Computer-generated influencers have arrived. The glamorous all-digital Miquela Sousa (also known as Lil Mequela), which was created by Los Angeles-based startup Brud, has been the star of an Ugg advertising campaign, appearing on billboards around the world. Brud believes it can create CGI social media stars that are easier to manage and monetize than human celebrities. It’s not alone in its efforts; Soul Machines, which has debuted dozens of digital humans, is launching its Digital DNA platform to make it easier to create virtual avatars. Continue reading Computer-Generated Photoreal Influencers, Avatars Are Here

The New York Times, which is now posting information explaining its journalistic practices, recently described how it reviews news-relevant videos from a wide variety of sources, including news agencies; social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat; and eyewitness videos via WhatsApp, witness contacts on the ground or “joining relevant groups.” The actual verification process is broken down into two steps. First, it determines whether a video is “really new.” The second step is to “dissect every frame to draw conclusions about location, date and time, the actors involved and what exactly happened.”  Continue reading New York Times Takes Multiple Steps to Authenticate Videos

The latest project out of Google Brain, the company’s machine learning research lab, has been using AI software to write Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on the Internet. But it’s not easy to condense social media, blogs, articles, memes and other digital information into salient articles, and the project’s results have been mixed. The team, in a paper just accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), describes how difficult it has been. Continue reading Google Brain Leverages AI to Generate Wikipedia-Like Articles