Prepare to be disrupted. It's not a choice. It's the moment we're in. Meteor is a new publication dedicated to the people, stories, art and ideas that are changing the world, from AI to Web3, crypto, VR and beyond.
Ben Tossel on the fate of jobs: If they go they go, if they don't they don't "Quick question: If you discovered that a technology could do your job, would you publicly explain to thousands of people, including your employer, exactly how? The answer is no. Keep that gold to yourself! Except this Guardian journalist’s answer was yes, and he just brought ChatGPT scaremongering to the mainstream. In the article, he communicates the threat of AI to copywriters like himself by showcasing AI doing his own job… as well as him. Gulp. This strange response notwithstanding, as we enter this new age of progress in AI it’s important not to spend time fretting about the fate of jobs - if they go they go, and if they don’t they don’t. Time is better spent looking for ways it can improve productivity at work and in your personal life. We’ll be better off if we learn to dance with AI rather than fight it." – Ben Tossel, in the Ben's Bites newsletter
Create
Every day we curate new AI art and go behind the scenes with artists, demos and art projects
Artist who found her face on an album cover fights back with NFTs
Ariel is the provocateur musician Ariel Pink, whose 2006 album Ariel Pink’s Thrash & Burn, re-released in 2013, wound up featuring a picture of Jill Miller on the cover, twice.
Miller, an artist who also teaches at UC Berkeley, says she never authorized the use of her image and has no idea how it got there. After texting with Pink and considering a lawsuit last year, she decided to hit back with a collection of 50 mocking images instead. Billboard has a long blow by blow.
Pink, who was dropped from his label after attending the Jan. 6 rally at the U.S. Capitol, claims he was not involved in picking the photo. "These are cool," Pink's official Twitter account replied when Miller Tweeted about her NFT collection.
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Top Story
Was this video made end to end entirely with AI?
There is no reference to AI in the Youtube video description, which begins "Uncover the dark truth behind social media's power to control our minds in this thought-provoking video..." It appeared Tuesday under the handle @seedofthoughtofficial and reposted on the r/artificial subreddit by u/smartmotherfkr, with the title "This Video is Entirely AI Generated, End to End."
The images plausibly seem to be created by generative AI image tools, which typically do a poor job rendering text, creating some spooky looking signage. ChatGPT might have handled the script. The voice over could be entirely synthetic. Other elements like layout and editing seem to be more of a reach for an unsupervised AI producing a complete film.
If the title was a joke, an attempted mind needle meant to exploit the tsunami of media unleashed by AI, it probably won't age well. AI generated movies are likely a matter of when, not if. And uncomfortable questions of provenance are only going to get trickier and more frequent. Passable text is now commonplace, schools worry homework is a thing of the past, the Turing test has been rendered obsolete, synthetic Deepfake video and audio can mimic real people and voices. New AI is being developed to detect AI. This is all now moving to other media at breakneck pace.
Generative AI is already creating short video clips. In September, Meta released one capable of producing short, awkward moving pictures from a single text prompt – far short of writing and story boarding a script, recording an audio track and combining it all, but count us impressed. Many examples exist of animations based on AI generated images, but the frames are usually selected and stitched together by an artist.
At the Venice and New York Film festivals last year, a new film by 'Frederico Fellini' premiered, though the director himself died 30 years ago. While not created entirely by AI – three human directors shared credit – AI captured his film making style to create a persuasive new work in his likeness.
“We used AI algorithms on a selection of Fellini’s past movies and scripts in order to extract a rich data set and establish patterns that could ascertain Fellini’s signature creative decisions," Marc D’Souza told PC Magazine at the time. "Shot type, scene cuts, camera movement, objects per frame, facial emotion and action/dialogue syntax and structure were all analyzed, as well as scenes and locations.”
Things are moving incredibly fast. An AI film unveiled in December 2022 raised the stakes further, tapping OpenAI's ChatGPT to not only write an original script but come up with the shot list, although not without humans. The project used real actors and cameras, among other things.
It's easy to see how each aspect of a movie might benefit from an AI assistant, or even generate the material itself whole cloth. Less clear is how to put it all together. Movie-making has been at heart a collaborative art. Creative partnerships and conflict between actors, writers and directors are legendary in the industry. Will AI bring all those disparate elements together into a cohesive whole without any human intervention – or human drama – that real humans will want to watch?
On Reddit, people were skeptical the video presented was as advertised. "Including the voice over?" asked u/TheGratefulGradient. "Very unsettling to watch, many of the images are 'familiar' but 'wrong' at the same time. Very cool video, but not sure how much AI went into this."
No Oscars for AI this year.
Notable
In the news
It's not safe for anyone out there. OG Kevin Rose (Moonbirds, GV, Digg, Screen Savers) got his wallet drained. Crypto news site The Block has the skinny on how it went down.
NFT marketplace Blur is making waves, rising to No. 2 on airdrop reward campaigns aimed at wooing pro traders.
Nike is expanding its NFT portfolio with dot Swoosh, a platform where community members can design Web3 digital art. It is hosted on Polygon, which has increasingly been attracting top NFT projects.
The WSJ (paywall) reports the SEC is blocking some crypto firms from going pubic.
Required reading
Beware Loab, the digital cryptid lurking in AI's forgotten space (Warning: article includes images that may be disturbing to some)
Google's complex path to the future of search
Tools and tips
Scenario has opened its GenAI art engine to artists during an early access period. It specializes in generators tailored for artists to upload their own images and produce similar ones in the same style, perfect for creating assets for games and the Metaverse.
drayk.it – Make AI Drake songs about anything. We're not big fans of "lyrics/songs that sound liked artist X" - they feel like they'll be a dime a dozen if they aren't already. Mildly entertaining.
How to bring diversity to your AI art What to do with algorithms that refuse to generate representative results. (Subscription required)
Disruptions
Joey Roulette/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/X7QOLJ5I6FIAVHSRFT7CLH63AQ.jpg)
Victor Tangermann
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