New Yorker profiles the creator of NTP and its evolution
— deep dive into its transition from benevolent dictatorship to open-source consensus #The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear
— Ed Yong is taking a six-month sabbatical because of burnout from pandemic reporting #Tree Talk
— scroll up to read this animated comic about two trees talking to each other via FlowingData #For once, the hurricane shark is real
— after a decade of “street shark” hoaxes, the AP confirmed this one was real #AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability
Yesterday, Meta’s AI Research Team announced Make-A-Video, a “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text.”
Like he did for the Stable Diffusion data, Simon Willison created a Datasette browser to explore WebVid-10M, one of the two datasets used to train the video generation model, and quickly learned that all 10.7 million video clips were scraped from Shutterstock, watermarks and all.
In addition to the Shutterstock clips, Meta also used 10 million video clips from this 100M video dataset from Microsoft Research Asia. It’s not mentioned on their GitHub, but if you dig into the paper, you learn that every clip came from over 3 million YouTube videos.
So, in addition to a massive chunk of Shutterstock’s video collection, Meta is also using millions of YouTube videos collected by Microsoft to make its text-to-video AI.
Louie Zong’s “Business!”, an album of retro corporate music
— commissioned by Brian David Gilbert for his “terrible guide to the terrible terminology of U.S. health insurance“ #NESOS
— 48K OS for the NES featuring “two core applications, the word processor, and the settings” via arstechnica.com #Teenage Engineering’s PO-80 Record Factory
— a recreation of Gakken’s Toy Record Maker, make your own lo-fi 5″ vinyl records #Google is shutting down Stadia
— predicted by virtually everyone since it launched, it’ll close in mid-January #Meta announces Make-A-Video, a text-to-video AI generator
— like Google’s Imagen, I expect an open-source model to come out before this is public #The Guardian interviews one of the admins keeping Discworld MUD going
— online for over 30 years, the community has created over 20,000 detailed rooms with 12 million lines of code #Matt Mullenweg on the challenges of hosting adult content in 2022
— like Matt, I’d also love to understand why Twitter and Reddit are an exception to Apple’s anti-porn policies #Folding Ideas on “passive income” con artist entrepreneurs
— Dan Olson wrote a 25,000 word book in 25 days to fully understand how one ghostwritten audiobook grift worked #Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine
— James Earl Jones signed over rights to Darth Vader’s voice, replaced by AI from a Ukrainian startup #webЯcade
— impressive open-source web frontend for 20+ emulated game systems and support for custom feeds #A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements and nobody knows how
Here’s a little mystery for you: there are multiple reports of a mysterious voice grunting, moaning, and groaning on American Airlines’ in-flight announcement systems, sometimes lasting the duration of the flight — and nobody knows who’s responsible or how they did it.
Actor/producer Emerson Collins was the first to post video, from his Denver flight on September 6:
How platforms turn boring
— Russell Brandom on the “Bootleg Ratio,” the ratio of original to freebooted content #OpenAI open-sources Whisper, a speech recognition and translation system
— this will be life-changing for many podcasters, journalists, and anyone else who needs transcription #Making Minecraft in Minecraft
— runs at 0.1 fps using MCHPRS, which runs redstone 10-20,000x faster via Garbage Day #Snap shuts down Zenly instead of selling it, fearing competition
— the social mapping app has 40 million monthly active users globally #Return to Monkey Island is out now
— 13 years since the last game, and the return of series creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman #After 23 years in prison, Serial’s Adnan Syed freed after judge vacates murder conviction
— “the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction” #BDG shutters Input Mag
— huge bummer, Input was always doing something interesting via @jesslucaswrites #Resurrecting “Ugly Sonic” with Stable Diffusion’s Textual Inversion
— Max Woolf doing the important work #Simon Willison on GPT-3 prompt injection attacks
— the raid on the Remoteli bot was hilarious, demonstrating its potential for exploits #Wikipedia Speedruns
— compete with others to get from one article to another in the shortest time using only article links #Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers
— previously: Aja Romano on the homophobic/transphobic “grooming” panic via @melissagira #Have I Been Trained?
— Holly Herndon and Mat Dryden are working on tools to help artists opt in or out of AI training data #The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books
— charming New Yorker profile of the series’ legacy, barely touching on its recent litigation and takedowns via @textfiles #The Follower
— artist Dries Depoorter used AI on video from public webcams to figure out when geotagged Instagram photos were taken via @golan #Behind the scenes of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’s new TV series
— it was set to debut today but was delayed to late September because of the Queen’s death #Vulture profiles Kate Beaton on the release of her new graphic memoir
— her 900-page book explores her two years working at the Alberta oil sands, “the world’s most destructive oil operation“ #Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images
As AI-generated art platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion explode in popularity, online communities devoted to sharing human-generated art are forced to make a decision: should AI art be allowed?
On Sunday, popular furry art community Fur Affinity announced that AI-generated art was not allowed because it “lacked artistic merit.” (In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned.) Their new guidelines are very clear:
Content created by artificial intelligence is not allowed on Fur Affinity.
AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists’ work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.
Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow AI generated content on the site.