Media pros respond to AI images from A24: ‘a huge misstep for their reputation’
...
Yesterday, A24 posted six images to its official Instagram page, each depicting an iconic American location in the midst of some kind of armed conflict. Sphere in Las Vegas, for example, is shown as a smoking husk lying in rubble, and the fountain in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park is ringed by heavily armed military transport vehicles.
There’s just one issue: none of the scenes captured in the stills were actually included in the film. ...
Looking closely, one can discern certain sloppy details that wouldn’t have been included by a human artist. The layout of the roads depicted in the image of Washington Square Park doesn’t look quite like the real thing. Another image shows one the Marina Towers in Chicago in the middle of the river – both buildings are, in real life, located on the same side of the water. The misalignment of small details like these is a hallmark of current text-to-image generative AI models. ...
See the full story here: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2024/04/19/marketing-ai-pros-deem-a24-s-ai-generated-civil-war-promo-images-repulsive-insulting
Meet Ada, the Virtual Host Captivating Audiences on Social Media
...
The entertainment landscape is taking an innovative turn with Ada Bíró, the first-ever virtual host on Hungarian television. This digital personality, brought to life through the aid of artificial intelligence on Duna TV’s science program “Delta,” has garnered a growing fanbase since her introduction. ...
Her presence demonstrates how technology blurs the lines between reality and virtual interaction, creating new forms of engagement. ...
Ada Bíró’s ascension isn’t just a novelty; it’s a conversation starter about the evolving intersections between technology, information dissemination, and society’s acceptance of non-human personas in traditionally human roles. ...
See the full article here: https://elblog.pl/2024/04/16/meet-ada-the-virtual-host-captivating-audiences-on-social-media/
In Venice, 1OF1 and Collector Ryan Zurrer Introduce Web3 Phenom Sam Spratt to the Art World
... “Something the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the collective, it sometimes leans into the cult of the individual,” Ryan Zurrer told ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the entire community around Sam.” ...
Spratt’s Venice exhibition was put on by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” set up by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been uniquely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the RFC Art Collection gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after nearly a year on view in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also arranged the first museum presentations of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, showing it first at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
... what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s shrewd approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did so by making his art a game. ...
“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” Lukas Amacher, 1OF1’s Artistic Director and the curator of the show, told ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to get people to engage in his work for much longer.”
The game Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too gamified to fit the art world’s notion of art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in the Web3 environment, value is built by finding alternative ways to create investment and attention in what are typically immaterial digital artifacts. And it’s working. Thus far, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and about $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been for the past three years, is to see if art’s gatekeepers will take this work seriously. ...
See the full story here: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/venice-biennale-sam-spratt-art-exhibition-monument-game-nfts-1234703518/
TikTok Pioneers the Rise of Virtual Influencers Using AI Technology
... In a world where the terms ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘influencer’ seldom intersect, TikTok is setting the stage for a significant shift, leveraging its sophisticated AI algorithms to create virtual entities. These AI-generated figures are expected to engage with viewers, delivering key messages with potential impact akin to their human counterparts. ...
See the full story here: https://elblog.pl/2024/04/14/tiktok-pioneers-the-rise-of-virtual-influencers-using-ai-technology/
How I Built an AI-Powered, Self-Running Propaganda Machine for $105
...
I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable.
Nawaz is a young Pakistani who told me he is “around 30” years old; he communicated with me in English, with limited proficiency, by instant message. He is among dozens of developers on freelance marketplaces who build fully automated AI websites from the ground up for a minimal fee. “I will create automated news website autoblog,” Nawaz’s posting on Fiverr stated. “If you are looking for an automated website to generate extra passive income without any effort, my gig is your best choice.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/politics/how-i-built-an-ai-powered-self-running-propaganda-machine-for-105-e9888705
Sony Electronics announces a 4K 60p pan-tilt-zoom camera with AI-based auto framing
Sony Electronics is releasing a flagship 4K 60p pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera model with an integrated lens, the BRC-AM7. Incorporating PTZ Auto Framing technology, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology for advanced recognition, the camera facilitates accurate and natural automatic tracking of moving subjects. These innovations enable simplified high-quality video production for broadcast, live event, and sports productions. ...
See the full story here: https://www.newscaststudio.com/2024/04/12/sony-electronics-announces-a-4k-60p-pan-tilt-zoom-camera-with-ai-based-auto-framing/
This L.A. escape room explores corporate greed — and shows how corruptible you really are
... For the past five years Los Angeles’ Hatch Escapes has been rethinking the escape room ground rules. The goal: to prove the an escape room is not mere entertainment but can, in fact, be experienced as a work of narrative art.
Think of the Ladder as a 90-minute interactive movie with puzzles, taking guests through five decades, beginning in the 1950s, in which they will play an exaggerated game of corporate life. Start in the mailroom, and work your way through secretarial and middle-management-themed areas, all the while mixing puzzles, games and choose-your-own-adventure-like choices. ...
You may find yourself playing a game of memory around digitally enhanced cocktail glasses, as our mid-level exec seemed more interested in company card perks than late nights with the books. Or perhaps you’ll choose to investigate a wall-long switchboard, listening to callers’ problems and trying to connect them with a solution. Elsewhere, in an area dedicated to the 1980s, Nintendo’s “Donkey Kong” gets remixed as “Bossy Kong,” with a suited villain rather than a gorilla trying to thwart our progress. The final room — the corner office — is group game chaos inspired by the popular collaborative video game “Spaceteam,” complete with fully animated windows overlooking a city. ...
If all goes according to plan, wits will be tested but so will morals, as participants are graded on puzzle acumen as well as personal choices. ...
“We wanted to build something that basically would allow a group of 10 people to never stop doing something effective,” says Tommy Wallach, who co-founded Hatch Escapes with Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp. ...
What it does achieve is trying to solve some other escape room problems. Replayability is one of them. Can we create something people want to come back to in the way people want to come back to Disneyland, because it’s not solved and done?” ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2024-04-10/ladder-escape-room-hatch-escapes-corporate-greed
Getty Images CEO Calls for Industry Standards Around AI
... But the stock images giant is trying to be proactive as well, signing a deal with AI giant Nvidia to create AI text-to-image and text-to-video services with a generative model trained on Getty’s copyright-protected library of stock images. Peters argues the deal will both protect creators by ensuring compensation for use of their work, and guard against abuse. “This model can’t produce deepfakes, because it was trained on only a creative universe. It doesn’t know who Taylor Swift is. It doesn’t know who Joe Biden is,” he says. ...
See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/ai-getty-images-ceo-industry-standards-1235869852/
Virtual Coffee, Ice Cream Shops Help Students Learn Business
...
Arizona State University began working in the virtual reality realm with its Dreamscape Lab in 2020. The university partnered with the lab and launched a pilot program last fall to test a student-run virtual coffee shop and teach students the ins and outs of supply chain management, without the risk of running a real business. The virtual experience also goes deeper than the surface-level knowledge gleaned from a site visit to an actual business.
“There’s been a long history of simulations in business education and a long history of case studies,” said Daniel Gruber, associate dean for teaching and learning at ASU’s Carey School of Business. “The virtual reality environment fuses some of the best elements of simulation and case studies and allows us to invent something new and innovative.”
Roughly 160 ASU students have donned the VR headsets over the last two semesters and entered the virtual W.P. Coffee Shop, where they immediately encounter a long line of customers. The participating students in the supply chain management course discuss and decide what may help the shop operate more efficiently—which could be adding more staff or more coffee machines—and then implement the plan in real time to see if it brings a boost or dip in revenue. ...
Los Angeles-based Loyola Marymount University held a virtual reality pilot program earlier this spring across nearly two dozen modules, ranging from training for interviews to pitching. The technology company that developed the program, Bodyswaps, gave feedback to students, including on whether they used too many filler words such as “um,” or didn't use their hands enough while speaking. ...
“There’s tremendous potential for virtual reality in the business world; it’s used by learning and development, human resources,” Schwartz said. “It can prepare students for that post-college workplace but it’s also a really powerful teaching and learning tool. As the hardware becomes more affordable and as the experiences become more inclusive, I do think this will become a part of higher education.”
See the full story here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/teaching-learning/2024/04/10/business-schools-dive-vr-virtual-coffee-shops
TikTok’s popularity among European politicians rises despite security fears
... With European elections approaching in June, mainstream politicians are wary of ceding ground to fringe parties who have successfully exploited its short video format. ...
TikTok says security warnings are unwarranted and it does not collect more information than other apps.
In a bid to assuage concerns, it launched, opens new tab a site to store European users' data in Dublin last year and hired a third-party security firm to monitor data flows. ...
ByteDance has denied using its product for spying, while the Chinese government has also denied any such intention.
Harris, 37, was an early adopter in March 2021, producing videos that ranged from a 60-second budget summary with musical background to footage of him making a cup of tea when watching football. ...
"We cannot leave social media to the AfD", he said, of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that surged to become Germany's second-most popular. ...
"Another reason we are on it (TikTok), is that we don't want to leave the field to the far-left or the far-right," a Green party spokesperson told Reuters.
"Young people get news through social media and TikTok is one of the biggest platforms. Some politicians are comfortable with that, others are not."
See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktoks-popularity-among-european-politicians-rises-despite-security-fears-2024-04-08/
Pages
- About Philip Lelyveld
- Mark and Addie Lelyveld Biographies
- Presentations and articles
- Tufts Alumni Bio