Culture

Another day, another AI art trend on TikTok. This time, people are asking AI art generators to conjure up the most ‘stereotypical’ depictions of people from a specific country. From there, users ask the AI art generators to ‘intensify’ those images to the point of absurdity. On TikTok, it’s called the ‘Make It More’ trend. For example, a user requested DALL-E to produce an illustration of a “typical American”. The first image spat out was an ordinary image of a boy munching on McDonald’s. The user then asked ChatGPT to make it “more American”, and… we’ll let you see the...

Perhaps it’s time to slow down with creating wacky AI art just for sh*ts and giggles. This is because the energy needed to generate one piece of AI art is equivalent to the amount needed to fully charge your smartphone. This is according to the latest study by Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers pulled together the top ten use cases for AI on Hugging Face’s platform, and examined the carbon emission level of those use cases. The top ten tasks performed by Hugging Face users included image generation, text generation, summarisation, Q&A, and so on. Creating an AI-generated...

Xiaohongshu – China’s Instagram-like photo-sharing social media platform – is accused by local Chinese artists of stealing their work without permission to train the company’s in-house AI model. What is Xiaohongshu? Xiaohongshu, which literally translates to ‘little red book’, is China’s largest photo-sharing lifestyle platform. Founded in June 2013, the app now has over 200 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the Chinese-language alone, according to latest data by Chinese third-party social media monitor Qiangua Data. Xiaohongshu has a sizable user base that rivals that of English-language social media platforms. It has thus earned itself the title of ‘Chinese Instagram’....

As Greta Gerwig’s Barbie arrives at cinemas worldwide, an AI-generated magazine cover of a Barbie-themed photoshoot has sparked criticism from fans. The Barbie-inspired cover was for Glamour Bulgaria’s August edition, which features model Lisa Opie who boasts 1 million Instagram followers. Opie poses at the front cover; her outfits, as well as the backdrop for several photos, are generated with AI. The AI-generated photoshoot was by New York-based artificial intelligence artist ‘AI Fashion Photos’ who teamed up with costume designer Joey Rolon. According to an interview with the New York Post, the AI-generated cover took only 20 minutes to create....

Meta has finally released its standalone AI art generator. The generator is powered by Emu, Meta’s own image foundation model. This means that there’s now another alternative to mainstream AI art generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E. Meta’s newest tool is completely free, too, it has its own dedicated website, which you can access here. Here’s a guide on how to use Meta’s latest tool. Before getting started First, you’ll want to head over to imagine.meta.com. On desktop, you should be able to view an empty text box on the left hand side of your screen, and several examples...

The creative industry remains largely opposed to the use of artificial intelligence (AI). In film, actors are fighting Hollywood’s major studios over the studios’ proposal to create “digital replicas” of performers using AI. In music, Spotify went on a purge in May to take down thousands of AI-generated songs.  But not everyone is against the idea of working with AI. Here in Australia, Sydney band The Deep Faith is entirely generated with AI – and it’s probably the first of its kind in the country. The Deep Faith: beginning with deepfakes Byron Spencer and Daniel Stricker, both multidisciplinary artists, tell...

My Little Pony, besides being an iconic children’s animated series, is also known for its fanbase of grown men known as ‘Bronies’. And now, someone – presumably from the ‘brony’ community – loves the series enough to sit down and create their very own version of My Little Pony, all with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).      As young children can only keyboard smash, we’re gonna assume that a ‘brony’ is responsible for a new AI-generated My Little Pony livestream on YouTube. The livestream isn’t just a single fan-made episode – the episode is seemingly never-ending, and its narrative develops...

A new type of scam is now spreading on social media thanks to easy access to AI art tools. Scammers are taking advantage of digital artists and illustrators by requesting drafts or rough sketches with the promise of payment, then vanishing with the incomplete artwork. The scammers then use AI tools to “finish up” the drafts, and resell them online as their own. Artificial intelligence to complete artist drafts The case first came to light via “MKKT”, an anonymous digital artist from Japan. MKKT shared on X that they were approached by an internet user who wanted to commission the...