Ghostwriter

Designer and engineer Arvind Sanjeev created Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The “ghost” inside the machine comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.

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Mestre Ensinador

“Me When I Was A Baby, also known as Whimsical Little Creature, refers to videos of the TikTok account MestreEnsinador1. It features videos of a flying white puppet wearing a green hat named Tiburcio. The name translates to “master teacher” in Portuguese, with the gnome puppet being referred to as a “forest being” by the TikToker in his comment sections. The videos often show the puppet flying and twirling, sometimes doing a little dance and sometimes undertaking mysterious rituals. Maestre Ensinador went viral in the fall of 2022 after a series of duets where people showed his videos to their younger siblings and tried to convince them that the puppet was them as a baby.”

“Tibúrcio is a strong gnome,” Jhonatan Oliveira says, once belonging to his late grandmother, “and that’s why I like it very much.” He remade the puppet’s body three years ago, before he began making the videos. His uncle appears with him in the first viral TikTok — he’s the one who took Tibúrcio out of the cruse, an earthenware vessel that Oliveira refers to as a buried treasure. “But, he is not a cash treasure, but a spiritual one,” he explains. “The inspiration to make the videos comes from God!”

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If you die in the game, you die in real life

Palmer Luckey, the man who created the Oculus rift, made a VR Headset that kills the user If they die in the game.

“The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.  Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.  This is an area of videogame mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes.”

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Something called the internet

“Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world – a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips – is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work”.

Originally broadcast 29 April, 1994 on BBC

AI for detecting cluster munitions

VFRAME is an organization that researches and develops state-of-the-art computer vision technologies for human rights research and conflict zone monitoring. It is developed and maintained by Adam Harvey in Berlin with contributions from Jules LaPlace, Josh Evans, and a growing list of collaborators.

During the winter/spring of 2022 VFRAME and T4T partnered to develop a 3D model of the 9N235 submunition that has frequently appeared in the war in Ukraine. This model is being used to create synthetic training data for object detection algorithms and high-accuracy 3D printed replicas for benchmarking purposes.

Everyone lives out a fairytale as a template script

Artist Ian Cheng looks at the way that the work of psychiatrist Eric Berne changed the way that he thought about human personality when it came to creating the AI simulations that people his work. On Elephant:

“Obviously we take different paths, but Berne believed that everyone lives out a fairytale as a template script that they’ve cast themselves into with the help of their parents. Most people aren’t satisfied with the script that they’re unconsciously barreling down. It might be a mismatch: maybe your parents had old fashioned values; maybe the culture you grew up in radically shifted in your teens, which alters the relevance of your life script.”

 

The Happiness Box theory

“The Happiness Box theory posits that sufficiently advanced civilizations don’t swarm out into the universe, they implode into virtual worlds of their own making. If you could gain the ability to upload consciousness into simulated realities that are functionally indistinguishable from physical reality, why would you bother to climb into a physical spaceship to outwardly explore?”

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VR and psychedelics

According to this research, in David Glowacki‘s VR experience, Isness-D “participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience.”
The study, involving 75 subjects, showed that Isness-D offers an experience near indistinguishable from 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD.

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