Cat McGinn, curator of Unmade’s AI conference for media and marketing, humAIn - human creativity x AI writes:
BREAKING: Humans Willing to Learn from History As Long As There Is Quite A Lot Of Money At Stake
Major tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe began discussions with leading media companies such as News Corp, Axel Springer, The New York Times, and The Guardian about using their content to train artificial intelligence technology. These negotiations are in the early stages and could result in media organisations being paid a subscription-style fee.
The discussions are a response to concerns about potential copyright infringement, and those involved cite the issues around content funding models from the early internet era. Google has recently announced a generative search function, which returns an AI-written information box above its traditional format of web links. Discussions are currently underway to establish a pricing model for news content used as training data for AI models, with figures between $5 million and $20 million a year being suggested.
Are Friends Synthetic?
Meta and Microsoft joined the Partnership on AI's (PAI) initiative for responsible practices for what’s now being termed “synthetic media.” The group aims to promote the responsible development, creation, and sharing of AI-generated media. The initiative, backed by companies including Adobe, BBC, OpenAI, and TikTok, seeks to minimize misinformation and ensure users understand the content they're viewing may be AI-generated. The partnership will focus on responsible synthetic media disclosure, and share case studies among supporters who distribute, create, and develop synthetic media technology.
What fresh hell is this?
DDB Melbourne and Mango launched a campaign using generative AI for Funlab, the company behind Strike Bowling and Holey Moley, encouraging businesses to host their corporate parties at Funlab venues instead of their offices. The campaign, "Office Party from Hell," uses grotesque AI-generated text to video to highlight the absurdity of forced office fun. The campaign was brought to life in under a week using the new generation of Text to Video AI technology.
DDB Group Melbourne Creative Director Giles Watson said: “The thing about AI-generated video at this stage is… it’s pretty absurd. But not as absurd as having your office party at your own office.”
Follow the money
Accenture, the global consulting firm, announced a $3 billion investment in AI to take place over the next three years. The firm plans to double the size of its Data & AI practice team from 40,000 to 80,000 via hiring, internal training, and external acquisitions. Accenture also announced its AI Navigator for Enterprise, a new platform to help clients define AI business cases and choose architectures/models. The firm will also establish data and AI readiness accelerators across 19 industries and launch a new Center for Advanced AI.
And Salesforce launched AI Cloud, its enterprise AI solution. The platform integrates various Salesforce technologies, offering real-time generative AI capabilities. The core of AI Cloud is the new Einstein Trust Layer, which the software giant claims will ensure data privacy and security. Salesforce’s AI Cloud addresses issues of trust in enterprise-level generative AI by protecting sensitive data within AI applications and workflows, acknowledging concerns around data privacy, security, and compliance.
Voiceboxing clever
This morning (Australian time) Meta revealed its new AI speech generation tool Voicebox. According to the announcement: “In the future, multipurpose generative AI models like Voicebox could give natural-sounding voices to virtual assistants and non-player-characters in the metaverse. They could allow visually impaired people to hear written messages from friends read by AI in their voices, give creators new tools to easily create and edit audio tracks for videos, and much more.”
Three weeks to go
Unmade released the full program for our half-day conference on AI in marketing, humAIn. The event takes place in Sydney on July 12. Design platform Canva, which is developing a series of generative AI tools and held its first developer conference this week, was among the new speakers announced. View the humAIn program here.
