Artificial Motion

JUST AS THE Academy Awards begin to hover at the horizon, two movies thought to be strong contenders have got into a con­troversy over the use of Artificial Intelligence. Both were to do with manipulating voice. The big news was The Brutalist, which had won Best Motion Picture at the Golden Globes. In an interview to a video technology magazine, the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó mentioned that they had used an AI tool called Respeecher so that the Hungarian spoken by the main characters were perfect. The same technology had been used earlier by another movie called Emilia Pérez, which too won multiple awards at the Golden Globes and is a favourite at the Oscars. Once the Jancsó inter­view got traction, it led to much negative response online by purists who questioned the authenticity of a movie that relied on such tools. Emilia Pérez, too, received fallout from the controversy. The use of AI is a subject of considerable insecu­rity in the world of entertainment. In 2023, screenwriters of Hollywood had gone on strike and managed to get demands acceded protecting them from being forced to use AI and increasing transparency over its use. The Brutalist episode signals how the technology is inevitably creeping into filmmaking.

Big Shift

Open AI has been umbilically tied with Microsoft to get to the scale it has. This week, it announced the The Stargate Project, which involves creating a corpus of $500 billion to set up AI infrastructure in the US. Except that its equity partners were Oracle and Soft Bank, leading to the question of whether it is cutting itself loose from Microsoft.

The Coming Meds  

The promise of drastically cutting down development time for new medicines is coming to fruition. At the WEF in Davos, Demis Hassabis, head of Alphabet’s subsidiary Isomorphic Labs, said that they expect clinical trials by 2025 end of AI-designed drugs. Hassabis co-founded Deepmind, later acquired by Google, which used AI to predict protein structures and won a Nobel Prize for it.

Insta Edit

In a clip, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced Edits, an app for video-making on the phone. It will help creators do more. His post said, “There will be a dedicated tab for inspiration, another for keeping track of early ideas, a much higher-quality camera…” Edits is available to pre-order for iOS now and an Android ver•sion will follow later.

 

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