AI Inspiration #4: Amazon’s Freaky AI-Designed iPhone Cases; An Animated Visual Web History; AR Tattoos for Brands
Here’s everything that’s new in artificial intelligence and computer vision, with a little tech pop culture to make the medicine go down. Our logic is undeniable.
“One of the things that’s very, very important in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine.”

[VIDEO] Coffee and Instagram: An Animated Love Story
Sorry, Instagram and Facebook, but people have been sharing pictures and videos of their coffee since the early ’90s, when the world’s first webcam went live. It was just the start of a revolution of the internet from a predominantly text-based medium to a picture-, video- and emoji-based one (brutalist web design fads aside). This dazzling animated video explains how today’s visually-dense repository of cat GIFs and Kardashian selfies got that way.
This Is Why AI Should Never Design iPhone Cases
A man wearing adult diapers. A cheese wheel on a set of killer abs. A woman getting Botox. Fantastic, freaky and funny are just a few adjectives one might use to describe the kooky smartphone case designs that an Amazon bot recently auto-generated from top online image searches. Photo editors and product designers don’t need to quit their day jobs just yet.
The Long Road to RoboCop Continues With Facial Recognition Body Cams
First there were police body cams, then autonomous cars in Dubai with biometric scanners, and now it’s cop body cams with built-in facial recognition. Motorola is working with AI company Neurala to produce the cameras, which use computer vision and real-time machine learning to recognize not only perps, but also missing kids (the software can learn simply from looking at pictures). Wethinks DARPA paid a lot more than a dollar for this research, though.
How AI and Video Games Will Revolutionize Marketing
If you thought gamification was a hoot, wait until you read up on how gaming will revolutionize marketing and business in the future. This fascinating panel of gaming-, marketing- and AI-experts covers topics such as simulation games that are literally made to machine learn from the players, smarter AI in-game bartenders and ideal times to advertise in gameplay. (Good rule of thumb, not after a humiliating player defeat.)
Why Every Brand Needs an AR Tattoo
Temporary tattoos are fun and don’t require any painful removal treatment. Temporary tattoos depicting brand logos raise the benefits by not forcing you to shill for a company any longer than you want to. But temporary tattoos of logos that come alive under the gaze of a computer vision-enabled AR smartphone camera are a nifty shot in the arm for consumers and brands alike, as the Clorox campaign in this account-based marketing roundup demonstrates.
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What Do Human Brains and Artificial Machines Have in Common?
It’s often said that the neural network, an essential component of machine learning and AI, is modeled on the human brain. But, it’s more like inspiration, because, ultimately, it’s all just ones and zeroes to a machine. And human brains are way more complex. This brief explainer demystifies the similarities and differences, so you can sound smart the next time someone makes this increasingly clichéd comparison between man and machine parts.