[This Motherboard story doesn’t use the term and isn’t about any traditional type of presence, but it describes a presence phenomenon in which humans overlook the key role of artificial intelligence technology in their mediated experience. See the original version for a Twitter post and link to an extended conversation, and Futurism’s March 2020 story “This Grad Student Used a Neural Network to Write His Papers.”  –Matthew] Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are Essays written by AI language tools like OpenAI’s Playground are often hard to tell apart from text written by humans.…

[We haven’t heard much about Google’s Project Starline for a while, but this first-person report from The Verge indicates that Google is gradually expanding access to, and pursuing use cases for, the “next generation 3D video chat booth.” In addition to describing the impressive illusions it evokes, the author makes this key observation about both Starline and Meta’s virtual and mixed reality efforts: “I found it striking that two of the biggest tech companies in the world are trying to improve virtual presence.” See the original story for more images and the 1:51 minute “heartwarming” video. –Matthew] [Image: This image…

[Amid the incessant hype about virtual reality and the metaverse, honest assessments and advice from an expert can be both refreshing and valuable. John Carmack illustrates this in the Ars Technica story below; the original version features additional sidebars and Carmack’s hour-long unscripted talk at Meta Connect 2022 (which is also available on YouTube). For related assessments, and some historical context, see “What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution?,“ also from Ars Technica, and “Virtual reality will now ruin ‘The Office’” from Cracked. –Matthew Carmack: “There’s a bunch that I’m grumpy about” in virtual reality Lonely lecture as a…

[The evolution of artificial intelligence systems that generate images, and now videos, from text prompts, has been particularly rapid this year. As the qualifiers in this story from MIT Technology Review (and others) suggests, it’ll still be a while before a member of the public can generate complete, complex and convincing audiovisual renderings of imagined objects, people and events, but the prospects are both intriguing and concerning. The original MIT Technology Review story includes three example videos, and for more on Meta’s system see coverage in The Verge. Google has already answered Meta’s work with its own Imagin system– see…

[Wired reports on Amazon’s improvements in, and longer term plans for, its home robot Astro, which include evolutions in form (limbs?) and function (elder care? companionship?) likely to generate a variety of medium-as-social-actor presence responses. Key quotes: “the company firmly believes domestic robots will one day become widespread. And they described how such devices offer a powerful way for Amazon to fulfill its main objective—anticipating customers’ every want and need.” and “’This is the beginning.’ Don’t expect Astro to evolve into something wildly more capable overnight—or Amazon to give up on the project.” –Matthew Amazon Wants Its Home Robot, Astro,…

[This insightful Big Think interview with the director of the documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix,” about the ultimate form of presence and its meanings and implications, isn’t new, but examples of people interpreting events as examples of the phenomenon continue to appear in the news, as noted in the new Yahoo! story, “TikToker convinced she finds ‘glitch in the matrix’ when unpacking after her move: ‘Your timelines merged’”; see the original Big Think story for different images and the documentary’s trailer (also available on YouTube). –Matthew ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ documentary explores the dark side of simulation theory…