Synthesia enabled a blogger from Neptune.ai to create a customized Christmas greeting with a Santa avatar. (Source: Neptune.ai)

Machine Learning Christmas Blog Captures Array of Holiday Spirit Options Online

Neptune AI‘s blog, written by Pawel Kijko gives a glimpse of how AI machine learning can create a merry or scary Christmas, based on the input fed into it and the amount of human intervention applied. Without people involved, it tends to lean toward the side of horror.

Kijko compiled past efforts and added new ones in the blog from November 17, which include everything from MIT’s 2018 effort to let AI write movie plots (Santa Fight Club, anyone?) to Google’s Santa Claus tracker, an app with games and other fun tailored for children, which has been around since 2004. Another is the nonsensical Christmas carol posted on Digg.com. While we’ve written about some of these oddities in the past, it’s fascinating to see how far holiday ML efforts have evolved.

One of the more intriguing examples is the holiday message Kijko created through Synthesia, an AI platform that allows anyone to create a video with an avatar of their choice—even using their own image. His use of a Santa to send a message with an animated background looks good, but Santa’s pronunciations are a bit laughable—instead of saying “Welcome Nep-tooners,” in his greeting, he pronounces it “Nep-tunners.” He also sounds like a computer when he says, “I will now go to North Pole and prepare some packages for you.” (My AI writing app, to its credit, keeps trying to fix his statement with a “the” before North Pole.)

A neural network, too, created this Christmas light show. More human intervention is definitely needed. And better music.

We think it will be interesting to see how similar apps evolve once the next version of GPT—which is expected to be savvier than ever—is applied to the efforts.

read more at neptune.ai