📰 News Roundup

• Vroom Vroom, Woof. Adobe is launching generative sound effects as part of its FireFly suite. Users will be able to mimic sounds, and have four audio choices returned. Get ready for your co-worker to be making woosh and vroom noises into their microphone. The move continues Adobe’s efforts to stay at the top of the AI creation food-chain.

• AI is going to make flights more expensive: In an investor earnings call, Delta Airlines announced a roll out of AI pricing, of which Delta currently uses AI to influence 3 percent of its ticket prices. The Delta president stated: “We like what we see. We like it a lot, and we’re continuing to roll it out.” and when a company president is phrasing comments like that, it’s not that a publically traded company is going to be making less money off its customers. It’s not fully clear what data Delta are receiving to price individuals, but privacy groups are concerned.

• Get paid to code Waifus: After the success of Grok’s anime character and seemingly AI girlfriend, Ani, xAI is hiring for an engineer whose sole job is to code more Waifus. In a job advert posted on X, an engineer can earn up to $440,000 to create more AI girlfriends or boyfriends. Musk has rumored at a male companion launching soon.

• Spotify is being hacked by dead artists: AI ripoffs of artist’s work are appearing on their official Spotify Pages. Often for artists that have been dead for over a decade. Last week Craig McDonald, the owner of Lost Art Records spoke to 404 media, explaining that one of his roster, Blaze Foley, who was murdered in 1989 suddenly had a new AI generated track and cover art on the page, without McDonald’s approval or knowledge. Some digging by 404 media found the name “Syntax Error” who are seemingly managing to get multiple AI tracks on often dead artist’s pages without permission or knowledge of rights owners.

🛠️ Tool Of The Week: Sync

Sync is an AI-powered tool for replacing dialogue in video, giving top-tier lip syncing. Sync’s trademark claim is that the model can learn the unique style of a speaker and express it without needing to train on the individual specifically. Whether it’s live action, animation, or AI-generated content, Sync can do minor word edits all the way to complete audio replacement.

Plus, when you’ve got Nicolas Cage in multiple languages as your product demo, surely you can’t go wrong.

Find more on SYNC here.

🎨 NY SUMMIT: AI As Co-Creator: The New Frontier Of Storytelling, Gaming, And Digital Expression

FROM THE SUMMIT: Our Los Angeles Summit is fast approaching on the 19th of November. Following on from the success of our New York AI & Creativity Summit. As the conversation morphs to the dichotomy of human and machine our Human Stage panel “AI as Co-Creator” is a must watch.

AI is transforming creativity: Blurring the boundaries between human imagination and machine collaboration. From generative gaming and interactive storytelling to AI-powered self-discovery, it’s reshaping how we create and experience culture. Visionary founders Amy Wu (Manifest App), Kelsey Falter (Mother Games), and Abran Maldonado (Create Labs Ventures) explore how AI is fueling new forms of expression and empowering people to shape their own narratives.

Can machine-generated culture still feel human? What happens when AI becomes a visible, creative partner? Moderated by Amar Bakshi (Shared_Studios), this session explores what it truly means to co-create with machines. WATCH IT HERE

🤖 Is Privacy Dead? AI is boosting Surveillance Capitalism.

You’ve all seen the memes by now, the girlfriend asking to check her man’s Instagram, messages, TikTok, all without a sweat, ChatGPT? Suddenly, the attitude changes. We often share our most personal and private thoughts with AI.

Amazon has told us for years that Alexa is not listening to your conversations, but this week the company announced the acquisition of Bee, a wearable device that transcribes all, and we mean all of your conversations, essentially turning you into a walking wiretap. The two Wall Street Journal journalists that have been testing the device out already showcase the dichotomy of this technology stating: “As we were about to get into some gossip, Joanna pointed at her wrist, and warned me Bee was listening.”

This isn’t new, it’s just more extreme. How many workers have bemoaned a colleague’s work ethic in a meeting, only to realise Fireflies just stuck it in the abridged notes and emailed it to everyone. Bee states it ‘only saves transcriptions’ as if that isn’t an accident waiting to happen.

Then we have Sam Altman, building the biggest Surveillance Capitalism fund out there, by the name of World Coin. Scan your iris and identity to prove you’re human, and receive free money. Whilst World Coin has some positives, with the potential need for UBI in an AI world, it’s clear that privacy is being forgotten in the wake of the speedboat that is AI.

Can privacy charities like the Electronic Frontier Foundation keep up? It’s certainly hard for them to focus their tiny resources on the AI behemoths, and with the speed and scale that Artificial Intelligence presents, it’s perhaps impossible to keep up.

💵 Meta’s AI Spending Spree by Sharon Goldman

We’ve recently covered the hiring wars that have bolstered Meta’s ranks, and left OpenAI in defence mode, with rockstar engineer Alexandr Wang at its forefront. Now Artist and the Machine Summit Speaker, and Fortune editor, Sharon Goldman has penned her first Fortune Cover Story on the subject. As AI Engineers start to be treated like superstar pro-athletes, her article is a must read, as Goldman delves into the world of the megacorps trying to achieve superintelligence.

READ HERE.

👮‍♀️ One more thing…

Dani’s Labubu, lovingly bought by her boyfriend (or should we say after much pestering) got stolen this week. Help an AI founder recover the one thing she didn’t train a model for: attachment.

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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