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A website sells AI-generated nudes of non-existent women. Why is it (not) okay?

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Scrolling through my Facebook (soon TikTok) feed yesterday, a saw a post my friend shared. It was about a website that sells nude photos of women for $1, but there’s a catch – none of those women exist. Similar to these portraits or these cameras, all of the nude women are AI-generated.

Like a hamster running frantically inside its little wheel, my brain started processing this information and I spent the rest of the day thinking about it. AI-generated nudes… Why? When? How? I was kind of disgusted and impressed at the same time and I knew I had to write about it. I gave it a good thought and now I want to present you with two things. First, the very fact that AI-generated nudes exist, and second, my opinion on the whole thing.

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Luminar NEO now has automatic portrait background removal. Is it any good?

Luminar Neo has added a new feature aimed at making your life easier and your editing time shorter. The previously announced Portrait Background Removal is now here, and as the name suggests, it removes the background in your portrait photos.

Like most of Luminar’s AI features, it does all the hard work in a single click. Skylum promises careful and precise hair-by-hair selections, giving you a transparent background in no time.

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This nightmare music video was made from AI-generated images based on the song lyrics

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I believe that you’re already familiar with the power of text-to-image AI. Tools like DALL-E and Google’s text-to-image AI turn any random text into illustrations. They try hard to make it as realistic as possible, but more often than not, the resulting images are bizarre.

So, have you ever thought about what happens when you put song lyrics into a tool like this? Jason Scott did. He took lyrics of a song about data encryption (how appropriate), let AI turn them into images and made everything into a video. The result – pure, unrefined nightmare-material that. But if you’re anything like me – you’re going to absolutely love it!

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These crazy looking cameras don’t really exist – They were created using AI

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Cool new ideas for concept cameras come out with alarming regularity. Painstakingly modelled in 3D software like Blender or Maya or something and then textured, lit and rendered to look as real as possible. They’re a great way to see what the general population thinks of a camera design before actually manufacturing it. Or they’re a good way for independents to tell manufacturers “Hey, this is what we want!”

The cameras here, though, aren’t concept cameras. They weren’t even modelled by a human. They were created by the AI system known as DALL-E 2 which attempts to generate photorealistic images based on written sentences. Mathieu Stern wanted to test its limits to see if it could come up with some cool camera designs based on somewhat unorthodox themes and… Well, yeah, it did!

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PicsArt’s AI tool can now upscale your photos in just a few seconds

There are now several ways to upscale small photos without them losing quality. And now there’s another one that lets you do it from your phone or web browser in only a few seconds. Picsart has now added a brand new AI-powered tool that allows you to upscale small images (and keep them sharp!) in literally a couple of seconds. But is that a good thing? Let’s discuss.

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Sony President and CEO says smartphone image quality will exceed that of (Sony) DSLRs by 2024

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Well, this is a bit of a surprise statement from Terushi Shimizu, President and CEO of Sony Semiconductor Solutions during a recent briefing. According to an article on Nikkei Japan, he made the statement that smartphone image quality will exceed that of DSLRs “within the next few years”, although an image accompanying the presentation suggested a more specific timeframe with a 2024 date.

If anybody would know about the image quality of sensors inside DSLRs and smartphones, it’s Sony. After all, they’ve arguably made most of them. But it’s not all about the sensor. He believes that along with new sensor technologies, computational photography will be the defining factor that brings the image quality up to par with DSLRs.

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Google’s new skin tone scale could reduce AI’s racial bias

We’ve already seen some cases of AI being biased towards lighter skin tones. But Google wants to turn it around and it’s now using an alternative, more inclusive skin tone scale.

Teaming up with a Harvard professor, Google is using and open-sourcing the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale. It’s more inclusive than the current tech-industry standard, making various skin tones included in search results.

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Describe a scene to this AI and it creates a picture

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I’ve had the chance to write about some amazing and creepy AI solutions over the past couple of days. And today, I was mind-blown by another one. It’s called DALL-E 2, and yeah, it’s kinda like an AI blend of WALL-E and Salvador Dali.

OpenAI’s cleverly named AI is able to create realistic “photos” based on your textual description. An astronaut riding a bike, a koala dunking a basketball, a bowl of soup that looks like a monster… You name it, DALL-E 2 will turn it into a picture that’s likely never been seen before.

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Creepy AI reconstructs your portrait based only on your voice

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Turning speech into text has become so common that i’s a part of almost every smartphone. But have you ever thought about turning your speech into a portrait? Researchers have, and they’ve even made it possible.

Artificial intelligence scientists at MIT’S Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created AI that turns short snippets of audio speech recording into a human face. As if this weren’t both stunning and creepy enough, the results are actually fairly accurate, too!

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This AI recreated a whole virtual San Francisco from 2.8 million photos

AI-generated imagery and 3D content have come a long way in a very short space of time. It was only two years ago that Google researchers revealed NeRF, or Neural Radiance Fields, and less than two weeks ago NVIDIA blew us away with almost real-time generation of 3D scenes from just a few dozen still photographs using their “Instant NeRF” techniques.

Well, now, a new paper has been released by the folks at Waymo describing “Block-NeRF“, a technique for “scalable large scene neural view synthesis” – basically, generating really really large environments. And as a proof of concept, they recreated the city of San Francisco from 2.8 million photographs. And this video, Károly Zsolnai-Fehér at Two Minute Papers explains how it all works.

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