Podium, a trailblazing company known for developing innovative AI tools for podcasters, has unveiled a revolutionary product—Podbook. This AI-powered application transforms podcast episodes into fully-fledged books, providing a seamless way for creators to repurpose their content, engage with their audience in a new format, and generate an additional revenue stream. With sophisticated language processing, Podbook ensures the transformed content reads like a book, enhancing the reader’s experience. Currently, Podbook is in closed beta, with the waitlist now open for all podcasters interested in this cutting-edge product. — Read More

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The Frost nails its uncanny, disconcerting vibe in its first few shots. Vast icy mountains, a makeshift camp of military-style tents, a group of people huddled around a fire, barking dogs. It’s familiar stuff, yet weird enough to plant a growing seed of dread. There’s something wrong here.

“Pass me the tail,” someone says. Cut to a close-up of a man by the fire gnawing on a pink piece of jerky. It’s grotesque. The way his lips are moving isn’t quite right. For a beat it looks as if he’s chewing on his own frozen tongue.

Welcome to the unsettling world of AI moviemaking. “We kind of hit a point where we just stopped fighting the desire for photographic accuracy and started leaning into the weirdness that is DALL-E,” says Stephen Parker at Waymark, the Detroit-based video creation company behind The Frost.

The Frost is a 12-minute movie in which every shot is generated by an image-making AI. It’s one of the most impressive—and bizarre—examples yet of this strange new genre. You can watch the film below in an exclusive reveal from MIT Technology Review. — Read More

AI is impacting the realm of photography, ranging from tools for professionals like Adobe Photoshop’s new generative AI, to those for consumers, like Google Photos’ forthcoming Magic Editor. Now, genealogy company MyHeritage is turning to AI to make it easier for families to preserve their memories with the launch of its latest app, Reimagine. The new mobile app’s main focus is to help users easily import printed photos stored in albums, then touch them up by improving their resolution, fixing scratches and creases, and even restoring color in black-and-white photos and animating faces — the latter, a technique that went viral in prior years with MyHeritage’s launch of “Deep Nostalgia.” — Read More

#vfx

Roll uses generative AI to simulate a 3D environment, allowing users to create panning or close-up shots without needing to move their iPhone camera.

Roll AI is a new video creation and collaboration platform for iOS and web that allows users to add simulated video effects to iPhone footage that would typically require professional camera equipment to achieve, such as stabilized pan or crane shots. It’s one of the latest examples in a boom of new apps and services that utilize AI to simplify technical creative processes like photo and video editing.

Roll AI uses its proprietary generative AI models to recreate the filming environment in iPhone footage as a 3D space, allowing users to add text overlay effects and simulate side-panning, dolly, and crane camera movements in postproduction and apply various studio effects like bokeh (background blur). The service also uses AI to automatically edit your footage for publishing. Roll captures metadata from audio and video recordings that the Roll editor later uses to reframe hosts and create scene changes based on any on-screen conversations. — Read More

What does it mean to be human?

You look human, you act human, you learn lessons, you have challenges, you feel emotions.

And yet, in 2023, we’ve shrunk decidedly away from being human.

The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) is currently on strike against the AMPTP, the representation of the Hollywood studios and streamers. A number of demands were made and were met with the expected pushback, but one pushback was alarming: the refusal to even have a conversation about the potential for AI to displace screenwriters in films and series. — Read More