Culture

A viral deepfake video showed media superstars who appeared to support a cause — but it was made without their participation or permission.

Harvard University amassed a huge new text corpus for training machine learning models.

As we approach 2025, my greatest hope for AI is that it will enable prosocial platforms that promote empathy, understanding, and collaboration rather than division.

Last year, we saw an explosion of models that generate either video or audio outputs in high quality. In the coming year, I look forward to models that produce video clips complete with audio soundtracks including speech, music, and sound effects.

Stability AI’s aim is to liberate artists of all trades from the repetitive, mechanical aspects of their work and help them spend the majority of their time on the creative side. So our highest hope for next year is that generative AI will help people to be more creative and productive.

Video generation exploded in an abundance of powerful models.

The world’s second-largest music publisher accused AI developers of potential copyright violations.

The longest actors’ strike in Hollywood history ended as actors and studios reached an accord on the use of generative AI in making movies. 

The latest advances in AI are built on freely available training data. What will happen if it becomes off-limits? Creative workers don’t want AI developers to train models on their works without permission or compensation, or at all. Data is vanishing as they scramble to lock it down. 

Microsoft's ChatGPT-powered assistants will roll out in the coming months.

The updates expand ChatGPT into a voice-controlled, interactive system for text and image interpretation and production.

Stability.ai, maker of the Stable Diffusion image generator and StableLM text generator, launched Stable Audio, a system that generates music and sound effects from text. You can play with it and listen to examples here. The service is free for 20 generations per month up to 45 seconds long.

A Korean pop star recorded a song in six languages, thanks to deep learning. Midnatt (better known as Lee Hyun) sang his latest release, “Masquerade,” in English, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese — none of which he speaks fluently.

The next generation of video games could be filled with AI-generated text, speech, characters, and background art. Nvidia announced a system that enables players to converse directly with in-game characters. Meanwhile, game developers are using generative AI to produce media assets.

A popular musician is inviting fans to clone her voice. Result: a flood of recordings that sound just like her. Experimental pop star Grimes released GrimesAI-1, a generative audio tool that allows anyone to make recordings of their own singing or speech sound like her voice.