KC DEBRIEF WEEK 18, FRIDAY 2024/05/03
DIGITAL TITANS
_ Adobe's latest updates bring desktop power to its mobile apps. The brand announced several improvements to its AI models across Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator and more. Adobe announced a host of updates across its portfolio at its recent MAX London event, including a new Photoshop (beta), the third iteration of its AI image generating model Firefly, and upgrades to its Expresssuite of mobile apps adding functionality once limited to desktops. Taking place in the middle of Battersea Park – coincidentally just a stone’s throw from Apple’s sprawling south London campus – MAX London built on the brand’s event in Los Angeles this past fall, demonstrating the pace at which it’s bringing its innovations to market. The newly released version of Photoshop (beta) has seen improvements to its AI driven Generative Fill feature. Now, instead of just accepting text prompts, users can upload visual ones, too. The new feature is being called Reference Image and can be used together with the existing text prompt functionality, not instead of, opening up a whole new world of potential as the AI now uses the user’s own images for generative inspiration. Another new feature is Generate Image which, according to Adobe, brings “full text to image capabilities directly within Photoshop for the first time.” Improvements to Photoshops’s AI functionality doesn’t stop there, though, with Generate Background, Generate Similar, and Enhance Detail rounding off the generative updates, respectively allowing users to make and replace backgrounds with ease, use already generated images as generative inspiration, and fine-tune the sharpness and clarity of their generated imagery. All in all, these updates make getting the most out of Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature a lot easier. In fact, during the opening keynote at MAX London, Creative Cloud’s SVP Ashley Still said one of the company’s goals was “to remove any boundaries” when it comes to creativity and creative output. As well as updates to its AI-based features, Photoshop (beta) now includes some new functionality that will help users on the most basic levels. One of these new features is an improved fonts browser that’s built directly in to the app, allowing users to search through over 25,000 fonts without ever leaving Photoshop. Fonts can also be previewed directly in app in real time and, whilst this feels like a simpler update when compared to some of the AI-driven ones, it’s something most users are likely to find useful in a fundamental way. Whilst AI is nothing new – Adobe’s press release states the brand “has over a decade-long history of AI innovation” – the pace at which it is developing before our eyes is quite something. Firefly, the company’s machine learning model for AI-generated images, was launched in March 2023 and is already on its third iteration. It has seen vast improvements between versions and, since its launch just over a year ago, Adobe claims its users have generated over 7 billion images with it. Firefly 3 is claimed to “have a better understanding of text prompts and scenes” with other notable updates being in the way it renders people “with detailed features and a variety of moods and expressions,” according to the brand. The photorealism of its renders has also been improved greatly, with lighting, moods and positioning all looking noticeably better when compared to Firefly 2. Adobe also announced that its Adobe Express apps have been updated to include much of the innovation previously restricted to its desktop apps. Features like Generative Fill, Text to Template and Text to Imageamongst others are now available on mobile, as the brand double down on its push to make editing and creating on the go just as fruitful as being at home or in a studio. In Premiere Pro, for example, users can now use remove the background in any video right on their phone with a simple action, an edit that would have once upon a time needed a serious editing rig and lots of time.
_ Apple services revenue rises 14% to new record, iPhone sales drop amid weakness in China. Apple‘s services business turned in double-digit growth for the first three months of 2024 — to reach a new record — but the tech giant’s core iPhone business suffered a decline and the company saw a continued sales drop-off in China.The Apple Services segment generated $23.87 billion, up 14.2%, for the quarter ended March 30, topping analyst forecasts of $23.12 billion. For the June quarter, Apple expects to see double-digit growth in services similar to its rates in the two most recent quarters. The services segment includes subscription services such as Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and iCloud; the App Store, Apple Pay and Apple Card; advertising; and payments from Google for search. Apple last fall raised the price of Apple TV+ to $9.99/month in the U.S., up from $6.99 previously.
ALSO
_ Apple says it is working quickly to fix an issue that caused some iPhone alarms not to play a sound, giving their slumbering users an unexpected lie-in. For many people, their phone is an indispensable alarm clock and some over-sleepers turned to social media to vent. One TikTokker complained that she had set "like five alarms" and they didn't go off. Apple has confirmed it is aware of the issue - but is yet to spell out what it believes is causing it, or what users can do to avoid a late start. It is also unclear how many people are affected or whether the problem is restricted to particular models of iPhone. Concerns were initially raised by the early-risers on NBC's Today Show, which broke the news. In the absence of an official fix, those losing sleep over the problem can try a few simple solutions. One is to guard against human error - so double check the phone's alarm settings and ensure the volume is turned up. Others though have pointed the finger at Apple designers, saying a quirk of the iPhones' "attention aware features" could be to blame. When active, these enable an iPhone to check whether a person is paying attention to their device and - if they are - to take action automatically, such as lowering the volume sound of alerts, including alarms.
_ Sony wants to buy Paramount with the help of yet another private equity firm. Private equity firms are a blight on society, but Sony is hoping that its offer to buy Paramount for about $26 billion with the help of Apollo Global Management will be tempting enough to get the studio to consider biting — something Skydance and its private equity partner Redbird Capital Partners haven’t been able to do just yet.
_Tens of millions secretly use WhatsApp despite bans. "Tens of millions" of people are using technical workarounds to secretly access WhatsApp in countries where it is banned, the messaging platform's boss has said. “You’d be surprised how many people have figured it out,” Will Cathcart told BBC News. WhatsApp is banned in Iran and North Korea and has been intermittently blocked in Syria, Senegal and Guinea. And last month, China banned iPhone users from downloading the secure platform. Other countries, including Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, restrict features such as voice calls. But WhatsApp can see where its users truly are, thanks to their registered phone numbers. “We have a lot of anecdotal reports of people using WhatsApp and what we can do is look at some of the countries where we're seeing blocking and still see tens of millions of people connecting to WhatsApp," Mr Cathcart told BBC News.
_ Google introduces new AI features to workspace apps like Gmail, Sheets, Google Docs, more. The 'Help me write' feature in mobile Gmail now supports voice prompting and input, making it easier to send emails while on the move. Gmail also gets a new feature called 'Instant Polish' that will make rough notes into a polished email.
_ TikTok and Universal settle music royalties dispute. TikTok will restore millions of songs to the platform after settling a dispute with Universal Music Group over royalties. It means users will once again be able to make videos featuring songs from artists including Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande. A row over how much TikTok was paying saw the two companies trade accusations - and Universal withdraw some of the world's most famous singers. But the rift now appears to have been healed with the firms announcing "improved remuneration" for artists, though they have not revealed how much money will change hands. In an email to staff seen by the BBC, Universal's boss Sir Lucian Grainge said TikTok had agreed to "key changes." "Under the new agreement, artist and songwriter compensation will be greater than under our prior TikTok deal," he wrote. The firms said they were "working expeditiously" to return Universal's music to TikTok, a process it is understood will take less than two weeks. This will include restoring the audio to videos which were previously muted during the dispute. Taylor Swift, perhaps the label's biggest artist, had already separately agreed to return her music to TikTok - a deal she could make as she owns the copyright to her songs. "Music is an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem and we are pleased to have found a path forward with Universal Music Group," said TikTok head Shou Zi Chew. It comes as the social media platform is facing a fight for its very survival in the United States, where it plans to challenge in court a law that could result in it being sold or banned in the country.
PEOPLE, MEDIA, CULTURE
_ Werewolf Billionaire CEO Husbands are taking over Hollywood. Chinese-backed streaming apps hosting bite-sized soap operas about vampires and fake marriages are making millions. Not everyone is happy about it “GUYS, PLEASE WATCH this insane ad I got on TikTok,” the caption of a viral thread on X (formerly Twitter) read last month. The thread, which has more than 20 million views, contains clips from a film titled Forbidden Desires: Alpha’s Love, about a college professor named Adrian who falls in love with his student, who also happens to be his stepsister. Also, Professor Adrian is a millionaire. And a werewolf. The plot begs a number of questions: Why does a werewolf millionaire need to hold a salaried job as an academic, albeit in an unspecified discipline? How does the university provost feel that his stepsister is in his classroom? And why does Professor Adrian look kind of like a hunkier Conan O’Brien? To quote Professor Adrian himself: “Stop asking questions for answers which you don’t need to know.” Forbidden Desires: Alpha’s Love is one of many vertical series, a nascent sector of the Western entertainment industry consisting of feature-length soap operas broken down into approximately 90-second increments and consumed on your phone. The plots are simple — they either involve werewolves, billionaires, CEOs, vampires, or more often than not, a combination of all four — the scripts nonsensical, and the acting quality ranging from decent to sub-pornographic. The female lead is always clumsy, with flawless ombre waves; the male is tall, dark, wealthy, and brooding, in the model of 50 Shades’ Christian Grey. More often than not, the principals are young, conventionally attractive, and white. “They have a very specific look for all of these verticals. I like to call it the CW Network look,” says Kyra Wisely, an actor who has starred in such projects as Fated to My Forbidden Vampire.
_ ChatGPT’s chatbot rival Claude to be introduced on iPhone. Challenger to market leader OpenAI says it wants to ‘meet users where they are’ and become part of users’ everyday life. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is facing serious competition, as the company’s rival Anthropic brings its Claude chatbot to iPhones. Anthropic, led by a group of former OpenAI staff who quit over differences with chief executive Sam Altman, have a product that already beats ChatGPT on some measures of intelligence, and now wants to win over everyday users. “In today’s world, smartphones are at the centre of how people interact with technology. To make Claude a true AI assistant, it’s crucial that we meet users where they are – and in many cases, that’s on their mobile devices,” said Scott White at Anthropic. “We’re putting the power of Claude directly into people’s hands. It’s not just about convenience; it’s about integrating Claude into the fabric of our daily lives.. The third version of the Claude large language model is offered direct to users on its website in three flavours: a speedy and simple model called “haiku”, a slower and more powerful model called “sonnet”, and, for paying customers only, the full “opus” system.It is that system that took the lead in the LMSys chatbot ranking, becoming the first AI to knock GPT-4 out of pole position, and it also made headlines for its enormous “context window” – a measure of how much of a conversation it can keep in mind at any one time. Opus can hold about 160,000 words, enough for a user to paste in a weighty novel and ask follow-up questions.Until now, though, ChatGPT has faced little competition on users’ devices. OpenAI first released its iOS app in May last year, and it remains one of the few frontier AI models with an accessible consumer app.Anthropic says the Claude app will allow it to bring new features to users, beyond simple ease of use. “For example, the Claude iOS app can, with a user’s consent, access the device’s camera and photo library,” White said.“After a meeting, a business user could snap a photo of a whiteboard diagram and ask Claude to summarise the key points, making it easier to share and act upon important information. Similarly, a consumer could take a picture of a plant they encounter on a hike and ask Claude to identify the species and provide more information about its characteristics and habitat.”Alongside the iOS app, the company is also boosting its business offering, with a “team” plan that lets corporate customers buy chatbot access for their entire staff.“We started Anthropic to lead the frontier of AI safety and research. That isn’t something you can do in the abstract. We don’t think we’d be able to positively influence the industry’s trajectory and inspire a race to the top on AI safety if we weren’t able to compete at the frontier,” White said.That competition appears to be having an effect on the market leader. On Wednesday, OpenAI changed its policies to allow users to access their entire ChatGPT history, without needing to opt in to allowing the company to train on their conversations as a quid pro quo.
_ When you go to a concert you’re obviously going to see the performer. But, often, what can really tip the show from something enjoyable into something really spectacular are the visuals that accompany it. Two people with a serious knack for creating immersive work for live shows are the animator Hugo Shiboski and the director and media artist Will Wharton, and one of their standout projects is for none other than Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper, singer and style icon who’s taken the music industry by storm.
_How could we make a better internet? For too long, the World Wide Web has been shaped by tech capitalists in California. A non-toxic, ad-free digital world is possible – but how do we get there? In the beginning, things were going to be good. When the first web pages began to blink up on screens in 1991, they brought with them with a boom of utopian thinking. Back then, the internet was envisioned as a dreamscape, an abundant space of infinite information sharing. In 1996, less than seven years after Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web, cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist and internet pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote the now-infamous piece “A Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace”. In it, he talked about a new “civilisation of the Mind”, a world “without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth”. In the early days, the internet was going to bring us to new realms of possibility. It was going to bring us together. Jump to today, and this hopeful tech-utopianism feels like a distant call from a lost world. Targeted ads burst and breed across every available online surface, while over half of all web traffic comes from bots. Trolls, hate groups and inflammatory far-right content flourish, and personal data is mined and sold for profit. Now, with Mark Zuckerberg expanding his empire of apps into the metaverse and news that Elon Musk has bought Twitter for $44 billion, it seems clear that instead of a free, abundant utopia for all, the web is simply a playground for tech tycoons. Traces of the idealistic language used by early internet pioneers remain – Musk’s bid for Twitter described the platform as having “tremendous potential”, promised to strive towards “making the algorithms open source” and “defeating the spam bots” (it doesn’t take a self-professed genius to realise these two goals work against one another). Yet it’s hard to shake the sense that billionaires are not doing good, just business.There’s this pervasive feeling that the internet is broken. It’s becoming a dystopia, a seething mass of conspiracies, violence, misogyny and greed. But what if, instead of darkly joking about how bad the internet might get, using old Black Mirror episodes to express our unease, we imagine how it might be better? What if, instead of nostalgically yearning for an earlier internet full of glittery, kitschy GIFs and chat rooms, we started to dream of something new? Some digital natives believe a “better internet” has already arrived in the form of Web3. To the average user, the terms “Web2” and “Web3” might seem like jargon, but this only proves that most of us are still firmly lodged in Web2 – the current iteration of the internet, with all its social media, online shopping and data surveillance. But while many people are catching up on what Web3 is, laughing at crap NFT art or falling for scams, a wave of internet theorists are harnessing new crypto and blockchain technologies to create online communities that are supposedly free from some of our present day’s most glaring issues.Berlin-based writer Caroline Busta says that, despite how it might look on the chimp-filled Twittersphere, “Web3 is more than Bored Apes in shutter shades”. In 2018, Busta co-founded New Models, an aggregator taking arts, tech and media content from all over the web and presenting it in a simple and decidedly retro single-page layout (while swerving the pay-to-play social network models). It looks like a leftover scrap from the old internet, before ads and pop-ups jostled for space on our screens. One of its foundational principles is the same as it was in the internet’s early days: decentralisation, or the process of giving back power to the user rather than greedy middlemen. In Web3, supposedly, decentralised apps can take the place of centralised social networks, while allowing individuals to maintain ownership over their data. Though, as Busta suggests, it’s best to view Web3 as “not a replacement for Web2, but more of a layer that sits in relation to it”.
BRANDS
_ April 23 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab said on Tuesday that Coca-Cola (KO.N), opens new tab had signed a $1.1 billion five-year deal to use its cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. Under the agreement, Microsoft and Coca-Cola will "jointly experiment" with Azure OpenAI. That service uses technology from Microsoft-backed startup and ChatGPT creator OpenAI to let customers build chatbots and other AI services that run in Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service.
_ EA SPORTS FC and Nike Launch "WHAT THE FC" Customizable Virtual Items Featuring a range of seasonal items, themes and apparel inspired by Nike’s iconic Air Max history. EA SPORTS FC worked with global sportswear giant Nike to create an out-of-this-world pack of in-game items for its inaugural FC video game. “WHAT THE FC” comprises of two headline kits and stadiums that are inspired by Nike’s renowned Air Max lineage, as well as footballing heroes from the past till the present, from Mia Hamm, Ronaldinho, and Ronaldo to Sam Kerr, Vini Jr.and Erling Haaland.As the worlds of footwear and fashion become more customizable, it only made sense for this same level of personalization to translate into the virtual world. EA and Nike aptly present virtual-first designed items inspired by the popular Nike Air Max Plus Tn, Nike Air Max 95, and all new Nike Air Max Dn collections. Across the game’s various modes, players can earn “WAHT THE FC” seasonal items, such as crests, stadium themes, TIFOs, VIP areas, trophies, VOLTA FOOTBALL apparel, footwear and more. “We’re excited to create amazing new possibilities for FC 24 players with Nike” said DJ Jackson, VP, Franchise Strategy and Marketing in a statement. “WHAT THE FC blurs the virtual and real worlds of football culture, through designs that celebrate Nike and EA SPORTS FC heritage, as worn by stars of the game, past and present.” Learn more about EA SPORTS FC’s latest developments here.
_ An effortlessly cool protagonist showcases how a pair of stylish smart glasses make mundane moments extraordinary. The short spot shows off the style and capabilities of the AI-powered accessory / Credit: Meta. Ray-Ban Meta has unveiled a new ad campaign for the spring and summer launch of its next-gen smart glasses. Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which run between $300 to $380, come in over 150 different color and lens combinations of the classic Ray-Ban frames. They boast high-quality audio and camera capabilities and an LED indicator on the left that lights up every time users take a photo or video.
MMM OF THE WEEK
_ FKA Twigs makes a deep fake of herself and testifies before congress.