AI Art and Music

Even with convincing deep fakes causing record-label panic and a flurry of new AI tech garnering plenty of interest, we’re still at the very beginning of learning just how modern machine learning will change art and pop culture, for both good and bad.

Deep learning neural nets have begun a roughshod rampage through the creative arts sectors, and if musicians thought they were safe from the AIs that plague the nightmares of writers, artists and others, they've got another think coming.

Thomas Edison once described genius as "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" – but AI systems like MetaGPT can already reduce that sweat to nearly nothing when it comes to coding and deploying simple apps and websites.

If ChatGPT's writing style seems a bit too boring, dry and neutral to you – or indeed, too "woke" – that's no accident. But OpenAI doesn't want it to stay that way, leading to discussions about bias, free speech, and the meaning of objective truth.

"Will Smith eating spaghetti" made text-to-video generative AIs look like a bit of a joke just a month or two ago, but nVidia has now demonstrated a new system that blows previous efforts out of the water. The pace of progress here is astonishing.

A new creative AI system called ModelScope is now pumping out short videos in response to text prompts. The early results are wonderfully bizarre and thoroughly memeworthy – but it's immediately clear how immensely powerful these tools will become.

Stanford's Alpaca AI performs similarly to the astonishing ChatGPT on many tasks – but it's built on an open-source language model and cost less than US$600 to train up. It seems these godlike AIs are already frighteningly cheap and easy to replicate.

ChatGPT's underlying language model, GPT-3.5, is about to be superseded. The CTO of Microsoft Germany has told the audience at the company's "AI in Focus" event that GPT-4 is set for imminent release, unlocking new capabilities, including video.

French DJ and music producer David Guetta has discovered AI tools, and thought it would be fun to use an unauthorized deepfake of Eminem's voice to rev up a huge crowd at a live show. It looks like it worked, but it raises legal and ethical questions.

"No Lights, no cameras, all action." You knew it was coming. One of the key companies behind the Stable Diffusion image generator has launched a mind-blowing AI video creation and editing tool that operates something like DALL-E for moving pictures.

This year may well be remembered as the moment the world woke up to the power, the potential and the world-inverting threat of artificial intelligence. OpenAI's humble, free-to-use chatbot has made it clear: life will never be the same after ChatGPT.

The greatest artistic tool ever built, or a harbinger of doom for entire creative industries? OpenAI's second-generation DALL-E 2 system is slowly opening up to the public, and its text-based image generation and editing abilities are awe-inspiring.