Ars Technica: Are Roblox’s new AI coding and art tools the future of game development?. “At the Game Developers Conference Monday, Roblox rolled out a new set of AI tools designed to let the company’s millions of player-creators create usable game code and in-game 2D surfaces using nothing but simple text descriptions.”
Ars Technica: Making faces: How to train an AI on your face to create silly portraits. “In this walkthrough, I’ll show you how to install Stable Diffusion locally on your computer, train Dreambooth on your face, and generate so many pictures of yourself that your friends and family will eventually block you to stop the deluge of silly photos. The entire process will take about two hours from start to finish, with the bulk of the time spent babysitting a Google Colab notebook while it trains on your images.”
Ars Technica: AI-imager Midjourney v5 stuns with photorealistic images—and 5-fingered hands. “On Wednesday, Midjourney announced version 5 of its commercial AI image-synthesis service, which can produce photorealistic images at a quality level that some AI art fans are calling creepy and ‘too perfect.’ Midjourney v5 is available now as an alpha test for customers who subscribe to the Midjourney service, which is available through Discord.”
The Guardian: ‘ChatGPT said I did not exist’: how artists and writers are fighting back against AI. “Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest.”
WIRED: How WIRED Will Use Generative AI Tools. “This is WIRED, so we want to be on the front lines of new technology, but also to be ethical and appropriately circumspect. Here, then, are some ground rules on how we are using the current set of generative AI tools. We recognize that AI will develop and so may modify our perspective over time, and we’ll acknowledge any changes in this post. We welcome feedback in the comments.”
Washington Post: The right’s new culture-war target: ‘Woke AI’. “The new skirmishes over what’s known as generative AI illustrate how tech companies have become political lightning rods — despite their attempts to evade controversy. Even company efforts to steer the AI away from political topics can still appear inherently biased across the political spectrum.”
The Verge: The AI-powered Seinfeld spoof is set to return to Twitch with new guardrails in place. “The AI-generated Seinfeld spoof was suspended for making transphobic remarks, but its makers say there are new content moderation systems in place.”
New York Times: This Tool Could Protect Artists From A.I.-Generated Art That Steals Their Style. “Say, for example, that [artist Karla] Ortiz wants to post new work online, but doesn’t want it fed to A.I. to steal it. She can upload a digital version of her work to Glaze and choose an art type different from her own, say abstract. The tool then makes changes to Ms. Ortiz’s art at the pixel-level that Stable Diffusion would associate with, for example, the splattered paint blobs of Jackson Pollock.”
Analytics India: Find the Real AI Artists with This Powerful New Tool . “[Stable Attribution] works on reverse engineering principles to extract the images that were used to create an AI image. The platform also allows attribution to the artists whose images were used for the creation.”
Search Engine Land: Google launches Bard, its answer to ChatGPT – here’s what it looks like. “Google is now testing Bard, its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google CEO Sundar Pichai today announced the soft launch of Bard to a set ‘trusted testers,’ showcasing what this early experimental release looks like with some examples.”
Motherboard: AI-Generated ‘Seinfeld’ Show Banned on Twitch After Transphobic Standup Bit . “‘Nothing, Forever,’ the infinitely-generating AI version of Seinfeld that tens of thousands of people were watching has been banned for 14 days from Twitch after Larry Feinberg—a clone of Jerry Seinfeld—made transphobic statements during a standup bit late Sunday night.”
Motherboard: ‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI. “There is one woman and three men who seem to be the animated versions of Seinfeld’s main characters, Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer. But unlike Seinfeld, these characters are set in a modern-era NYC, and their voices and bodies look and sound robotic. That’s because ‘Nothing, Forever’ is a live-streaming show that’s almost entirely generated by algorithms. It’s been streaming non-stop on Twitch since December 14.” I’ve never seen an episode of Seinfeld so I lack context, but this is some weird stuff.
Beyond Search: Definitive AI Market Snapshot. “Matt Shumer, the co-founder of Otherside AI, posted on Twitter ‘the definitive market map Twitter thread.’… The format of the information in Twitter is helpful, but I prefer information in tabular form. Here is Mr. Shumer’s ‘map’ presented with the company name and its url.” I think you’re going to be surprised at how long this list is already.
Futurism: Leaked Messages Show How CNET’s Parent Company Really Sees AI-Generated Content. “Kevin Hughes, the head of AI content for Red’s EDU division, is a true believer in the company’s vision of sites populated largely by AI-generated content. On LinkedIn, for instance, he recently boasted that the company’s ‘dirt cheap’ AI can crank out articles so efficiently that it costs ‘less than a penny for 750 words’ — a practice that he wrote was ‘generating millions of dollars in revenue.’”
TechCrunch: Google created an AI that can generate music from text descriptions, but won’t release it. “An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description. But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it.”
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