AI – Page 15 – Matt's Homepage

Stable Audio AI

November 4, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

Need some royalty-free music or sound effects for your game or a video you made? Do you need a drum solo, ambient music, or other audio track to set the mood? TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023 list called out the Stable Audio AI music creator as such a tool to get music generated for free.

As an example of how good Stable Audio is, enter “Post-Rock, Guitars, Drum Kit, Bass, Strings, Euphoric, Up-Lifting, Moody, Flowing, Raw, Epic, Sentimental, 125 BPM” for a 95-second track – and the site will create audio like the results in this YouTube video. (It just generates the music, not any imagery)

Sources:

AI generated Simpsons

October 21, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

Hidreley Diao let curiosity get the best of him and he ask AI to render many animated household names in flesh and blood. He used Photoshop, FaceApp, Gradiente and Remini to create somewhat realistic images of well-known cartoon characters.

Here’s what AI came up with for The Simpsons. He also has given the AI treatment to some historical figures.

AI Backflip

October 21, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

Animator Nikita Diakur thought it would be safer to have a digital stand-in do a backflip after he failed to do a backflip in real life. Maximilian Schneider helped him use machine learning tech to create a photorealistic avatar of himself, use a voice simulator trained for 15 minutes on his actual voice, wire the voice to the mesh on his face, and a few other techniques from the paper Deep Mimic. He then tried to train the avatar.

It’s an interesting way to tell a story – especially when he puts the avatar into his tiny apartment and proceeds to virtually receive what would be numerous serious head traumas, bone breaking collisions, and likely tons of broken furniture.

Free AI spoken audiobooks

October 17, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

Audible provides a great collection of audiobooks, but you do need to pay for a subscription or buy individual selections. Now, Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. The project has been selected as one of the ‘Best Inventions of 2023′ by Time magazine.

Traditionally, AI narrators and voices have limitations. Early generated voices were barely good enough for simple one phrase statements. For longer text, they tend to be very flat/monotone and have bad pacing to the point of being very painful to listen too for any extended period of time. While this is still somewhat the case, this version is much improved.

I personally love combining my workouts/hikes/drives with audiobooks – and having a new free source of good material is great.

The book selection obviously are works in the public domain, but that includes lots of classics – such as some of my favorites: Edwardian and Victorian ghost stories.

You can go to the project’s main page here to learn more, or browse the collection here.

The audiobooks are also hosted on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and the Internet Archive.

AI Filmmaking courses

October 13, 2023 matt Comments 1 comment

The Future of filmmaking is here – and it’s done by a single person using AI tools. I’ve already posted about AI videos before, and included a number of trailer-like ones on the Curious Refuge channel or these humorous fake commercials from Turbodong2000.

Now Caleb Ward, who is the force behind Curious Refuge, is offering $749 AI Filmmaking classes.

The first 3 courses are completely sold out with waitlists to even apply for the November courses. For that price, you get:

4 Weeks of Video Modules
Private Group Chat Access
Feedback from Pro Artists
Weekly Homework Assignments and Critiques
Downloadable PDFs
Prompt Templates
After Effects Templates
Title Templates
Notion Templates for Organizing the Production Process
Distribution Feedback and Critique

Besides Caleb’s work, here’s some sample student work:

Here’s one that plays more like an ad – with voice matching:

nVidia uses AI for place and route on it’s chips

October 11, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

nVidia just published a paper and blog post revealing how its AutoDMP system can accelerate modern chip floor-planning using GPU-accelerated AI/ML optimization, resulting in a 30X speedup over previous methods. Hopefully it doesn’t get the treatment the Google AI place-and-route solution got.

AutoDMP is short for Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement. It is designed to plug into an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) system used by chip designers, to accelerate and optimize the time-consuming process of finding optimal placements for the building blocks of processors. In one of Nvidia’s examples of AutoDMP at work, the tool leveraged its AI on the problem of determining an optimal layout of 256 RSIC-V cores with 2.7 million standard cells and 320 memory macros. AutoDMP took 3.5 hours to come up with an optimal layout on a single Nvidia DGX Station A100.

Initial metrics shows it does an amazing job – in a fraction of the time. Definitely worth the read.

AutoDMP is open source, with the code published on GitHub. Below is a link to an article about Cadence’s Cerebrus AI place-and-route solution.

Article:

Bringing your favorite signers back from beyond

October 5, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

Kid Klava wanted to sing a song he wrote, but realized his chops really weren’t up for the task. So why not get John Lennon sing it – with Paul on backing vocals? He claims it was surprisingly easy and it only took a few minutes to generate. If you’d like to have a go yourself, there are dozens of great YouTube tutorials.

https://youtu.be/pGk1nfStHCM

Science fiction to science reality?

September 26, 2023 matt Comments 0 Comment

Have you ever heard of a movie about an advanced AI based defense system that becomes sentient? After being handed full control, it expands on its original nuclear defense directives to assume total control of the world despite its creators’ orders to stop.

It’s not War Games or Terminator. Nope, this movie is from 1970 and it’s called Colossus: The Forbin Project and it’s available on Vimeo for free. Maybe give it a watch before it becomes reality.

Google AI Chip Design leads to a drama fueled trainwreck

September 25, 2023 matt Comments 2 comments

Who would think something like improving a chip design tool would cause the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) to get so out of hand it was called a “trainwreck” and an “ambush” of the presenters.

The crux of the clash was whether Google’s AI chip design layout solver was really better than those of humans or state-of-the-art algorithms. In the end, there was a firing and a wrongful termination lawsuit with Google, a team re-doing a years worth of work, ugly accusations and drama, and 2 AI researchers leaving a promising field of AI improved chip design due to the conflict.

The argument involved a lot of factors like comparing different chip placement algorithms, results of reinforced learning, initial placement bias, metrics of success such as wire length, annealing, and general benchmarks – but in the end resulted in a circus of accusations, lawsuits, and drama.

Read more about it here on the IEEE article

AI powered NPCs fill a city

September 24, 2023 matt Comments 1 comment

Combining live voice recognition, voice synthesis, and an AI large language model, Replica Studios’ Smart NPCs for Unreal allows you to carry out real-time, non-scripted conversations with anyone on your virtual streets. You can even download the demo here and try it yourself (warning: it’s 25 gb!).

These fully simulated AI characters will respond to your live-spoken language in the demo. You can ask where they’re from, whether they believe in aliens, complement their clothes, what car they drive, get food recommendations, tell people you don’t like their haircut, ask for directions to the park (and they’ll give it to you and tell you to feed the pigeons), talk about their insurance plans, what crimes they have committed, start some rumors and conspiracy theories, and anything you can think of. It’s got a few quirky bits, but it’s pretty surreal.

If you think that’s crazy, also check out their AI powered voice actors. The amount of dynamic quality in their voices is pretty amazing. It is almost good enough to replace main character voice actors, but it sure could be used to fill out dozens and dozens of minor roles.

The original channel comes from Jeff Favignano:

https://youtu.be/rMfCpUhvbVg?si=7Dbvg-TaA6-u3ben