A multi-institutional team of electrical engineers in the Republic of Korea has overcome the problem of resolution degradation when bendable video screens are bent. In their project, reported in the journal Nature Communications, the group added fill factors between OLEDs to retain resolution on bendable screens.
To build bendable video screens, engineers have taken two approaches: developing bendable OLEDs that sit on a bendable background or adding serpentine interconnecting material between non-bendable OLEDs mounted on bendable backgrounds.
Since a method to mass produce bendable OLEDs has proven elusive, device makers have opted for the latter option. The problem with this option is that when the device is bent, the space between the pixels grows wider, revealing a darkness gap between them, resulting in loss of resolution.
In this new effort, the research team found a possible solution—adding super-thin OLEDs between the regular OLEDs that are only seen when the device is bent.
To build such a screen, the researchers created a stretchy elastomer and patterned it with traditional square OLEDs. They then added ultra-thin OLEDs to a glass plate and pressed them to the elastomer with the ultra-thin OLEDs situated between the traditional OLEDs.
The light from the fill factors, the team notes, moves outward, but also bounces off the sides of the regular OLEDs, preventing dark gaps. Testing showed that the method improved the geometrical fill factor from 87% to 97% during normal stretching.
The research team acknowledges that their test device had a pixel density of just 11 ppi, whereas commercial devices are typically in the range 300 to 450 ppi. But they suggest that limited testing showed that their approach could be scaled up for both higher ppi and for mass production.
They further suggest that their technique could be used to cover curved surfaces, such as spheres, and down the line, possibly to make wearable electronics.
More information:
Donggyun Lee et al, Stretchable OLEDs based on a hidden active area for high fill factor and resolution compensation, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48396-w
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Using fill factors to prevent loss of resolution in bendable video screens (2024, June 5)
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Some of the world’s major music labels are suing music generation services Suno and Udio, accusing the startups of violating the copyrights of top artists to train their generative AI engines without permission.
Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Records, Capitol Records and others—who filed the copyright infringement suits on Monday in federal courts in Boston and New York—are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per song or shares of the companies’ profits.
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist‘s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) chief executive Mitch Glazier said in a statement.
Examples cited in the lawsuits included prompts using Suno’s service to churn out songs mimicking copyrighted works of Chuck Berry, James Brown, Michael Buble, ABBA, and others.
Suno and Udio did not respond to requests for comment.
Breaching ownership rights of people’s artistic creations to train generative AI models has been a flashpoint as the technology races to become more capable and, ultimately, more profitable.
The two lawsuits, one against each company, center on generative AI services that allow people to make songs using basic prompts.
Suno and Udio have been evasive about how they train their AI models, saying that is a guarded secret, according to the complaints.
Music publishers are collaborating with “responsible developers” to build AI tools that respect the works of artists, according to the head of the RIAA, which announced the lawsuits.
“Real music comes from real life and real people,” Black Music Action Coalition chief executive Willie “Prophet” Stiggers said in the release.
“It is vital that artists and songwriters are in charge of their own work, story, and message.”
In April, hundreds of artists and songwriters including Billie Eilish, Smokey Robinson and the estate of Frank Sinatra signed an open letter urging protections against what they called an “assault on human creativity” posed by artificial intelligence.
“We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem,” read the letter, submitted by the non-profit Artist Rights Alliance.
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Major music labels sue AI startups over copyright infringement (2024, June 26)
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Google on Tuesday rolled out a retooled search engine that will frequently favor responses crafted by artificial intelligence over website links, a shift promising to quicken the quest for information while also potentially disrupting the flow of money-making internet traffic.
The makeover announced at Google’s annual developers conference will begin this week in the U.S. when hundreds of millions of people will start to periodically see conversational summaries generated by the company’s AI technology at the top of the search engine’s results page.
The AI overviews are supposed to only crop up when Google’s technology determines they will be the quickest and most effective way to satisfy a user’s curiosity—a solution mostly likely to happen with complex subjects or when people are brainstorming, or planning. People will likely still see Google’s traditional website links and ads for simple searches for things like a store recommendation or weather forecasts.
Google began testing AI overviews with a small subset of selected users a year ago, but the company is now making it one of the staples in its search results in the U.S. before introducing the feature in other parts of the world. By the end of the year, Google expects the recurring AI overviews to be part of its search results for about 1 billion people.
Besides infusing more AI into its dominant search engine, Google also used the packed conference held at a Mountain View, California, amphitheater near its headquarters to showcase advances in a technology that is reshaping business and society.
The next AI steps included more sophisticated analysis powered by Gemini—a technology unveiled five months ago—and smarter assistants, or “agents,” including a still-nascent version dubbed “Astra” that will be able to understand, explain and remember things it is shown through a smartphone’s camera lens. Google underscored its commitment to AI by bringing in Demis Hassabis, the executive who oversees the technology, to appear on stage at its marquee conference for the first time.
The injection of more AI into Google’s search engine marks one of the most dramatic changes that the company has made in its foundation since its inception in the late 1990s. It’s a move that opens the door for more growth and innovation but also threatens to trigger a sea change in web surfing habits.
“This bold and responsible approach is fundamental to delivering on our mission and making AI more helpful for everyone,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a group of reporters.
Well aware of how much attention is centered on the technology, Pichai ended a nearly two-hour succession of presentations by asking Google’s Gemini model how many times AI had been mentioned. The count: 120, and then the tally edged up by one more when Pichai said, “AI,” yet again.
The increased AI emphasis will bring new risks to an internet ecosystem that depends heavily on digital advertising as its financial lifeblood.
Google stands to suffer if the AI overviews undercuts ads tied to its search engine—a business that reeled in $175 billion in revenue last year alone. And website publishers—ranging from major media outlets to entrepreneurs and startups that focus on more narrow subjects—will be hurt if the AI overviews are so informative that they result in fewer clicks on the website links that will still appear lower on the results page.
Based on habits that emerged during the past year’s testing phase of Google’s AI overviews, about 25% of the traffic could be negatively affected by the de-emphasis on website links, said Marc McCollum, chief innovation officer at Raptive, which helps about 5,000 website publishers make money from their content.
A decline in traffic of that magnitude could translate into billions of dollars in lost ad revenue, a devastating blow that would be delivered by a form of AI technology that culls information plucked from many of the websites that stand to lose revenue.
“The relationship between Google and publishers has been pretty symbiotic, but enter AI, and what has essentially happened is the Big Tech companies have taken this creative content and used it to train their AI models,” McCollum said. “We are now seeing that being used for their own commercial purposes in what is effectively a transfer of wealth from small, independent businesses to Big Tech.”
But Google found the AI overviews resulted in people in conducting even more searches during the technology’s testing “because they suddenly can ask questions that were too hard before,” said Liz Reid, who oversees the company’s search operations, told The Associated Press during an interview. She declined to provide any specific numbers about link-clicking volume during the tests of AI overviews.
“In reality, people do want to click to the web, even when they have an AI overview,” Reid said. “They start with the AI overview and then they want to dig in deeper. We will continue to innovate on the AI overview and also on how do we send the most useful traffic to the web.”
The increasing use of AI technology to summarize information in chatbots such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT during the past 18 months already has been raising legal questions about whether the companies behind the services are illegally pulling from copyrighted material to advance their services. It’s an allegation at the heart of a high-profile lawsuit that The New York Times filed late last year against OpenAI and its biggest backer, Microsoft.
Google’s AI overviews could provoke lawsuits too, especially if they siphon away traffic and ad sales from websites that believe the company is unfairly profiting from their content. But it’s a risk that the company had to take as the technology advances and is used in rival services such as ChatGPT and upstart search engines such as Perplexity, said Jim Yu, executive chairman of BrightEdge, which helps websites rank higher in Google’s search results.
“This is definitely the next chapter in search,” Yu said. “It’s almost like they are tuning three major variables at once: the search quality, the flow of traffic in the ecosystem and then the monetization of that traffic. There hasn’t been a moment in search that is bigger than this for a long time.”
Outside of the amphitheater, several dozen protesters chained themselves to each other and blocked one of the entrances to the conference. Demonstrators targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus that provides artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli government. They contend the system is being lethally deployed in the Gaza war—an allegation Google refutes. The demonstration didn’t seem to affect the conferences attendance or the enthusiasm of the crowd inside the venue.
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Google unleashes AI in search, raising hopes for better results and fears about less web traffic (2024, May 14)
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