Technology

We’ve been talking about intellectual property in one way or another for at least the last five hundred years, and each new wave of technology or creativity leads to new kinds of arguments. We invented performance rights for composers and we decided that photography – ‘mechanical reproduction’ – could be protected as art, and in the 20th century we had to decide what to think about everything from recorded music to VHS to sampling.

Source: Generative AI and intellectual property — Benedict Evans

While recent developments in A.I.-powered chatbots have taken the Internet by storm, another Large Language Model (LLM) is quietly revolutionizing filmmaking. Generative diffusion models are unlocking powerful image creation and editing tools, enhancing the creativity of visual effects artists, and delivering a new era of movie magic.

Source: Hollywood shouldn’t entirely reject A.I.–it’s already delivering a new era of movie magic

Source: Can news outlets build a “trustworthy” AI chatbot?

Magisterium AI uses artificial intelligence technology to provide information for users on everything relating to Catholic doctrine, teachings and Canon law.  Unlike other AI programs, which have access to vast swaths of ever-evolving data, the information used by Magisterium AI is limited to official church documents and is carefully curated.

Source: Artificial intelligence program poised to shake up long-held Catholic doctrine

A new experimental YouTube feature reported by some users allows anyone to hum or record three or more seconds of a song to try and identify it. “If you’re in the experiment, you can toggle from YouTube voice search to the new song search feature, and hum or record the song you’re searching for 3+ seconds in order for the song to be identified,” an official support document for the new test reveals.

Source: YouTube Testing New Song Humming Search Feature on Android

Here’s the thing, at the end of the day, the average music consumer–not everybody, you’ll still have your audiophiles and the sort of farm-to-table music people–but the average listener, they just don’t care how music is made. All they care about is the consumptive value of music. So if it slaps, it fucking slaps.

Source: Breaking Down The Future of Music and AI with Lawyer Ash Kernen

MidJourney, a prominent generative AI image creation tool with an annual subscription cost of around $100, has announced the release of its latest feature. Called “Vary (Region),” this new addition allows users to engage in inpainting—a process that edits elements within an image’s canvas. The Vary feature gives users the ability to select specific portions of an image and modify them using text prompts.

Source: MidJourney Adds Image Inpainting—Game Changer or Catch-Up Play? – Decrypt

According to BeatStars, the new “Seeds” tool is aimed at helping creators generate initial ideas, or “plant seeds” for their tracks. It builds on the technology introduced by Lemonaide, which claims that its AI is trained “exclusively on voluntarily contributed data from producers” to generate millions of different combinations.

Source: After partnering with AI music startup Lemonaide, BeatStars unveils AI music creation tool, ‘Seeds’

Hollywood’s quiet AI hiring spree, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, is not necessarily tied directly to AI-generated scripts or actors’ likenesses, nor are all the positions related to generative AI, the subject of much ethical debate and concern. But taken together, the push to expand AI employment indicates an industry-wide arms race to build up companies’ machine learning capabilities, cutting across many aspects of the business.

Source: ‘Embrace it or risk obsolescence’: how will AI jobs affect Hollywood?

Several months later, the bloom is coming off the AI-generated rose. Governments are ramping up efforts to regulate the technology, creators are suing over alleged intellectual property and copyright violations, people are balking at the privacy invasions (both real and perceived) that these products enable, and there are plenty of reasons to question how accurate AI-powered chatbots really are and how much people should depend on them.

Source: Is the AI boom already over?