Culture

The longest actors’ strike in Hollywood history ended as actors and studios reached an accord on the use of generative AI in making movies. 

The latest advances in AI are built on freely available training data. What will happen if it becomes off-limits? Creative workers don’t want AI developers to train models on their works without permission or compensation, or at all. Data is vanishing as they scramble to lock it down. 

Microsoft's ChatGPT-powered assistants will roll out in the coming months.

The updates expand ChatGPT into a voice-controlled, interactive system for text and image interpretation and production.

Stability.ai, maker of the Stable Diffusion image generator and StableLM text generator, launched Stable Audio, a system that generates music and sound effects from text. You can play with it and listen to examples here. The service is free for 20 generations per month up to 45 seconds long.

A Korean pop star recorded a song in six languages, thanks to deep learning. Midnatt (better known as Lee Hyun) sang his latest release, “Masquerade,” in English, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese — none of which he speaks fluently.

The next generation of video games could be filled with AI-generated text, speech, characters, and background art. Nvidia announced a system that enables players to converse directly with in-game characters. Meanwhile, game developers are using generative AI to produce media assets.

A popular musician is inviting fans to clone her voice. Result: a flood of recordings that sound just like her. Experimental pop star Grimes released GrimesAI-1, a generative audio tool that allows anyone to make recordings of their own singing or speech sound like her voice.

Text-to-image generators are visualizing the next wave of architectural innovation. Patrick Schumacher, principal architect at Zaha Hadid Architects, explained how the company uses generative AI to come up with ideas. He made the remarks at an industry roundtable called AI and the Future of Design.

Reinforcement learning is powering a new generation of video game cheaters. Players of Rocket League, a video game that ranks among the world’s most popular esports, are getting trounced by cheaters who use AI models originally developed to train contestants.

A major company is using face recognition to settle scores. MSG Entertainment, which operates large entertainment venues in several cities in the United States, used face recognition to block its perceived enemies from attending events...

Too exhausted (or unimaginative) to tell your child a bedtime story? Amazon’s smart displays can spin bespoke tales on demand. A feature called Create with Alexa generates children’s stories complete with illustrations, music, and sound effects on the Amazon Echo Show device.

Artists are rebelling against AI-driven imitation. DeviantArt, an online community where artists display and sell their work and marketplace for digital art, launched DreamUp, a text-to-image generator that aims to help artists thwart attempts to imitate their styles or works.

For the debut episode of a new podcast series, Play.ht synthesized a 19-minute interview between the rock-star podcaster and late Apple CEO.

An online marketplace enables people to buy text prompts designed to produce consistent output from the new generation of text-to-image generators.