Welcome, humans.

Question: would you watch a new Lord of the Rings extended universe TV show based on this viral fan-made trailer?

It’s based on The Fall of Gondolin, a real book by J.R.R Tolkien, and it’s got the Tolkien hive fans so hyped they’re claiming it looks better than Amazon’s version (The Rings of Power) with its $1B budget.

IDK about that, AI content still looks too AI to us, but it’s got some cool ideas!

If you’re into this, the same creator made fan trailers for Tolkien’s other books The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Silmarillion (starring Henry Cavill).

If those weren’t your vibe, try this trailer for a 1950s Super Panavision 70 version of the O.G. LOTR. The creator said it took 10 hours to make—and if you want to try this style yourself, here’s a tutorial.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• The Pentagon wants to create “undetectable” deepfakes.

• OpenAI thinks o1’s reasoning is “GPT-2” level and replicable by others.

• OpenAI’s ex-CTO is raising funds for new AI startup.

• AI firms will pitch their services to healthcare companies in Las Vegas today.

The Pentagon wants to create undetectable AI deepfakes. What could go wrong?

Over the last few months, we’ve shown you countless examples of how AI can now create ultra-realistic fake people. Fun fact: multiple studies have shown that we have a harder time knowing what’s real than we think we do. 

So the question nowadays isn’t how do we prove what’s fake and what’s not.

The question is, in this new world of AI, everywhere, all the time… how do we humans prove we're real? 

That question is getting more complicated by the day—just look at this espionage thriller movie happening in real time: 

• According to a new investigation by The Intercept, the U.S. military now wants to create undetectable fake online personas that are so convincing other AIs can’t spot them. 

• We're talking “government ID-quality photos”, fake selfie videos, and matching audio.

• Ironically, this is the same U.S. government that previously warned of deepfakes, last year calling genAI content from adversaries a “malign influence accelerant.” 

Meanwhile, Sam Altman of all people is pushing a startup called Worldcoin (but drop the coin) that verifies humans by scanning their eyeballs.

Here’s how it works: 

• World uses an “Orb” to scan your irises. 

• These eye-scans create a “World ID”, or digital passport for “proof of human.”

• Over 6.9M people have already been scanned.

So let’s get this straight: The government wants to create hyperreal, deceptive deepfakes, and private enterprise wants to create a central identity database to verify real humans??

Isn’t that like, the opposite of what you’d think would be going on?!? 

Why this matters: GenAI images are already flooding social media, often pushing political narratives. The Pentagon's deepfake push feels like opening a Pandora's box of online deception that could accelerate an AI deception arms race with other govs.  

At the same time, collecting biometric data to prove we're human raises its own set of concerns, and World is already facing scrutiny in multiple countries over its data collection practices.

Plus, the ultimate irony of World is that it’s Altman's answer to a world overflowing with AI agents—a world his other company, OpenAI, plans to unleash next year…

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Around the Horn.

• The CPO of OpenAI, Kevin Weil, thinks that o1 (the reasoning model) is only at “GPT-2 level” atm, and that competitors will eventually figure out how to reverse-engineer its methods.

• Mira Murati, ex-CTO of OpenAI, is reportedly raising ~$100M+ for a new AI startup to build new proprietary AI models.

• The era of enterprise AI kicks off in full today as the big AI companies will pitch their services to healthcare corps at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas.

Treats To Try.

1. SagaLabs translates your stories into 200+ languages while preserving emotional flow and cultural nuances—free to try.

2. Ichigo lets you have real-time voice conversations with Llama 3.1—code here, code to run locally here, or demo it for yourself here. 

3. Beyond Presence creates a hyper-realistic avatar that can attend video calls and conduct interviews, demos, and sales conversations on your behalf (raised $3M, waitlist only rn).

4. Endor Labs evaluates the top open source language models on HuggingFace across security, popularity, quality, and usage to help you select the best open models for your projects (free trial here). 

5. Highperformr manages and automates your social media tasks across multiple platforms (one time purchase tool).

6. Photo AI generates lifelike photos and videos of you in any setting or outfit, helping you save time and money on photoshoot (how it works in action 1, 2, 3).

7. Here’s a Reddit round-up of the top 10 AI headshot tools—the poster looks like they like Headshot Pro the best, and suggested using this link for a free trial. We’ve used Headshot Pro before, and it’s legit. Heads up (pun intended)—this is probs affiliate marketing, but it’s a good roundup nonetheless (here’s another one to compare).

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

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Sunday Spooky.

It’s no wonder Meta is teaming up with Blumhouse to test its video model with horror movies. Generative AI creates some of the most genuinely creepy horror-core content we’ve ever seen. Here’s a few examples—vote for your favorite below!

1. Cursed shore.

2. The Antarctica Portal Incident.

3. The Kaiju event.

4. Baby Secret Mattel doll - 1966 commercial spoof.

5. Runway - prompting a long haired woman.

A Cat's Commentary.