Discovery 'Shark Week' has breaching great whites, looks back at 'Jaws' and starts with some dancing
Former 'Dancing With the Stars' host Tom Bergeron steps up for a marketing masterstroke by Discovery Channel's 'Shark Week' — 'Dancing with Sharks,' where humans and 20-foot-long hammerhead sharks do a little mambo.
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Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How AI, robotics and late artist Morrisseau are helping fight art fraud
Famed Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau was browsing a Vancouver gallery with his longtime friend Cory Dingle around 1993 when a painting stopped them in their tracks. The pair asked who created it. The answer? "Norval Morrisseau." The trouble? The artist had never seen the work, let alone painted it. "We had a little chuckle and we left," Dingle recalled. "Then, I said, 'What do you want to do about this?' He said, 'You know, you can't police the world.'" Morrisseau, who died in 2007, was a self-taught, trailblazing artist known for his pictographic style and membership in the Indian Group of Seven. He was the first Indigenous artist to have his work shown in a contemporary gallery in Canada and now his paintings sell for millions. But the incident Dingle remembers proved to be an omen. At least 6,000 fake paintings have since been uncovered, costing Morrisseau's estate $100 million in losses. The phenomenon amounts to what police have called the biggest art fraud in world history. Finding fakes is time consuming work. It requires co-operation from galleries and private collectors, a trained, critical eye cast on anything purporting to be made by the late artist and the patience to keep pursuing justice through the court system. But now a new tool has emerged to help the battle: artificial intelligence. Bogged down by the enormity of the task at hand, Morrisseau's estate, which is run by Dingle, partnered with two art-loving professors to build software nicknamed "Norval AI" about three years ago. It can analyze art pieces and determine the probability that they're a genuine Morrisseau. "Because the fakes were so terrible ... we got to a point with our AI that it was so good at picking them out," Dingle said. "There was no problem." Yet the estate knew fakes were still out there. They were just getting harder to detect because court hearings were revealing the tell-tale signs of a fake Morrisseau — thinner paint lines, for example — which allowed fraudsters to make their works even more convincing. Enter Chloë Ryan. The then-engineering student loved making large-scale abstract paintings. Even though such works could sell for a decent amount, they often take weeks or months to create, narrowing the odds that she could make artistry a viable career. She could make prints of her pieces, but they just weren't the same because they lacked the texture of a real painting. The conundrum became a source of inspiration for Ryan, leading her to start tinkering with robots and paint on her Montreal balcony. She eventually developed Acrylic Robotics, a company that uses technology to paint pieces at the behest of an artist. The process starts with an artist painting with a stylus on a drawing table, which acts like a massive tablet. Amazon Web Services software analyzes and logs every movement, detecting millions of details in the piece, including the strokes, brush pressure, pigment and speed. "We like to think of AI as a powerful magnifying glass," said Patricia Nielsen, AWS Canada's head of digital transformation and AI. "It can detect those patterns and the anomalies that might be invisible to the human eye ... so art experts, historians, can dig in further." With that data, Acrylic's robotic arm can then paint a replica so precise, Ryan says it's indistinguishable from an original — exactly what Dingle needed to put Norval AI to the test. A mutual connection put him in touch with Ryan last August. Shortly after, they got to work. Because Morrisseau isn't alive to paint images on Ryan's tablet, Acrylic's robot (Dingle affectionately calls it Dodo) had a more complicated feat to accomplish. Dingle would send Ryan a hi-resolution image of one of Morrisseau's works. Acrylic Robotics would then have an artist learn about eccentricities of his style and paint the piece before Acrylic's robot would give it a try. Everything the robot painted was analyzed by the estate and Norval AI. The two sides have been going back and forth for about a year, picking out errors in the robot's execution and poring over new works. Early editions had several spots where both the estate and Norval AI could tell the robot had stopped a long stroke to pick up more paint — something uncharacteristic of Morrisseau. "If you look at one of our works randomly on the street, you wouldn't be able to say that's made by a robot, but we can't yet do all art under the sun because there's a lot of techniques that we haven't yet built in," Ryan said. "We can't use every tool in an artist's arsenal yet. If an artist is out here finger painting, obviously we can't do stuff like that." Newer editions of the Morrisseaus are about 69 per cent accurate and expected to improve even more. But Dingle admits, "I have kind of been holding back on getting to 100 per cent." He's scared of developing anything too perfect before he and Acrylic Robotics have found a foolproof method for ensuring a Morrisseau recreation can't be passed off as the real thing. It's a concern Ryan shares. "The worst thing that could happen is that we release this without consultation with groups that have been harmed by art forgery and this technology is used against artists," she said. They're currently exploring markings or other features that can be embedded in pieces to denote they're not originals. Once they settle on an ideal method, they'll have an avenue to disseminate recreations of Morrisseau's work — responsibly. While some might think that's the last thing an estate plagued by forgeries would want to do, Dingle sees it as a way to bring Morrisseau's work to the people who would value it most. "There's two schools named after Norval. There are healing institutions. There are academic institutions. There are remote Indigenous communities," said Dingle, sitting in front of a rarely-shown Morrisseau. "They could never afford to buy this painting, to hang it in their halls, to have the healing and the lessons of it, so we need to be able to produce high level reproductions that bring the life of that painting to these places." This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 20, 2025. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press Sign in to access your portfolio
CNET
19 minutes ago
- CNET
Get Ready for These New Emoji, Which Are Coming Out This Fall
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit devoted to developing, maintaining and promoting software standards and data, and it also releases new emoji once a year. And on July 17, also known as World Emoji Day, Unicode announced that the newest emoji will debut this September as part of Unicode 17.0. Here are the new emoji you can expect to see later this year. Trombone Treasure chest Distorted face Hairy creature (Sasquatch) Fight cloud Apple core Orca Ballet dancers Landslide "These new emoji have long-standing symbolic meanings, are visually distinctive and contain multitudes of expression," the Unicode Consortium wrote online. These new emoji were proposed in November 2024. According to Unicode, the data files for these emoji will be made available this fall as part of Unicode 17.0. Then, the emoji will likely appear on your device in spring 2026. Emojipedia, an online encyclopedia of emoji managed by people who research emoji, announced on World Emoji Day that the distorted face emoji won the award for Most Anticipated Emoji 2025. In 2024, the Unicode Consortium debuted new emoji in September 2024, including the face with bags under eyes and the splatter emoji. You can find those emoji now on your Android and iPhone devices, as well as across the internet. Correction, July 18: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the number of emoji that had been approved for the Unicode 17.0 update. Unicode has since confirmed that nine emoji have been approved, including the Landslide emoji. For more on emoji, here are all the emoji award winners for 2025, the favorite emoji among the CNET staff and how to decipher every emoji.
Washington Post
20 minutes ago
- Washington Post
She's the bassist in a band of strangers. It's their first (and last) show.
Maddy Knoth shifts back and forth in her red and pink Converse high-tops. She's busy debating early-aughts pop hits with the bandmates she met only a few weeks ago, but can already feel the adrenaline that builds before a live performance. Their set isn't for another three hours, and the members of newly formed Legends of Limewire are killing time before doors open to the public. Knoth paints her chipped nails with baby blue polish, and waves a piece of notebook paper with a handwritten set list to dry them. She hardly needs the note. She's played these songs dozens of times. The bass line grooves have sunk into her fingers. She's ready to play her first concert in her new city. After living in Memphis for three years, the city's music scene felt small. Knoth knew the other performers at open mic nights and the people who would come see her queer, femme punk band play backyard shows. When she moved to D.C. with her partner in December, she knew she had to start over. She had to find her way back into a creative scene, to take an active role in forming her identity beyond the corporate world that dominates much of D.C. culture. So she signed up for Flashband. The 13-year-old program, run by music school 7DrumCity, is a launchpad for Washington's hobbyist musicians. Participants enter a lottery for a slot. Winners attend a meet-and-greet event — speed dating, basically, for musicians. Everyone from young teens to retirees leaves as a member of a new band. About a month later, they perform in public. Knoth, 25, sort of knows the people she's taking the stage with tonight. This evening they've met each other's significant others for the first time, and learned what their day jobs are. But she trusts them, if not their penchant for Limp Bizkit. For the past month, they've met up for weekly rehearsals, and Knoth has spent hours in between plucking away in her bedroom. So now, as ticket holders of the sold-out show come pouring into the Atlantis — a grubby venue that holds 450, she feels ready. The bands have names like the Recessionists, Vote for Pedro and Mom's Spaghetti, and the first ones warm up the crowd with interpretations of Myspace-era hits. The third band begins, and the Legends of Limewire members get their cue to sneak backstage. Knoth meets them at the entrance to a yellow-lit hallway. 'Okay,' she mutters to herself, lifting her shoulders up with a deep breath. She climbs the stairs to the green room. A Flashband organizer runs through the checklist: 'Chords, cables, pedals, picks…' Knoth grabs a pair of green sunglasses — part of the band's outfit, a nod to the music-pirating site LimeWire that they're named for — and straps her bass guitar over her crop top. 'I really want eight more bars of cowbell,' one of her bandmates says. They were allotted 15 minutes for their set, and it's tight — they've factored in only 15 seconds for claps. 'They're probably not gonna pull us offstage,' Knoth responds. She talks herself through the set list: 'Take Me Out,' 'Can't Get You Out of My Head,' 'Electric Feel.' 'Let's make it count,' singer Aaron Conrado says. Their hands fall into the circle formed by their bodies and instruments, then shoot into the air. The beer Knoth sipped helped ease her nerves, but some are bubbling back up. Her bandmates are depending on her bass's steady pulse to keep them together. When she takes the stage, though, all she feels is excitement — the ease of being back in a spotlight she finds addictive. She looks out to the crowd, which ravels out to the bar at the far end and up across a balcony. It's at least twice the size of any she's played before. She locks eyes with her partner in the front row, who is wearing a shirt with the logo of the band Knoth had in Memphis. Conrado sings: So if you're lonely You know I'm here waiting for you. I'm just a crosshair I'm just a shot away from you Knoth lets her mind and fingers disconnect. Her body leads the groove. She shakes her wavy bob and shouts backup vocals. She hits every note in her 'Murder on the Dance Floor' solo, and dances as hard as anyone in the crowd. The audience erupts into cheers.
