TikTok Bulks Up Video-Editing Tools, Embraces Stories With ‘Photo Mode’

TikTok’s new suite of mobile editing tools (Credit: TikTok)

“The updates are available now to users in the US and “most regions globally,” the company said in a Thursday announcement. “Our new editing tools empower people to enjoy more creative freedom, share richer stories, and bring their content ideas to life across formats,” according to TikTok(Opens in a new window), which now lets creators stack, trim, and split videos, as well as edit audio, position text, adjust video speed, and embed sound effects.”

https://www.pcmag.com/news/tiktok-bulks-up-video-editing-tools-embraces-stories-with-photo-mode

AI music generators could be a boon for artists — but also problematic

Image Credits: DALL-E 2 / OpenAI

“Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore. They already have, albeit around simpler AI systems. In 2020, Jay-Z ‘s record label filed copyright strikes against a YouTube channel, Vocal Synthesis, for using AI to create Jay-Z covers of songs like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” After initially removing the videos, YouTube reinstated them, finding the takedown requests were “incomplete.” But deepfaked music still stands on murky legal ground.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-diffusion/

Overwatch 2 will no longer require legacy players to verify their phone number

Blizzard

“Blizzard originally made SMS Protect, which requires players to link a phone number to their Battle.net accounts, a requirement to access Overwatch as a way to make it harder for people to cheat or to troll others. It doesn’t always work with numbers associated with prepaid plans, though, and therein lies the problem. While some Mint customers were able able to link their numbers to SMS Protect just fine, players on Cricket seem to be completely locked out of the game. As Kotaku reports, fans feel like they’re being punished or shamed for ‘being poor.'”

https://www.engadget.com/overwatch-2-no-longer-requires-legacy-players-verify-phone-number-114017280.html

Why Redbird’s Mixed-Reality Sim Could be a Game Changer

Plane & Pilot’s Editor-in-Chief Isabel Goyer trying out Redbird’s Mixed-Reality Simulator.

“The Holy Grail would be to create a virtual reality world that lets in only the controls and operator parts (the physical controls, in this case, a flight sim’s controls and the pilot) while creating an outside world, the airplane and the world outside, including airports and terrain and weather, so the pilot could fly using physical controls while seeing a world around them that’s rendered via virtual reality.

That is what this is.”

https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/news/the-latest/2022/07/29/redbird-mixed-reality-simulator-game-changer/

Spotify acquires content moderation tech company Kinzen to address platform safety issues

Image Credits: Stockcam / Getty Images

“Today’s announcement of the acquisition of Kinzen is an indication that even that step was not enough — Spotify needed to bring content moderation expertise in-house, it seems.

In short, Kinzen’s solutions are aimed at helping platforms more quickly respond to content moderation issues in real time by using a combination of technology and human expertise at scale.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/05/spotify-acquires-content-moderation-tech-company-kinzen-to-address-platform-safety-issues

Meta’s AI Chief Publishes Paper on Creating ‘Autonomous’ Artificial Intelligence

Despite some dubious recent claims—for example, the ex-Google engineer who claimed a chatbot had gained sentience before being fired—we’re pretty far off from that reality. Instead, one of the biggest barriers to a robot overlord situation is the simple fact that compared to animals and humans, current AI and machine learning systems are lacking in reason, a concept essential to the development of “autonomous” machine intelligence systems—that is, AI that can learn on the fly, directly from observations of the real world, rather than lengthy training sessions to perform a specific task. 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkwqb/meta-ai-chief-publishes-paper-on-creating-autonomous-artificial-intelligence