Author: Aurora Cai

  • A Song for Grandma (ft. suno, chatgpt, and mom)

    My final project is a music video. Composed of Chinese lyrics, it is a song memorizing my grandmother, who passed away in August 2020 due to cancer. The song was generated by Suno AI with lyrics[1] written by ChatGPT, prompted by my mother’s writings about grandma[2]. The footages within the video were old pictures and…

  • AI’s accessibility

    Well, in light of the recent wave of craze among people all over the world focusing on AI, we have spent a whole semester discussing topics around AI and we also researched its functions by actually trying those AI tools. I just realized that those tools that seem very familiar to us that we could almost use by default – such…

  • good news but for uk

    The Biggest Deepfake Porn Website Is Now Blocked in the UK Obviously, the UK just made a big move to prevent the deepfake sexual abuse content. The article indicates that all UK IP addresses will be blocked from accessing the biggest deepfake porn website. Previously, it was illegal for people in the UK to share sexualized…

  • so i quit playing chess

    I quit playing chess for almost 10 years. Before I quit, chess was my main elementary school extracurricular activity – practicing it with peers and coaches, doing puzzles, researching openings and endgames, traveling across the country for tournaments, etc. That was early 2010s. Back then I didn’t even have my cellphone not to mention computer.…

  • A battle with AI or just ourselves?

    The Terminator really sets the machine character, in a sci-fi film, to its most extreme end out of all the AI characters that we have seen so far this semester. The next similar character to the Terminator might be Ava from Ex Machina: both share the inorganic, steel-like machine “bodies” under the seemingly human-like skin,…

  • ai rights and blade runner ip reader post

    Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights While the article acknowledged the current inefficiency and shortcomings of the development of automated systems and advanced technology that relies heavily on users’ data and online statistics, it also unambiguously expresses the White House’s open-minded attitude to technological advancements. Even though titled “AI Bill”, the five pillars stated…

  • Aurora Video Essay on Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

    Like many sci-fi films set near an anthropocentric future that have thematic discussions on the isolation nurtured in distant space, the identity crisis raised among clones, the depiction of artificial machines, and their intellectual consciousness, Duncan Jones’ Moon also poses the dire question of what makes a human being, in contrast to a robot AI…

  • Revealing conspiracy through stereotypes & Exploring Black Awakening through sci-fi

    Setting aside the cloning component, They Cloned Tyrone (2023)presents a twisted thriller, showcasing prevalent skepticism among Black people. The central theme revolves around the conspiracy theories where African Americans suspect their citizenship and freedom are being stripped away, leading to rioting as a means to vent their anger and assert themselves through violent actions. It is…

  • ai-powered storyboard

    Before OpenAI released their groundbreaking “Sora”, there were already many people creating or using AI to facilitate their production process. It seems that people in this industry are more inclined to embrace the new technology than to repel it, which is a bit contradicting to the overall pessimistic sentiment that I perceive in our class.…

  • Fordism and Systematic Exploitation

    In NOEMA’s article, the authors brought up the issue of labor exploitation in the process of training AI and related fields of machine learning. It is not as neat and clean or high-grade technology as it appears to be, but rather an inhuman and capitalistic machine fueled up with millions of human bodies who are…