AI and cutting-edge computing the focus at SIGGRAPH conference

The SIGGRAPH conference in Denver is a mix of academia and art — a peek at the future of computing, effects for movies, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

Roaming the show floor inside the Colorado Convention Center, you might spot humanoid robots along with their four-legged companions, all powered by cutting-edge AI that gives them a mind of their own.

"In our case, actually, we have a lot of safety areas built into the system," says Shayegan Omidshafiei, chief scientist at Field AI.

Robot dogs may be a ways off, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes we'll soon be seeing a lot of AI-generated clones.

"Every creator can build sort of an AI version of themselves," Zuckerberg said during an appearance with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

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Zuckerberg calls them "agents" — digital assistants designed to handle a number of different tasks, including a company's customer service, or maybe a celebrity's interactions with fans.

"If you're a creator, you want to engage more with your community, but you're constrained on time. And similarly, your community wants to engage with you. But it's tough," Zuckerberg said.

For more than 50 years, the SIGGRAPH conference has been where the computer graphics industry comes to see the latest tech: translating realistic movements into video games, digital art exhibitions, and AI-generated images that now look exactly like the real thing.

Visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic was on hand to pull back the curtain on how artists created the powerful tornado simulations for the movie "Twisters".

Companies like Getty Images are focused on the ethical use of AI. Their new image-generator only uses their own approved picture library instead of scraping the internet for content that they don't own.

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"Our customers can use this in confidence knowing that they're not going to run into any sort of legal issues when they generate user content," said Bill Bon, senior director for creative operations at Getty.

The Getty system generates images that might be used in a corporate advertising campaign, stopping short of using copyrighted imagery. For example, if a user tried entering a prompt with the name Taylor Swift, the system could not render the image.

The SIGGRAPH conference runs through Thursday in Denver.