The week's developments on the intersection of AI and creative content | 19.03.24

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This week, the AI image generation world is abuzz with Midjourney's rollout of its 'Character Reference' feature, a revolutionary new tool for fine-tuning character creations with professional-level precision. Is AI art transitioning from a playful gimmick into a serious creative tool?

Elsewhere, Google's DeepMind unveils their new smart AI gaming companion, Europe stakes claim as the world’s digital cop and an innovative AI chatbot brings Marilyn Monroe's persona back to virtual life.

We cover these stories, plus the latest study exposing the shortcomings of current text-to-image AI safeguards and a review of the best current AI art generators.

— Charlie and the Research and Intelligence Team

P.S. You can now register your interest for CogX Festival LA 7 May, where we’ll be talking all things AI, Impact, and Transformational Tech!

Cinema and Industry

👀 Midjourney may have just solved a big problem with AI image generators. With its new "character reference" feature — introduced in the alpha version of Midjourney 6 — users can now maintain consistency in a character's appearance across multiple generated images.

🤖 Google's DeepMind Unveils SIMA: The AI gaming companion that's not your typical NPC. What sets SIMA apart is its ability to understand and follow verbal commands, adapting to various 3D gaming environments as a generalist AI.

🇪🇺 Europe stakes claim as the world’s digital cop with its recently enacted Digital Markets Act (DMA). This legislation aims to combat unfair competition and prevent market dominance by digital "gatekeepers," targeting tech giants such as Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok.

🖼️ Midjourney vs. Stable Diffusion: Which Is the best AI art generator? Midjourney stands out for its user-friendly interface and ability to create high-quality, detailed images quickly. In contrast, Stable Diffusion shines in its flexibility and customisation options.

Arts and Entertainment

🚫 Study exposes failings of measures to prevent illegal content generation by text-to-image AI models. The researchers investigated seven of the latest content filtering methods and found that they could be easily circumvented through simple "concept inversion" attacks.

🦇 DC Comics investigates claims of AI-Generated artwork in Batman Comics. The claims, which originated from a thread by Twitter/X user James Leech, specifically target the artwork in DC Comics' Batman #143 edition, part of the Joker: Year One story arc.

🖼️ How Gen-AI tools like Lore Machine can revisualise storyboarding. Lore Machine analyses user-provided text, whether in the form of a screenplay, novel, or short story, and outputs images of key characters and locations rendered in a specific visual art style.

💃 AI chatbot is used to resurrect Marilyn Monroe. The bot, made by AI tech company Soul Machine, is touted as a pioneer in the humanisation of AI, with the ability to share anecdotes, deliver personalised greetings, and even read emotions to interact accordingly.

👾 Is VR perfectly human? From interactive art installations to immersive documentaries, VR experiences at the South by Southwest festival in Texas aimed to showcase the potential of VR as a medium for fostering human connection and emotional expression.

In case you missed it

Watch OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati discuss the intricacies of Sora, their new AI model able to craft hyper-realistic videos from text prompts:

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