LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #95:

A COUPLE OF THINGS ABOUT DEEP-LEARNING

“What we want is a machine that can learn from experience.”

~ Alan Turing

Today, there’s some light-hearted, some try-it-out-yourself, some scary and some relieving things about deep-learning. And old video game ads.

What are “Fwends”?

In case you ever wondered what exactly Fwends actually are, the friendly AI behind Thisworddoesnotexist has the answer.

How does a car learn to park?

A lot of “smart” machines “learn” to perform complex tasks. For example, a car with an autopilot somehow needs to learn how to actually drive a car. It’s simply impossible to write software that can deal with every eventuality the car might be experiencing in traffic, so instead of trying to give the car instructions for every possible situation, you try to make the car “understand” what driving is all about.

This sounds very abstract, and it is. So here’s a fun simulation that actually lets you experience what it takes to make a car learn how to park itself.

A Company Pays People to use their Faces in Deep-Faked Videos

Don’t use your face too often? Don’t mind being a puppet of an AI? Then maybe renting out your face for some corporate videos might be an option? A company creates on-demand corporate videos (think support, marketing) and pays people for their faces to use them in those videos.

But They’re Probably Easily Spotted

While it might not apply completely to the technique mentioned above,faked faces are actually pretty easy to spot. That’s mostly because the software doesn’t know jack about what it’s actually doing (another funny thing about machine-learning algorithms), and so it doesn’t know that for example pupils are always round. Always, without exception.

Old Video Game Advertisements

There used to be a time when computer games were 8bit pixels, and their advertisements were hand-painted masterpieces. And here is a website devoted to this golden time.

That’s it from this edition of Let’s be Fwends, reaching the bottom of the mail is like winning against the end boss, innit? 🦤