Cloudflare is trapping AI in honeypots

📰 News Roundup

• OpenAI gets a huge upgrade. GPT 4o can now produce accurate text on imagery, as well as generating some of the best imagery from prompts we’ve seen to date. In early testing it seems that Midjourney may be in serious trouble, as this update looks incredible. Sam Altman announced today that due to the popularity the update is now only rolling out to paid plans for the time being.

• Cloudflare is trapping AI in AI honeypots. In possibly my favorite AI tool this year, Cloudflare has essentially made an advanced AI honeypot to trap AI web scraper bots. Instead of just blocking them, it feeds them AI garbage instead. The tool is called AI Labyrinth, and is activated when Cloudflare detects “inappropriate bot behavior”. For those of you less akin to the hacking world, a honeypot is a system set up as a decoy to lure cyberattackers away from the main system. The idea of using one to trap AI in some sort of AI hell loop, is quite frankly, brilliant.

• CyberCab? How about RoboTruck. General Motors has partnered with Nvidia to create autonomous cars. GM famously shut down its Waymo competitor ‘Cruise’ last year, but has a new invigoration for AI cars, partnering with Nvidia to create a number of Level 2 and ADAS features for GM models, as well as looking further afield to full autonomy.

• U-Turn Ahead. Apple has announced it’s going to use Apple Maps photos to train its AI, which given the state of Apple Maps, sounds like a recipe for wrong turns. We’ll wait and see if there are any detours. For those of you worrying about privacy, both faces and licenses are blurred as standard, houses are not, but you can request your house to be blurred by submission.

• Ferrari Outsmarts AI deep-fake attack. This month a Ferrari executive recieved texts from Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna, shortly after Benedetto rang the executive, explaining that there was “a deal that could face some China-related snags and required an unspecified currency-hedge transaction to be carried out”. Neither the messages, nor the call was Benedetto, instead an advanced AI deepfake, to dupe the executive. Ferrari avoided any issues, but to see spear-phishing at this level is certainly something to keep one eye open for.

🛠 Tool of the Week: SudoWrite

Sudowrite is an AI-powered writing tool that is solely focused on fiction. This tool isn’t for emails or KPI reviews, but to help authors, screenwriters, and creatives enhance their storytelling. The platform provides real-time suggestions, rewrites passages, and generates ideas while being able to maintain the writer’s voice. The tool makes it easier for writers to develop compelling narratives without losing creative control.

🤌 Check it out: [HERE]

👾 Summit Spotlight: OpenHome

OpenHome are partnering with us at Artist and the Machine for attendees of the summit to create their own AI twin. The activation takes place as an interactive experience to clone your voice, likeness and personality, giving attendees a sharable OpenHome twin, that attendees can take home and share with their peers, giving anyone the ability to talk to their custom AI Twin.

🤖 Interview: AyseDeniz

This week we interview AyseDeniz, a classically trained virtuoso pianist and composer, With her new classical regenerated AI initiative and piano show, AyseDeniz brings back legendary classical composers and explores the future of music through cutting-edge Al technology. AyseDeniz will be performing at our AI & Creativity Summit on April 24 in NYC, we caught up with her to talk about AI in music.

How do you see AI reshaping the creative process for musicians like yourself? Could AI become a collaborative composer?

At the moment, my AI experiments are limited to projects specifically designed for exploring human-machine interaction, where I test various tools to co-create with AI, but I like to keep my AI music projects separate from my own creative process for several reasons. Right now, most AI tools are built with non-musicians in mind. Most of the AI tools I would actually use as a professional composer and pianist simply don’t exist yet, likely because the market for them is too small.

For example, I improvise on the piano and then transcribe the music, but listening to my recordings hundreds of times to write down the notes is an incredibly boring and repetitive task. I would love an AI tool that could accurately generate high-quality sheet music from complex improvisations in free time.

Through my AI experimentations, I found that AI can be an incredible collaborative tool for generating new melodic ideas. However I wouldn’t claim that those are my compositions - if the AI wrote a melody, then it is written by AI and not me. I like being honest with my fans. People deserve to know which part of the composition is done by a human and which part is AI.

In these projects, I am fully present: I not only generate, produce and curate but I perform in all the pieces. I build the story, I dream and I make it a reality on stage. It is still about my vision, and my story. The effort I put in is the same amount if I were doing my own compositions.

The real issue, however, isn’t AI itself, it’s the lack of protections for artists in an industry already struggling due to the exploitation of musicians by streaming platforms that pay artists mere pennies, and big labels that take advantage of them. Instead of blaming AI, we need to focus on building a system that protects human artists in an already flawed streaming economy.

Can AI help us experience what past composers might have written, or does it lack authenticity?

I think AI is getting really good at analyzing and generating music based on existing works of a composer, and there is a new AI classical music generation tool called ‘NotaGen’: it is the most advanced one I have seen so far.

I have also managed to generate other classical tributes before that I believe sound pretty amazing! But these are tribute projects that are hopefully aiming to educate the audiences about the real composers who lived and to appreciate their talent even more.

I use AI in my concerts to let audience members ask Chopin or his lover / feminist author George Sand questions, for example, which makes classical music history more interactive and fun.

In terms of authenticity, Ai is not there yet. Only the future will tell!

How do you think AI might influence the future of live music, from composition to stage experience?

AI can elevate the concert experience to another level and I am most excited about this because back in the day that would be so expensive and with the current visual tools I can create amazing videos to go with my music and even create my AI twin! Previously I would not be able to afford any of these, but now the million dollar productions are going to be possible and as a non technical person I can do most of these things myself!

If artists embrace the technology, this will support the music industries such as classical that were not previously supported financially as the popular genres, and appeal to younger audiences!

What do you enjoy most about using AI to assist with composition and experimentation?

I absolutely love the relationship and the feedback loop I have with the AI tools I use. Somehow, I feel like the outcome I create truly represents what I wanted to say, and it does get pretty spiritual and it makes me wonder what it means to be human if AI is capable of creating such emotions already.

How do you preserve emotion and human nuance in an age where AI can “compose”?

People will say “AI-generated music is often technically perfect but emotionally hollow. It lacks the human imperfections, subtle timing shifts, dynamic expression, and intentional phrasing, that make music feel alive.” That’s not true at all. Some of the generations I have created are absolutely amazing performances and incredibly emotional. They will only get better.

But that is not a problem to me: my role is to create and portray what the notes say in my own way, and to tell my story, so it is not about competing with AI. I will always play differently than others including than AI. This goes for any human - the more I interact with AI, the more I think about how each living being has a unique personality. It makes me appreciate life more.

How do you see the relationship between human musicians and AI evolving over the next 5–10 years? Can AI deepen our connection to music?

I think people listen to music for two main reasons: Because the music itself is great or because the artist has built a strong community and become the voice of their audience.

These two don’t always go hand in hand. There are incredibly talented musicians who remain unheard due to a lack of community or self-promotion. Meanwhile, some popular artists create fairly average music but have such a strong connection with their fans and benefit from the virality of social media algorithms, that their work reaches millions. It’s an unfortunate reality and it can change with the help of AI, if it is used in the right way: to save time with boring tasks, to save money, to create better concert experiences and much more. If artists are able to learn new tools they will be very advantageous.

What excites me most is AI’s ability to generate music using vast amounts of data and frequencies, exploring sonic possibilities beyond what has traditionally been composed. Western classical and popular music are rooted in tonal structures, and while different compositional methods such as 12 tone or atonal systems exist, or that cultures have developed microtonal systems, AI has the potential to go even further. Instead of relying on familiar pitches, it could create its own musical structures, drawing from an immense range of sounds and forming entirely new rules for composition. I’d love to see AI enjoying music by other AI! I also love sci-fi movies so…

AI & Creativity Summit April 24, New York City

Til next time,

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

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