In a recent heartwarming story, Mr. Sun has touched the hearts of many by using AI face-swapping technology to create a video message from his late father.

The touching video captures Sun’s emotions as he replicates his father’s appearance and voice to convey a message of well-being to his grandmother. The entire process of face-swapping and video creation took a lot of effort and lasted nearly half a month, during which Sun couldn’t help but shed tears as he missed his deceased father.

In 2022, Sun’s father was diagnosed with a rare condition known as appendiceal mucinous adenocarcinoma (阑尾黏液腺癌). Despite Sun’s efforts to seek medical treatment for his father, the disease progressed rapidly, and his father passed away in 2023.

Concerned about his grandmother’s fragile health, the family decided to keep Sun’s father’s passing a secret. They fabricated (编造) a story, telling the elderly woman that her son was still receiving treatment in a Beijing hospital. The prolonged separation depressed the grandmother a lot, who continuously expressed her longing to speak with her son.

In a creative attempt to comfort his grandmother, Sun, inspired by science fiction films, decided to use AI face-swapping technology to create a video message from his father. Prior to recording the video, he even shaved off his bear d to look more like his late father. By using AI software, he successfully transformed his appearance into that of his father, delivering a heartfelt message to his grandmother: “Mom, it’s Jihai. I’m doing well in Beijing.” Despite the relatively low pixel (像素) quality, the grandmother believed the well-intentioned fabrication.

Sun admitted that his emotions almost broke down within the half-month, as every mention of his father’s name or a glance of his photograph brought great sorrow. He also expressed uncertainty about how long he can keep up the fabrication and whether he will make use of face-swapping again. Nevertheless, he is determined to follow in his father’s footstep to be a strong support for his family.

Modern inventions have greatly increased people’s love of speed. Motor cars cover a hundred miles in a little more than one hour, aircraft cross the world within a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year we produce motor cars which go even faster and each new computer is said to save precious seconds in handling tasks.

All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jet lag (时差反应): our bodies feel that they have been left behind in another time zone. Again, spending too much time in front of computers results in eye pain or finger pain. Mobile phones also have their dangers, according to some scientists. Too much use may do harm to our brains, a bad result we do not like to think about.

What do we do with the time we have saved then? Certainly not relax. We are so used to constant (连续不断的) activities that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

Modern inventions have brought us great benefits, but at the same time, we have lost a lot of fun as human beings. There was a time when some people’s lives were devoted simply to the farming of the land or the care of cattle. Their lives went on at a much slower speed, and in a   familiar pattern. We might admire a way of life like this, yet such a lifestyle will be just a dream for us nowadays. Modern technology has changed everything.

Robots have proved very useful in different situations. But those robots are small remote-controlled tanks with a mechanical (机械的) arm, and they can get stuck on narrow stairwells (楼梯井) and are stopped by ladders. “A lot of the places where you do disaster recovery are only accessible for people,” says Marc Raibert, the president of Boston Dynamics, which is providing advice and help for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to create the most advanced robots on earth. “If you have a humanoid (a machine or creature with the appearance and qualities of a human), access can be increased and you can use available tools.” In the future, DARPA hopes a humanoid robot will be able to drive trucks, and enter power plants.

That future is a long way off. Simple movements like squatting (蹲) are almost impossible for something with metal parts and skin that cannot bend, says Raibert. Still, recent progress is impressive enough that the military has begun to develop legged robots. The Office of Naval

Research is working with Virginia Tech on a humanoid firefighting robot, and Dynamics showed off its latest projects: Cheetah, a four•legged and headless robot able to run 28 miles per hour and do backflip. It can run with energy efficiency that could compete that of real running animals. “Half the land on earth is too rough, sandy, or rocky for wheeled things,” says Raibert. “Humans and animals can go to those places. However, they don’t have the capacity to carry heavy loads in all kinds of terrains (地形). Legged robots like cheetah are the only successful examples that do what we’re trying to do.”

None of the walking robots is meant to fight. They’re designed to put out fires and clean up industrial accidents. But they are all funded by the military. “I’m well aware of how the world works,” says Dennis Hong, founding director of Virginia Tech’s robotics lab. “Robots for me are tools to help society, not to fight in wars. But once a technology leaves our lab, there’s no way to control how people can use it.”

A．

B．

C．

D．