📰 News Roundup

• Meth-cooking SpongeBob: Sam Altman recently teased a roadmap for Sora–the new prompt-based video creation tool–that will allow copyright holders to exercise stricter controls over the use of their IPs and to collect revenue down the line. The move comes in response to the oodles of cringey-y content that has washed over the platform featuring characters like SpongeBob and Pokemon in far from wholesome scenarios.

• Bezos says AI is in a bubble, but it will pay off: Speaking at Italian Tech Week, the founder of Amazon said, “What’s happening currently is an industrial bubble akin to the biotech bubble in the 1990s where companies went out of business and investors lost money, but we did get a couple of lifesaving drugs.”

• Sam Altman has been caught stealing GPUs: Sora users have been yucking it up creating videos of Altman stealing GPUs and such after the OpenAI founder allowed the use of his likeness on the platform.

• Deloitte refunds the Australian government: This past August, The Australian Finance Review called out Deloitte for allowing AI slop to slip into its commissioned report for Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. Deloitte’s write-up was plagued by made-up citations to non-existent papers by academics at the universities of Sydney and Lund in Sweden. Deloitte has refunded part of its $290,000 fee.

🤖 Our LA Summit is Heating Up - Peep our third Speaker Drop

We are thrilled to announce our third speaker drop for our AI & Creativity Summit in LA on November 19th! Introducing:

Joel Kawahara is a two-time Emmy Award–winning producer with over 30 years in the animation industry. His credits include iconic series such as The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers. As Co-Founder and former President of Production at Bento Box Entertainment, he helped build the studio into a global leader in digital animation, fostering collaborations with artists and studios worldwide. His clients include 20th Animation, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, FOX, and Disney, to name just a few. Joel’s career has been defined by innovation at the crossroads of creativity and technology, and he remains dedicated to advancing the craft of animation and inspiring the next generation of storytellers.

Heather Schoell is the daughter of a biochemist and mathematician, balances her passion for art and science by using her art degree from Yale University to work as a creative in tech companies in Northern California, including Apple and NVIDIA. She enjoys teaching herself and others about new creative media. When AI emerged as an artistic outlet, Heather dove in to learn about it and meet the artists using it as part of her role as a creative director at NVIDIA. Through curating the NVIDIA AI Art Gallery, Heather gives voice to creatives who might not otherwise be heard in the tech arena, educates on the foundations of AI and how it can be applied creatively, and inspires others to experiment with the medium while learning about its benefits and shortcomings.

Mindaugas Petrutis leads creator partnerships at Lovable where he's built relationship infrastructure that spans influencers, creators, and high-profile collabs. Before Lovable, he founded Coho, a platform helping senior professionals make better decisions through structured peer insights. He spent a decade building influential design communities—first at InVision, then creating the On Deck Design Fellowship—and has advised thousands of designers and product leaders at Meta, Cisco, HubSpot, and OpenTable on career strategy and the changing nature of work. He's been using AI since before GPT-3 to automate and scale work most people still do manually, from building creator pipelines to helping people land jobs without applications.

Benjamin Woollams is the founder and CEO of TrueRights, the only platform that enables brands and AI platforms to safely and ethically license talent likeness for generative AI advertising. TrueRights protects creators while unlocking scalable, transparent content usage, giving advertisers a seamless way to source, license, and manage talent IP with full legal clarity. Prior to founding TrueRights, Ben was Commercial Director at Influencer.com, where, as one of the earliest members, he helped grow the company into one of the world’s leading influencer marketing agencies. It was there that he saw the urgent need for better governance around content and IP as AI began reshaping the industry. With TrueRights, he’s building the infrastructure to protect creators, simplify licensing, and ensure fair value in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

🤖 Introducing….AWS Sponsors our AI & Creativity Summit in LA 11/19

We’re thrilled to announce AWS as a partner of our upcoming LA Summit! As the technical backbone of innovation in Media, Entertainment, and Immersive experiences, AWS is uniquely positioned to support the next era of AI-powered Creativity and Human–Machine collaboration.

Our partnership with AWS is rooted in a shared belief: the future of Media and Entertainment lies in the co-creation between cutting-edge technology and human creativity. With AWS’s unparalleled cloud and AI capabilities powering the next wave of innovation, creators can unlock entirely new pipelines and possibilities.

At our LA Summit on the 19th of November, AWS will bring together leading creative visionaries on our Main Stage to explore how AI is powering a new wave of immersive and experiential entertainment, transforming bold creative visions into large-scale physical experiences.

🤖 Tool of the week: Dress X Agent

DRESSX Agent, the newly launched AI-powered membership club, is changing the way we shop for luxury fashion. With DRESSX Agent, you can create your own digital twin and try on curated styles–virtually-mixing and matching items–to see what fits before you buy.

It makes fashion discovery fun and personalized, turning online shopping into an interactive experience. DressX has even created a special code for the Artist and the Machine community! Just activate code AATMDX
on the membership page!

Try out DressX Agent HERE

🤖 AI Versus Human Content - A Middle Ground?

A new report from SEO firm Graphite offers insight into the balance between human and machine-made content online. According to the study, AI-generated content briefly surpassed human output in November 2024, before leveling off to around a 50/50 split. Graphite notes that AI articles have plateaued, largely because they tend to underperform in search, though that could shift with the rise of GEO. In what will come as no surprise to anyone, the authors of the report suspect that most AI-written articles aren’t actually being read by humans.

Read the full report here.

Send us your latest

We welcome news tips on exceptional projects, creative work, research, or tools. If something lights your 🔥we want to know. Write to us at community@artistandthemachine. 

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Remember to follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn as we get closer to our AI & Creativity summit in Los Angeles.

Til next time,

Dani Van de Sande (Founder), James Joseph (The Weekly Newsletter’s Editor) & the Artist and the Machine team.

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