Artificial Intelligence: Promise and Peril

During the HPA Tech Retreat eXtra (TR-X) last month, Phil Lelyveld, program lead for the AR/VR Initiative at the Entertainment Technology Center @ USC, spoke about “Artificial Intelligence: Immersion, Story, Technology and Ethics.” He started by reminding attendees that although the market has divided “virtual reality” and “augmented reality” into two separate verticals, it’s actually a continuum. “The goal is to create objects or experiences indistinguishable from real experiences, which can impact your brain like a real experience,” he says. Researcher Skip Rizzo, director for the Medical Virtual Reality Institute for Creative Technologies, describes all of it as “mental stimuli,” noting that “we already live in a mixed reality world.”
As it advances, this world of mixed reality will also be impacted by social media, world building, crowd-sourcing and data from dozens of Internet of Things devices, from smart watches to smart houses. Then comes artificial intelligence. “AI will shape and filter the information you get through AR or VR, so it can have a huge impact on how you view the world,” he says. Lelyveld showed “Eclipse,” a music video commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi that was made completely in AI systems. “When it was shown in film festivals, side by side with other music videos created by humans, the audience couldn’t tell the difference,” he reports.
Continue reading the full article in Hollywood Professional Association.