Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 25, 2018

Creepy AI-Created Portrait Fetches $432,500 at Auction

A creepy-looking painting of a fictitious man in a dark frockcoat left the auction block at Christie's for a whopping $432,500 today (Oct. 25) in New York City. While that price tag is high — nearly 45 times its upper estimate — that's not what makes the sale so compelling:...

Jan 4, 2019

AI Can Now Decode Words Directly from Brain Waves

Neuroscientists are teaching computers to read words straight out of people's brains. Kelly Servick, writing for Science, reported this week on three papers posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in which three different teams of researchers demonstrated that they could decode speech from recordings of neurons firing. In each study,...

Jan 11, 2019

Mathematicians Discovered a Computer Problem that No One Can Ever Solve

Mathematicians have discovered a problem they cannot solve. It's not that they're not smart enough; there simply is no answer. The problem has to do with machine learning — the type of artificial-intelligence models some computers use to learn how to do a specific task. When Facebook or Google recognizes...

Jan 29, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Algorithms Can Be Racist. Here's Why She's Right.

Last week, newly elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines when she said, as part of the fourth annual MLK Now event, that facial-recognition technologies and algorithms always have these racial inequities that get translated, because algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to...

Feb 14, 2019

AI Sucks at Making Adorable Cat Photos, Clearly Misses the Entire Point of the Internet

Artificial intelligence (AI) recently tried to generate cat photos from scratch, and the results were cat-astrophic. This particular neural network (a type of AI modeled after the workings of the human brain) can produce astonishingly realistic original photos of human faces. In fact, the images of these made-up people were...

Mar 27, 2019

AI Is Good (Perhaps Too Good) at Predicting Who Will Die Prematurely

Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person's early death. Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if...

Apr 25, 2019

Why Is This Viral Image of Unrecognizable Objects So Creepy?

See more What do you see in this image? Viewers are finding it virtually impossible to identify any of the almost-familiar objects in the picture — and it's freaking them out. Twitter user @melip0ne shared the image on Tuesday (April 22) with this challenge: Name one thing in this photo....

May 27, 2019

This Animated Mona Lisa Was Created by AI, and It Is Terrifying

The enigmatic, painted smile of the Mona Lisa is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as...

Jun 11, 2019

AI Listened to People's Voices. Then It Generated Their Faces.

Have you ever constructed a mental image of a person you've never seen, based solely on their voice? Artificial intelligence (AI) can now do that, generating a digital image of a person's face using only a brief audio clip for reference. Named Speech2Face, the neural network — a computer that...

Sep 30, 2019

Deepfake AI: Our Dystopian Present

Of all the scary powers of the internet, it's ability to trick the unsuspecting might be the most frightening. Clickbait, photoshopped pictures and false news are some of the worst offenders, but recent years have also seen the rise of a new potentially dangerous tool known as deepfake artificial intelligence...

Jul 25, 2020

What could drive humans to extinction?

The scene opens on a sparse, gray landscape, a gnarled tree in the foreground, bits of ash slowly drifting down from the sky. On the horizon, a few huddled figures stumble forward and into a bleak future. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's a common visual trope in many...

Sep 1, 2020

New 'AI Jesus' can deliver a sermon, but will you understand it?

What happens when you train a neural network using the King James Bible? You get AI Jesus — artificial intelligence (AI) that expounds on topics as Jesus from the King James edition of the New Testament might have done. Well, almost. The voice of this so-called AI clone of Jesus...

Sep 28, 2020

AI 'resurrects' 54 Roman emperors, in stunningly lifelike images

Ancient Roman emperors' faces have been brought to life in digital reconstructions; the unnervingly realistic image project includes the Emperors Caligula, Nero and Hadrian, among others. The features of these long-dead rulers have been preserved in hundreds of sculptures, but even the most detailed carvings can't convey what these men...

Oct 5, 2020

Astonishing AI restoration brings Apollo moon landing films up to speed

Astronauts on NASA's Apollo missions to the moon captured astounding movies of the lunar surface, but recent enhancements with artificial intelligence (AI) have really made the films out of this world. In remastered movies shared online by by DutchSteamMachine, a YouTube channel run by a film restoration specialist in the...

Oct 14, 2020

Do we live in a simulation? Chances are about 50–50.

It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we...