... MARZ, which stands for Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies, isn’t interested in being a onetime solution in Hollywood. The company has used its proprietary AI technology on 27 projects so far, including Stranger Things, Jack Ryan, Being the Ricardos, Umbrella Academy, and No Way Home, where it focused its energies on Willem Dafoe. So far MARZ’s AI de-aging technology, called Vanity AI, has been offered as a service, but later this year the company plans to allow businesses and creatives to download the Vanity software for free and pay MARZ a fee based on the number of shots that are processed. ...
Vanity works by first “learning” the face of an actor or actress. “You literally upload five images of an actor; you tag it. Those five images teach the system who the actor is,” Panousis says.
“Once you’ve created that mask, Vanity is going to comb through every shot in your movie and find the actor and is actually going to stick the mask on the face automatically,” Panousis says. “So if you’re an artist going in to work on a shot, all you’re actually doing now is confirming that the mask is (fitted) correctly. ...
How do you dub film and TV projects in a more seamless and effective way than simply laying on new audio? The company’s solution, which is still in development, is called LipDub, and uses AI to re-create the bottom portion of an actor’s face so that it synchs with the dubbed language. ...
... She’s doing both at the same time, live streaming herself working from home to an audience ranging from hundreds to thousands of viewers.
She usually starts work at 9 a.m. and goes live an hour later. Onyia’s TikTok live videos, which she calls “work alone together,” have earned her 100,000-plus followers. She has an aesthetic desk setup with ambient music, and she stops working from time to time to answer questions in her comments section from viewers who work alongside her.
Onyia is body doubling, or parallel working—a new term for an old strategy: doing work in the presence of others. Traditionally done in the same room, the trend is now taking over TikTok live and Zoom as remote workleaves many people struggling to concentrate or looking for community. ...
The stranger in body doubling serves as an unbiased, accountable “other” that helps one to get out of their personal struggles, explains Campbell. She adds that it’s “completely changed the game” for her productivity and that of other people with ADHD she’s worked with. ...
LinkedIn has introduced a feature called collaborative articles, which uses “AI-powered conversation starters” to start discussions between “experts” that use the platform. In an announcement post on Friday, the company says it will “match each article with relevant member experts” based on its skills graph, and invite them to add context, extra information, and advice to the stories.
The company thinks the system will make it easier for people to contribute their perspectives because “starting a conversation is harder than joining one.” People can judge the experts’ contributions with an “insightful” reaction. ...
... To meet this need, my research group turned to an old idea from education: Bloom’s Taxonomy. First published in 1956 and later revised in 2001, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchy describing levels of thinking in which higher levels represent more complex thought. Its six levels are: 1) Remember — recall basic facts, 2) Understand — explain concepts, 3) Apply — use information in new situations, 4) Analyze — draw connections between ideas, 5) Evaluate — critique or justify a decision or opinion, and 6) Create — produce original work. ...
Thus, Bloom’s Taxonomy allows us to draw more nuanced assessments of the AI technology than raw human versus AI comparison. ...
Using Bloom’s Taxonomy we can see that effective human-AI collaboration will largely mean delegating lower-level cognitive tasks so that we can focus our energy on more complex, cognitive tasks. Thus, instead of dwelling on whether an AI can compete with a human expert, we should be asking how well an AI’s capabilities can be used to help foster human critical thinking, judgment and creativity. ...
... The Misalignment Museum imagines a future in which AI starts to take the route mapped out in countless science fiction films—becoming self aware and setting about killing off humanity. Fortunately, in Kim’s vision the algorithms self-correct and stop short of killing all people. Her museum, packed with artistic allegories about AI and art made with AI assistance, is presented as a memorial of humankind’s future near-miss with extinction. ...
As we talk, we watch passersby peer into the gallery space—fittingly located eight blocks from the offices of OpenAI—that has a prominent “Sorry for killing most of humanity” sign along one wall. ...
At its developer conference in May 2022, Niantic formally launched its “Lightship Virtual Positioning System,” a virtual map of the world that allows AR developers to anchor 3D graphics to physical places. For example, a developer might hide a digital prize near a well-known statue as part of a scavenger hunt game. ...
7. RENDEVER
For using VR to help seniors
Rendever is using VR to promote engagement and mental fitness among senior citizens. The Somerville, Massachusetts–based VR content company operates a platform that delivers customized 3D immersive experiences to nursing homes and other senior living facilities. The content lets people relive moments from the past (weddings, for example) and virtually visit bucket-list destinations. ...
8. ARCHER’S MARK
For reliving history through VR
Archer’s Mark‘s “On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World): Take Cover” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers program in January 2022. The production studio’s narrative VR work lets participants relive the horrifying morning in Hawaii on January 13, 2018, when residents began getting text messages saying that a nuclear attack on the island was underway. ...
... For some reason, this new trend in K-pop makes my blood absolutely boil, and the fact that people are promoting MAVE on social media and following and liking their content upsets me greatly. These girls are programmed to be perfect; they have no human emotion, no story, no inherent talent and no personality. And yet, rather naively, people are falling in love with their “originality.” ...
I usually love to tote K-pop because of its performative value and adherence to perfectionism (before it becomes toxic). Similarly, you often can’t help but fall in love with the idols and their personalities, their abilities and even their imperfections. You just don’t get that with artificial intelligence.
On a more serious note that diverts from the standard engagement issues, there are rising concerns about the idols’ safety as well, and how this AI technology and its wide-scale availability can inadvertently hurt the real performers it aims to encapsulate. As virtual sex crimes and deepfake porn continue to rise online, controlling their spread and identifying problematic sites in the first place is becoming more and more difficult. ...
There is a real issue with artificial technology that replaces humans in the entertainment industry. In my eyes, it’s ridiculous, and should stop before it gains any traction, if it hasn’t already. It’s honestly an embarrassment to the K-pop world and a slap in the face to all the idols who trained for so many years only to be surpassed by a blank stage.
Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including advertising, beauty, design, and more....
“It’s bringing the vision of the artist to life on stage,” says Karen Allen, a longtime industry consultant and cofounder and CEO of Infinite Album, which creates AI-generated music for livestream gamers. “We’ve been looking for a better way to bring the audience into the show, to make it more fun and a bigger spectacle.” ...
NYX Professional Makeup, a beauty brand owned by the L’Oréal Group, created a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for the beauty community earlier this year.
The company sees it as the next step in building a community around its brand.
It’s part of a wider web3 bet for the company, which has also established its own department for web3 technologies.
Summary: Business strategy is usually born of a highly rational process, grounded in facts and analysis. Storytelling, often associated with fiction and entertainment, may seem like the antithesis of strategy. But the two are not incompatible. A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. Through stories, mere facts and information are turned into a shared mental model of how the business works and where it is heading. Knowing how to construct such a strategy story as a shared, and evolvable mental model can not only improve implementation but also greatly increase a company’s rate of learning, which can be a key source for competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced world.
Posted on the website for “96 Elephants” in 2016, the above strategy, orchestrated by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), became one of the most successful conservation efforts ever*. The WCS helped convene a coalition of hundreds of zoos, companies, environmental organizations, and individual donors, who succeeded in banning the ivory trade in U.S. and China, passing anti-wildlife trafficking legislation in the U.S., and substantially reducing elephant poaching.
“It’s inconceivable that we could successfully execute our strategy to protect wildlife and wild places worldwide without creating and using powerful stories,” says John Calvelli, executive vice president of public affairs at WCS. ...
