AI Movie Promo

An AC sends: "I recently stumbled upon one of the coolest movie promotions I have ever seen. If you download the trailer and notice the second frame of credits is "Sentient Machine Therapist-Jeanine Salla". Searching for this on google.com leads to a plethora of pages seemingly outlining some fictional murder mystery having to do with robots. For those of you who are too lazy to follow this trail yourselves, Ain't It Cool News has a list of most of the links." The trend of seeding the web with fictitious pages about your movie/product/whatever appears to be catching on, and this movie has really gone off the deep end. Was X-Men the first one to do this?

Comments

A list of phone numbers to call:

[DoorFrame]

here are all the secret phone numbers you can call to get more steps into the story... if you so desire:

503 321 5122 (weird ass woman... # from trailer call first)
212 502 1177 (evan chan's distraught wife)
919 425 2310 (nancy re: the funeral)
212 613 1680 (living homes designs)

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Advertising gone too far

[SMN]

This New York Post article details the extent of AI's advertising campaign:
NO EXPENSE SPARED WITH OUTRAGEOUS PROMOTION OF 'AI'

And the obligatory hide-the-karma-whoring comment: It may seem like a pretty neat idea, as this story's submitter thought, but look at the message this is sending -- people are so gullible that a massive advertising campaign can make or break a movie. Remember, many websites does not a good movie make. I, for one, will wait until I see the reviews. The last time I saw a movie based on advertising alone, I wound up watching Independence Day. Should have known better =)

Re:In our lifetimes...

[ajs]

you also have the technology called "intrusive/non-intrusive brain scanning", which, according to ray, would allow us to "download" our brain structure into computers. Yeah, I considered the idea a bit weird too when i read it.

It's not that it's a weird technology, it's that it doesn't make any sense. Imagine if I told you that I was going to build a company that would be just like Microsoft by building the same sorts of buildings that Microsoft has and populating them with the same height/weight people. You'd laugh at me, and with good reason.

• We have yet to define where the line between intelligence and sentience is.

You dont have to define the line to cross it.

I disagree. You have to know where you're going, when you're alone in a vast desert looking for the one oasis. You have a small chance of stumbling on it, but I would not bet on it.

if you take a look at some of the existing robots

Let's ignore the idea of a Turing Test for dogs for a moment (given how many holes there are in the idea of a Turing Test for human intelligence). If you look at any of the hard research in AI, you will find that the brick wall is feedback and stability. If you build a machine capable of handling the gigantic feedback loops that make up intelligence, you build something which is very nearly guaranteed to be unstable.

How do you solve this? Well, some think that genetic algorithms are the solution, and I tend to agree, but that leads to another problem....

If you are going to create an intelligence out of a self-evolving simulation, you need many, many generations of simulated life and death with carefully controlled conditions. This means that you either need thousnands of years or computers that are orders of magnitude faster than you will eventually need to run the final proogram. So, while we might have the technology to run an AI in 20 years, we may have to wait another 50 for the technology to create one....

Again, we could be 2 years from "eureka!", but I don't see signs that that is the case.

• It's quite possible that sentience requires a very different kind of computer than we have (e.g. non-Von Neuman architectures).

This could be true, but quantum computers are on the way

I'll just assume you were kidding, since every use of quantum computing I've ever seen is a simulation of a set standard parallel computers. I was talking about an actual paradigm shift in the way computation occurs (e.g. a move away from math/boolean logic as the basis for computing). I don't know if that will be neccessary, I was just pointing out that we don't know what will be neccessary yet.

Re:Once again...

[Speare]

I haven't seen all these "Slashdot advocates boycotts" and "Slashdot wants you to stick it to RIAA" posts. Maybe you can provide some links that aren't followups to some nested thread. Maybe you can show evidence of a pattern of recommendations, evangelations, prostelizations, petitions, assignments, pleas or agreements that set up this official Slashdot Political Bloc of which you speak.

There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.

All I see is a group of nerds who sit in their condos posting things to their own weblog that seem interesting to them. Some of them point out MPAA shenanigans, and some of them beat their chests about censorship. Many of the stories aren't even about these hot political topics; watch the stories on anime, journaling filesystems, quickies, book reviews, laugh-it's-funny stuff, advice-seeking about legal or business matters, and what distro of Linux someone likes.

There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.

If you want to organize a boycott, do it. If you want to post non-registration-required New York Times links, if you want to shop at Amazon's competitors, if you want to destroy DVDs to show your moral indignation, do it. You may even find other people who agree with you on this issue or that issue.

There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.

Don't expect Slashdot editors, or thousands of Slashdot readers to follow along like some Million Geek March. We're not organized, and speaking for myself only, I like it that way.

There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.

Eschew groupthink. Think for yourself. Be an individual. Make your own decisions.

x-men first?

[pf kro]

Was X-Men the first one to do this?

What about the Blair Witch?
--
steve

In our lifetimes...

[Temporal]

In 1988, a man named Ray Kurzweil predicted, based on various mathematical calculations, that a computer would beat the chess grandmaster ten years later. Deeb blue beat Kasperov in 1997.

In 1999, the same man made a few new predictions in a book entitled The Age of Spiritual Machines. Here are the predictions:

• In twenty years, the average $1000 home computer will have the processing power of a human brain.
• In thirty years, the average $1000 home computer will have the processing power of the entire human race.

Prepare to witness the most significant event since the dawn of life on Earth: The move from evolution by selection to evolution by design. It's going to happen within 20 years whether you like it or not.

This is not fiction. This is reality.

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taking all the fun out of web-based narrative :)

[phenomenologism]

with these things i like to see if i can determine what entity is creating the hoax as quickly as i can. once i figure out that it is (being set in the future is something of a giveaway, though). this is done with the magic of WHOIS (also available in a handy spray at register.com). simply put it's the best way to quickly uncover who's behind the scenes when you think you're being fed a line via a website, or in this case a few.

Lee Jeans w/ Supergreg and the other two guys was really sloppily done. all the adminstrative contacts in the WHOIS records were from "Fallon.com." which after two more minutes of hunting i learned was an agency that had the Lee Jeans account.

mutantwatch.com was registered to 20th Century Fox. lame.

Blair Witch was also lame and registered to Artisan or Disney or something.

These guys (AI) did it right. all the contacts for the domains are registered to "Ghaepetto, Bianca," "Ghaepetto, Carla" and "Anna Ghaepetto," and so on. each of the records is formatted somewhat differerently BUT has the same technical contact, so it's kinda easy to tell the jig is up. but i kinda guessed it immediately given that i knew the movie was coming out and was similarly themed. "Ghaepetto" (nice allusion) has gotta be a code name for the web project, or maybe something or someone from the movie that i couldn't dig up. searches on google and NL for "Ghaepetto" turn up ZILCH. my hat's off; that's about the best and artiest way to sidestep geeks doing WHOIS on your sly undercover internet marketing schemes.

-jeff

Once again...

[Karma Sink]

Once again, the Slashdot community charges off to tell us about another movie tht is made by the MPAA, a group which has been (successfully) attempting to take down 2600, and trying to strip us all of our freedoms.

Look at some of the movies they've supported. The Matrix. X-Men. I shit you not, The Emperor's New Groove. Over and over, Slashdor shows us that they're willing to take a hard stance over something, until such a time as it becomes inconvenient.

I urge everyone to avoid this, and any other MPAA movie, until such a time as they stop attempting to deny us our rights. Take that 7.50 and give it to the EFF, or to 2600's legal defense fund. As long as we keep watching the "cool movies" they put out, they will never take us as a serious threat.

Hell, we're some of their best customers.

I spent tonight ...

[nachoworld]

Friday night in my room trying to deceipher the system of websites. There are hundreds of pages of information set up all pretending that we are in the future. By decoding a chemistry cryptogram here I found out that coronersweb.org set up a case file for Evan Chan who died on a boat having sex with a sexbot. I found out about Evan Chan by calling Jeanine Salla's number, 212-502-1177 and going to extention #2. The number I found on her website. She's important because she's the sentient machine therapist listed in the credits in the trailer.

But perhaps the most esoteric thing I found was that there are notches in the 'Coming "Spring 2001"'. Spring 2001 has 10 characters, the same as a telephone number. That number was, corresponding the notches, 503-321-5122.

The information above is only ~3% of all information found on the web pertaining to the movie. It must have taken programmers well over a thousand man hours to put all this up. AICN is definitely the way to find out more.

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