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📰 News Roundup

• The AI Bowl: AI giants came out swinging at the Superbowl with a string of commercials. Our winner? Meta x Rayban, with this dry yet humorous commercial with Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth and Kris Jenner. GoDaddy got our runner-up with Act like you Know.

• Samsung can now generative fill your face, Apple… not so much: Tech Creator Andrew Clare tested Samsung’s object eraser this week, posting a generative reconstruction of his face in this incredible testament to AI, he then tried it with Apple Intelligence… and well, the result was different.

• Bitcoin Pizza, now AI Pizza. You can now order Pizza with Pizza My Heart, texting their AI agent “Surfer Jimmy” a take on the character from the brand’s old TV commercials, Bitcoin Pizza is so 2010.

• Bickering Billionaires: The bickering continues between Musk and Altman as Musk tries to buy OpenAI for $97 Billion. Continuing to ratchet the tension over the future of ChatGPT. Altman hits back on Twitter “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want”

• Creativity Isn’t Dead, Just Uploaded. Christie’s new AI art sale is causing controversy. 4,000 artists signed an open letter calling on Christie’s to cancel the sale over concerns about “the mass theft of human artists’ work” as the open letter reads. On the other side of the argument, artists taking part in the sale have trained their data on their own systems, protecting other artists work. Decide your take by reading the full piece here.

🔦 Spotlight

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👾 Interview: Kelsey Falter

Your company Mother Games is about to launch its first title Le Zoo, how have you been using AI to support this release?
We have been working with AI to create emergent mechanics within the game. This means that the player will experience a personalized experience as their actions shape the reality of their play experience. One way we use AI to support the game development is with our AIC creator. This allows for AI companions to be created and deployed into Le Zoo as more advanced forms of NPCs who players can actually play and interact with. We are also exploring generative texturing and shaders which help create a dynamic 3D environment, uniquely generated for each player. In general we work with human artists for our game art and work with AI for emergent and personalized experience creation.

In a world where procedural generation and AI-driven storytelling are evolving rapidly. Do you think we’ll ever see a game where AI fully writes the story in real time based on player choices? 
Absolutely. Reinforcement learning has been available within an engineering context for a long time. As models get smaller and more performant, they can ingest information and respond within real time. We are exploring sending vectorized multimodal data into models (sLMS) and AICs (AI companions) within Le Zoo. This is just the beginning. We are also building homomorphic encryption because as the world moves to agentic optimization, the data that humans are giving to models needs to be protected on behalf of the human who generates the data.

You recently spoke about the transactional purpose of talking to AI, how do you feel this is going to evolve in the near term and long term relationship of humans and AI?
Right now, in most cases AI is being billed as a service for humans to make use of. Humans asking AI to perform tasks, respond to requests, or to complete goals within an agentic system is giving humans a false sense of agency within the AI boom. The truth? Humans are the ones feeding models through their data. Humans are the ones at risk in this scenario without even realizing it. As Big Tech invests in agents and artificial agency, Mother is focusing on investing in human agency by creating games that help humans understand their role. In the short term, I believe it’s important for humans reflect on the growing dissent and distortion around Big Algorithm. There is a lack of understanding that human data has created Big Algorithm. Human data has also been fed to AI. But this process is obfuscated at the moment through all the various services that are wrapped around the data. Right now, humans are experiencing a sense of false power as they interact with AI models because the end to end experience from data to outcome is far removed from the human as a result of Big Tech maintaining the corpus of human data in their relative silos. In the future, I believe the evolution will need to result in humans understanding their role and agency within the process of creating artificial intelligence and artificial agency.

In a present where AI is communicating with other AI, negotiating deals with itself, how will AI models evolve to talk to each other? Is the model important as we go forwards?
The model is less important than the pipes and the information that is being passed to the model. The models themselves will continue to evolve and specialize. I hope we have lots of different models for different requirements. But the superhighway between models still needs to exist. It doesn’t matter if we have a great model, but all of the data that we would want to give to the model can’t get to the model. It doesn’t matter if we have a state of the art water filtration system if none of the water that needs to be clarified can flow intro the filtration site and then from the filtration site to the end user delivery site. Right now, the models are within their own sandboxes of training knowledge. In the future, safely piping to and between models will become the focus.

Is there a character from Le Zoo that you have some favoritism towards? It’s ok we won’t tell the others!
Tiga! She is a guide of one of the five archetypes within our game. As you play, your actions sort you into a house archetype — and each house has a guide associated with it. Tiga is the guide of the House of Infinity. She is sassy, edgy, and certainly pushes boundaries. You can find out your house here (it’s kind of like a personality quiz)

With the Le Zoo teaser now out, when can we expect the next surprises, and the release of the game?
We are releasing Womb — which is where creators can work with our generative and emerging micro services. Within Womb, players can create an AIC and deploy it to Le Zoo. That’s next! Then players will be able to connect their personal in-game data to their AIC for emergent experiences with the AIC. And…. Our next playtest is coming up for both Android and iOS — apply here.

📅 Upcoming Events

We have some big announcements coming soon. 🤫 Stay tuned NY - April 24th, LA - June 5

🛠 Tool of the Week: Magnific.ai

Magnific, Magnifique!
This tool is the key to taking your AI image creations and making them truly realistic. Gone is the blurry, uncanny valley look of AI faces. Great AI is achieved by layering services, and Magnific is that gives that true final touch. Just look at the difference in our before and after above.

🤙 Check it out: [HERE]

Til next time,

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

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