Artificial Intelligence

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares95 Views

    What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?

    by

    The Los Angeles headquarters of Metaphysic, a Hollywood visual-effects start-up that uses artificial intelligence to create digital renderings of the human face, were much cooler in my imagination, if I’m being honest. I came here to get my mind blown by A.I., and this dim three-room warren overlooking Sunset Boulevard felt more like the slouchy offices of a middling law firm. Ed Ulbrich, Metaphysic’s chief content officer, steered me into a room that looked set to host a deposition, then sat me down in a leather desk chair with a camera pointed at it. I stared at myself on a large flat-screen TV, waiting to be sworn in.But then Ulbrich clickety-clicked on his laptop for a moment, and my face on the screen was transmogrified. “Smile,” he said to me. “Do you recognize that face?” I did, right away, but I can’t disclose its owner, because the actor’s project won’t come out until 2025, and the role is still top secret. Suffice it to say that the face belonged to a major star with fantastic teeth. “Smile again,” Ulbrich said. I complied. “Those aren’t your teeth.” Indeed, the teeth belonged to Famous Actor. The synthesis was seamless and immediate, as if a digital mask had been pulled over my face that matched my expressions, with almost no lag time.Ulbrich is the former chief executive of Digital Domain, James Cameron’s visual-effects company, and over the course of his three-decade career he has led the VFX teams on several movies that are considered milestones in the field of computer-generated imagery, including “Titanic,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Top Gun: Maverick.” But in Ulbrich’s line of work, in the quest for photorealism, the face is the final frontier. “I’ve spent so much time in Uncanny Valley,” he likes to joke, “that I own real estate there.”In the spring of 2023, Ulbrich had a series of meetings with the founders of Metaphysic. One of them, Chris Ume, was the visual-effects artist behind a series of deepfake Tom Cruise videos that went viral on TikTok in early 2021, a moment many in Hollywood cite as the warning shot that A.I.’s hostile takeover had commenced. But in parts of the VFX industry, those deepfake videos were greeted with far less misgiving. They hinted tantalizingly at what A.I. could soon accomplish at IMAX resolutions, and at a fraction of the production cost. That’s what Metaphysic wanted to do, and its founders wanted Ulbrich’s help. So when they met him, they showed him an early version of the demonstration I was getting.Ulbrich’s own career began during the previous seismic shift in the visual-effects field, from practical effects to C.G.I., and it was plain to him that another disruption was underway. “I saw my career flash before my eyes,” Ulbrich recalled. “I could take my entire team from my former places of employment, I could put them on for eternity using the best C.G.I. tools money can buy, and you can’t deliver what we’re showing you here. And it’s happening in milliseconds.” He knew it was time to leave C.G.I. behind. As he put it: “How could I go back in good conscience and use horses and buggies and rocks and sticks to make images when this exists in the world?”Back on Sunset Boulevard, Ulbrich pecked some more at his laptop. Now I was Tom Hanks — specifically, a young Tom Hanks, he of the bulging green eyes and the look of gathering alarm on his face in “Splash” when he first discovers that Daryl Hannah’s character is a mermaid. I can divulge Hanks’s name because his A.I. debut arrived in theaters nationally on Nov. 1, in a movie called “Here.” Directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth — a reunion of the creative team behind “Forrest Gump” — and co-starring Robin Wright, “Here” is based on a 2014 graphic novel that takes place at a single spot in the world, primarily a suburban New Jersey living room, over several centuries. The story skips back and forth through time but focuses on a baby-boomer couple played by Hanks and Wright at various stages of their lives, from age 18 into their 80s, from post-World War II to the present day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares112 Views

      in Theater

      How ‘McNeal,’ a Play About A.I., Lured Robert Downey Jr. to Broadway

      by

      In “McNeal,” the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores the way artificial intelligence is disrupting the literary world and raising questions about creativity.This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar said. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there.”Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot’s lines. But his attempt to mimic A.I.-generated text — an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny effect: Downey’s delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the whole play,” Downey said, sitting on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage, where he, Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, gathered recently to talk about “McNeal.” “The only thing that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the final speech.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      A Shocking Country Song Is Dominating TikTok. Is Girly Girl for Real?

      by

      TikTok’s latest musical obsession is a country song. But not the kind that first comes to mind.Miles removed from the weather-beaten earnestness of Zach Bryan, or Bailey Zimmerman’s heart-on-sleeve crooning, the viral “10 Drunk Cigarettes” is plasticky, poppy, alien and seemingly A.I.-assisted. Its lyrics advocate for a carefree, resolutely American way of life, although they replace Nashville standards like beers and Bibles with cigarettes and copious amounts of cocaine, and find humor (and plenty of shock value) in their clash of saccharine femininity and unbridled nihilism. The result is like the cult comedy “Strangers With Candy” or the early web series “The Most Popular Girls in School” for the short-form video generation.“10 Drunk Cigarettes” is by Girly Girl Productions: a mysterious trio supposedly based in St. Louis that seem to have a preternatural ability to turn ironic, startlingly contemporary internet humor into music. Most Girly Girl songs follow a brutally effective structure: an intro verse about how empowered women are, followed by a chorus about using that power to do something horrifyingly self-destructive, in a tone that vaguely echoes the “God forbid women have hobbies” meme.Not every Girly Girl song is indebted to country, but its most ingratiating ones, like “Notes App Girls!” and “Coked Up Friend Adventure!” feel rooted in the genre. “10 Drunk Cigarettes,” which has gained the most traction on TikTok and streaming, combines the smiley feminized empowerment of RaeLynn’s “Bra Off” — which likens a breakup to “takin’ my bra off” — with the boozy escapism of Chase Rice and Florida Georgia Line’s “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen.”“10 Drunk Cigarettes” is not dissimilar from that collaboration in structure and arrangement. It’s built around a rhythmic acoustic guitar line and surges to an anthemic chorus structured as a list. But it’s not the kind of song that will be getting played on country radio anytime soon. TikTok is filled with videos of people reacting, mouths agape, to its chorus: “I can name 10 things us girls need before we ever need a man/One new vape/Two lines of coke/Free drinks from the bar/Four more lines of coke” — and so on.The very first line of “Demure,” Girly Girl’s debut album, makes a statement: “Haters mad ’cause my music is A.I./Wish I cared, but I’m way too high.” While many vocals on the album are wobbly and lo-fi in a way that recalls the fake songs by Drake and the Weeknd that proliferated last year, it’s unclear how much of Girly Girl’s songs are A.I.-generated; it’s unlikely that tracks like these could be made without a high level of human involvement. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)Girly Girl’s songs tap into a vein of humor that’s firmly of-the-moment. Their glib jokes about vaping, drinking, drug taking and trauma — and, specifically, how those things relate to, or form an essential part of, “girlhood” — are the kinds of jokes going viral on X, formerly Twitter, every day. “Demure” was released last month, and even its title (which refers to a TikTok trend about being “very demure, very mindful” that blew up and faded away within the last few weeks) points to a desire for immediate relevance at the expense of longevity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Watching Movies Like It’s 1999

      by

      A multimedia Culture desk series, “Class of 1999,” revisits a group of mold-breaking, star-studded films released that year.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.A sci-fi film whose climactic choice — red pill or blue pill? — has become so famous that it’s a meme. A found-footage style documentary horror film that achieved cult-classic status. A “Star Wars,” a “Toy Story” and two Tom Cruise movies.The year was 1999, and it was blessed with an abundance of cinematic riches. So many, in fact, that “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the top-earning indie films ever, was just the fifth-highest grossing film at the U.S. box office three weeks after its release.“It definitely was an epic year,” said Stephanie Goodman, the film editor for The New York Times. She led a team of more than a dozen writers, editors and designers who produced “Class of 1999,” a monthlong series celebrating the 25th anniversary of what many would argue is the greatest year in movie history.The multimedia project, which includes features, profiles and critical essays, not only explores directors’ innovation and risk-taking in 1999, but how their films were, at times, chillingly prophetic about the cultural, social and political themes of today.There’s a look at how the opening scene in “The Matrix” proved remarkably prescient; an essay on how “Blair Witch” foreshadowed the age of misinformation; a profile of Haley Joel Osment, who was 11 when he starred in “The Sixth Sense”; an article about the vulnerability of Tom Cruise; a playlist from the year’s top films; a reflection on reviewing movies in 1999; and a roundup of favorite films from the year, as selected by writers and critics. (Readers were invited to share their picks, too.)“A lot of people who worked on it had a strong connection to the movies,” said Ms. Goodman, who in 1999 was a copy editor at The Los Angeles Times. “That’s one thing that made the year special, in addition to the fact that just about every major filmmaker of the past 25 years was working that year.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Brings Up a Riddle That Looms 25 Years Later

      by

      Twenty-five years ago, the indie horror blockbuster compelled audiences to ask, “Was that real?” The question now permeates our age of misinformation.“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”Audiences packed elbow-to-elbow into theaters in the summer of 1999 saw that shaky white text on a black background during the first moments of “The Blair Witch Project.” What followed was 80 or so minutes of growing dread as three 20-somethings — Josh, Heather and Mike — tried to uncover the truth behind the legend of a supernatural entity called the Blair Witch. It does not end well for the trio.Initially shot for just $35,000, “The Blair Witch Project” grossed almost $250 million, then a record for an indie film. It became a pop culture phenomenon, one that foretold the found-footage horror boom and left one uneasy question hovering over moviegoers: “Is this real?” It’s an existential riddle that looms larger than ever 25 years later, compelling us to apply that exact question to nearly every image, sound or nugget of information we encounter.Back then, creating that air of uncertainty took some strategic work by the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Marketed as a documentary, promotional materials included missing posters for its largely unknown lead actors — Joshua Leonard; Heather Donahue, now known as Rei Hance; and Michael C. Williams — who had to keep ultralow profiles in the lead-up to the film’s release.A separate faux documentary called “The Curse of the Blair Witch,” which aired on cable TV shortly before the film’s premiere, had an eerily convincing true-crime approach: It incorporated candid-seeming photos of the characters including childhood snapshots, as well as fake newspaper articles and interviews with actors posing as Heather’s film professor and Josh’s girlfriend, among others, to round out the alternate reality.Joshua Leonard and his “Blair Witch” co-stars filmed all the footage used in the movie.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot

      by

      What does artificial intelligence sound like? Hollywood has been imagining it for decades. Now A.I. developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk.Last month, OpenAI revealed upgrades to its artificially intelligent chatbot. ChatGPT, the company said, was learning how to hear, see and converse in a naturalistic voice — one that sounded much like the disembodied operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie “Her.”ChatGPT’s voice, called Sky, also had a husky timbre, a soothing affect and a sexy edge. She was agreeable and self-effacing; she sounded like she was game for anything. After Sky’s debut, Johansson expressed displeasure at the “eerily similar” sound, and said that she had previously declined OpenAI’s request that she voice the bot. The company protested that Sky was voiced by a “different professional actress,” but agreed to pause her voice in deference to Johansson. Bereft OpenAI users have started a petition to bring her back. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How A.I. Has Changed Music, and What’s Coming Next

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWhether you know it or not, you’ve likely encountered A.I. — artificial intelligence — in your music consumption over the past year. Maybe it was Ghostwriter releasing a song with a fake “Drake” and “the Weeknd” in collaboration that took over the internet last year. Or maybe it was Drake himself rapping as “Tupac” and “Snoop Dogg” during the recent Kendrick Lamar beef. Or maybe it was a new track by the country superstar Randy Travis, who suffered a stroke in 2013, and hasn’t sung a song since.In these ways and more, A.I. has become the dominant disrupter to music creation and distribution. And those use cases are merely the tip of the iceberg — A.I. is being used in playlisting, demo recording, and in the case of two hyped startups, Suno and Udio, consumer-level music-making.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the ways in which A.I. has been deployed by musicians, the legal and philosophical questions it generates, and the sub rosa ways A.I. companies hope to weave their products into the music production and consumption of the future.Guests:Rachel Metz, who covers A.I. for BloombergKristin Robinson, who covers the music business for BillboardConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      In the Battle of Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, AI Is Playing Spoiler

      by

      A rap beef between hip-hop’s two dominant stars has left fans wondering whether new tracks are real or fakes.For the past month, an all-out brawl has consumed hip-hop, with some of the genre’s top artists trading barbs in rapidly released tracks. The dispute, which began in late March with a perceived dig at Drake by Future and Metro Boomin, has roped in J. Cole, Rick Ross and even the estate of Tupac Shakur.At issue: Who is the current holder of hip-hop’s crown — Drake or Kendrick Lamar — with a whole lot of rumors, personal attacks and inside jokes adding fuel to the fire.Rap battles aren’t new, but this time, fans are grappling with a very 2024 question: Which of the diss songs are real?When a diss track in a high-profile conflict gets released, the splintered rap media ecosystem — including magazines, blogs, Instagram pages, YouTube channels, podcasts and livestreams — often erupts immediately. Journalists spread the word, critics dissect every line, and fans rush to crown a winner, round by round. But when a Drake response called “Push Ups” appeared online, fans wondered whether it was made by him or was perhaps the work of generative artificial intelligence.They had reason to be skeptical. Last year, “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song impersonating Drake and the Weeknd, was posted by a musical creator called Ghostwriter, and in many ways served as a harbinger of the impact this technology may have on the industry.A track like “Heart on My Sleeve” requires a fair amount of musical know-how to produce. The beats and raps are typically generated by a musician, then put through an open-source deepfake filter to transform the vocals into a well-known artist’s. It is that last step, imitating another artist’s vocals, that has caused the most consternation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      A.I. Made These Movies Sharper. Critics Say It Ruined Them.

      by

      Machine-learning technologies are being used in film restoration for new home video releases. But some viewers strongly dislike the results.In 1998, Geoff Burdick, an executive at James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, was hunched in front of a 12-inch monitor at a postproduction house, carefully preparing “Titanic” for release on LaserDisc and VHS. A state-of-the-art computer process had made it possible for Burdick and his team to scour the film frame by frame, removing tiny imperfections embedded in the original negative: little scratches, flakes of dirt, even water stains that smeared the image. The computer could erase these blemishes using a kind of copy-paste tool, concealing the defects with information from another frame.Burdick, now a senior vice president at the company, told me that this process “seemed like freaking magic at the time.” And yet the results were not entirely well-received. “There were a lot of people who said that this was the most beautiful VHS they’d ever seen in their life, because we’d gotten rid of all that gobbledygook,” he recalled. “But there were a lot of folks who said, ‘This is not right! You’ve removed all of this stuff! If the negative is scratched, then we should see that scratch.’ People were really hard-core about it.”In the decades since, home video formats have reached higher and higher resolutions, with VHS and LaserDisc giving way to DVD and Blu-ray, and eventually to ultra high-definition 4K discs, known as Ultra HD Blu-rays. As the picture quality has improved, restoration tools have evolved with them, making it easier than ever for filmmakers to fine-tune their work using computers. Several of Cameron’s films, including “The Abyss,” “True Lies” and “Aliens,” were recently released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in newly restored versions that are clearer and sharper than ever before — the product of painstaking attention from Lightstorm and Cameron himself. “I think they look the best they’ve ever looked,” Burdick said.Bill Paxton with Schwarzenegger in the film’s streaming version, top, and the Blu-ray version. Details in the background and colors in the foreground are clearer in the new take.20th Century FoxBut as with the old “Titanic” home video, these restorations have proved controversial, with many viewers objecting strenuously to their pristine new look. What has caught the particular ire of critics is the fact that these versions have been restored, in part, using artificial intelligence. Park Road Post Production, the New Zealand company owned by the filmmaker Peter Jackson, helped clean up Cameron’s films using some of the same proprietary machine-learning software used on Jackson’s documentaries “The Beatles: Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old.” The images in Cameron’s classic blockbusters were refined in a way that many felt looked strange and unnatural.The level of detail is eye-popping. Water looks crystalline; colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and inky. Some surfaces, however, do look a little glossy, with a buffed sheen that appears almost lacquered. It can be hard to pinpoint what is changed. But there does seem to be a difference, and depending on the viewer, it can feel slightly uncanny.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More