Milo has since become one of Obsidian’s most outspoken users, with a popular YouTube channel and e-course that calmly explains not just how to use Obsidian, but why. (A popular comment on his first video: “This wasn’t a product walkthrough. This was a guided meditation.”)
He’s not alone in seeing the light: Obsidian estimates that it has one million users, and its Discord channel has more than 110,000 members, who use the app for everything from task management and bookmarking to organizing their daily thoughts. On Reddit, Obsidian ranks in the top 5% of communities, with 94,600 members. All this happened without any venture capital backing or outside investment. ...
The threat harks back to videos nearly a decade ago from the Islamic State, which spread fear and won attention by posting videos showing the beheadings of journalists, aid workers and other civilian captives. But those videos were prerecorded and edited. Hamas’s pledge to record and air executions that have yet to take place is new and seems calibrated to incite fear over the barbarism to come.
“Hamas’s entire strategy is to inflict as much damage as possible and drive as much attention to that damage as possible, in order to incite fear for the broader public,” said Graham Brookie, a senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “This is one of the first times we’ve seen this glossy propaganda content recorded in real time.” ...
... Virtual production technology has altered the writing process when it comes to writing for films and series that use the technology. “The difference – or at least in my singular experience working on 1899 – was that much of the rewriting in post is happening in pre-production or during production latest,” says Juliana Lima Dehne, who was Story Editor and wrote Episode 5 of the Netflix series, a show that relied on virtual production to create its vivid landscapes. ...
“One of the reasons for it is that locations – for example – are set. You can’t change your mind; nor will the controlled environment change once you start production. It’s all definitive,” Dehne adds. “The sets and the images projected onto the LED screens have already been designed, and the soundstage has already been dressed to match it. It’s like a game. You have to work with what’s there. You can’t decide to go off script in the middle of a game because you want to enter a door that doesn’t open because nobody designed what’s behind that door. ...
For Emma Needell, writer and director of the short film “Life Rendered,” virtual production greatly affected the writing process. “This was because I embraced the tools of virtual production for story development specifically. I first learned how to use Unreal Engine – which is free to download and use – then I created an animatic of my short film in the program, experimenting with pacing, cinematography and music all before we began pre-production in earnest,” Needell remarks. “As a filmmaker, the ability to iterate through ‘drafts’ of your film via an animatic is extremely advantageous. ...
The “as a service” model allows companies to avoid purchasing solutions outright. Instead, companies pay for the solutions they need on a subscription basis. For software as a service, this means paying for access to specific software and solutions each month.
Metaverse as a service combines this flexible purchasing model with the opportunities offered by the metaverse, allowing companies from all landscapes to build their own digital experiences. ...
A promotional poster for the new series features a spiralling clock in the background which eagle-eyed viewers believe was generated using artificial intelligence. From seemingly meaningless shapes to inconsistent styling, the hallmarks are there – and several AI image checkers seem to have confirmed that image, apparently taken from Shutterstock, is AI-generated.
The Shutterstock image, catchily titled 'Surreal infinity time spiral in space', isn't actually marked as AI-generated, even though one Twitter user ran four tests, three of which came back as 'AI positive' (is that the right terminology? I'm using it now). ...
Adobe, in collaboration with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), has launched the “icon of transparency.” This symbol – embeddable in images, videos, and PDFs – reveals content provenance, including its creation via AI tools. When viewers encounter this icon online, hovering over it discloses details about the content’s ownership, the AI tool utilized, and other production specifics.
Content Credentials (the icon’s underlying technology) is a decentralized, trustless, and verifiable system for content creators to prove the authenticity of their work. It uses blockchain technology to create a tamper-proof record of content creation and ownership. This could be used to prevent plagiarism, copyright infringement, and other forms of content fraud.
The C2PA – which includes members such as Intel, Microsoft, and Nikon – is working to standardize this symbol across digital platforms. I really like the way the C2PA is thinking about this issue, and I’ll be very interested to see if creators and rights holders start to use it.
'Adobe Introduces “Icon of Transparency” for GenAI Content'
... “We actually were kind of shooting blind because the Sphere itself did not turn on the screen until August,” Aronofsky said. “So we had no idea what this would feel like or look like.” Instead, the director and his team (which included editor Jennifer Lame and cinematographer Matthew Libatique) made do with 4k headsets (“nowhere near the quality that you need to understand what was going on in the shot”) and Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s Big Dome, a fourth the size of the Sphere in Burbank.
But even that couldn’t prepare them for seeing the 18k footage they’d captured across the globe with a camera and lens so powerful that even a speck of dust could mar the shot. Even armed with some knowledge, the filmmakers weren’t prepared for the quirks of such a new camera. A shot involving a helicopter was thought to be an easy fix: remove the blades in post. But the camera’s sensitivity meant that the sunlight passing through the chopper’s blades would make the whole image flicker. ...
[The camera] was literally coming off the assembly line,” Aronofsky said of the filmmaking process. “Often it took 12 people just to turn it on. It was outputting 32 gigs per second. So it has a huge hard drive wired to it. [And] the lens was very unwieldy because it’s a 270-degree lens. So it’s an incredible piece of glass, [but] it’s a very hard piece of machinery to work with. And it became clear that we were going to be limited in how to move the camera to give some type of propulsion. ...
The end result is a 50-minute combination of film and Vegas attraction that takes viewers from the Grand Canyon to close-ups of a praying mantis that no one in the history of the world has ever seen rendered with such clarity. And not just see — a sequence in a Parma, Italy, opera house includes a solo violinist whose performance is rendered in such minute detail, thanks to the immersive sound powered by Holoplot, that one can hear her fingers on the strings. ...
AMD said on Tuesday it plans to buy an artificial intelligence startup called Nod.ai as part of an effort to bolster its software capabilities.
In its race to catch rival chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) plans to invest heavily in the critical software necessary for the company's advanced AI chips. Through more than a decade of work, Nvidia has built a powerful advantage in the AI chip market through the software it makes, and the software developer ecosystem.
AMD has vowed to invest in and build a unified collection of software to power the various chips the company makes ...
... Enter Forever Voices AI, a startup that offered to create an AI version of Caryn so she could better serve her overwhelmingly male fan base. For just one dollar, Caryn’s admirers could have a 60-second conversation with her virtual clone.
During the first week, Caryn earned $72,000. As expected, most of the fans asked sexual questions, and fake Caryn’s replies were equally explicit. “The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue,” she told Insider. Her fans knew that the AI wasn’t really Caryn, but it spoke exactly like her. So who cares? ...
“Replika is for anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama or social anxiety involved. ...
Many Reddit posts argue that AI relationships are more satisfying than real-life ones — the virtual partners are always available and problem-free. “Gaming changed everything,” said Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who has spent decades studying human interactions with technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, Turkle said,“People may let you down, but here’s something that won’t. It’s a voice that always comforts and assures us that we’re being heard.” ...
The idea is to go beyond generic AI chatbots to create a true personal agent that leverages the company’s unique data set and the inferred preferences of individual users, said Ian Morris, the Likewise CEO, in an interview Thursday morning.
