Welcome to The Upgrade

Welcome to my weekly newsletter, which focuses on the intersection of AI, media, and storytelling. A special welcome to my new readers from Amazon, HSBC, UC Berkeley, and many other top organizations — you’re in good company!

In today’s issue:

• The Week’s Top AI Stories 📰

• 🎓 Upcoming Course Offer: AI Upgrade for Creatives⚡️

• 🎧Podcast: Tony Elkins on Visual Ethics in the AI Era

• 🎙️The Big Interview: AI Artist Kevin Broome on “Meets Gucci” — a Midjourney forest mashup 🌲

The Week’s Top AI Stories

Top AI Headlines

• Investors in Talks to Help Elon Musk’s xAI Raise $3 Billion, Adding to Industry Arms Race — The Wall Street Journal

• DALL-E now lets you edit images in ChatGPT — The Verge

• How the Ad Industry Is Making AI Images Look Less Like AI — The Wall Street Journal

• Meta expands AI labeling policies as 2024 presidential race nears — The Washington Post

• The Chess Master Trying to Propel Google’s AI Push — The Wall Street Journal

• Yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app from the Instagram co-founders — The Verge

Ethics & Safety

• This Camera Turns Every Photo Into a Nude — 404 Media

• After AI-generated porn report, Washington Lottery pulls down interactive web app — Ars Technica

  

  Image generated by the WA State Lottery

• Showing AI just 1000 extra images reduced AI-generated stereotypes — The Scientist

• Meta expands AI labeling policies as 2024 presidential race nears — The Washington Post

Legal & Copyright

• Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and more musicians demand protection against AI — CNBC

• OpenAI’s GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints — WIRED

• Publisher: OpenAI’s GPT Store bots are illegally scraping our textbooks — Ars Techni

AI in the Workplace

• Business Schools Are Going All In on AI — The Wall Street Journal

• A Wharton professor explains why most jobs will be impacted by AI — Fast Company

• ‘Co-Intelligence’ Review: Learning to Live With AI — The Wall Street Journal

• AI seen cutting worker numbers, survey by staffing company Adecco shows — Reuters

🎓May AI Course for Creatives! 💻

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m partnering with Kris Krüg, founder of Future Proof Creatives to offer a special 6-week AI course for creatives of all types! ⚡️Kris and I met through the Google News Initiative’s Pre-Launch Accelerator and have been guest lecturers in each other’s AI courses for months. Kris is a former tech marketing director, a professional photographer, and an AI consultant and explorer!

The class starts on Wednesday, May 8th, at 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT. Learn more here!✨The course fee is $1,499 — discounts are available for freelancers, NGOs, and educators. Book a time to chat here!

💡The Big Interview: AI Artist & Activist Kevin Broome

Kevin Broom is the principal of Wall on the Fly Creative and creative director at the Living Forest Institute. 

Kevin discusses his fascinating visual experiments using AI image generation tools like Midjourney for forest preservation advocacy in his community in British Columbia. By mashing up the Roberts Creek Forest Charter with aesthetics like "Meets Gucci," Kevin has created stunningly unique visuals that tap into new audiences.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity

Peter: Tell me how Midjourney has been useful in your work at the Living Forest Institute.

Kevin: One of the things that we really want to do at Living Forest Institute is introduce natural forests to people who might not normally be paying attention. So we're not going after the tree huggers, although they are a part of our community and audience. What we want is to introduce younger generations and people who aren't necessarily going into the forest for mountain biking, hiking, or foraging. We give them other reasons - we put on concerts in the forest every summer, have classrooms in the forest, organize hikes, offer self-guided secret trails and geocaching.

So with the Midjourney project, it was yet another audience that is arguably very different from typical forest people. We're talking about AI, which raised some eyebrows even in my liberal hippie community. AI is scary and threatening to some, artists aren't sure if it's a friend or foe. But it generated buzz and conversations in the local cafe that otherwise wouldn't have been happening. It came at preserving forests from a very different angle than protesting or chaining yourself to a tree. Maybe this connected with someone who otherwise wouldn't have paid attention.

Peter: How do you view the IP and copyright landscape within generative visual AI?

Kevin: With the state of the internet, images are so available, even before AI. There's a lot of grey area around image usage in general. But I personally have no interest in going in and saying, "Create an illustration exactly like this current living artist" by feeding a bunch of their graphics in to produce something that looks exactly like their work. I don't understand why you would do that.

With the Gucci mashup, I loved the idea that those two pure prompts produced what it did. I'm not as worried about "stealing" from Gucci as I would be from stealing from some smaller artist who's just trying to get by in the world. It's a little bit of a “stick it to big fashion” in a sense. There's a comment on how a small local non-profit organization in the forest doesn't have access to Gucci in the real world. Why is Gucci a multi-billion dollar fashion industry while our old-growth forests are getting cut down? That's the world we're living in. So if someone says, "You're ripping Gucci off," I'd say, "Yep, bring it on."

At the same time, I have full empathy for artists looking at this and going, "How do I compete or stay relevant?" In some cases, artists' work will be worth more because of AI. Like with my fellow Living Forest Institute member Shell Neufeld, a nature photographer. Anyone who is a potential client or customer of his has no interest in an AI-generated beautiful nature photo. When you buy one of Shell's pieces, you're buying the story of him going deep into the BC forests. You're paying for a photo of an actual place and moment in the world. That's what you want to hang on your wall. An AI-generated photo of nature is worthless in comparison.

Peter: It's fascinating to think about the creative possibilities that are opening up with these tools. Many will see when they check out your project that it has taken on a life of its own. What other mashups have you done that have resulted in similarly eye-opening results?

Kevin: A typical Midjourney session for me over the course of an evening would involve coming up with some sort of image idea as a starting point. Then, I tend to use a number of different prompts as "meets" - I probably have 8-10 that I go to all the time because they produce a similar style.

The Meets Gucci project really inspired me to keep pursuing that avenue of forest activism in AI. That's the focus, and I'm still looking for that next image that captures me and makes me say, “This is something unique we could work with.”

There was one point where I was creating forest spirit creatures, entering as a prompt, for example, "Pacific Northwest forest spirit," and getting these three men. You could keep hitting regenerate, and it would make these different tree armies. I was thinking these guys look kind of threatening, maybe they could be the guards of the forest…

Don’t be shy—hit reply if you have thoughts or feedback. I’d love to connect with you!

Until next week,

Peter

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