The countdown to our LA Summit!

Two months until our epic LA Summit, don't miss! Plus the Drive Thru AI hack, Wizard of Oz gets the AI treatment, and Anthropic triples its valuation.

September 05, 2025

📰 News Roundup

AI for influencers: Lucy Guo the billionaire founder of Scale AI, has a new company: Passes. This social media AI startup aims to revolutionize how influencers and creators can connect and be paid by their audience.
Vibe Coding? Try Vibe Hacking: Vibe hacking is becoming popular, and a real threat. Claude helped North Korean IT workers fraudulently get jobs at Fortune 500 companies in the U.S in order to fund the country’s weapons program as well as in romance scams, enabling non-native English speakers to write persuasive messages in order to gain the trust of victims in the U.S.
Anthropic just tripled its valuation: Anthropic is now worth $183 Billion, closing a series F raising $13 Billion in the process. Anthropic is now fourth among private companies by value globally, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance, according to research firm CB Insights.
Drive Thru AI: Taco Bell has started using AI to take drive-thru orders, and it’s not really going to plan. Customers have had frustrations and taken it into their own hands, with the now viral 18,000 water cups as a bypass to get to speak to a human. CTO Dane Mathews has now announced: “‘We’re learning a lot, I’m going to be honest with you,’ is a great euphemism for ‘it’s not working and I’m in trouble.’”

🧠 Just over two months till our epic LA Summit on November 19th

We’re just over two months away from bringing the community together for the LA Summit, and we’re most definitely counting down the days! This is going to be a truly unique experience and location that we’re beyond excited to bring to life for you all. The speaker and partner lineup is quite something and we’re stoked to start sharing - stay tuned for some big announcements incoming…

A note from our Founder, Dani Van de Sande:

It's a wild time — we're on a rollercoaster ride through one of the biggest paradigm shifts for humanity. That's why I'm dedicated my time to Artist and the Machine. Because the deeper we go into technology, the more essential it is to gather, to question, to play, to challenge — and to define what the dynamic between what the Human, who is the Creator and the Artist, should really be in the age of Machines. It's up to us. The energy in the room at our NY Summit this past April was something I can't quite put into words. And now, six months later (which feels like lightyears in AI time), we're bringing that energy back to where it all began: Los Angeles. The birthplace of storytelling. The heartbeat of entertainment. A city that has always set the global stage for creativity. And selfishly, my hometown and the place Artist and the Machine was born. Join us on November 19th for our second-ever Artist and the Machine AI & Creativity Summit, hosted at a secret location in LA — the city where dreams become reality and creatives set the stage. At this moment of tectonic shifts, it's more essential than ever to convene as a cross-disciplinary community — artists, brands, founders, studios, HUMANS — to move beyond echo chambers and into unified conversation about where we go from here, to collaborate and shape the industry together. The pressing themes we'll dissect together, both from a thought leadership and hands-on experience perspective: ✨ Power Plays & Paradigm Shifts — The fundamental moves that industry leaders - top brands, studios, big tech and institutions - are making now and why they'll reshape everything. ✨ New Creative Economies — Revenue unlocks, IP monetization, and the emerging creator economy. ✨Wild Imagination vs. Replication — Are we truly pushing creative boundaries or just automating the old playbook? We'll explore all mediums - from video to experiential to robotics and more. ✨Humans at the Heart — Artists as stewards of authentic, brand-driven creativity in an automated world. ✨Human-Algorithm Partnership — Designing for human agency, alignment, and flourishing in creative collaboration. ✨The Studio Revolution — How legacy institutions and new creator-native models are colliding to redefine creation and distribution. And much more…stay tuned, and join us in celebration of the future of Creativity on November 19 in LA

www.linkedin.com/posts/danivandesande_ai-creativity-summit-sizzle-reel-2025-activity-7369088034715205634-yxBl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAncqdQBwlEt32JP4P1pjwmabKbCNg_4t7o

🛠️ Tool Of The Week: Recraft

Recraft has built its reputation on delivering “AI visuals that match your brand”, and it lives up to that promise. Unlike general-purpose generators, Recraft lets you define and save your brand’s visual DNA through customizable style presets drawn from reference images, allowing each new output to stay consistently on-brand. Whether you're crafting logos, icons, ads, or mockups, Recraft’s suite of tools, lets designers generate visuals that not only reflect brand identity but also adapt seamlessly across formats.

Try out Recraft HERE

👾 Launching the Chroma Awards - The “Olympics” of AI Creativity

At Artist and the Machine we’re excited to share and support the Chroma Awards - a groundbreaking AI Film, Music Video, and Games competition!

Starting today, the Chroma Awards is offering $1M+ in free trials to educate, empower, and spotlight the next generation of creatives to compete for $175,000+ in cash prizes.

Now until November 3rd, submit your work, and be in for a chance of these incredible creator prizes. Join the Chroma Awards to push forward the future of AI creativity.

🤖 Wizard of AI: Wizard of Oz debuts at The Sphere with AI integration

Last week, The Wizard of Oz debuted at The Sphere in Las Vegas. But this time with a yellow brick road of AI integrated into the picture. The film has become the Sphere’s first true “main movie” powered by artificial intelligence. In partnership with Sphere and Warner Bros., Google’s teams used fine-tuned Gemini, Veo, and Imagen to up-resolve images, extend compositions beyond the original frame, and rebuild moments so the story fits the 360 Sphere effect.

What’s most interesting is the scale of the project and what it signals. With over 90% of the film touched by AI, Oz becomes a proof point for how legacy titles can be responsibly adapted to new formats, how we can preserve authorship, and how we invite audiences into versions of beloved films that can evolve with time.

Visual effect specialist Ben Grossman stated: “We had a choice. We could either hire modern artists to reanimate those performances by hand, which we felt would destroy the integrity of the original performance,” or embrace “a new technology that allows you to train on things that existed before it, so that it can reproduce those things accurately.”

Learn more HERE

🛜 Follow @artistandthemachine

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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