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😺 Photoshop on steroids

😺 Photoshop on steroids

PLUS: an update on text-to-video

Pete Huang & Noah Edelman
May 22, 2023

Welcome, humans.

Instagram went down yesterday, which, for teenagers, was the 2023 equivalent of getting a military draft card. 🤳

Here’s what’s going on in AI today:

DragGAN can completely manipulate images.
Runway Gen-2’s capabilities are improving.
Neeva is shutting down its search engine.
Charts and visualizations are now available in Bing.

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DragGAN Can Completely Manipulate Photos 🙀

Yet another crazy bit of research…

On Friday, researchers dropped a new paper showing they could edit images by simply “dragging” a point.

A little hard to use words to capture what this does, so check this video out.

For instance, you can take a picture of a cat and make it yawn by simply dragging its mouth open.
Even better, drag its head to the other side of its body to make it look like it’s hunting a pesky cockroach.

In simple terms, you start with an image, pick a few points to move or hold still, then ask the AI to re-imagine the image with those points moved/held still.

This also means it can “hallucinate” hidden content, like revealing the teeth of a cat that has its mouth closed.

While this was just a demo, we could one day find this type of concept in the hands of anyone editing images in post. The code will release in June - buckle up to see what the open-source community will do with it.

Why it matters: Today’s skills lie in producing, editing, & photoshopping images. The next era will be generating & enhancing … all courtesy of AI’s magic.

By the way, what happens when you can do anything to a photo, infinite times?

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An Update On Text-To-Video 🎥

So far, text-to-video creations we’ve come across have given a “cool, but that’s clearly AI” type of vibe.

Converting text into sequences of frames (as opposed to a single image) that stay consistent both spatially and temporally is hard.

While we have a ways to go, Runway’s Gen-2 closed beta users have slowly been showing off some more and more impressive creations.

There’s this that mimicked high-quality stock footage in seconds — the faces look way better than DALL-E but lag Midjourney.
We also stumbled upon this horror movie trailer with impressive special effects and annotations.
Not to mention this 'Wake and Bake' video, which seems to have been made by someone who had quite literally just woken up and baked.

It’s also become clear that the better the prompt, the better the video (much like Midjourney).

Why it matters: We’re expecting text-to-video to get really good, really fast. Runway Gen-2 is currently under a pretty tight closed beta. We’re hungry for access ourselves, so we’ll share when it’s out!

Should we add Runway to our Top AI Tools For Business?

Around the Horn 🦄

Neeva is shutting down its consumer search engine and pivoting to building LLMs for enterprises.
A study found that GPT detectors often wrongly tag content by non-native English speakers as AI-generated.
Apple is going on a hiring spree for machine learning specialists.
Someone built a tool that outputs real-time responses during job interviews.
Microsoft shipped new features for Bing last week including chat history, charts and visualizations, and exporting answers into Office apps.

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