Grok | Forever Young
Celebrities Live Forever
TL;DR: Suzanne Somers has been recreated as an AI-powered humanoid robot by her husband Alan Hamel, opening up new challenges for the rights of the deceased and future content creation.
Key Points:
Legal Changes: There’s a growing need for laws to protect deceased celebrities from unauthorized AI recreations, with debates about a “right to be left dead.”
Industry Impact: Studios might prefer AI talent for cost savings and perpetual use, potentially affecting living actors’ opportunities and leading to more reboots.
Fan and Ethical Concerns: Reactions are mixed, with some finding comfort in AI interactions, while others see it as unethical or disturbing, raising questions about grief and memory.
Why It Matters: The creation of an AI-powered humanoid robot of Suzanne Somers, unveiled late last month by Hollo.ai and Realbotix in collaboration with her widower Alan Hamel, moves us closer to the world envisioned by the movie A.I. This synthetic twin, designed to mimic Somers’ voice, personality, and facial expressions, is trained on her extensive body of work, including 27 books and performances from shows like Three’s Company and Step by Step. Hamel’s intention is for this AI to appear in future projects, such as new episodes of Three’s Company, effectively “reactivating” Somers’ career posthumously.
Grok | The Undead Album
TL;DR: In Western Australia, a team of artists and scientists has grown a “mini-brain” from the late composer Alvin Lucier’s cells, creating a haunting, real-time musical installation that blurs the lines between art, science, and authorship. The project, Revivification, raises profound questions about creativity and ethics while echoing Lucier’s experimental legacy.
Key Points
Posthumous Collaboration: Alvin Lucier, a pioneering US composer who died in 2021, donated blood in 2020 to a team in Western Australia, enabling them to grow cerebral organoids—lab-grown neuron clusters—from his reprogrammed stem cells.
Live Performance: The installation, Revivification, features a “mini-brain” that generates sound via neural signals, interpreted through custom tech and amplified by 20 brass plates, creating an otherworldly, responsive soundtrack.
Interactive Design: The organoids not only produce sound but also react to ambient noise in the gallery, potentially adapting or “learning” over time, as captured by a 64-electrode mesh.
Why It Matters: The debut of Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia proves that in the future our greatest musicians likely never stop producing. The project’s use of Lucier’s organoids, clusters of neurons that mimic the human brain, to both generate and absorb sound. While the team behind Revivification sees it as art first, its neural data might one day inform scientific advances, potentially influencing how studios and developers harness biotech for storytelling. For now, it stands as a bold experiment, amplifying Lucier’s legacy while challenging the industry to consider what it means to create in a post-human age.
Lifehacker | Quake Demo
TL;DR: Lifehacker plays AI generated quake and shares their experience describing it as odd and dreamlike.
Key Points:
Microsoft’s Muse model powers an experimental AI version of Quake II, originally released in 1997.
The AI Quake demo features a first-person perspective with basic game elements like a health bar and ammo counter, but suffers from instability and lag.
Movement triggers unpredictable shifts—enemies appear or vanish, rooms transform, and the environment feels fluid and dreamlike.
Why It Matters: Microsoft’s AI-powered Quake II experiment, is a proof-of-concept that exposes both potential and pitfalls. The Quake demo, built on Microsoft’s WHAM model trained on human gameplay data, delivers an experience that’s less a game and more a surreal sandbox—lagging inputs, vanishing enemies, and spontaneously morphing maps create a disjointed, almost hallucinatory feel.
The current form lacks objectives, stability, or genuine engagement limiting potential audience appeal. Media outlets may hype AI’s role in content creation, but this experiment underscores a gap: while AI can mimic game mechanics, it struggles to replicate the intentional design and emotional pull of titles like The Last of Us or Elden Ring. If Microsoft refines this into a consistent experience, it could influence how studios allocate resources, potentially freeing up artists to focus on narrative or polish.
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