"Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money." – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and Google AdSense
In Today's Meteor
- Create: A Japanese dog hairdresser finds success in AI art
- Think: AI goes hunting for ET
- Compress: A sexbot that's smarter than you
- Disrupt: High tech yarn generates electricity
Create
A Japanese Artist Gets a New Creative Life with AI
Maho Nikami (@xxLONGOLONGOxx) is a Japanese artist living near Tokyo with an unusual day job. She's a hair dresser for dogs. The Covid epidemic made work hard to find. And then she discovered AI art.
Nikami says she's influenced by music from all over the world, sci-fi movies, Japanese anime and fashion.
"My past experiences have shaped my current identity."
She takes inspiration from Japanese musicians Susumu Hirasawa, Sakanaction and pop star Rina Sawayama who she credits with changing the image of Japanese women. "I think she is very prominent in my colorful female dancing works," she says.
She's also influenced by anime masterpiece "Ghost in the Shell" and avant-garde fashion designer COMME des GARCONS. But perhaps the greatest lesson is from the OG master Leonardo da Vinci. "From him I learned the law of making anything beautiful." – Neil Katz
He caused an uproar last year by publishing a children’s book with AI, now he’s back with this Batman-based short video.
Have artists and art projects we should feature? Send them to artpitches@thisismeteor.com
Think
Can AI Find ET?
Novel AI analysis of radio signals from space has identified a handful of star systems where, pending confirmation, alien technology may be present.
That confirmation may be pending for a while, but meanwhile the tools involved might revolutionize the search for E.T.
Researchers from the SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen (where Mark Zuckerberg is on the board) used a new machine learning system to analyze 480 hours of radio signal data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
It identified three million signals coming from the direction of 820 stars and then narrowed that cosmic haystack down to just eight needles, originating from five star systems, that could be alien technosignatures.
AI hasn't cracked the puzzle yet, but Peter Ma, a University of Toronto undergraduate student and lead researcher on a peer-reviewed paper out Monday in Nature Astronomy, said it has become a powerful tool for sorting through massive and complex data sets involved in such a search.
“We need to distinguish the exciting radio signals in space from the uninteresting radio signals from Earth,” he explained. “In many of our observations, there is a lot of interference."
Scientists have so far been unable to detect the signals a second time, but they encourage other radio astronomers to keep trying.
“These results dramatically illustrate the power of applying modern machine learning and computer vision methods to data challenges in astronomy,” says Cherry Ng, one of Ma’s research advisors and an astronomer at the SETI Institute. “Application of these techniques at scale will be transformational for radio technosignature science.”
Others, like controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, hope to deploy AI in the near future to sift through the growing number of unidentified aerial phenomena (what we used to call UFOs) sightings in the sky here on Earth.
After decades of trying to determine if we are truly alone in the universe, it now seems artificial intelligence is certain to play a central role in finally answering the ultimate existential question.
It also brings up another question: if aliens have built technology detectable by our AIs, how likely is it they’ve also built AIs able to detect ours? – Eric Mack
Compress
A fun quiz. (We scored 16 out of 21 correctly.)
David Ingram, Justine Goode, Anjali Nair
Also fun: With AI set to transform how movies - and everything else - get made, here's a supercut you won't want to miss.
How special effects were done in the past pic.twitter.com/zmH0oqfFgb
— Imjustculture (@imjustculture_) January 21, 2023
That was quick
Cursive is dead, long live Cursive
A sex bot that's smarter than you
Damocles
NFT Prime?
Chris Katje
California's DMV is trying to schedule an appointment with the blockchain
China joins AI chatbot race
Reuters/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/63ZBO3MYIJLDFBKR3URIVLJH7E.jpg)
Disrupt
Andrew J. Hawkins / @andyjayhawk/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24390334/22C0157_016.jpg)
Isaiah Richard
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