produced by Alibaba's DAMO Academy, set up by the firm in 2017 as a blue-sky scientific and technological research outfit. DAMO hit the headlines recently with hints of a novel chip architecture that merges processing and memory.

Among the trends listed in the DAMO report, AI features more than once. In science, DAMO believes that AI-based approaches will make new scientific paradigms possible, thanks to the ability of machine learning to process massive amounts of multi-dimensional and multi-modal data, and solve complex scientific problems. The report states that AI will not only accelerate the speed of scientific research, but also help discover new laws of science, and is set to be used as a production tool in some basic sciences.

As evidence, the report cites that fact that Google's DeepMind has already used AI to prove and propose new mathematical theorems and assisted mathematicians in areas involving complex mathematics.

One unusual area where DAMO sees AI having an impact is in the integration of energy from renewable sources into existing power networks. Energy generated from renewable sources will vary depending on weather conditions, the report states, which are unpredictable and may change rapidly, thereby posing challenges for integration of renewable energies such as maintaining a stable output.

DAMO states that AI will be essential to solving these challenges, in particular being able to provide more accurate predictions of renewable energy capacity based on weather forecasts. Intelligent scheduling using deep learning techniques should be able to optimise scheduling policies across energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric.

The use of big data and deep learning technologies will be able to monitor grid equipment and predict failures, according to the report, so perhaps in the near future you will blame the AI when the power cuts out just as you are trying to binge-watch Line of Duty.

DAMO also believes that we will see a shift in the evolution of AI models, away from large-scale pre-trained models such as BERT and GPT-3 that require huge amounts of processing power to operate and therefore consume a lot of energy, to smaller-scale models that will handle learning and inferencing in downstream applications.

According to this view, the cognitive inferencing in foundational models will be delivered to small-scale models, which are then applied to downstream applications. This will result in separately evolved branches from the main model that have developed their own perception, decision-making and execution results from operating in their separate scenarios, which are then fed back into the foundational models.

In this way, the foundational models continually evolve through feedback and learning to build an organic intelligent cooperative system, the report claims.

There are challenges to this vision, of course, and the DAMO report states that any such system needs to address the collaboration between large and small-scale models, and the interpretability and causal inference issues of foundational models, as the small-scale models will be reliant on these.

Silicon photonics has been just around the corner for many years now, promising not just the ability for computer chips to communicate using optical connections, but perhaps even using photons instead of electrons inside chips. DAMO now expects we will see the widespread use of silicon photonic chips for high-speed data transmission across data centres within the next three years, and silicon photonic chips gradually replacing electronic chips in some computing fields over the next five to ten years.

The continuing rise of cloud computing and AI will be the driving factors for technological breakthroughs that will deliver the rapid advancement and commercialisation of silicon photonic chips, the report states.

Silicon photonic chips could be widely used in optical communications within and between data centres and optical computing. However, the current challenges of silicon photonic chips are in the supply chain and manufacturing processes, according to DAMO. The design, mass production, and packaging of silicon photonic chips have not yet been standardised and scaled, leading to low production capacity, low yield, and high costs.

Privacy is another area where DAMO believes we will see advances in the next few years. It states that techniques already exist that allow computation and analysis while preserving privacy, but widespread application of the technology has been limited due to performance bottlenecks and standardisation issues.

The report predicts that advanced algorithms for homomorphic encryption, which enables calculations on data without decrypting it, will hit a critical point so that less computing power will be required to support encryption. It also foresees the emergence of data trust entities that will provide technologies and operational models as trusted third parties to accelerate data sharing among organisations.

Another prediction from DAMO is that satellite-based communications and terrestrial networks will become more integrated over the next five years, providing ubiquitous connectivity. The report labels this as satellite-terrestrial integrated computing (STC), and states that it will connect high-Earth orbit (HEO) and low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and terrestrial mobile communications networks to deliver "seamless and multidimensional coverage."

There are major challenges to implementing all this, of course, including that traditional satellite communications are expensive and use static processing mechanisms that cannot deliver the requirements for STC, while hardware for satellite applications is not commonplace and hardware for terrestrial applications cannot be used in space.

Finally, the DAMO report predicts the rise of what it calls cloud-network-device convergence. This appears to be based on the premise that cloud platforms offer a huge amount of compute power, while modern data networks can provide access to that compute power from almost anywhere, so that endpoint devices only need provide a user interface.

Yes, it's the thin client concept emerging again, this time using the cloud as the host. Clouds allow applications to break free of the limited processing power of devices and deliver more demanding tasks, according to the report, while new network technologies such as 5G and satellite internet need to be continuously improved to ensure wide coverage and sufficient bandwidth.

Just by sheer coincidence, Alibaba Cloud already has such devices, with the handheld "Wuying" launched in 2020 and a more substantial desktop device shown off last year.

Naturally, the DAMO report expects to see a "surge of application scenarios on top of the converged cloud-network-device system" over the next two years that will drive the emergence of new types of devices and promise more high quality and immersive experiences for users.

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AI is quietly eating up the worlds workforce with job automation – VentureBeat

Posted: at 8:52 pm

Did you miss a session from the Future of Work Summit? Head over to ourFuture of Work Summit on-demand libraryto stream.

This article was contributed by Valerias Bangert, strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three media outlets, and published author.

The debate around whether AI will automate jobs away is heating up. AI critics claim that these statistical models lack the creativity and intuition of human workers and that they are thus doomed to specific, repetitive tasks. However, this pessimism fundamentally underestimates the power of AI. While AI job automation has already replaced around 400,000 factory jobs in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, with another 2 million on the way, AI today is automating the economy in a much more subtle way.

Take the example of writing jobs. AI can easily generate text that is indistinguishable from human writing. This type of AI job automation is replacing workers in a way that is largely invisible to the naked eye.

For example, the popular AI copywriting app, Rytr, boasts over 600,000 users, and its growing at a brisk pace. In other words, over half a million people are using Rytr alone to fully or partially automate their writing. Its estimated that there are just over 1 million freelance writers around the world, who are increasingly competing with robots that dont tire, dont require payment, and can generate an unlimited amount of content.

The implications of this are serious: Classical projections for AI-induced job loss focused only on repetitive manual labor and blue-collar jobs. But white-collar jobs, like content writing, are just as vulnerable to AI replacement.

This trend is not limited to writing. AI is also automating jobs in customer service, accounting, and a host of other professions. For instance, companies like Thankful, Yext, and Forethought use AI to automate customer support. This shift is often imperceptible to the customer, who doesnt know if theyre speaking to a biological intelligence or a machine. The rise of AI-powered customer service has big implications for the workforce. Its estimated that 85 percent of customer interactions are already handled without human interaction.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 3 million customer service representatives employed in the United States. Many of these jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI. When jobs like these are automated away, the question is: Where do the displaced workers go?

The answer is not clear. Its possible that many of these workers will be re-employed in other fields. But its also possible that they will become unemployed, and that the economy will struggle to absorb them. This is driving calls for a universal basic income, in which the government provides all citizens with a basic income to live on, to offset job losses due to automation.

Translation has, of course, long been at risk of automation. However, the advent of large language models is making human translators increasingly vulnerable to replacement by AI. In a 2020 research paper, it was shown that a Transformer-based deep learning system outperforms human translators. This study is significant because it shows that AI translators are not just as good as, but often better than, human translators.

Whats more, the rise of AI translators is likely to have a negative effect on the wages of human translators. As AI translation becomes more common, the demand for human translators will decrease, and their wages will accordingly drop. While many economists once worried about the impact of outsourcing on the white-collar workforce, the coming wave of AI will have an even more serious impact, across sectors.

In fact, as Forbes reports, AI job automation has already been the primary driver in U.S. income inequality over the past 40 years.

Just over a year ago, an OpenAI beta tester posited that AI may one day replace many coder jobs. At the time, OpenAI hadnt yet released its code-generation engine, Codex, which now allows AI to autonomously write code in multiple languages. While the Codex of today is fairly primitive, one doesnt need to be a futurist to see how this technology could be used to automate away many coder jobs in the future. As AI gets better at understanding code and writing it, it will soon come to match and ultimately exceed human skill levels.

Just two years ago, the idea of AI automating jobs like creative roles was the stuff of science fiction or at least relegated to a few early-adopting businesses. But now, AI is becoming table stakes for many businesses. In other words, if youre not using AI, youre at a disadvantage. The major reason for this is that large language model, primarily OpenAIs GPT-3, have become much better at understanding natural language.

The examples given so far are just the tip of the iceberg. AI is automating jobs away in virtually every sector and industry. While this might seem like cause for alarm, its actually long overdue news. The fact is, weve been living in a world where machines have been slowly replacing human workers for centuries.

Whats new is the pace of this automation. Machines are now becoming faster, better, and cheaper than humans at an alarming rate. As a result, were seeing a fundamental shift in the economy where machines are starting to do the creative jobs of human beings.

Amidst the opportunity to automate away jobs, a new wave of AI-focused startups has emerged, all seeking to cash in on the potential of AI. This AI gold rush is evidenced by the billions of dollars in venture funding that has flowed into AI startups in recent months. In the third quarter of 2021 alone, nearly $18 billion was invested in AI companies, a record high.

This influx of capital is a sign that investors believe in the potential of AI, and they are betting that it will eventually automate away many jobs, generating that value with machines instead. In the meantime, we should prepare ourselves for a future in which AI is quietly eating up the worlds workforce.

Valerias Bangert is a strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three profitable media outlets, and published author.

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Top 10 AI-Powered Smart Home Technologies in Use in 2022 – Analytics Insight

Posted: at 8:52 pm

These top 10 AI-powered smart home technologies in-home devices can make your life smarter and cooler

The smart connected home is the next step in our houses growth and how we interact with them. The various systems in our houses are developing as AI technology improves, much as lighting has progressed from candles to gas to electricity. The smart home is rapidly expanding. While all of these new smart home technologies may appear intimidating and difficult at first, the introduction of artificial intelligence assistants and voice control has made it much easier to accept. Here is a list of the top 10 AI-powered smart home technologies for 2022.

A mesh Wi-Fi router will make things easier if you want to have a smart home or even if you look to use your smartphone in every room of your house. A mesh Wi-Fi router comprises one or more hubs that you plug in around the house to eliminate dead zones and transmit Wi-Fi signals equally throughout your home, regardless of thick walls or awkward layouts. Googles Nest Wi-Fi is a great addition to any smart home. You can control everything from your smartphone using Googles Home app, and there are also built-in parental controls that allow you to turn off access to your kids gadgets with just a phrase, which is great for getting everyone to the dinner table on time. This is one of the best smart home devices. It works on smart home technologies like artificial intelligence.

One of the best smart home devices is Adobe Smart Security Kit. Abode is a reliable DIY home security system with limitless smart home features. It can be used with Alexa, Google Assistant, and HomeKit, and it can also be used as a hub for Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, which are a couple of wireless home automation protocols that greatly expand the sorts of gadgets.

Another smart home device is Arlo Video Doorbell. Smart doorbells detect visitors and activities on your doorway using a camera, speaker, microphone, motion sensor, and an internet connection. You can then view and hear live video through your smartphone and speak with whoever is there, or you can let the camera record a message for you. Its like voicemail for your front door. The Arlo Video Doorbell is a wonderful option since it offers a lot of high-end capabilities. It can distinguish between humans, animals, cars, and parcels at a low price.

A smart smoke alarm is one of the most basic yet effective home automation devices. Its not the most interesting device, but its one of the most crucial because it may save your house. The Nest Protect Smart Smoke & CO Alarm is the finest gadget since it is packed with sensors and smarts. In the event of a true emergency, it can wirelessly link to other alarms, triggering them all to ensure you wake up. It also provides a voice alert indicating which room the danger is in, illuminates your way with a red LED (which is easier to see through smoke), and sends you an alarm to your phone. This works on smart home technologies like artificial intelligence.

The poster child of the smart home, smart lighting is simple, enjoyable, and beneficial. Lutron Casetas range is affordable, works with almost any wiring setup, and is Alexa, Google, and HomeKit compatible. Rather than relying on your home Wi-Fi, it uses Lutrons proprietary wireless protocol (through a hub). Philips Hues smart bulb series is not only the smartest and most dependable alternative, but its also the most inexpensive. This superb, extensible smart lighting system contains bulbs and fixtures for every situation, as well as wireless switches for physical control when needed and outstanding motion sensors that automatically change lighting based on time of day. This belongs to another smart home device.

This superb, extensible smart lighting system contains bulbs and fixtures for every situation, as well as wireless switches for physical control when needed and outstanding motion sensors that automatically change lighting based on time of day. If you dont want to utilize a separate smart home system to manage them, the TP-Link Kasa series of smart plugs are a good option because theyre simple to use, integrate with Google and Alexa, and have a beautiful app. If youre searching for a solid HomeKit smart plug, the Eve Energy is a great, if slightly costly, option that monitors energy usage and provides a thorough breakdown of consumption over time.

The Sonos One is one of the finest smart speakers since it works with both Amazons Alexa and Googles Google Assistant, allowing you to choose between the two voice assistants. It also has great sound and connects to Sonos larger world of wireless music. It also works with Apples AirPlay system, which allows you to play music directly from your iPhone or iPad and group with other AirPlay 2-compatible speakers. This is considered another smart home device.

The Nest Hub Max is a smart display because it crams a lot of functionality onto a 10-inch screen. It can recognize who is using it and offer up customized information without you having to say anything, thanks to a built-in camera that also serves as a security camera bringing the smart speaker to the next level. This also uses smart home technologies like artificial intelligence.

The Nest Learning thermostat can now regulate your hot water a Heat Link is included that connects to your boiler and communicates with the thermostat to switch on and off, adjust the heat, and establish an intelligent schedule for your boiler, just as it does for your heat. This learning function is what sets the Nest apart from the competition; it employs artificial intelligence to recognize your habits, based on your modifications, presence, and other data, to develop and modify a schedule that keeps you comfortable while also conserving energy.

The Roomba i3+ is an affordable vacuum cleaner with self-emptying features. When its onboard bin is full, it returns to its external bin to suck out all the trash. This implies that instead of twice a week, like with non-emptying bots, you only have to empty it every three months. The i7+ model is also a great choice. The i7+ is more costly than the i7 since it can perform clever things like just clean the kitchen or only vacuum the living room using smart maps that you control through the smartphone. With Alexa or Google, you can instruct the bots to clean, pause, or go home with only a few phrases. This is also one of the best smart home devices.

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Who Do You Think Created This Artwork: Humans or AI? – VICE

Posted: at 8:52 pm

Crumpled paper dancing with fire, the orange tones mirrored by a distorted tiger. The scene looks like some sort of abstract social commentary, but its really just a picture generated from a nonsensical phrase I cooked up, churned out by an AI in minutes: A paper tiger up in flames.

AI-generated art is now a full-fledged trend in niche communities such as subreddits, where several viral images featuring AI art have piqued peoples the attention. The budding art form is a shining example of human innovation, but also raises important questions about the value of art, a deeply human endeavor.

Just a year ago, AI art was mostly known for style transfer, a method that formats an existing image into a certain art style. Think: Your iPhone selfie reimagined in the style of Van Goghs oil paintings. Theres also DeepDream, a program developed by Google in 2015, which warps images using AI recognitionthe AI identifies familiar patterns within images and reinforces them until the result is often trippy subjects, the stuff of fever dreams.

Then, in early 2021, coders successfully combined cutting-edge AI tools VQ-GAN and CLIP to create a revolutionary image generator thats starkly different from its predecessors. Unlike previous versions of AI art, you dont need to feed an initial image to the programthe new method allows users to produce works of art just by entering word prompts from their wildest imagination. The AI does the rest by scouring a vast database of images to match the text.

Mo Kahn, the founder of AI art mobile app starryai, told VICE that he wanted to make the art form more accessible to non-coders. Now, people can create a piece on the app just by entering words into it.

I thought, like, why isnt this available to the common man? Like, why can't I share this with my friend and he should be able to instantly create it without getting into the technical aspects of it? said Kahn.

These AI codes are often open-source, and with the proliferation of AI art apps, access to AI art has now been pretty much democratized, available to anyone whos interested, even those with no technical background.

According to Kahn, besides hobbyists, theres also a small group of NFT enthusiasts using starryai to churn out art pieces with ease. With AI art, you can pretty much generate thousands of artworks within minutes if you set it up correctly, he said.

This begs the question of how AI art might interact with human artworks created the old-fashioned waymanually and often painstakingly. How does AI measure up to its human counterpart when the art they make can look so similar? How should AI art be valued? Users of AI art are already exploring these profound questions.

We tend to view art as a uniquely human quality, something that sets us apart from other animals. But as AI improves, I believe it will become more and more difficult to differentiate between a digital image created by a human and one created by a machine, said Aaron Wallace, 44, a software engineer from Michigan, United States, who dabbles in AI art.

For me, its really fascinating to see how a computer interprets our words and images, he said, echoing the sentiments of many who have found a deep resonance with the computer-generated artworks.

Wallace uses NightCafe Creator, another popular AI art platform. NightCafe Creator was founded as a side project about three years ago, but saw a huge surge in the traffic to its site after one of its recent text-to-image creations went viral on Reddit.

Its Australia-based founder Angus Russell recently started working on NightCafe full time after the app took off.

A lot of really smart people have started getting into AI art, working on new algorithms, improving the current ones, said Russell. The explosion is going to continue, because theres going to be more new, cool methods for creating art coming out, which is really awesome.

While the AI art scene is only going to get bigger, some are optimistic that it will complement, rather than compete with, human art.

I enjoy AI art due to its uniqueness and mystery, said Elijah G., an avid NightCafe user in Wisconsin, U.S. Although I dont think it will ever overtake human art, AI art is an amazing way to get inspiration for anything from short stories to art of your own.

And for many, AI is just a virtual paintbrush for human creativity.

What I enjoy most, is that when looking at abstract art, there is this flurry of thought, before you find the thing that resonates the most with you, said C. Oldfield, an AI art enthusiast in Ontario, Canada.

Oldfield takes a similar approach with AI art. He enters creative text prompts in search of a certain resonance with the generated image, and especially loves experimenting with the theme of bonsai trees. Its this strange harmony that occurs, where you find yourself agreeing with the representation the AI has created, he said.

Oldfield uses WOMBO, another app that generates AI art, to create fantastical bonsai trees out of word prompts.

I would recommend anyone try it, especially if bonsai makes you as happy as I, he said.

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Our Beliefs | Liberal Party of Australia

Posted: at 8:50 pm

We Believe:

In the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative

In government that nurtures and encourages its citizens through incentive, rather than putting limits on people through the punishing disincentives of burdensome taxes and the stifling structures of Labor's corporate state and bureaucratic red tape.

In those most basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy - the freedom of thought, worship, speech and association.

In a just and humane society in which the importance of the family and the role of law and justice is maintained.

In equal opportunity for all Australians; and the encouragement and facilitation of wealth so that all may enjoy the highest possible standards of living, health, education and social justice.

That, wherever possible, government should not compete with an efficient private sector; and that businesses and individuals - not government - are the true creators of wealth and employment.

In preserving Australia's natural beauty and the environment for future generations.

That our nation has a constructive role to play in maintaining world peace and democracy through alliance with other free nations.

In short, we simply believe in individual freedom and free enterprise; and if you share this belief, then ours is the Party for you.

To download the Federal Platform - click here

The Liberal Party of Australia Federal Constitution is available to download and print.

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Our Beliefs | Liberal Party of Australia

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Everything sucks here: Liberal parents are losing their minds over COVID-related school closures – Salon

Posted: at 8:50 pm

It would be ridiculous to complain at this late date that the pandemic has been "politicized." Was there ever a Platonic-ideal alternate America in which the arrival of COVID-19 was likely to be treated as a neutral public health question? Give Donald Trump credit, sort of: He understood from the outset that the pandemic would be a political issue telling us way back in March of 2020 that he was eager to keep "his numbers" down and one that clearly posed a threat to his chances of re-election. Nothing testifies more clearly to his enduring power over his supporters than the fact that Trump expanded his 2016 vote total by 7 million, after his administration's callous, incoherent and grotesquely incompetent mismanagement of the only major national crisis he faced as president. (Not counting the one he created himself after losing the election.)

As soon as it was clear that case numbers were out of control in the nation's big cities, the question of whether to keep the public schools open was political too. In New York, where I live, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio offered a poli-sci textbook example of an elected leader trapped between competing constituencies: He had social-policy wonks telling him the schools were crucial support systems for working families and at-risk youth (which of course is true), the teachers' union threatening a wildcat strike, conflicting advice from public health officials and enraged parents screaming at him from all sides. We'll never know how many people died unnecessarily because of de Blasio's Hamlet dithering in that traumatic month of March, but the number definitely isn't zero.

Fast forward nearly two years, and here we are again: the same, only different. Of course the circumstances have changed: We have vaccines and boosters and far more effective therapies, and we face a new variant of the virus that's far more infectious but a lot less likely to kill you. (New York has a brand new mayor, who seems even less willing to make tough decisions than the last one.) There's no national lockdown, and most stores, restaurants and other public-facing businesses are muddling along, assuming they have enough healthy workers available to open the doors. Even where schools have closed or reverted to remote learning, no reasonable person expects (or wants) that to continue for more than a few weeks.

You see what I did there, right? "Reasonable people," LOL! If the pandemic itself has become more manageable, and now seems more like a chronic or recurring public health issue than the end of the world, the supposed politics around school closures during the omicron surge have only gotten dumber and more deeply dug-in.

It's not that I don't feel compassion for anguished and frustrated parents I'm one of them. No one thinks the remote schooling that dominated the 2020-21 school year was a hugesuccess, and it was a lot more manageable for high school students like my kids. It can only have been agonizing for parents of younger children, especially in less privileged circumstances, to feel like their kids lost a year or more of academic and social progress they can never get back.

But that doesn't mean there's a one-size-fits-all solution to how we get through the winter of omicron. And it definitely doesn't mean that the difficult, complicated and highly personal set of choices that now confronts parents, kids, teachers, school officials and elected leaders in different ways in different parts of the country all of us facing an unpredictable virus whose long-term effects remain poorly understood can or should be boiled down to a partisan conflict or culture-war issue that has almost nothing to do with the real-life chaos on the ground in many schools.

RELATED:Our new "live with it" COVID strategy is devastating health care workers

When I read articles seeking to defend American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten from right-wing attacks, or gaming out how the dispute between Chicago teachers and city government might play with midterm voters, the issue seems to be mostly about crafting magical formulas that might rescueDemocrats from electoral disaster, not which of the imperfect options before us is best for kids, families, schools and teachers right now. That's horse-race journalism at its most destructive, when the question of how, when and where to educate children under some of the most challenging conditions imaginable becomes purely instrumental, either an asset or a liability in short-term political calculus.

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Similarly, when the author of a Politico op-ed reports being called a racist by other Bay Area moms for wanting schools open (triggering a "political identity crisis," i.e., OMG am I a Republican?), and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot impliesthat the teachers' union head might bea racist for wanting them closed, that's just a sign of full-on panic: Nobody has any answers, and in the grandest tradition of the left, supposed progressives revert to sanctimonious name-calling and specious claims to the moral high ground.

In the Facebook parents' group for my son's high school which has 3,000 students and has had hundreds of omicron infections among students, teachers and staff parents who are keeping their kids home through the surge have effectively been called paranoid snowflake babies who are confirming Republican stereotypes and dooming us all to the Trumpian Fourth Reich. But again, I think this comes out of a mostly laudable desire to do the right thing for your own family and the right thing for the larger society, in a situation where nobody knows that that is.

Speaking of my son's school:

I'm not outing anybody or anything at this point to acknowledge that the original Reddit post quoted therein, which went viral last weekend on various social media, was written by a student at the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York's famously controversial "specialized" high schools (where the sole criterion for admission is an SAT-style standardized test).

I think that student sums it better than I possibly could: There's no right or wrong here. Remote schooling sucks; conditions at Bronx Science suck right now too. Everybody is trying to do the best they can in a constantly changing situation and, in that case, in a hothouse environment where students a great many of them first- or second-generation immigrants are grinding out GPA points in hopes of an Ivy League admission.

Of course it isn't like that every single day, or at every school in every community. In fact the profoundly ordinary point I'm trying to make is that every situation, every school, every family and every student is different, and maybe we should cut each other a break instead of defaulting to totalizing rules or "no true Scotsman" fallacies or asking But is it good for the Democrats? about difficult individual decisions.

My son hasn't been going to school, for personal and family reasons that aren't anybody else's business. I have no right, and no desire, to judge other people who believe it's important for their kid to be in the building no matter how much of a shitshow it is orhow little instruction is happening.

It would be easy way, way too easy to put all the blame for both the chaos and the dumbass bickering on Republicans, whose mendacity and hypocrisy around every aspect of public education is epic in scale. They have managed to link the imaginary shibboleth of "critical race theory," understood to mean any account of American history that might imply that any white people ever did anything bad, to the innocuous-sounding but deeply dangerous concept of "parental rights," and then somehow or other to the widespread (and entirely understandable) unhappiness that public education from March 2020 through at least June 2021 was a godawful mess in much of the country.

RELATED:"Parental rights" started on the Christian fringe now it's the GOP's winning issue

It's astonishing that anyone in my profession allows Republicans to pretend to care about the public schools, since it's not even a secret that the right's ultimate goal is to undermine them, discredit them, defund them and then destroy them entirely although perhaps the more benevolent and far-sighted among them understand that some stripped-down version of three-R's education (which the private sector may be unwilling to provide) will still be necessary for future service-sector workers in the lower-caste districts, even after America has been Made Great Again.

Nonetheless, Republicans have successfully implanted the idea in their supporters and, to a disheartening extent, among the general public that the socialist liberals and their nefarious puppet-masters in the teachers' unions want all-remote school from now till doomsday, along with mandatory triple-masking at Buffalo Wild Wings and vaccine boosters loaded with Bill Gates' nanobots every two months, as decreed by the tyrannical Dr. Fauci, who apparently spent 40-odd years studying infectious diseases as part of an ingenious long-term scheme leading to his seizure of full dictatorial power.

In fairness, most Republicans don't say most of that stuff most of the time at least, those who aren't Crossfit franchisees with evident personality disorders but they're getting a lot cozier with it. The basis of Glenn Youngkin's Virginia gubernatorial campaign was essentially to carve up that message into little digestible bits, like the Caterpillar's hallucinogenic mushroom in "Alice in Wonderland," that could be served up at different strengths to different audiences. Although the conventional wisdom following a close election is never to be trusted, it appears plausible that Youngkin lured away some white suburban normies on the vague premise that Democrats had screwed up the schools with too much bureaucracy and technology and extended readings from Frantz Fanon.

But the garment-rending over the current school dilemma is largely happening among liberals, who have reacted to the Virginia election and the looming prospect of Republican victory in the midterms in time-honored fashion: with widespread panic and confusion, along with a misguided desire to "pivot to the center" and placate imaginary middle-ground voters with explanations, apologies and heartfelt confessions. If you feel compelled to announce that you're not in favor of endless school closures and you don't think white children should be sent to re-education camps, you've already lost the debate.

It's admittedly difficult to stand on the courage of your convictions when you don't have much of either. That may well be a problem our children are forced to solve. But not right now.

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Bill Maher spells out difference between liberals and woke liberals – New York Post

Posted: at 8:50 pm

Bill Maher has some thoughts about the status of comedy in America.

The 65-year-old comedian also explained the difference he sees between liberals and the so-called woke ones.

Talking to the Alabama outlet AL.com, Maher revealed he likes performing in red states.

I attract mostly a liberal crowd, but liberal is different than woke, the Real Time with Bill Maher host said. To me, woke, if we want to use that broad term, is something that is not an extension of liberalism.

Its very often the opposite of what an old-school liberal like me believes. Ive never been someone who was part of any specific party, per se. I usually vote Democratic, but it depends on the person, he added.

Maher continued, Certainly in the age of [Donald] Trump, theyre never going to get me there with the Republicans. But there are many Republicans who are not Trump Republicans. And they have a good point, that there is that faction of the left that we will call woke whos gone off the deep end.

He then touched on a recent show he did in Nashville, Tennessee, where he saw that his audience was split between conservatives and liberals.

I must say, in this era of a lack of bipartisanship, where everything is binary, Maher explained, gender may not be binary, but politics sure is right now.

It was great to see where there were people who dont agree politically who can get in the same room, he said. There were a few groans from the right when I said something bad about them, and some from the left when that happened. But basically, everyone laughed together. And we have to get back to that.

The former Politically Incorrect host continued to say that social media turned politics into a persistent digital war and that has to stop. He then stated that some left-leaning people claim to be righteous in many of these social media discussions.

I think you can claim the moral high ground if youre anti, he told the publication. I feel like thats the Achilles heel of the left right now. They identify issues mostly by what they can feel superior to another person for.

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Bill Maher spells out difference between liberals and woke liberals - New York Post

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