Welcome to The Upgrade

Welcome to the fifth edition of my weekly newsletter, which focuses on the intersection of AI, media, and storytelling. A special welcome to my new readers from The Associated Press, Cal Poly, Deloitte Digital, and many other outstanding organizations — you’re in good company!

In today’s issue:

• The Week’s Top AI Stories 📰

• Special Offer: 3 Spots left for My Live Online Course! 💻

• Quick Quote: Ricky Sutton on AI 🧠 

• The Big Think 💭 : Is a Picture Still Worth 1,000 Words?

The Week’s Top AI Stories

Gen AI Tools

• Character.AI introduces group chats where people and multiple AIs can talk to each other — TechCrunch

  

  Character.AI release allows humans and AIs to mingle.

• AI app EPIK hits No. 1 on the App Store for its viral yearbook photo feature — TechCrunch

  

  AI-generated 90s-style yearbook photos using the EPIK app.

• Adobe's Firefly AI is now commercially available on Photoshop, Illustrator and Express — Engadget

• ChatGPT Vision lets you submit images in your prompts: 7 wild ways people are using it — Mashable

Regulation & Policy

• How countries around the world are trying to regulate AI — Quartz

• Calls for AI regulations to protect jobs rise in Europe after ChatGPT’s arrival — CNBC

Ethics & Safety

• Amazon's Alexa fumbles its facts by falsely claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen — Business Insider

• 'Godfather of AI' Just Issued an Ominous Warning for the Future of Humanity — Newsweek

• 'Godfather of AI': AI could rewrite own code to modify itself, 'escape control' — CNBC

• AI chatbot Chai encourages underage sex, suicide and murder — The Times

Privacy & Security

• Snapchat: Snap AI chatbot 'may risk children's privacy' — BBC

• AI’s ‘Unicorn Hunt’ Gives Privacy Officers a Key Governance Role — Bloomberg Law

Legal & Copyright

• ‘Keep Your Paws Off My Voice’: Voice Actors Worry Generative AI Will Steal Their Livelihoods — Forbes

• Google to defend generative AI users from copyright claims — Reuters

• Generative AI needs tools to avoid copyright infringement, Databricks' Naveen Rao says — or more companies could meet Napster's fate — Business Insider

In the Workplace

• The No. 1 thing CEOs are investing in: You can use it to get a lucrative job — CNBC

• Will AI make CEOs obsolete? — Fast Company

• AI threatens to dethrone the 4-year college degree — Axios

• AI and Work: AI for Jobs, Startups and Everywhere Else on Apple Podcasts — ‎WSJ Tech News Briefing (audio)

• How to keep generative AI from fully replacing humans – soft skills and entrepreneurship — The South China Morning Post (opinion)

3 Spots Left in My Live Online Course

Only a handful of spots remain for my new online certificate course! The 6-week class, based on my curriculum at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, will cover the essentials of Generative AI for media and marketing professionals.

The live course will take place on Wednesdays at 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT beginning October 18th. The 90-minute Zoom sessions will be split into lectures, hands-on exercises, and activities, culminating in a final capstone project. Want to get up to speed and get ahead? Now’s your chance: act now before the course fills up!

(If those dates or times don’t work, but you’re interested in learning about future cohorts, please sign up for the waitlist here.)

Is a Picture Still Worth 1,000 Words?

AI is changing photo ethics as we know it.

It’s possible to generate any image imaginable with a few text prompts and to edit a photo’s subject and composition with the tap of a finger. The democratization of image manipulation begs some serious questions: What does it mean for a photo to be considered real? How will any of us know if it is or isn’t? And do we even care anymore?

This is not an arcane debate for photojournalists, visual artists, academics, and hobby photographers. It’s now something everyone with a smartphone needs to consider… which is nearly 7 billion of us.

Google has been leading the way with its AI-powered mobile editing capabilities. It released Magic Eraser earlier this year at Google I/O, which empowers users to easily remove objects from their photos' backgrounds. (The app is also available to iPhone users for $2/month.)

VP of Google Photos, Shimrit Ben-Yair, recently told The Verge, that its official mission has changed from “home for all your photos and videos” to “home for all your memories.” As journalist Allison Johnson notes, memories are messy, complicated, and imperfect. Research has shown that they are not reliable representations of fact or truth. Neither are photos taken on Google's smartphones.

The Google Pixel 8 line of phones now includes Magic Editor, an even more powerful set of tools to enhance and alter images. As Basil Kronfli says in an op-ed in Digital Camera World, Google “Pixels are the first phones whose key selling point is AI, and that’s both exciting and alarming.”

Previously, the capability to manipulate images required a degree of expertise and software. This barrier now seems quaint.

While Google has said it will include metadata to note when an image has been manipulated, will any of us care to search for it? Will we remember that we edited it weeks, months, or years down the road? Will we care at all, or should we?

A picture may still be worth 1,000 words — they will just be the words we want to tell ourselves and others.

What do you think? 💭 Let me know by replying to this email!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great weekend!

If you liked this edition, please share it with someone who might enjoy reading it. 📧 

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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