Digitally de-aged ABBA pull a Gorillaz, play Concert as digital Avatar-Band
Plus: Zoom Dysmorphia / Unreal Engine 5 / Covid-Safe-Sex / AI learns to Code / Deepfake Stock-Faces / Fake Banksy NFT / Plant Leather / Fictional Movies / Good Vibes Only!
ABBA = Gorillaz x De-Aged Leia
ABBA have a new Album out Nov 5 2021 and they play a gig in London 2022 using digital Avatars.
So, this is the future: A geriatric band from the 70s, digitally de-aged via high end FX-tech from Industrial Light & Magic for a (supposedly giant) avatar concert aka Gorillaz in London 2022, playing their new record, is more a sign of our demographic reality, where old people reign supreme while birth rates are dropping, than a sign of a technological scifi-future. Dude, where's your flying car? De-aged FX-ABBA ate them.
I find the fact that this particular cultural artifact is emerging from nostalgia and technology utterly fascinating. This is saying a lot more about the mental states of our (western) societies than about music or tech. A wholesome experience, ABBAesque.
From ABBAvoyage.com:
It's been a while since we made music together. Almost 40 years, actually. We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we've decided it's time to end it. They say it's foolhardy to wait more than 40 years between albums, so we've recorded a follow-up to [1981's] 'The Visitors.' To tell the truth, the main inspiration to record again comes from our involvement in creating the strangest and most spectacular concert you could ever dream of. We're going to be able to sit back in an audience and watch our digital selves perform our songs on a stage in a custom-built arena in London next spring. Weird and wonderful!
We simply call it 'Voyage' and we're truly sailing in uncharted waters. With the help of our younger selves, we travel into the future. It's not easy to explain but then it hasn't been done before.
Sex in the Pandemic: Glory Holes and Zoom Orgies
Social Distancing und Sex sind nicht ganz so inkompatibel, wie man annehmen sollte. Gruppensex wurde zwar abgesagt, aber man trifft sich halt per Zoom und wichst und masturbiert oder man veranstaltet Bondage-Workshops. Gesichtsbesamung via Webcam ist zwar eher suboptimal, aber Zewa Wisch und Weg hilft auch in schwierigsten Kleb-Situationen.
Key informants shared that due to COVID-19 restrictions, group sex events were cancelled and participants only had sex with others they were isolating with. Participants emphasized the challenges of isolation, the need to be patient, but also the opportunities associated with isolation. Participants reported attending online group sex events (e.g. Zoom orgies) as well as skill-building classes (e.g. rope bondage).
Und wenn es ganz dringend echten Hautkontakt mit Feuchtgebieten braucht, New York und British Columbia haben eine offizielle Empfehlung für Glory Holes als COVID-kompatible Sex-Praktik herausgegeben.
Public health units, including New York City’s, have recommended using large barriers like glory holes as a potential way to avoid spreading COVID-19. For the uninitiated, a glory hole is an opening through a wall or partition used in performing a variety of sex acts.
This week, British Columbia climbed aboard that bandwagon with new guidelines around COVID-19 and sex from the BC Centres for Disease Control (BCCDC).
In the guidelines, BCCDC representatives suggest residents “use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact.”
BCCDC also suggests wearing a mask during sex and avoiding kissing or using face-to-face positions.
AI learns to code
Vor drei Monaten spielte Max Woolf mit AI-generiertem Code und der GPT-AI rum, vor ein paar Tagen stellte Elon Musks OpenAI ihre neue Version von Codex vor, ihrem System für genau das: Code-Generation durch GPT3.
Die Demo im YT-Clip ist extrem beeindruckend. Open AI hat ein System geschaffen, das Coding durch natürliche Sprache ermöglicht und mit wenigen Befehlen ein rudimentäres Spiel programmieren lässt, ein Game-Maker basierend auf GPT3.
Von heise.de:
Auf der OpenAI-Seite finden sich Videos zu unterschiedlichen Szenarien von der Spieleprogrammierung bis zu DataScience-Anwendungen.
Für das Spiel bilden Sätze wie "When the rocket is clicked, temporarily display some text saying 'Firing thrusters!' in white on the current location -- and temporarily speed up by 4x for 0.25 second" die Grundlage für JavaScript-Code. Die Anweisung in natürlicher Sprache steht anschließend als Kommentar über der Umsetzung.
Die Videos demonstrieren das erweiterte Sprachverständnis, indem Codex beispielsweise dem obligatorischen "Hello World" für mehr Gefühlsausdruck drei Ausrufezeichen anhängt und auf die Aufforderung "Even louder please" mit Großbuchstaben als "HELLO WORLD!!!" umsetzt.
NVidia updates the not existing persons
Nvidia hat den die Technologie weiterentwickelt, die die Personswhichdonotexist produziert. Die Resultate sind vor allem im Bewegtbild, also den “Reisen durch Latent Space” offensichtlich, Details wie Haar- und Bart-Strukturen, aber auch Oberflächen und Reliefs sind nicht mehr im Bildformat fixiert, sondern orientieren sich am abgebildeten Objekt.
Hier ein Two Minute Papers-Clip über die neue GAN-Technique:
Windows 95 Startup Sound but an AI attempts to continue the song
Unreal Engine 5: Now Games Can Look Like Pixar Movies
Mindblowing collection of demos showcasing Unreal Engine 5:
Rise of the TextTok - by kate lindsay
TikTok's trendsetters are (...) focusing instead on making memes that will transcend the app and spread on other platforms. Like this TikTok, these are videos that mainly serve as a backdrop for a single block of text. They are videos that tell, don't show. But because the language is typically observational or opinionated, they're more like tweets than stories.
‘I believe it’s a mental health issue’: the rise of Zoom dysmorphia
The effects of staring at ourselves for hours at a time during video conference calls has resulted in a breakdown of how we perceive our own self image. The phenomenon has been nicknamed “Zoom dysmorphia” by the dermatologist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr Shadi Kourosh, who has noticed an increase in appointment requests for appearance-related issues during the pandemic. “I was concerned that the time spent on these cameras was negatively affecting people’s perceptions of their appearance,” she says. Kourosh likens the video conference via phone camera to a “funhouse mirror” because, she says: “[People] are not looking at a true reflection of themselves. They don’t realise it is a distorted mirror.” She says factors such as the angle and how close we are to the camera mask how we really look.
Related:
How beauty filters took over social media | MIT Technology Review
The most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming: it’s the face filters on social media. The result? A mass experiment on girls and young women.
People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones | MIT Technology Review
Basically, these are stock photo model jobs, but for deepfake stuff. Look up the story of Jet Li and how he refused to have his kicks 3D-scanned for future productions. He was on point.
Like many students, Liri has had several part-time jobs. A 23-year-old in Israel, she does waitressing and bartending gigs in Tel Aviv, where she goes to university. She also sells cars, works in retail, and conducts job interviews and onboarding sessions for new employees as a corporate HR rep. In Germany. Liri can juggle so many jobs, in multiple countries, because she has hired out her face to Hour One, a startup that uses people’s likenesses to create AI-voiced characters that then appear in marketing and educational videos for organizations around the world. It is part of a wave of companies overhauling the way digital content is produced. And it has big implications for the human workforce. Liri does her waitressing and bar work in person, but she has little idea what her digital clones are up to. “It is definitely a bit strange to think that my face can appear in videos or ads for different companies,” she says. Hour One is not the only company taking deepfake tech mainstream, using it to produce mash-ups of real footage and AI-generated video. Some have used professional actors to add life to deepfaked personas. But Hour One doesn’t ask for any particular skills. You just need to be willing to hand over the rights to your face
All possible ways to divide 2520 into equal parts:
Fake Banksy NFT sold through artist's website for £244k
How plant-based ‘leathers’ are becoming the future of luxury fashion
This musician will sing about your enemies over WhatsApp
Ghost Pacer: Your Personal Holographic Workout Partner
Nestflix: Fictional Movies within Movies
Hσʅʅყ+ now accepts uploads of Artworks made with her synthetic voice modell for approval by the Holly+ DAO, a “decentralized international group of friends and supporters who steward my digital twin.”
“China has forbidden under-18s from playing video games for more than three hours a week, a stringent social intervention that it said was needed to pull the plug on a growing addiction to what it once described as ‘spiritual opium’.”
RaveDJ - Music Mixer - AI Music-Masher with surprisingly good results.
Vibin’
TikTok and the Vibes Revival | The New Yorker
Where others might get meme dances or practical jokes, I only see chill vibes. Casually cooking a meal in a swaying sailboat on the open Atlantic Ocean is a vibe. So is slaloming down the road on a skateboard to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while swigging cranberry juice, as Nathan Apodaca did in a now famous TikTok. (...) In the social-media era, “vibe” has come to mean something like a moment of audiovisual eloquence, a “sympathetic resonance” between a person and her environment, as Robin James, a professor of philosophy at U.N.C. Charlotte wrote in a recent newsletter.
What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. (#Aesthetic is sometimes used to mark vibes, but that term is predominantly visual.) A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off an intense vibe or is particularly amenable to vibes. Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text.
What is a vibe? - by Robin James
Vibes (or sometimes “vibez”) are everywhere now. (…) Vibes are contiguous with moods, such as the moods Spotify uses to organize playlists and the Seattle bookstore Oh Hello Again uses to organize their books in place of genre. (…) The “lo fi” in “lofi study beats” is a vibe. Colloquially, “vibez” is used to express an intention, a situation/one’s geographic and sociological position, an ambience, a stateofmind, one’s material surroundings, and other sorts of contexts that orient present and future possibilities. Similarly, “lofi” and “chill” are ergonomic devices individuals use to regulate psychological and affective states for optimal present and future productivity, just as Oh Hello Again’s mood-based catalog system was designed as part of a broader philosophy of “biblotherapy,” where people use reading to manage their emotional and affective comportment.
A vibe is not exactly a vibration. As these examples suggest, a vibe is the sympathetic resonance between a multiply-situated (geographically, temporally, politically, epistemically, materially, etc.) subject and their social and material milieu. Sympathetic resonance happens when the vibrations from a sounding object like a tuning fork or piano string activate similar frequencies in nearby objects that are relatively “in tune” with the original sound source. For example, when the strings on a stringed instrument are left undamped, playing one of the instrument’s higher pitches will activate harmonics at that same pitch in some of the lower strings. Vibes likewise activate perceivers’ attuned capacities and shape how people act in and on the worlds around them.
The killer app for NFTs are Avatars - Protocol
CryptoPunks just became a billion-dollar business. The 10,000 low-res characters have now generated over $1.16 billion in total revenue and are being traded like precious art; in the time it took me to write this sentence, three bids were placed on three Punks for a total of about $1.5 million. (…) avatars are emerging as the killer app for NFTs. NFT buyers are increasingly spending big on digital characters they can use in Twitter profile pictures, as in-game avatars, and to stake their spot and character in online spaces. Bored Ape Yacht Club has been booming recently, offering a set of avatars similar to CryptoPunks — except they're all apes, they're much higher res, and yours might have devil horns and earrings and 3D glasses. If you buy one, your ape also doubles as your entry card into an online club that the BAYC team is building out now. Steph Curry bought one this weekend! There's also Pudgy Penguins, which is basically the same thing but with cute penguins. And Cool Cats and Lazy Lions and Sup Ducks, which are basically ... well, you get the idea. Even Larva Labs, the company behind CryptoPunks, created 20,000 new characters called Meebits that are basically ultra-cool Minecraft characters.
Clifford Stoll hatte vor 30 Jahren einen vielbeachteten und belächelten Artikel geschrieben, in dem er das Internet verächtlich machte und zu einer Entwertung menschlichen Kontakts führte. Damit hatte er Recht, allerdings nicht, wie er annahm, durch das Fehlen tatsächlicher menschlicher Interaktion, sondern durch eine Übersättigung durch parasoziale, also nur schein-soziale Interaktion. Clifford Stoll was spot on.
Stoll’s worry was that human connections would be ignored, or assumed as being unimportant, even in an abstract sense. But there is another way to think about human interactions being “devalued” [in the digital age]. Instead of having less interaction with one another, we’ve ended up with a lot. Too much, even. The devaluing of human interaction has come not from dearth but overabundance — a kind of interaction inflation.
When we adopted the social platforms, the promise was, of course, that they would make possible all the things Stoll thought improbable — not to mention cover the global community in a digital blanket of common understanding. Obviously, this didn’t happen. Though social platforms do often make the exchange of goods and even ideas easier in some cases, the interactions they truly thrive on are the billions of those in which little of value is exchanged. Driven by so-called trending topics, they are reactionary and shallow, vapid and ultimately pointless. The emptiness you feel using social platforms never goes away.
(Falls Ihr Clifford Stoll nicht kennt, das war der Mann, der in den 80ern die berühmten KGB-Hacker aus Deutschland auffliegen ließ. Die Story wurde 1998 unter dem Titel “23 - Nichts ist wie es scheint” verfilmt.)
