Hollywood begins AI cloning

PLUS: Drake's AI mic drop

Author

Rowan Cheung
April 22, 2024

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

A leading Hollywood talent agency has started preparing A-list clients for the age of AI.

By scanning clients’ bodies, faces, and voices — CAA is creating AI clones that could shake up the entire entertainment industry. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Hollywood begins AI cloning

  • Drake posts AI-powered diss tracks

  • Transform text to speech for free

  • Report: AI surpasses humans

  • 6 new AI tools & 4 new AI jobs

  • More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

HOLLYWOOD & AI

Image source: Xangle Apps

The Rundown: Leading Hollywood talent agency CAA has reportedly been testing an initiative called CAA Vault, allowing A-list clients to create AI clones of themselves to open new creative opportunities.

The details:

  • CAA partnered with AI firms to scan clients’ bodies, faces, and voices, creating AI replicas for uses like reshooting, dubbing, and stunt double superimposing.

  • CAA's goal is to eventually make the tech available industry-wide, not just to its clients.

  • Hollywood has already been bracing for AI’s impact, with Tyler Perry even halting studio expansions after seeing OpenAI’s Sora video capabilities.

Why it matters: While the industry grapples with AI’s coming implications, CAA is taking proactive measures to help clients benefit from the shift. As models continue to improve, the difference between hiring Ryan Gosling or his AI replica may become imperceptible to the average fan.

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AI & MUSIC

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Drake just posted "Taylor Made Freestyle", a new diss track aimed at Kendrick Lamar featuring AI vocals of rappers Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.

The details:

  • Drake's track uses AI to create verses that convincingly sound like Tupac and Snoop Dogg taking shots at Kendrick Lamar.

  • A diss track using Lamar’s vocals went viral last week, fooling fans after it turned out to be AI-generated by 23-year-old Sy the Rapper.

  • “Taylor Made Freestyle” is the second ‘Drake’ song of the weekend, with another called ‘Push Ups’ released earlier that carried additional AI speculation.

Why it matters: The inability to distinguish human-created music from AI generations is happening faster than anybody expected, and some of the world’s most popular musicians publicly leveraging the tech is sure to raise some serious questions about music’s AI future.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you'll learn how to access and use Parler-TTS, a free text-to-speech model that allows you to convert a script into a speech in seconds.

Step-by-step:

  1. Access the Parler-TTS model on the Hugging Face website.

  2. Explore the interface and locate the input fields for your text prompt and voice description.

  3. Write your text prompt effectively by including phrases like "very clear audio,” using punctuation, and specifying desired speech features such as gender, speaking rate, and pitch.

  4. Click on the "Generate Audio" button to initiate the speech generation process and listen/download the generated audio.

PRESENTED BY CHECKMARX

The Rundown:  Join 16 security leaders from top companies like NVIDIA, AWS, Solvo, and Sysdig at the first-ever AI Security Symposium to explore how AI is transforming the cybersecurity landscape.

Session topics include:

  • Making security easier and more impactful with AI

  • Using AI tools to better manage risk

  • How hackers use AI in attacks

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AI RESEARCH

Image source: Stanford University

The Rundown: Stanford University released its 2023 AI Index report that tracks worldwide trends in AI — revealing that AI has surpassed human-level performance on the majority of significant benchmarks.

The details:

  • AI now exceeds human performance on benchmarks for tasks like image classification, reading comprehension, visual reasoning, and more.

  • Many benchmarks have become obsolete due to AI’s acceleration, with researchers rushing to develop more tests to measure capabilities.

  • Closed-source models still lead (for now), with the AI industry still dominated by major players due to the increase in training costs.

  • LLMs are also becoming more truthful and less prone to "hallucinations".

Why it matters: The most staggering part of this report is that it doesn’t even cover 2024, which has already seen major model advances like Claude 3, Llama 3, and more to come. As quickly as things are moving, each year is likely going to be magnitudes crazier — whether the world is ready or not.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

  • 🚀 AE Studio - Tech Lead & PM

  • 👩‍💻 Runway - Member of Technical Staff, Frontend

  • 📈 Mistral AI - Revenue Development Representative

  • 🕵️‍♀️ Cohere - Member of Technical Staff, Evaluation

QUICK HITS

Apple is reportedly building an LLM that will be completely on-device instead of cloud-based, which could improve privacy and speed up response times for AI tools on next-gen devices.

Meta’s Llama 3 has ascended the AI model rankings, topping GPT-4 in English prompts on LMSYS LLM leaderboard in a milestone for open-source LLMs.

Hugging Face introduced Open Medical-LLM, a new benchmark for evaluating AI models in healthcare tasks.

TED Talks released a viral promotional video created by OpenAI’s unreleased Sora model for its recent TED2024 conference.

The Canadian government is setting aside $50M to retrain workers potentially displaced by AI as part of a broader $2.3B initiative to enhance AI adoption.

TikTok is reportedly developing a new AI-based text-to-speech feature that allows users to record and clone their voices in just 10 seconds for use in videos.

Blockade Labs released a new update to its Skybox AI technology, improving the generation of 3D art for 360-degree applications while also adding 8K resolution support.

THAT’S A WRAP

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