AI Music Just Got Crazy Good

After fleeing war and a surgery that left her bedridden, she found AI art

Olena is a Ukrainian photographer who fled to Turkey when the war began. An operation left her bedridden for three months, unable to shoot photos. She turned to AI art.

"All I had was my imagination and my fingertips," she said. "AI opened a new door. For me it's like clean air."

Olena's images are both beautiful and haunting. She says it's an expression of her inner mind, but not about the conflict. "I decided not to make art about the war. It's too hard for me."

Olena is now featured on Foundation, Objkt and was showcased at Scope during Art Basel 2022. Love her work? Collect her NFTs here.

"Blockchain artist" wants Koreans to be free to say what they really think
A new social art experiment is attempting to reveal how Koreans think and what they are willing to say anonymously (which could be mostly commentary about mixed martial arts by the looks of things).

Conceived by pseudonymous "blockchain artist" Peti Triot, the project features an online messenger that anyone can use to enter text and have it published on YouTube and Twitter stripped of any identifying metadata. The project promises to make the source untraceable using Qamon, a messaging platform operating on the Everscale blockchain that advertises anonymous p2p communication. A real world version will be installed in April in Seoul's Desiego gallery.

Have artists and art projects we should feature? Send them to artpitches@thisismeteor.com

Dancing with the prompts

A team at Google has pulled off an incredible new text-to-music AI. Just type in a phrase to create irresistible melodies and beats. The samples will blow your mind.

MusicLM

Click here if the embed above doesn't work for you.

MusicML joins a crowded field, but sets a new standard. OpenAI’s Jukebox, Amper, Aiva and others have been available publicly for years, and have achieved good results using inputs like genre and style. Aiva has written an “Opus 1 for Piano Solo,” released an album and composed music for a video game. Due to training data and other limitations, none before have been able to reliably produce complex music from nothing more than a text prompt.

By contrast, MusicLM delivers off of something like this:

The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds, like cymbal crashes or drum rolls.

Although it can glitch sometimes, it's hard to exaggerate how good the results are.

There's more. MusicLM can be fed combinations of pictures and captions, or be directed to generate audio that sounds like a given instrument in any genre, and even specify the experience level of the “musician.” Places, historical eras or situational awareness (e.g. music for morning mediation) can all be used to alter the outputs.

It won't rival ChatGPT in popularity any time soon, but that's only because there are no plans to release it publicly at the moment, and no code was included in the paper describing it. As with other generative AI products, copyright is a concern, with about 1 percent of the music created by MusicML referencing recognizable songs, according to the team.

Keunwoo Choi, an AI scientist at Gaudio, has a detailed technical breakdown on Twitter about how they did it.

Art

"A flying dog with a red cape"
Meta AI has a new generative AI, MAV3D (Make-A-Video3D), that turns text prompts into full 3D motion video (aka 4D). It is believed to be an industry first.

Text-To-4D Dynamic Scene Generation

Text-To-4D Dynamic Scene Generation, 2023.

Text-To-4D Dynamic Scene Generation

This was inevitable

Someone Made AI Videos of ‘Americans’ Backing a Military Coup in West Africa

AI video generator Synthesia confirmed to VICE World News the “Pan-Africanist” video backing Burkina Faso’s military rulers had been made using its software but would not reveal who had created them.

VICESophia Smith Galer

The NFT project Kevin Rose thought he was buying into when he got hacked

Obscure NFT Collection Based on Memes Fetches $83M Market Cap - The Defiant

On Jan. 19, something unusual happened in the NFT market — a CryptoPunk, which typically sells for a minimum of $100,000, was swapped for a full set of tokens from an obscure collection called The Memes.

The DefiantOwen Fernau

Work

Porsche lawyers have opened a can of NFTs
Purchasers of the car maker's 911 mint were asked to waive their 14-day window for requesting a refund, which is the default under the law. This guy didn't.

We put this under work, but it is really about how not to work.

Supernormal raises $10M to automatically transcribe and summarize meetings

Supernormal, a startup developing a platform that can automatically summarize meetings, has raised $10 million.

TechCrunchKyle Wiggers

If you sold a gorilla picture for $900,000 would you quit your day job?

Marvel Iron Man Artist Sean Chen: Web3 Is a ‘Paradigm Shift’ for Comic Creators - Decrypt

After a prolific career as a comic book artist for Marvel, DC, and Valiant, Sean Chen shares why he left to create his own series in Web3.

DecryptKate Irwin

The human army that's feeding AI

OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete | Semafor

The company behind ChatGPT now employs around 1,000 people around the world to label data and help OpenAI’s models learn software engineering tasks.

Semafor Logo

To cite a bot, or to not cite a bot?

ChatGPT can’t be credited as an author, says world’s largest academic publisher

But using AI to help write a paper is fine, with proper disclosure.

The VergeJames Vincent

How we’re approaching AI-generated writing on Medium

Transparency, disclosure, and publication-level guidelines

3 Min ReadScott Lamb

Some do, some don't

Here’s How Art Schools Are Dealing With The Rise of AI Generators

Automated tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are changing how instructors teach their students, but many won’t ban them outright.

VICEEmily Driehaus

Crypto is as safe as you want it to be. With a steady news beat of OG crypto investors getting ripped off, you'd think putting your NFTs in 18 different cold storage wallets is like parking a Ferrari in Times Square with the ignition running. There are many ways to make sure you don't fall victim to scams, you just have to learn about them and use them. Drive a car? Wear a seat belt. Ride a motorcycle? Wear a helmet. Trade in crypto?

1) Use a cold storage wallet, like Ledger, and keep your seed phrase separate and secure.
2) Only use a hot wallet when you are actively trading.
3) Use a hot wallet with pro-active security features, like Coinbase Wallet, which offers Web site scam alerts, seaport alerts, and transaction previews so you can see what will happen if you execute a smart contract before you sign it. (The Chrome extension Fire Wallet advertises similar protections, and while it seems safe to try it has not been thoroughly vetted.)
4) Use Revoke.Cash to reverse transactions and limit wallet permissions that allow dApps like NFT marketplaces to access your funds.
5) Separate your assets into multiple wallets so if one gets compromised the damage will be limited.

It's risky out there, learn how to be safe.

What Would AI Jesus Do?
Ask him, via Bible GPT.

AI Cuts Cancer Wait From Four Weeks To Two Minutes

Imagene’s algorithm can make a near-instant cancer diagnosis, and identify the type of mutation that has caused it to develop.

NoCamelsAriel Grossman

Thanks for reading! Send your thoughts and comments to feedback@thisismeteor.com. We are accepting story pitches. Hit us up at storypitches@thisismeteor.com.