ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE — current posts

Between Humans and Machine: The Iron Giant's Reflection of AI

Popular media has often portrayed technology as a looming threat to society and human livelihood. However, animation as a medium has provided a unique lens through which to explore the nuances of humanity's interaction with technological forces. Brad Bird's feature The Iron Giant (1999) stands as a poignant example of this exploration. By analyzing the use of hybrid animation techniques and storytelling in the film, I aim to unravel a metaphorical narrative that delves into humanity's relationship with technology, as well as its modern-day resonance with perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) and assumptions on the threat of machine learning to humanity.

EDITORIALAlyssa LamellNovember 22, 2024TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, HOLLYWOOD, CEL ANIMATION, DIGITALComment

The Role of Animation in Creating New Visions for the Future

In the libraries of history and literature, there’s a recurring theme: it’s not enough to have knowledge, you have to be able to navigate it, accessing and linking relevant pieces of information that often seem disparate. The goal of the Library of Alexandria in Ancient Egypt was to amass all the knowledge in the world in one place, and the world’s first known index system, called the pinakes, was developed to organise the expanding collection as it became more and more unwieldy.

EDITORIALElizabeth CoxOctober 25, 2024ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, KNOWLEDGE, TECHNOLOGY, DIGITALComment

Animation vs Automation: Labour, Artificial Intelligence, and the Silent Crisis in the Animation Industry

In 2009, Vivian Sobchack asked: “what might it mean to bring together the concepts and practices of ‘animation’ and ‘automation’”? At the time Sobchack was writing on the visibility of labour within a modern computer-generated cinematic framework, where computers have become advanced enough that they appear to “have a life of their own” (2009, 375). In her examination of Pixar’s computer-animated film WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), Sobchack notes that it is the machines, the robots like WALL-E and EVE, who are imbued with “the movement of life,” while the humans are left motionless.

EDITORIALOliver VigniJune 28, 2024ANIMATION, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, LABOUR, HOLLYWOOD, INDUSTRYComment

Empowering Inclusion through Animation: Pioneering Digital Resources for Cultural Competency at King’s College London

The story began with discussions with colleagues about cultural competence content to train staff and students. I appreciated the unique insights I had on these perspectives, both as an outsider (experiences I had as a non-native) and as an insider (working as an academic in the UK for the past 17 years). Driven by a desire to address this issue, I began exploring the less overt forms of bias, i.e., microaggressions. While explicit biases are widely acknowledged for their impact, implicit biases are subtler and vary significantly based on individual backgrounds, education, and conditioning.

Another Kind of Magic: Méliès, Mercury, and Machine Learning

The music video for Queen’s “Heaven for Everyone” from their then-final record Made in Heaven (1995) - and a song that originally appeared on Shove It (1991), an album by drummer Roger Taylor’s side project The Cross (and featuring Freddie Mercury as a guest vocalist) - includes somewhat surprisingly footage from Georges Méliès’ early ‘trick’ films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).

EDITORIALChristopher HollidayMarch 8, 2024TECHNOLOGY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, VOICE, STARDOM, CELEBRITY, DIGITALComment

The Case for Progress: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Neuralink

What if you could Google search in your mind? What if you could have a much better memory? Be effortlessly good at arithmetic, or able to suddenly display a talent for drawing or composing music ? What if you could communicate your thoughts and feelings in rich detail directly to another specific human being without speaking? What if you could become much smarter? What would you do?

EDITORIALVictoria BaltagFebruary 9, 2024ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ROBOTS, MACHINE, POSTHUMANISMComment