Japan has a declining population. The government, in all its wisdom, has decided to do something about this. Helping women maintain careers after giving birth? Fixing the toxic work culture that requires gruelingly long hours and male-dominated management? That can wait. The government is hoping robots will fix things. As recently reported in the mainstream media, the government plans to allocate a whopping ¥2 billion next year for giving out to local authorities that implement programs where residents find love -- assisted by artificial intelligence. In fact, about half of the ...

Is this future of idols? People often complain about the manufactured nature of idols, both in terms of the way they look and their music. Well, this development takes things to the next logical yet extreme step. Kyoto-based DataGrid has released a video showing the creation of a fully digital schoolgirl idol. In fact, it's dozens of smiling, innocent-looking schoolgirls -- a fully fledged supergroup of its own, and all generated by computer graphic pixels and artificial intelligence. To be honest, we don't know whether to be amazed or terrified. The realism is certainly amazing ...

Make the first "AI doll" based on gravure idol Ai Shinozaki. First off, there's some serious wordplay going on here: "AI doll" is aidoru (idol), while Shinozaki's name also references "artificial intelligence." In other words, some geeky boffins are planning to create a fully digital version of Shinozaki. Virtual idols already exist aplenty, from Vocaloid music idols to AKB48 temporary digital members and virtual dating game idols. How is this different? Well, they are going to use artificial intelligence based on Ai Shinozaki. The digital creation will speak like her and learn her ...