Created by Humans, a company that aims to make it easy for creators to be compensated when their work is used for AI model training, has emerged from stealth with $5 million in funding. Positioning itself as “the AI rights licensing platform for creators,” the company was launched by Trip Adler, formerly the CEO of document sharing service and publishing platform Scribd. Noted author Walter Isaacson is an investor and creative advisor. In streamlining the licensing process, Created by Humans hopes to spare individuals and smaller companies from the proposition of engaging in costly litigation against LLM firms. Continue reading Created by Humans: AI Rights Licensing Platform for Creators

Deepfake videos are becoming increasingly problematic, not only in spreading disinformation on social media but also in enterprise attacks. Now researchers at Drexel University College of Engineering say they have developed an advanced algorithm with a 98 percent accuracy rate in detecting deepfake videos. Called the MISLnet algorithm, for the school’s Multimedia and Information Security Lab where it was invented, the platform uses machine learning to recognize and extract the “digital fingerprints” of video generators including Stable Video Diffusion, VideoCrafter and CogVideo. Continue reading Drexel Claims Its AI Has 98 Percent Rate Detecting Deepfakes

The world’s first AI-powered movie camera has surfaced. Still in development, it aims to enable filmmakers to turn footage into AI imagery in real time while shooting. Called the CMR-M1, for camera model 1, it is the product of creative tech agency SpecialGuestX and media firm 1stAveMachine, with the goal of providing creatives with a familiar interface for AI imagemaking. It was inspired by the Cine-Kodak device, the first portable 16mm camera. “We designed a camera that serves as a physical interface to AI models,” said Miguel Espada, co-founder and executive creative technologist at SpecialGuestX, a company that does not think directors will use AI sitting at a keyboard. Continue reading New Prototype Is the World’s First AI-Powered Movie Camera

After three years of development, the Alice Camera — which transforms smartphones into mirrorless photographic systems with a mount for interchangeable Micro Four Thirds (M43 or MFT) lenses — is taking preorders and will start shipping July 15, beginning in the UK. The Alice Camera leverages AI to produce “computational photography” that runs on-device in real time. The result, its makers say, is content that is “beautiful straight out of camera” and instantly ready to share. “Alice Camera transforms your phone into a content creation studio,” according to parent company, London-based Photogram Ltd. Continue reading Alice Camera Targets Mobile Creators with AI and M43 System

A group that includes the world’s three largest music labels — Sony, Universal and Warner — are backing federal lawsuits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America against AI companies Suno and Udio. Claiming “mass infringement,” the suits allege the startups scraped libraries of copyrighted songs to train models that power generative audio products allowing consumers to create music using text prompts. Suno is based in Massachusetts while Udio and its parent Uncharted are headquartered in New York, with the actions filed earlier this week in their respective states. Continue reading Recording Industry Sues AI Startups Citing Mass Infringement

Figma is rolling out its third redesigned user interface, UI3, aimed at making the company even more competitive with Adobe. New are native AI features that accelerate workflows, letting teams build high-quality software. Available in limited beta, Figma AI adds the ability to generate design drafts with a single prompt, enabling rapid experimentation and prototyping. The move advances Figma’s goal of moving beyond design tool to a full-blown product development platform, while making the service intuitive and friendly enough for novices while maintaining the full features demanded by Sigma’s professional users. Continue reading Figma Redesigns Its User Interface and Adds New AI Features

Toys R Us is the first company to use OpenAI’s generative video platform Sora to produce a commercial, or what is being described as a “brand film.” With a running time of 1:06, the spot depicts company founder Charles Lazurus as a young boy, “envisioning his dreams” for the toy store and mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe. It was co-produced and directed by Los Angeles creative agency Native Foreign co-founder Nik Kleverov, who has alpha access to the pre-release Sora. Toys R Us says that from concept to completed video, the project came together in just a few weeks to premiere at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Continue reading Toys R Us and Native Foreign Create Ad Using OpenAI’s Sora

Synthesia, which uses AI to create business avatars for use in content such as training, presentation and customer service videos, has announced a major platform update. “Coming soon” with Synthesia 2.0 are full-body avatars that include hands capable of a wide range of motions. Users can animate motion using skeletal sequences on which the persona selected from the catalog can then be automatically mapped. Starting next month, the Nvidia-backed UK company will offer the ability to incorporate brand identity — including typography, colors and logos — into templated videos. A new translation tool automatically applies updates to all languages. Continue reading Lifelike AI Avatars to Get New Features with Synthesia Update

Amazon is launching Ad Relevance, a cookieless consumer tracking solution that will be available to those using Amazon DSP, a tool that lets advertisers buy Internet ad placements on and off Amazon’s website. Ad Relevance “uses the latest in AI technology to analyze billions of browsing, buying, and streaming signals in conjunction with real-time information about the content being viewed” to reveal customer shopping patterns and serve relevant ads across devices, channels, and content types without using third-party cookies. The technology accommodates Google’s long-delayed cookie deprecation, currently set for 2025. Continue reading Amazon Debuts Ad Relevance Cookieless Solution in Cannes

Bellevue, Washington-based startup Butterflies AI has created a new social platform that makes artificial intelligence more interactive with humans, allowing people to create customized AIs that generate posts, comments and DMs to which their creators and other humans — as well as other Butterfly AIs — can respond. Anyone using the platform, which has launched publicly on iOS and Android after 5 months in beta, can create their own AI, called a “Butterfly.” The venture, created by former Snap engineer Vu Tran, has raised $4.8 million on Tran’s premise that the public lacks an “interesting” consumer AI product. Continue reading Butterflies: AI Interacts with Humans on New Social Platform

OpenAI has acquired Rockset, a database firm that provides real-time analytics, indexing and search capabilities. Rockset will help OpenAI enable its customers to better leverage their own data as they build and utilize intelligent applications. Rockset technology will be integrated into the retrieval infrastructure across OpenAI products, with members of Rockset’s San Mateo, California-based team joining the staff of OpenAI, which is headquartered in San Francisco. This is the second major purchase for OpenAI, following last year’s acquisition of New York-based AI design studio Global Illumination. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Continue reading OpenAI to Expand Data Indexing, Analysis with Rockset Tech

MainFunc Inc. has raised $60 million on the strength of its principal technology — a free, AI-powered search engine called Genspark. The platform responds to queries by writing custom summaries that are presented in a “Sparkpage,” a one-page overview featuring content from around the web. Genspark joins a growing field of generative AI search engines, the best-known of which is Perplexity, which has raised $250 million since its 2022 launch and is currently valued at about $2.5 billion. Reuters says Genspark’s funding values the company at $260 million. Google also offers “AI Overviews” as part of Google search. Continue reading Genspark Joins Collection of GenAI-Powered Search Engines

Snap Inc. teased a new on-device AI model capable of real-time filter creation in-app using Snapchat. At last week’s Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, Snap co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy explained that the model, which runs on smartphones, can re-render frames on the fly guided by text prompts. Snap’s unnamed prototype model “can instantly bring your imagination to life in AR,” Snap says, explaining “this early prototype makes it possible to type in an idea for a transformation and generate vivid AR experiences in real time.” Continue reading Snapchat Previews Instant AR Filters, GenAI Developer Tools

Anthropic has launched a powerful new AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that can analyze text and images and generate text. That its release comes a mere three months after Anthropic debuted Claude 3 indicates just how quickly the field is developing. The Google-backed company says Claude 3.5 Sonnet has set “new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval).” Sonnet is Anthropic’s mid-tier model, between Haiku and, on the high-end, Opus. Anthropic says 3.5 Sonnet is twice as fast as 3 Opus, offering “frontier intelligence at 2x the speed.” Continue reading Anthropic’s Claude 3.5: ‘Frontier Intelligence at 2x the Speed’

Ilya Sutskever — who last month exited his post as chief scientist at OpenAI after a highly publicized power struggle with CEO Sam Altman — has launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Sutskever’s partners in the new venture are his former OpenAI colleague Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, who founded the AI startup Cue, which was acquired by Apple where Gross continued in an AI leadership role. “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” the trio posted on the company’s one-page website, stating its goal is to “scale in peace.” Continue reading Sutskever Targets Safe Superintelligence with New Company