MARYJANE's PET ZOO: AI video

"AI Pet Zoo" by Midjourney 

Dig into your hash-stash and check out “Maryjane's...”. A year ago Eki said he had an AI app he could play around with when I wanted to do digital art. A pal took photos of toy animals and we did a voiceover.

For Eki AI has been a boon. But not all the news is rah-rah. Schools will have to adapt – AI can write almost perfect papers. When AI gets a "conscience', will it be good or bad? “How ChatGPT* Highjacks Democracy” was an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

New AI apps keep popping up. Just found out I can talk to a ChatbotGPT version of Karl Marx and a bunch of other famous people. Shuda, an AI supermodel starred in a Louis Vuitton** ad. Whoa. We're on a wild rollercoaster ride. Feels good to get a little stoned. Light up.

*Microsoft has made a $10bn bet on ChatGPT.

**LVMH has hooked up with GoogleCloud to invent AI Apps for their companies

Sources: Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Eki, Annie Lavinge, Augustin de Saint-Remy,

Next week: CONDOMS come in handy: ask a CUBAN

"The AI takes over the world" by Midjourney AI

Note: It's indeed been a wild ride over the last year or so - yet it seems we're still just cruising in the suburbs in this journey, still only just approaching the freeway. Following AI development closely, I'm more and more convinced that it will change everything we humans do, and I mean that quite literally. Currently in line: the creative professions from writing to coding to art to research.

Lately, the tempest in a teapot has been the visual arts community, and the way AI image generators will make many art-related jobs obsolete - usually disguised as a copyright issue, without real merit to those claims - the real beef is the fear of becoming unnecessary.

Sure, it's indeed a big deal for all those illustrators and stock photographers whose work will be replaced by ai images... but that's still just a side note of the AI revolution. The whole AI imaging technique is pretty much just a byproduct of machine vision research that's been done for intelligent robotics and self-driving cars.

As the AI models are becoming multi-modal (not specialized in text or images etc. only, but integrating all of them), we're perhaps quite close to the so-called singularity, the point where AI becomes superhuman.

Now, *that* is putting the pedal to the metal on the freeway.

To the subject at hand, turning the Pet Zoo into a video, it's in the works. There are some AI tools that I will use to assist with that. But it will still be sort of "dumb", in the sense that I will need to produce the motion, either animating by hand or by acting the motions to a webcam, then using AI to transfer my captured movement into the movement of the AI Pet Zoo animals.

But we are on the verge of a very different kind of AI video - where just like with images, we simply type what we want to see, and the AI will create a video automagicly. This kind of tools already exist, but only in the chambers of the research labs - they'll likely be in the hands of us mere mortals later this year. These will be fun and interesting tools to play with, but similar to what's happening to illustrators, they will also bring the AI apocalypse to my turf, the video post-production job market.

Interesting times. And terrifying. And exhilarating. Whoa.

CU

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Eki