In a high-tech lab at Stanford University, a team of scientists has just shared with the world a pair of glasses that do some pretty cool shit, honestly.

These aren’t your average spectacles.

Led by Associate Professor Gordon Wetzstein, the team at Stanford’s Computational Imaging Lab has been pushing the limits of what augmented reality can do with the help of AI.

Their secret sauce? A nanophotonic metasurface waveguide.

Yeah, it sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but this waveguide—a fancy piece of glass embedded with tiny optical elements—might be the key to next-gen VR and AR headsets. Essentially, these microscopic structures guide light in and out of the waveguide, allowing for stunningly realistic 3D images to be projected right onto the lenses.

“We're talking about a bunch of tiny optical elements embedded in the glass surface that help guide the light,” Wetzstein told CNET.

The prototype, which currently can't be worn but can be handled while attached to a model head, weighs just half a pound and can project moving AI images through its lenses.

That’s less than half the weight of Apple’s Vision Pro, a mixed-reality headset that uses cameras to project the real world onto screens in front of your eyes.

These glasses, on the other hand, aim to blend the real world with digital enhancements directly within the lenses — you’re looking directly through them and not through a video screen.

“What we're aiming for is a perceptually realistic experience that’s very similar to the real world,” Wetzstein explained. “The vision is to create something indistinguishable from a real object.”

Imagine a surgeon using these glasses to map out a complex procedure or an airplane mechanic using them to learn the intricacies of the latest jet engine.

Or, just picture yourself in the back passenger seat of a long Uber ride, watching a film that appears in mid-air with your partner beside you.

Manu Gopakumar, a doctoral student who helped design and build the prototype, highlighted these practical applications. “One could imagine a surgeon wearing such glasses to plan a delicate or complex surgery or airplane mechanic using them to learn to work on the latest jet engine,” he said.

Before these glasses can become available for everyone, there are a few hurdles to clear.

For starters, they haven’t been tested on human eyes yet (not kidding).

That’s the next big step, along with making the glasses more compact and efficient. If they can reduce power consumption and size, we could see these glasses becoming as common, but not for a long, long while yet.

In the lab, the glasses are demonstrated with an illuminated waveguide activated by a laser. You can watch a video of the glasses here.

The work at Stanford is a major leap forward in augmented reality. Even if it is tough to explain without sounding like something from a Sci-Fi movie…

When discussing AI, we often get stuck in conversations about how it will impact us in our daily lives—conversations around copyright law, losing our jobs, and what is actually considered art. Sometimes, we lose track that these AI tools are also being used and weaponized by governments. And they are starting to have major implications for what the future might hold. 

Security researchers have uncovered a major Russian disinformation campaign using  AI, dubbed "CopyCop," to manipulate content from major news organizations.

While disinformation campaigns aren’t unique to Russia, ones using AI are relatively new and surprisingly effective. CopyCop employs AI to clone and subtly alter articles from trusted sources like Al-Jazeera, Fox News, and the BBC, injecting political bias to tailor these stories for specific audiences. 

This AI-driven network doesn’t just steal and tweak existing articles—it also creates spoofed versions of legitimate sites. This alters the name just enough that you won’t instantly recognize that you are on a fake site.

So, while you think you are on the actual BBC website, you're actually on a Russian clone of that website. Beyond that, they have created entirely fictitious news platforms like London Crier. 

But Why?

Well, to try to gain support or cause more division about topics that are of great importance to the Kremlin. They have recently been shown to spread conflicting reports about the Israel-Hamas conflict. As you would expect, some articles are aimed at undermining support for Ukraine. And it wouldn’t be a Russian propaganda campaign without it trying to get people living in democracies to be overly critical of their governments.

The scary part is that these stories aren't always obviously fake. Yes, they have produced articles claiming that the UK government criminalizes Islam or plans a NATO buffer zone around Ukraine. You can dispel most of those with a quick Google search. But some reports are only changed just enough to sow conflict between well-read individuals. While the campaign is trying to influence people, it also serves the larger goal of getting people to distrust all media. Because if you don’t know who is telling the truth, does the truth really matter?

Clément Briens, a threat intelligence analyst, warns that CopyCop's use of AI achieves unprecedented reach and effectiveness in swaying public opinion. This isn’t the old KGB spread of misinformation; this is happening in real time a thousand times a month.

If successful, CopyCop could inspire similar future operations, posing significant threats to Western democracy and trust in mainstream media. Combating this requires enhanced collaboration between governments, tech companies, and civil society to counter the proliferation of disinformation online. That is a huge ask for us, considering most of us will inevitably be fooled by at least one of these articles. 

In a world of fake news, these threats are very real.

Rap beef with AI voices is fun.

Propaganda campaigns aimed at eroding public trust in institutions - less fun.

Scarlett Johansson is renowned for her roles in films like “The Avengers” and the award-winning “Marriage Story.” Not to mention the movie “Her,” in which she voices an AI assistant that the lead character ends up falling in love with.

She’s always quite well known for standing up for herself and pursuing legal action against brands like Disney when they breached her Black Widow contract by releasing the film online instead of exclusively in theatres first.

This past week, she’s been the center of a big AI controversy regarding OpenAI’s ChatGPT new voice feature. Remember last week when we wrote about their very flirty female voice assistant? Well, that’s the one that catalyzed all of this week’s drama.

The voice OpenAI named Sky sounded remarkably like Scarlett. Even the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, hinted at their similarity by simply tweeting out the word “Her” at the time of Sky’s release. Many linked this tweet to the Scarlett Johansson movie of the same name.

Well — Johansson saw the similarity, too, claiming the voice sounded “eerily similar” to hers. But she also made some startling revelations; she’d actually been asked to be the voice by Sam Altman himself, and she’d turned it down.

Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered Johansson the opportunity to voice ChatGPT, suggesting that her involvement could bridge the gap between technology and creativity, making AI more relatable and comforting to users. Despite the offer's potential, Johansson declined for personal reasons.

One week before the new voice was made public, Sam contacted Johansson’s team again to ask her to reconsider.

When OpenAI released the new ChatGPT voice, Sky, Johansson, and those close to her were struck by the similarities. Johansson released a public statement outlining everything that had happened and stating that the resemblance was so uncanny that it deceived her friends and the general public.

In response to the backlash, OpenAI denied any intentional likeness. The company explained that Sky, along with other new voices, was created using professional voice actors. They’d said they could not reveal the identity of the original actors for privacy concerns.

OpenAI asserted that the voice actor behind Sky was selected before any outreach to Johansson and emphasized that their policy is against deliberately mimicking a celebrity’s distinctive voice. Despite these assurances, the controversy prompted OpenAI to pause the use of Sky's voice out of respect for Johansson and to address her concerns.

The story has been terrible for Open AI’s public perception. It’s not good when a great number of the public believe the most notable startup in AI may have stolen their main voice from an actor who once voiced one in a movie.

The key thing this story may have highlighted, though, is how difficult it will be for the eventual winners of the AI race to differentiate themselves. Apple and Samsung can compete on the form factor, the features, and the materials in their new phones.

If the finish line for AI is a virtual voice assistant who can do anything and everything for you and even talk to you with any voice you wish, then — well, won’t they all end up being pretty much the same thing?

Advances in AI often raise interesting questions and implications on a large scale. We’ve talked about music, politics, and cancer research. But the further we get into this technology, the more these implications will stop being theoretical and have lasting impacts. For one small business owner, this has already happened. This is how AI shuts down a business. 

The first line of Julie Ann Dawson's closure announcement is, “Effective March 6, 2024, I will begin the process of winding down Bards and Sages publishing.” 

You can only imagine the emotions she was feeling when she wrote those words. Back in 2002, she started the small publishing company to produce content for role-playing games, which included a quarterly magazine and supplements to games like Dungeons and Dragons. Over the years, she went on to publish anthologies, novels, and magazines. 

As you read through her closure announcement, she lists a few reasons why she is closing. Once she lists some personal reasons, she hits the readers with the final reason: Dawson states, “AI...and authors behaving badly.”

Like many small publishing houses, Dawson gets submissions for publication. The process takes hours a week, and now it's taking longer because of the obvious AI-generated submissions. See, unlike Amazon, and how they have allowed AI to take over, for a small speculative fiction publisher, they reviewed the submissions and are quickly able to tell the difference between human creativity and the large language model's attempts to write a story. 

And while the fight between small publishing houses and Amazon has been going on for years, Dawson has pointed out that this gap between the publishers will only continue to rise. As we noted in our coverage of AI-generated books on Amazon, it takes minutes to produce that content and sell it. The industrial standard of the “cream will rise to the top” is no longer good enough. As Dawson pointed out, algorithms decide what will rise, and AI bots will be better at manipulating those algorithms. 

Dawson, during an interview with 404 Media, stated that the people turning out these AI stories “…are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer.” 

This notion has led Dawson to state that it has less to do with AI and more with the people who use AI. People will harass her with negative reviews, prank calls, and vulgar insults after she rejects their AI work. 

While this might not be the first business to shut down because of AI, it also won’t be the last. The influx of content into an already oversaturated market will have a huge impact on publishing. But as we cover every week, it will touch everyone. Let’s just hope we are ready!

Netflix’s Black Mirror is slowly overtaking The Simpsons when it comes to TV shows correctly predicting real-world events. We’ve written in the past about how Black Mirror correctly predicted how people are using AI to talk to dead loved ones from beyond the grave. Now, it’s Black Mirror’s take on dating that might be coming true next.

An episode titled Hang the DJ was published on Netflix in 2017. It was written by British writer Charlie Brooker, the show’s creator. If you’ve never seen Black Mirror, all you need to know is that each episode is a standalone story that usually takes place in the near future and is almost always very, very dark in terms of tone. Some episodes will definitely give you nightmares.

The show is known for its sci-fi plots that build off of tech ideas rather than aliens and spaceships. In Hang the DJ (spoilers), two young people are seen falling in love under quite strange circumstances.

The twist at the end of the episode is that they have been inside a Matrix and are one of 1,000 simulated versions of their real selves. They are, in fact, inside a dating app, and now that they have displayed real love for one another, the real two humans they’re based on in the real world are sent an alert to their phone—they have a 99.8% match probability.

Just seven years after the episode first aired, the futurist idea of sending virtual versions of yourself out into the digital world to date other virtual versions of people might not sound so unrealistic after all.

Speaking this week at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco, Whitney Wolfe Herd (the founder of Bumble who met her husband offline on an Aspen vacation) shared her thoughts on how AI will transform dating apps in the future.

“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities ... and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people,” Wolfe Herd said on stage.

Okay, still not Black Mirror enough just yet. She went on to add:

“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities ... and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people.”

Woah! There we have it, then. Another Black Mirror episode might actually be coming to life, and you’ll soon be sending out the AI version of yourself to date on your behalf.

Here’s hoping your AI clone doesn’t end up dating your ex.

It seems like the last few years have been an absolute explosion in AI news. Hell, just 5 years ago, there might not have been a huge need for a newsletter like this one. But it feels as if every day, we get more and more news. Every week we get more and more developments. 

This week, Sam Altman (founder of OpenAI) stated that Chat GPT-4 is “the dumbest version of AI we will ever use again.” Considering how fast and how much that particular program has taken over, it's almost hard to believe. It's almost as hard to believe that one man’s research caused this boom. 

Jared Kaplan, a distinguished theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University, made a groundbreaking contribution to the field of AI in 2020. His research singlehandling ended one of the hottest debates in the field. He proved that there are no diminishing returns with information when training AI. In other words, the more information you can train it with, the better. This revelation has revolutionized the way we approach AI training. 

So, the only thing separating us from having the best version of AI is just data. 

Upon hearing Kaplan's research, every major tech company developing AI sprang into action. They went on a mission to gather as much information as possible. They started pulling data from Wikipedia, Reddit, and other publicly available sources. These companies were determined to provide their AI models with the best training data. If scaling were the issue, they would scale up as fast as possible.

While this strategy has worked well and has helped push AI to grow at this rapid pace, it does have one minor drawback. There is only so much data that is usable on the Internet without having to deal with copyright laws and intellectual property issues. Research from the Epoch Institute claims that these chatbots could be out of high-quality data by as early as 2026. 

And this is where things get both confusing and fascinating. The big three companies in the space—Google, Meta (the parent company of Facebook), and Open AI—started skating by rules and regulations to get their hands on that precious data, transcribing podcast episodes and YouTube videos and uploading copyrighted information to their datasets. 

Ultimately, we see that the major players are fine with lawsuits ( like the one Sarah Silverman has raised against Open AI) if they get more data. This is all because Jared Kaplin’s research showed that if you want better AI, you just need more data. 

Will we run out of data? Will there ever be a path forward for AI that isn’t going to stampede over copyright laws? Who knows. We do know that a research paper caused such a frenzy that data became the most precious resource in the world, and we might run out.

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We’ve all, at some point, given in and binged one of Netflix’s hugely popular true crime documentaries. The latest big hit has been a standalone documentary titled “What Jennifer Did.”

The film begins with a recording of a police call from panicked Jennifer. She’s tied to the banister upstairs, terrified and begging for help after three thugs broke into the house with guns, shooting her Mom and Father downstairs.

Her mother sadly dies, but her father manages to stay alive and wakes up after being put in an induced coma. The police interviewed him and quickly realized his story didn't align at all with the one Jennifer had been telling the police. Somewhat ominously, the Dad asks the detectives to use their police techniques to find out what Jennifer did.

Okay, we’re hooked - but what does any of this have to do with AI? Did Jennifer use AI to help her tell the many lies she was found to have told? No, she did not. The reason this documentary has caused controversy and a flourishing of news stories is much less due to the lies Jennifer told and much more to the lies in the images featured by the documentary itself.

Just like any documentary nowadays, there are a lot of recreations of What Jennifer Did. The cinematic shots of crime scenes you see in documentaries are almost always filmed years later by the documentary makers. They’ll often hire actors and recreate parts of the story to be able to tell it visually for the audience at home.

Documentary makers usually signal to the audience that these scenes are recreated, either directly with a title card at the start of the film or indirectly by never showing the actors' faces, color-grading them differently, or even clearly showing the faces of actors who do not look like the real people from the story.

In What Jennifer Did, there are parts of the documentary in which we see candid photographs of Jennifer. As her high-school friend describes her as “bubble, happy, confident, and very genuine,” we’re shown photos of Jennifer posing at parties and throwing the peace sign with her tongue out.

There’s just one problem — viewers were quick to spot that the photos might not be genuine… they appeared to be AI-generated. It’s a little odd to see her posing pretty similarly in each of the images, but on close inspection, you’ll see Jennifer is missing a thumb and two fingers in one of the photos.

Futurism was the first to report the observations and was quick to note that human hands can be the first sign of an AI image. So remember, if you ever wonder if you’ve woken up inside an AI simulation… check your hands.

Netflix has been asked for comments from just about every publication that has converted the story. It seems they’re yet to release a statement.

If they used AI (they probably did) to generate or manipulate these images, then it raises important moral dilemmas and questions surrounding the use of AI in documentaries. AI content generation will be a brilliant tool to bring to life parts of stories that have no existing footage. But in this case, using fake images and passing them off as real in a documentary about someone who still insists she’s innocent is, well, complicated.

AI continues to be headline-worthy news and will continue to make profound impacts in our daily lives. But it isn’t always that serious. Sometimes, its implications can be downright amusing. This is one such story. While there might be some rap or hip-hop background you're not familiar with, the conclusion of this story is worth it! 

A few months ago, we shared the story of Ghostwriter and his use of AI to create a song using the voices of The Weeknd and Drake. This led to a lawsuit between Universal Music Group and the anonymous Ghostwriter.

Hell, there has even been a new law about AI voices and music in Tennessee.

But what's surprising is that Drake, the very artist at the center of this controversy, has now embraced AI in his own music creation. 

Before getting to that part of the story, we must understand Drake and his relationship to the music industry. He is arguably the biggest name in music and by far the most mainstream rapper. Back in October, he dropped an album called For All The Dogs. One of the standout tracks of that album was First Person Shooter. In this song, rapper J. Cole said that the big three in rap are Kendrick Drake and himself. 

This apparent compliment was the spark that has now set off a long-standing feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Last month, Kendrick, in collaboration with rapper Future and producer Metro Boomin, released a song called “Like That.” This song directly responded to the Cole and Drake track and made it clear Kendrick wasn’t impressed with them. Honestly, it might be one of the best verses in years. 

After an initial response from J. Cole that was later deleted, Drake took up the mantle with his own diss track. In the new song, Push Ups, Drake responds to every single person (and there's been a lot) who has commented about him over the last few weeks. With personal attacks and insults flying, rap fans eagerly awaited a response from Kendrick Lamar.

Reminiscent of Drake’s feud with Meek Mill, Drake gave a week for a response before he made a follow-up. Late on Friday, Drake released a follow-up entitled “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Instagram. The craziest part is that the freestyle uses AI versions of Tupac and Snoop Dogg. 

The AI versions of Tupac and Snoop Dogg appear on the track to make self-deprecating jokes about Drake and poke at Kendrick for not responding.

At the time of writing, there hasn’t been a clear response from Kendrick or fans. But, like any use of AI technology to bring back the dead, there will be discourse about it. 

All in all, this story, which started with Universal suing a creator for using an AI voice of Drake and now seems to be ending with Drake using the AI voices of other artists, has been a weird ride.

I wonder if Kendrick will make a joke about him doing the same thing Universal is suing someone else for doing. And who knows, perhaps we can expect a song with Biggie or DMX on Kendricks's response.

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“I don’t need to worry about AI tracking me because I’m never online.”

Ummmm… we’ve got bad news for you.

AI is making its way into the real world, and it’s tracking our everyday movements. We’ve written in the past about the very real implications of AI face detection, including how it can make big mistakes.

But AI isn’t just being used to spot criminals and theirs; it’s also being used to track our movements and purchases as customers.

The European Union seems to be onto something when it comes to protecting its citizens with its newest AI act. Almost every week now, we’re seeing incredible new use cases for the technology (some rather worrying).

Most recently, we came across a video illustrating how coffee shops could use AI to monitor and analyze the behaviors of their employees and customers.

It could track individual employees, keeping a log of how many coffees they have made, how many customers they’ve served, and how often they used their phones or went to the restrooms.

For customers, it could keep track of how long they spend inside the establishment and how much they order, and with that information, it could calculate their spending per minute.

The argument goes that this sort of AI analysis will lead to shorter wait times. We’re already seeing fast-food restaurants like Sweetgreen implement AI to help their staff more accurately predict which food needs to be prepped and when based on historical sales data.

As with many AI use cases, there’s a trade-off between privacy and the desired benefits. Do we really want to have our every moment tracked so we can get a coffee 1.289% faster?

Good news for those of you who are not interested in being physically tracked by AI. The University of Maryland just released videos of its new privacy sweater. They spent time researching and testing materials and prints to create the perfect sweater that makes you invisible to AI. While the AI they tested it on could track the male without the sweater, it got awfully confused once he pulled the sweater over his head.

The sweater’s print is essentially camouflage created with a combination of objects and shapes you might see in a public space. In the eyes of today's AI, this splits you up into smaller, harder-to-track objects.

So there you have it! Maybe an ugly sweater won’t be so much of a bad gift to get this Christmas.

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You learn to speak a different language when you're on the internet. No, I’m not talking about Spanish or Russian. I’m talking about the languages that surround the niches you are involved in. It doesn’t matter if you have a hobby in magic or knitting; you will use language around those topics differently.  One term common in the world we inhabit as the writers of this newsletter is “SEO.” This stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” and it is a tool that can get more traffic to your website. Today’s story concerns how far some will go to improve their SEO numbers. 

If you run a website (or newsletter), you may need to use images found online. However, you must be careful when using these because the last thing you want is a letter from a lawyer. Copyright law can be tricky and lead to expensive lawsuits. That's why places like Buzzfeed and Vice have deleted thousands of photos on their websites. It’s not worth a copyright infringement notice ending up in your email. 

Well, that is what Ernie Smith, the writer behind Tedium, woke up to last month.  Commonwealth Legal’s intellectual Property division reached out to Smith, claiming a photo used of a keyfob was the copyright of their client Tech4Gods. While some copyright notices ask for monetary compensation or the image to be taken down, they only wanted a credit with a link. 

Okay, this is where it gets interesting. The firm in question doesn't exist. Their website claims to be operating out of the 4th floor of 3909 N 16th St on the fourth floor. Well, as pointed out in the Smith’s Mastodon thread, this is the image you get when you look for it on Google Maps.

I’m no genius, but that building doesn’t have four floors. It also doesn’t match the building on its website!

Okay, but if you go to the website, will you see their lawyers? Nope. What you will get is a page of fake names and photos of people with thousand-yard stares. After grabbing a few of the faces and reverse image-searching them, I found other fake personas with the same photos, and it all leads back to a website that makes AI-generated people that don’t exist. Even the logo looks as if it came out of a prompt given to the AI.

We had an actual lawyer using AI to write briefs. Now, we have AI lawyers threatening lawsuits.

So, the question has to be, “Why?” Why use fake AI lawyers? Why threaten a copyright lawsuit and only stand down if they link to a website?

They want backlinks. This is a fancy way of saying that the more websites link to your website, the better your SEO. The better your SEO, the more people visit your website and the more potential eyes on advertisements.

While we could speculate about whether the people from Tech4Gods are behind this or the utility of threatening lawsuits to improve your SEO, the main issue is how AI is being used. We have an AI-generated legal team sending fake claims of copyright violation. The world is getting murkier.

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Advancements in AI are changing the way the world works across every industry. While we mostly read about the big tech companies building humanoid robots and self-driving cars, incredible new tech is getting rolled out in places you might not see on the front pages… like farming.

Pests destroy up to 40% of the world’s crops each year, which is an insane number to comprehend. Farmers work to tackle this issue in various ways, but recent AI advancements have made things easier.

Enter the Slovenian AI company Tapview.

They decided one of the best ways to help farmers would be to enable them to quickly and accurately detect which pests are making their way onto their crops. The earlier they can detect the pests, the faster they can act, and if the farmers know precisely which insects are present, they can be much more targeted in their approach to resolving the issue.

First, Tapview built the world’s largest database of pictures of insects. They used this data to train an AI model so that it can quickly identify any insect you present it with.

Then, they built a device that uses pheromones to attract pests. The insects are photographed by a small camera inside the traps, and the AI cross-references the images against the database.

It can now identify over 60 species with true precision, whether that’s the codling moth that afflicts apples or the cotton bollworm that damages tomatoes.

After the trap captures the image and identifies the pest, it gets even more impressive. These AI-driven traps use location and weather data to map the insect's likely impact and send the findings to the farmers.

The app can even calculate when and where the best place to use pesticides will be. This means farmers save money by reducing the use of chemical sprays, which is better for the environment, too.

Something that always strikes us about these AI companies is how small their teams are. Tapview currently employs 50 people. It won’t be long before we see our first billion-dollar AI company with just one employee. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, we’ll leave it to you to decide.

In 2022, the company said it had sold over 7,500 devices in more than 50 countries. Given AI’s booming popularity, it’s safe to assume that more farmers will be open to the idea of using this technology.

There are three key trends we identify in almost every story we cover for Subscribe to AI. First, AI will never be this bad again — it will only get better. The second is that, in general, it will only get more accessible too — both in terms of costs, tools and resources. And finally, as more and more people find out about AI and what it can do, more people will adopt the tools to use it, too.

When automation became a massive trend across industries over a decade ago, the USA became much more productive, and employees made more money. Elsewhere, in places like Europe, though, people used automation tools to simplify their lives. Instead of increasing their output, Europeans measurably kept a consistent output and freed up more time for their personal lives.

We’ll have to see how the world uses AI in the future to either focus on increasing output or freeing up their lives.

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Gov Bill Lee and Luke Bryan

Tennessee is the proud home of country music. The state boasts over 61,000 music-related jobs and over 4,000 venues for live music performances. That honestly shouldn’t be surprising, given that the state has both Nashville and Memphis inside its borders. Music is one of the most dependable revenue sources for the state. This past week, the governor kept it that way, signing a sweeping bill preventing AI from copying an artist’s voice and more. 

There has been a lot of talk about AI taking our jobs. On an intuitive level, we can all understand why that is a frightening prospect. This is especially scary for singers. Their job is to be themselves and produce music. Ultimately, it is their voice that makes them unique. With AI, you can copy their voice and have them sing almost anything. And sometimes, it's tough to know the difference between the authentic voice and the AI rendering. 

We saw that just last year when a person known as Ghostwriter decided to release music he wrote, but under the fake voices of Drake and The Weeknd. While that story ended with possible lawsuits, it almost guaranteed Ghostwriter a Grammy nomination. This trend has only continued, leaving artists at a loss. 

Tennessee has decided to take on AI with a new law.

The Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act (ELVIS Act) is a first-in-the-nation bill. It aims to curb the use of AI content that copies artists. Starting in July, you will no longer be permitted to make content that mimics an artist’s voice, likeness, or image. 

Violators of this law could face fines of up to $2,500 and 11 months in jail. The artist will also be able to sue for damages! Based on the governor’s attitude, they seem too serious about the threat to seek punishment. Add that to the list of arguments against making an AI Hozier sing a Lana Del Ray song. 

But like with most new legislation, some details are still murky, and people raise red flags. Instead of the usual “think of the children,” we are asked to think of the tribute bands and Elvis impersonators. Some lawyers have argued that the bill’s vagueness would hinder these acts. 

On the other hand, we have people who want the same protections for private citizens. We have seen a rise in AI-generated explicit images of private individuals. Shouldn’t their claim to their likeness be held up with the same scrutiny?

Much like with AI, time will determine how effective this all is. As it stands, it feels like there's no clear answer. 

Celebrities like Grimes have embraced AI renderings of their likeness. Just last year, Beatles fans were treated to one last song with the help of AI. Other artists and public figures are actively in lawsuits over how their likenesses and voices have been used against their will. As always, this feels like a Pandora's box situation. Where is the line, and just how far past that line will we go?

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Zoopla

Take a look at that lovely image of a very yellow bathroom. The photo was part of a property listing on Zoopla designed to show off the apartment in all its glory. Here’s a question for you: Where’s the bathroom sink?

That’s right—the longer you look at the above image, the stranger it becomes. At first glance, it’s a simple bathroom furnished with a bunch of plain IKEA furniture. But things seem a little out of place. The angles seem wrong, and what appears to be the bathroom sink on the left doesn’t seem to have a basin or taps to pour the water.

In the past year, real estate agents have begun furnishing their listing photos with artificial intelligence.

It has long been known that a furnished property can be much more attractive to buyers than an empty one that might be more difficult to imagine yourself living in.

There’s even a term for it, too: staging. There’s an entire industry of companies that stage homes on the market, like Meridith Baker, who furnishes over 150 listings per month across the US, which often sell for up to six figures over asking. A staged home can inspire buyers by showing them a finished product.

Staging makes sense for the big mansions and millionaire holiday homes, but your average landlord and letting agent probably can’t afford to stage their apartments. Even if they did, it certainly wouldn’t add six figures to the price.

But then along came artificial intelligence. Solopreneur and self-named indie-hacker Peter Levels was one of the first to build on top of AI models like ChatGPT to create products like InteriorAI.

Level’s website allows users to redesign their interior in seconds for a small fee digitally. The app can be used to change your existing furnishings to a new style or add furniture to an empty apartment. Try InteriorAI here. 

It’s impossible to know which tools landlords and agents are using to furnish their empty apartment listings. One thing we do know is that people are unsure how to react to this new trend. At least when you stage an apartment with authentic furniture, the furniture is actually there when you show up to view the place.

These AI-staged images have a certain catfish deceptive feel. They’re as fake as fake can be. We certainly can’t imagine how people react when they do rock up to the beautifully furnished apartment to find an empty room that’s not at all yellow and totally void of a bathtub and a sink.

In an online world that is slowly filling up with fake images, be that this example or heavily manipulated pictures of Kate Middleton, it’s getting more and more difficult to gauge what’s genuine online.

Truth be told, every image you take with your phone is a little bit fake. Most phones already rely on AI to produce the best combination of the many photos they take when you think you’re only taking one snap.

Next time you get sucked into looking at properties online and dreaming of which one to buy someday, remember to ask yourself… where’s the sink?!

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Life's simple pleasures often include the joy of reading a good book, with fiction holding a special place in many hearts. Memoirs, too, are embraced for the unique perspectives they offer. However, the dark side emerges as some exploit artificial intelligence to write and sell books on platforms like Amazon, leading to unforeseen consequences.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher experienced this firsthand when preparing to release her latest book last month, "Burn Book." Alongside its pre-orders, she discovered unfamiliar books claiming to tell her life story. She didn’t recognise the authors or the photos of her on the covers…

The books were made with AI.

The alarming trend involves individuals using AI to generate books similar to best-selling releases rapidly. By scraping the internet for information, the AI can generate books at an astonishing pace. However, the drawback is that these AI models may "hallucinate," injecting outright lies into biographies.

For Kara, seeing an ungodly amount of fake biographies about her alongside her real memoir was bad. Her name is in the title of the fake books, but at least she’s not listed as the author.

Imagine you’re a best-selling author, and someone starts publishing AI books under your name, too. If you happen to be best-selling author Jane Friedman reading this, you don’t have to imagine it; it happened to her. 

Jane Friedman is a best-selling author who writes about making it in the world of publishing. So imagine her shock when she saw some new books pop up online using her name. She has fought for sites like Amazon and Goodreads to delete these bogus books, but it's a real struggle. AI can write a book, design the cover, and upload it for sale in less than a few hours. 

Amazon has claimed to take this problem very seriously. But, it currently has no policy against AI-generated books. It does have rules about books with misleading descriptions. They also cover books that infringe on intellectual property. And books that are "typically disappointing". In other words, the problem of these AI books will become a lot worse before it gets better. As of today, those AI-generated books no longer litter the page when you search for Kara’s book. But how long will that last? 

This is the important thing to keep in mind about AI: it is simply a tool. We can use this tool to sell pastries or detect cancer. We can also use it to create NSFW images of celebrities (please don’t do that). So, people have seen AI as a cheap and easy way to produce a book as a cash grab. And now actual writers are having to deal with that.

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A Newsletter You’ll Love: Stay ahead on the business of AI

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We began sharing weekly human stories from the world of AI six months ago. We’re so glad to have you here on this journey with us. It’s been fun to ignore all the noise and worry around artificial intelligence and try to find the real stories impacting humans like you each week.

There’s been a pattern in our coverage of AI that’s struck a chord with us: AI has a lot of transferable skills.

An AI trained to do one thing can often help tremendously elsewhere. And more frequently than not, it tends to be money-driven industries leading the charge. They fund the development of AI models at a record pace. Then, once they’ve achieved the impossible, the rest of us can also take their AI for a spin.

This week’s story takes begins in a pastry shop in Japan.

You decide which pastries you want to buy. You place them into bags, some clear and some brown paper, then head to the checkout. To your surprise, no one is behind the tills. But instead of tapping a touch screen and trying to find each of the pastries you want to buy from a list of options, all you do is place your selection on the table. Instantly, the till knows which pasties you chose and charges you correctly for them.

It sounds made up, but it isn’t!

These shops use a unique AI system called BakeryScan to speed up the checkout process. BakeryScan can instantly recognise which croissants and other pastries you chose. It doesn’t stop there; the system calculates the prices and manages the rest of the transaction process.

BakerySkan has revolutionised bakeries in Japan. It’s faster and makes fewer errors than its human counterpart — we’ve all tapped around at a self-checkout before eventually tapping on the regular croissant because we can’t find the chocolate one in the tiny grid of pictures.

The AI system took years to train and had to learn how to adapt to different lighting conditions, placements, and various pastry shapes.

But here’s the cool part — what started as a pastry-detecting tool now has an unbelievable range of use cases. The BakeryScan tech was expanded with a new, broader name, AI-Scan.

Today, the AI model is used in various ways, including detecting incorrectly wired bolts in jet engine parts and recognising pills in hospitals.

Most importantly, AI-Scan is now being used to detect cancer cells. No kidding. It probably wouldn't fill you with much hope to find out as a patient that a tool originally designed to detect croissants is now going to be checking to see if you’ve got cancer — but it is!

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Do you know how real people write this newsletter? Both writers (Nathan and Rory) were unwell last week and couldn’t send out the newsletter. But we are back and healthy this week, so let’s jump into the story! 

It often feels like the world has lost its mind. That could be because our media will take nothing stories and blow them out of proportion. “Whatever we can change narratively to fit a certain agenda, we will” mentality from most news publications.  But sometimes, the story is so insane that it doesn’t need a spin. We can look at something and tell that the intentions were good, but the road was still leading straight to disaster. 

This past week, Google announced that its AI chatbot would no longer be able to produce images. This is due to the fact that the AI seemed to refuse to show white people in any of its produced content - even making historical figures appear to be of different nationalities. They publicly stated that they know the inaccuracies and are working to improve these depictions. 

Don’t get me wrong, we like Hamilton as much - if not more- than the next guy. We’re super cool with the idea of a black George Washington. The issue is that, historically speaking, he was an old white man who owned slaves. And for better or worse, Gemini was not offering that option. Instead, we got this: 

Which, admittedly,  is pretty cool. But you might see why swapping the race of a historical figure is … problematic. But it did it with countless other prompts. It had no problem showcasing the achievements of other races. It just simply refused to show white people. Hell, even when asked to show a picture of a 1940s German soldier - it gave an image of an Asian woman in a German uniform. Simply bizarre. 

Even when prompted to give a picture of a white person, the chatbot responded that it could not because it “reinforces harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race.” When pressed as to why it wouldn’t showcase any white people, the AI answered with a nuanced take on the historical context and the norm surrounding the whitewashing of history. 

It’s undeniable about the whitewashing of history. It’s just not a great answer to while it portrayed historical figures as different races. 

To be clear, AI could inherently have certain biases due to training data. This can have real-life consequences - especially when considering some of the data and results of facial recognition used by businesses. But this over-correction has caused backlash and is fed into the nonstop culture war. They committed the cardinal sin of letting Fox News be right about something. 

Google has put a pause on the image generation of its AI. While some will spin this story as a “woke” culture gone too far, in reality, it is an AI that was told to have nuanced views on complicated subject matter. And as great as AI is, it's not good enough to deal with the issue of racism just yet. 

This should be an absurd, silly story about as great as AI is, it’s still learning. Instead, it has become a place to lash out on more culture war nonsense.

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In October, we shared a story of a 21-year-old who used AI to decipher a word in an ancient scroll. Today, we bring you an exciting update from the world of artificial intelligence and 2,000-year-old scrolls.

It’s all tied to the same $1,000,000 challenge set out by Brent Seales and Nat Friedman: the Vesuvius Challenge.

“When we launched this less than a year ago, I honestly wasn’t sure it’d work,” said Friedman this week. “You know, people say money can’t buy happiness, but they have no imagination. This has been pure joy. It’s magical what happened; it couldn’t have been scripted better.”

The backstory of these scrolls is pretty interesting because they’re not trying to use AI to translate the writings. No, there’s a reason this is called the Vesuvius Challenge.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls were severely burned when Vesuvius erupted nearby in AD79. The scrolls were in the library of a luxury Roman villa, and they’ve never actually been unrolled since. Opening the scrolls to read them would cause them to crumble into a crisp.

Participants in the contest had to use AI or any other tool to analyze high-quality CT scans taken of the scrolls in Oxford, England.

A few months back, 21-year-old Luke Farritor won $40,000 when he managed to decipher a whole word on one of the scrolls.

And on Monday, three researchers won the grand price of $700,000 when they used AI to decipher a large portion of one of the carbonized documents.

They had to decipher four scroll passages of at least 140 characters to win this prize, with at least 85 per cent of the characters recoverable.

And they say they did so over a rush of 20 hour days spurred on by adrenaline with that big prize in mind.

It’s believed that having achieved this level of AI detective work; they can apply the same process to decipher about 800 crumbling scrolls known as the Herculaneum Papyri.

The author of the scrolls is believed by experts to be Epicurean philosopher Philodemus based on the themes of these latest excerpts. The author wrote about music, food, and how to enjoy life in the newly uncovered writings.

Think of it like a blog post from 2,000 years ago.

Maybe someday, after something as disastrous as a volcanic eruption, 2,000 years later, someone will be using AI to decipher your old tweets.

This philosopher even seems to dunk on rival philosophers over on the Roman Stoicism camp, who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.”

The winning team was led by Youssef Nader, an Egyptian student from Berlin, and included Jiluan Schiliger, a Swiss robotics student. Oh, the third member of the team was Luke Farritor. Remember him? He progressed from deceiphering one word in October to multiple complete phrases!

The trio have made their ink detection software code public, so who knows what we’ll get to read next? Maybe some AD79 sexts. Congrats to the three students for winning the contest’s largest prize of $700,000.

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A Furby

There is plenty of news about what is happening in the AI world today, from lawsuits to Taylor Swift to the spread of misinformation in active war zones. But today, we want to rewind the clock to 1998, when Furbies ran wild. 

In 1999, an NSA employee leaked information that the spy agency had banned the new children's toy, Furby. While the original article never specified what they thought the toy was doing, the fear was about learning classified information. If it wasn’t bad enough, the FAA banned the toy from takeoffs and landings around the same time. 

So, if you were a kid who never got a Furby, your parents probably worked for the NSA or were pilots. 

While this was a cute enough story from the late 90’s, the internet does what it always does - digs deeper. Thanks to @dakotathekat, we have now discovered what led to the ban from the NSA offices. They recently filed a freedom of information request, got the papers, and promptly uploaded the documents to the Internet Archive last week!

An email sent on December 9th, 1998, with the headline “Christmas Toys with AI,” started the beef between the US and the furry friend. 

This led to the release of an agency-wide memo reinforcing that any personally owned recording devices were strictly prohibited. This, unfortunately, included the beloved toy and was titled “The Furby Alert.” While some agents considered the toy a serious threat to national security, others didn’t. It can only be assumed that someone who thought the memo was a bit silly was the one who leaked it to the press. 

As a side note, the documents also show conversations between agency members about the matter. There was some back-and-forth about whether the memo was necessary and how likely it was that the toy had artificial intelligence. It reads like a Reddit post. The back-and-forth soon ended when a fellow agent reminded everyone how embarrassing it would be if these comments were made public due to a FOIA filing. If that person only knew how right they were. 

The story soon became a bit of internet trivia and a fun story about how a small toy caused such panic from the US intelligence agencies. But now we know the real fear was not that it was recording - the possible presence of AI. 

Yes, AI does pose real issues. AI also poses real opportunities. And part of what is going on is us learning the capabilities of this new technology. And while some organizations will attempt to scare mongers with how bad AI can be - just know that even the most powerful spy agency in the world has been scared of this technology.

If we can look back and laugh at the ridiculousness of this government agency and their fear of a toy - imagine how silly we might look with some of our grim predictions. 

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Joe Biden

We like to write about how AI impacts real people in the real world. So, let’s talk about elections and AI's role in this next big one in the US.

With AI companies and social networks gearing up and releasing statements on how they plan to tackle the rise of AI-generated misinformation, this week’s story comes in the form of a less techy communication style — phone calls.

On January 22nd, the New Hampshire Department of Justice released a statement informing the public that people had received calls from a recorded audio deepfake of Joe Biden.

This means when they answered the robocall, they heard what sounded like a prerecorded message to voters from President Joe Biden himself. When, in fact, the audio was entirely deepfaked and generated with AI.

Voters were encouraged by the fake Joe Biden not to vote in the state primary election. They heard him encourage them to “save” their vote, telling them, “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.”

Voters can and should vote in the primary and November elections.

What’s remarkable about this story is how quickly the industry could determine who was behind the robocalls and how they’d made the audio. It was a voice-fraud detection company called Pindrop Security who found out that the fake Biden robocall was made using ElevenLabs.

ElevenLabs is an AI voice generator that can add human-like inflexion to AI voices based on context. You can use thousands of their pre-made AI voices to read whatever you want aloud and in whatever tone you wish to hear. You can also use their platform to create custom voices.

Once ElevenLabs was made aware of the Biden deepfake, it investigated and suspended the account that created it. But it’s unclear what the legal repercussions for something like this might be.

What stands out to us about this story is how easy it appears to have been for one user to create such startlingly realistic election misinformation with the voice of the current president.

If anyone can use simple, affordable software to produce things like this quickly, and if everyone else’s parents believe the things they see on Facebook as much as ours do… what’s going to happen when serious players decide to wade in and push out AI-generated misinformation?

We’ve seen how much countries like to meddle in elections, creating hundreds of thousands of fake profiles and user accounts online—posting and sharing misinformation and stoking the fires of division. How will we cope when AI misinformation gets so realistic and frequent that we cannot tell what’s real?

Half the videos of Trump or Biden we see every week could just as believably be AI-generated. We’ll have to keep an eye on how things go this year.

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Dudesly AI Special: YouTube

George Carlin was arguably one of the greatest names in comedy. Starting his career in the late ‘50s, he made a name for himself with his sharp wit and cutting social comedy. He made his mark on the stand-up scene in the late 70s with his infamous “Dirty words you can't say on TV or the radio.” He was an outspoken critic of the status quo and made a point of never punching down. 

His effects and comedy can still be felt in how some comedians tell their jokes or how hard they try to match his record of a new hour log special every year - a tradition that was sadly broken because he died in 2008. 

In 2016, a posthumous special was released with some of his previously unseen work, and we laughed with him for the last time. 

That was until this month.

AI comedian “Dudesy” released a new comedy special on YouTube entitled “I’m Glad I’m Dead”—a very Carlin-esque title for a very bizarre concept. 

The special opens with the voice of “Dudesly”, explaining that this is an impression. It says it's using a rendering of his voice, selected topics, and Carlin's mannerisms to create this new act. 

The opening joke was that he hadn’t made a new special because he was dead. It was super jarring, mainly because it felt like the type of joke Carlin would have made. 

After listening to the special, it's clear how good the technology is getting. It’s unclear how many of the jokes were written by  Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen( the minds behind this project) and how many the AI actually punched up itself. But the voice and cadence were undeniable. Even the bit about why we love reality TV was very Carlin - with its four-beat structure. 

Reactions have been mixed - while we've seen AI imitations of van Goth in museums and even people building their loved ones into chatbots - this has a uniquely different feel. Much like the criticisms against Ghostwriter and his music - the notion of taking the voice of a beloved comedian and using it to tell jokes just feels wrong. 

Carlin’s daughter wrote in a series of tweets: 

“My statement regarding the AI-generated George Carlin special: My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination.  No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI-generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can’t let what has fallen into it stay there. Here’s an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere.” 

As technology gets better, we will see more and more of this. Based on some of the lines in the special, it's evident that the people behind this project don’t believe they have done anything wrong, linking the idea of AI and digital consciousness to heaven. 

The reaction has been all over the place for fans of the late comedian. Some hate the idea, saying that Carlin would despise the lack of creativity. Some say it's a work of art and are excited to have Carlin back. Others, and probably the more sane of the groups, are united in missing such an icon in the comedy world. They are even revisiting some of his actual work. 

Seeing how this has been one of the more divisive topics - what do you think? Should they take it down out of respect for the family? Should we support art created in this manner? Where is the line between using AI to help create art and using AI to replace art?

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