Welcome to The Week in Generative AI, a weekly roundup for marketers from Quad Insights that sums up the latest news surrounding this rapidly evolving technology.
Yahoo to acquire AI-powered news app Artifact
Yahoo just announced it will acquire Artifact, an AI-powered, personalized news app created by Instagram Co-Founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, The Verge’s David Pierce reports. News of the acquisition comes just three months after Krieger and Systrom announced that Artifact would be shutting down, Pierce notes, adding that at the time, the two felt further investment wasn’t warranted as the user community hadn’t grown large enough. However, soon after the shutdown announcement, a number of companies reached out regarding potential acquisition, Systrom shared with Pierce. Financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Yahoo said that Artifact tech will be rolled out to Yahoo News users gradually.
The takeaway: This acquisition is all about content personalization at scale.
OpenAI unveils new AI voice tool that can mimic human voices
OpenAI just unveiled samples of output from Voice Engine, a new AI tool capable of mimicking human voices, CNN’s Clare Duffy reports. Voice Engine takes a 15-second recording of an individual’s voice to replicate it, Duffy notes, adding that the tool then allows the user to enter a text prompt that it will read in the voice replica. While the AI voice generator has powerful potential — use cases cited by OpenAI in the announcement include providing reading assistance and helping patients recover their voice — it “could also prompt concerns about misinformation and other forms of abuse,” Duffy writes. Voice Engine is still in testing mode and has not been formally released as a product.
See also: Voice Engine marks the second splashy new tool announced by OpenAI in recent months. In February, the ChatGPT developer announced a text-to-video AI model called Sora (also still in testing mode), as we noted in an earlier installment of The Week in Generative AI.
Some of music’s biggest stars sign open letter warning of AI threat to artists
More than 200 musical artists including Billie Eilish, Camila Cabello and Katy Perry have signed the Artists Rights Alliance’s just-released open letter calling for digital music developers to “cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Etan Vlessing reports. The letter comes as controversy surrounding AI “copycats” in music and entertainment continues to heat up. “The advent of AI has allowed developers to use a vocal sample to transform songs they produce into ones that sound like a popular human artist who neither knows about nor gives permission for the song’s creation,” Vlessing writes.
The takeaway: As U.S. law lags behind rapid AI-related developments, artists are speaking out — and leveraging the power of public opinion among their fan bases — to apply pressure on tech companies and policymakers.
Further reading
AI tools and advancements:
- “DALL-E now lets you edit images in ChatGPT” (The Verge)
- “Brave is launching its AI assistant on iPhone and iPad” (TechCrunch)
AI regulation:
AI controversy:
- “This tool makes AI models hallucinate cats to fight copyright infringement” (NBC News)
- “OpenAI’s GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints” (Wired)
- “NYC’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down” (The Associated Press)
AI strategy:
- “Google considers charging for AI-powered search in big change to business model” (Financial Times)
- “Elon Musk Boosts AI Engineer Pay in ‘Craziest Talent War’” (The Wall Street Journal)
