If you haven’t read Josh Dzieza’s story on the grueling, extremely human work required to make AI systems work, you really should. And then you should catch up on all The Verge’s Smart Home Week coverage, because we have some big ideas about garage door openers on this podcast.
The entire point of Marvel’s Secret Invasion series is to tap into people’s deep, existisitential anxieties about being replaced and destroyed by hostile adversaries. That makes the studio’s choice to create the show’s opening credits sequence with AI-generated art make a certain amount of sense.
But it’s hard to deny how bad these optics are for Marvel especially at a time when traditional artists are increasingly sounding the alarm about the threat AI-generated art poses to their livelihoods.
You.com was one of the first search engines to incorporate a ChatGPT-style chatbot, and now it’s one of the first to put unlimited access to AI tools behind a paywall.
The new YouPro subscription costs $14.99 / month (but currently costs $9.99 / month for a limited time), and gives you access to unlimited AI chat searches, unlimited AI image generation, unlimited text generation, and more. Will Microsoft and Google be next?
A year after launching its AI Voices feature in beta, soundboard and voice changing tool Voicemod has announced a new “AI Humans” feature that adjusts your voice in real-time to sound like a virtual person across apps like Facetime, Zoom, and Discord. There are 20 characters to choose from including 80-year-old Joe and 25-year-old Jennifer.
Yep, it uses ChatGPT. It only raised $5 million of the $10 million it wanted earlier this year so it seems like I’m not the only who’s a little skeptical of this.
The Information reports that OpenAI is “considering” opening a marketplace for AI models, and CEO Sam Altman apparently talked about it in a meeting with developers last month.
The idea makes a lot of sense, if you ask me, but it we may not be seeing it anytime soon. A spokesperson told The Information that OpenAI doesn’t have “active efforts” to make the marketplace.
[The Information]
The Recording Academy has released new rules for the upcoming 66th Grammy Awards. Among them is the clarification that “Only human creators are eligible to be submitted for, consideration for, nominated for, or win a Grammy Award”.
Works featuring AI-generated material, however, are eligible. The AI just can’t win. Sorry, AI.
Meta announced a new AI model called Voicebox yesterday, one it says is the most versatile yet for speech generation, but it’s not releasing it yet:
There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time.
The model is still only a research project, but Meta says can generate speech in six languages from samples as short as two seconds and could be used for “natural, authentic” translation in the future, among other things.
That’s according to a notice on the Project Tailwind website, at least. The company teased AI-powered notebook at Google I/O this year.
[tailwind.sandbox.google.com]
