Your weekly update on how AI is changing our lives. Our experts keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on Midjourney. Don't forget to explore our Archive and Share & Subscribe with your friends!
If at first you don’t succeed, prompt, prompt again 😣 👏
Although all of the images in this newsletter were generated with Midjourney, the stunning Cyber Orange Ford Bronco we used as inspiration is very real, and if you’re quick you still have time to bid on it!
Deepfakes are a growing problem for everyone from celebrities to politicians, but until now they have also had one serious problem of their own; typically, they’re not very good. That said, as the kerfuffle earlier this year over deepfaked images of Donald Trump and Pope Francis proved, they don’t have to be good to be convincing. People want to believe, so even if an image is riddled with digital artifacts, garbled text, and hands that do weird things, it will still go viral if it’s sensational enough.
Steps are already being taken by the major AI firms to try to combat this issue. Just this week, Google announced its SynthID watermarking system, which works by embedding a finely detailed pattern over images it creates, one that is imperceptible to humans but readable by machines. Unfortunately, this will only apply to images created with Google’s products, so offers little real protection against deepfakes to anyone except Google’s lawyers. Meanwhile, as the countermeasures improve, so do the deepfakes. This week Midjourney - the industry-leading text-to-image AI that was used to create the Balenciaga Pope images - launched a new feature that promises to make generative AI’s influence much harder to spot.
Midjourney calls it 'Vary (Region)' but everybody else calls it 'inpainting' - a term carried over from fine art restoration where it describes the technique of retouching a damaged canvas. With Midjourney, the method - and outcome - are slightly different; modern inpainting allows you to select regions of your generated image and then replace them using a new prompt. Want the logo of the vehicle in your psychedelic portrait to say “BRO” instead of “BRONCO”? Just select the region you want changed and enter your new prompt, and Midjourney will roll the generative dice on a new image. The same trick works just as well for human portraits, so the days of counting fingers to assess whether an image is human or AI-generated will soon be a thing of the past.
Of course the best way to learn how to spot an AI-generated image is to make them yourself, so with that in mind we have a detailed guide to Midjourney to help you master this incredibly powerful tool.
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Washington DC is getting its first air defense upgrade since 9/11, with a new system of AI-driven monitors watching the skies for foreign bodies, promising a “tenfold increase in performance” over the old ways.
Online dating site Bumble has announced a crackdown on bots, ghosting, spam and doxxing on its service, and claims that over the last year its AI-powered monitors have banned over 8 million accounts.
Another leap forward for people with speech difficulties, as researchers in the Netherlands have created a system to predict a user’s intended speech from their brainwaves, with tremendous accuracy.
The latest polling from the Pew Research Center is here, and it shows a significant shift in public opinion on AI over the last nine months; the more people learn about it, the more worried they tend to be.
Technology has promised to revolutionize our kitchens for decades - with varying degrees of success - but Samsung is hoping to kickstart the AI kitchen era with their promising new Samsung Food app.
If you’d rather avoid the kitchen then DoorDash have an even more convenient solution, an AI-driven ordering system that they claim will make life easier for both busy restaurants and hungry customers.
At SPY HQ you’ll explore hidden worlds, break codes, run surveillance and spot liars - while a system developed with MI6 experts reveals your personal spy role and profile.