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Is this Twitter bot the next Bob Ross?

Bob Ross is a man that needs no introduction, but I’ll write one anyway. Bob was a television host from long ago that taught the world how to paint. His signature afro, calming voice, and beautifully hand-painted vistas made him a household name in the 1980s and 1990s, until he lost his battle with

How AI is shaping the future of interactive games

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. In the 2013 film Her, protagonist Theodore plays a videogame where he is surprised by a wild, swearing artificially intelligent cartoon character. The foul-mouthed little alien launches into a conversation with Theodore, remaining stubbornly

The perfect videogame for people into stargazing

I like to dream about space—the flowering alien plant life light years away from Earth, the planets circling a big burning star rivaling our sun. It’s water on Mars and planets made up of swirling gas that I think about, too. I’ll conjure up in my mind the planets lurking just beyond our solar syste

I fell in love with a Soviet robot and all I got was hacked

You get a message from an unknown number that doesn’t say much more than “hello,” and after a brief response, those dreaded words: “your device has been compromised.” You splutter and demand answers. The person on the other line is unhelpful; weaves some grand tale of identity theft and infinitely v

Get ready to build a relationship with an emotional AI this September

Last time we heard about Event[0] was back in February 2015 with a 20-minute playable demo. That was a while ago, so it’s understandable that we now have a new trailer and a confirmed September 2016 release date (plus, it’s being backed by Indie Fund now). Léonard Carpentier, the producer of Event[0

StarCraft II: Battlefield of Ethics

Pale, crumbled skin and brightly glowing blue eyes. A weak but upright figure, covered in heavy, hovering armor and a blade of pure psi­-energy on each arm. The Protoss of the StarCraft universe are masters in complementing their seemingly weak physiology with highly advanced technology to produce a

Don’t worry: The Last Guardian is still coming out in 2016

When we last saw the Fumito Ueda-directed The Last Guardian, it was E3 of last year. The sun was shining, as it often is in Los Angeles, and the tweet-buzz was chirping. The long-anticipated follow-up to Ico (2001) and Shadow of the Colossus (2005) wasn’t dead after all. Prior to the surprise traile

How computers find naked people

We are all just collections of limbs and appendages, naked before the Internet. Some of us—or some of our devices—just may not know this yet. Curiously, it’s our devices that lag that lag behind in this regard. The Internet, as was correctly noted in Avenue Q, may be for porn, but identifying nudity

Smart devices still struggle to cope with mental health crises

Content warning: This article discusses suicide and depression. /// Most days can be good days, even when you’re diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Or at least they can be made to look as such. You learn to put on a good face, to make it through the day. All of this means that when you spiral—an

Just what are we losing to Google’s AlphaGo?

In Tang dynasty China, Go was one of the skills socially required of a certain class of educated elite—along with calligraphy, painting, and the ability to play the stringed guqin, it was part of a kind of artistic quadrivium. The art and beauty of the game are present in the way it is played, but a

This Go student has become the Go master—and it’s a computer

If Go is mentioned in the US, it’s in the context of complicated games, or hard games, or games with some element of “purity.” It’s just white stones and black stones on a nineteen by nineteen board. You play by putting stones down, not moving them, if you surround your opponent’s stones they are “c

What is #DeepDream and why is everyone getting so weird with it?

To answer your question, Mr. Dick, yes, androids do dream of electric sheep. Or, at least, artificial intelligence does. And it’s less sheep and more like an insectoid nightmare of sheep as seen through a faint kaleidoscopic filter. We are fascinated and disturbed, Mr. Dick, but the future isn’t qui

How Facebook’s scary artificial intellegence could change game consoles

Last week Facebook made public their plans to establish an artificial intelligence lab, a new research center devoted to giving you the content you care about. The new technology, which is purely theoretical at this point, aims to analyze video and voice, delivering to your news feed the cutest kitt

The eternal futility of two computers playing rock, paper, scissors

A duo of interactive media artists have pitted two Macbook Pros against one another in a never-ending game of rock-paper-scissors. There is an algorithm that picks between paper, scissors, or rock running on both computers, which are connected by an ethernet cable. The winner gets a point.  Going by