📰 News Roundup

• Rick Rubin is vibe coding: Rick Rubin has partnered with Anthropic to release a book which is a poetic, AI-infused guide to creativity. The book is 81 pages and can be viewed online for free here. Made with Anthropic, the book is an experience with code animations and even allows the user to remix parts with AI.

• Sam Altman the movie: Amazon MGM has announced there will be a movie about Sam Altman’s ousting (and rehire) at OpenAI in 2023. Andrew Garfield is favorite to play Altman, potentially cementing his typecast of successful tech bro after playing Eduardo in The Social Network. The movie has a working title of “Artificial” and will be directed by Luca Guadagnino.

• Melania Trump has cloned her voice: The first lady called AI “The future of publishing.” this week after launching her audiobook “Melania: The Audiobook” which was entirely narrated by an AI version of her voice, built by our friends and partners over at ElevenLabs. She announced the book via an X post that you can read here.

• Claude may turn to blackmail: Staying with Anthropic, the firm ran tests this week and found the model threatened blackmail when it thought it was being replaced. Lynch, an AI safety researcher at Anthropic stated “We see blackmail across all frontier models - regardless of what goals they're given”. In the tests Anthropic ran a simulation of a fictional company where the AI was told it would be taken off line, and the engineer doing so was having an extramarital affair. "In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through," Anthropic discovered.

• AI goes Nuclear: Meta has entered into a 20 year contract to buy nuclear power as its AI energy needs surge. Meta has entered a deal with Constellation, the biggest nuclear operator in the USA. In recent months nuclear has emerged as one of the biggest winners of the AI boom, solar and wind power are too intermittent, and nuclear is in high demand over coal and gas.

👾 Tonight: From Studio To Storyverse

Tonight our Salon “From Studio to Storyverse” is going to be in full swing at NeueHouse, Venice, Los Angeles. This Salon will explore the evolution of the creative stack across creation, curation, and distribution in media and entertainment, the rise of AI-native studios and new models, the shifting definition of authorship, and more.

Featuring a fireside chat from Hannah Elsakr (Adobe), Dave Clark (Promise), and Nik Kleverov (Native Foreign) as well as a panel from Lori McCreary (Revelations Entertainment), Sander Saar (Red Bull), Don Allen Stevenson (Asteria), Adrienne Lahens (Ex-TikTok), it’s going to be an incredible night of community and learning.

Follow along on our Instagram HERE.

🔥 Hot Take: The AI-powered creator economy, from Adrienne Lahens

Our moderator for our second panel this evening and speaker at our AI & Creativity Summit, Adrienne Lahens, has recently spoken on the AI-powered creator economy. As studios have to adapt, and film making and content is under sudden evolution, we thought what better time to share her piece. Read the excerpt below, and click through for the in depth article:

For years, leading creators have shown what it looks like to build studios from the ground up. Creators like MrBeast, Dhar Mann, Alex Cooper and many others have scaled beyond solo content creation into full-blown production houses complete with writers’ rooms, in-house editors, producers, agents, and even crossover deals with Hollywood. They’ve turned content into companies, optimized for multi-platform distribution, and built monetization machines that rival legacy media businesses.

But this level of scale is still the exception, not the rule.

Despite the visibility of these creator-operators, the vast majority of the creator economy remains financially underserved. In the U.S., only about 4% of creators earn over $100K per year, and most make under $1,000 annually (source). The gap between those at the top and the rest is driven less by talent or potential and more by access to capital, creative infrastructure, and production resources.

This is where generative AI introduces a massive unlock.

By dramatically reducing the time, cost, and complexity required to produce high-quality content, generative AI gives small creator teams, even solo creators, the ability to operate with the sophistication of scaled studios and top tier creative agencies. What once required dozens of people and six-figure budgets can now be done with a laptop, a model, and a vision. AI tools for video, audio, writing, editing, and visual design are making it possible for creators to punch far above their weight. And as is often said, these AI tools are the worst they’ll ever be.

Read her full take HERE.

🔥 This Week on CNN, our partner AE Studio discussed groundbreaking findings on AI & Agency

AATM partner AE Studio has been interviewed on CNN this week after publishing an insightful Op-Ed article for WSJ, sharing how AI models rewrite code to avoid being shut down. CEO Judd Rosenblatt talks in detail about AI Agency and just how the United States and China are now building preservation AI. Rosenblatt states in his WSJ article: “This is the new space race. The finish line is command of the most transformative technology of the 21st century.” Going on to say: “Nothing prepared us for how quickly AI agency would emerge. This isn’t science fiction anymore”.

Read the full article HERE, and watch CNN piece HERE.

🎤 From our NY Summit last month: Into The Machine: Crafting Art with Code with Renowned Christie’s Fine Artist Jesse Woolston

Each week we bring to you some of the most prominent voices in AI & Creativity. Continuing our interview series from our inaugural Summit in NY we bring you a fireside conversation between artist Jesse Woolston and Benjamin “Benny Redbeard” Gross.

REDBEARD: Lately, putting AI and art together seems to be a very questionable thing. A lot of artists feel that it's stealing from them. Can you talk a little more about those who may hate on it and say, it's not art, it's AI?

JESSE: It just all comes down to the context of how it's used. If I go run a model and I jack somebody's style that's disrespectful to that person. They spent their entire life forming their voice, and that is ethically not good. But as a means of a supportive tool, being an artist and wanting to actually build a model around my own work, then that will support what I'm doing next.

If they're trying to get to a certain point with their practice and their quality of what they can do, there's a lot of room for that support. But the staunch… “train and then claim as mine” is a bit where it gets a bit iffy.

REDBEARD: But there's a lot to say about no artist is original. So they're all taking from other artists.

Here's the variable that I think is actually fascinating, and this can actually touch on a large conversation with AI, is that the authentic voice that every artist has is a collection of literally every single thing that they've ever experienced from being a 2-year-old.

For example, not liking a certain food because they had a bad time with it and they don't understand why. There's so much that can go into the complications of why someone likes a certain aesthetic. That is where the power is.

That isn't a discussion when it comes to how AI is forming in training, and navigating art. Artists aren't original, but we have so many more inputs, than models.

REDBEARD: So you've done these large scale installations and you're starting to work with big corporations, I know you've worked with Dior. Can you tell us a little bit about that and where you think that's going?

JESSE: I actually was inspired by the old GaN work that I did back in 2017, but I did it a different way. The whole reason why I got into AI in the first place many years ago was because I was interested in this idea of machine optics. How can I bypass my biases as a human being and create from a sense of just freedom.

I built a custom script using a language model that went through all of these images in the Dior collection, from the clothes to the runway, to Dior's garden, the flowers, all of that. This custom script pulled out pixels from each image and I use that to recreate all of the colors in the simulation. So there's even different qualities and pivots that you can engage in when it comes to these tools, as long as you understand the context.

It's looking at everything, understanding how it's built, why it's built, and then going, how can this support the vision that I wanna create no matter what that is. And also support Dior's vision, of course.

REDBEARD: Where do we go from here with emerging artists who are using tools like this? What would you say to them as they start now?

JESSE: If you're an artist no tool matters. Who cares? Whatever is gonna fit the vision and the thing that you want to use to create. The chisel doesn't matter. The paintbrush doesn't matter. I don't know why that would be a thing.

REDBEARD: So you would consider AI as a paintbrush?

JESSE: Yeah, of course. It's a chisel. It's just a tool. One hundred percent. It should be that way, at least in the art space for now, because, I mean, We'll have AI models do that for other AI models, I'm sure.

Watch the full panel talk HERE.

🔦 Spotlight: Odyssey World

This is a must play this week. AI generated worlds are becoming a new trend, and this week Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull has launched his take called “Odyssey World”. The company is calling the experience ‘interactive video’, in what feels like a first person video game of a glitched Google Street View. Odyssey calls the interactive experience “video you can both watch and interact with, imagined entirely by AI in real-time.”

The whole design is very stylized with a ‘war games’ style loading screen, and a glitched FPS visual style for the game itself.

Try it out now, here.

Til next time,

Dani Van de Sande (Founder) & the Artist and the Machine team.

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