A video on TikTok has accused Wacom of using AI-generated images in their latest New Year’s advertisement. The images show different Chinese dragon-inspired illustrations. The quality of the images is, at best, a bit shonky. One of the dragons has a tail that doesn’t quite attach to its body. Another has some pretty bizarre-looking teeth. Or are they hair? I actually can’t tell, that’s how bad it is!
https://www.diyphotography.net/did-wacom-use-ai-generated-images-in-their-latest-ad/
In a blog announcing the change, Microsoft executive vice president Yusuf Mehdi said it was a "transformative" moment and compared it to the addition of the Windows key nearly 30 years ago. He added that it would "simplify" and "amplify" user experience.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67881373
OpenAI plans to launch a store for GPTs, custom apps based on its text-generating AI models (e.g. GPT-4), sometime in the coming week. GPTs don’t require coding experience and can be as simple or complex as a developer wishes. For example, a GPT can be trained on a cookbook collection so that it can answer questions about ingredients for a specific recipe. Or a GPT could ingest a company’s proprietary codebases so that developers can check their style or generate code in line with best practices.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/04/openais-app-store-for-gpts-will-launch-next-week/
In the dying days of 2023, US teenager Willis Gibson – online handle "Blue Scuti" – "beat" the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the video game Tetris, which was first released in 1989.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240103-tetris-how-a-us-teenager-achieved-the-impossible
Despite sounding like a parody, Wehead, from a company of the same name, appears to be a serious product. It was previously billed as a 'spatial video' device to allow '3D video calls'. With that having failed to grab the world's imagination, the device has now been repurposed as a face for AI in the form of a 'ChatGPT edition'.
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/chatgpt-face-wehead
A group of news organizations, camera makers, and technology companies have joined together to create a web tool called Verify for checking the authenticity of images for free. If the image has a digital signature, the site will display the date, location, and other credentials for the image. The authentication technology is now adopted by Nikon, Sony, and Canon.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/camera-companies-are-working-on-technology-to-watermark-real-images
The oldest version of Mickey Mouse will become one of the youngest members of the public domain when the copyrights covering the cartoon rodent’s cinematic debuts expire in the last instant of 2023. While the 1.0 release of Mickey that graced screens in 1928 will become collectively owned on Jan. 1, newer versions of the mouse remain Disney property. And Disney’s continuing trademark for Mickey means you can’t suggest your fanfic is a Disney production or otherwise endorsed by the company.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/get-ready-to-remix-mickey-mouses-10-release-enters-the-public-domain