Welcome to The Upgrade

Welcome to the sixth edition of my weekly newsletter, which focuses on the intersection of AI, media, and storytelling. A special welcome to my new readers from Voice of America, the University of Washington, RP Creativ, and many other outstanding organizations — you’re in good company!

In today’s issue:

• The Week’s Top AI Stories 🗞️

• 🎧 Listen: My Interview on AI & Work

• 👨🏼‍💻 My New Online Course: AI Boost⚡️— spots are limited!

• 🎥 Watch: Musician’s Voice Sings in Languages She Does Not Speak 🎵

• The Interview🎙️: Jeremy Toeman, founder of AI video startup Augie, talks voice cloning, AI ethics, and the Hype!

The Week’s Top AI Stories

Gen AI Tools

• OpenAI’s image generator DALL-E 3 is now available to ChatGPTPlus and Enterprise users — OpenAI

  

  Paying users can now use the latest image generation algorithm.

• Meet two open source challengers to OpenAI’s ‘multimodal’ GPT-4 — TechCrunch

• YouTube Is Developing an AI Tool to Help Creators Sound Like Famous Musicians — Billboard

Regulation & Policy

• New York City unveils an ‘artificial intelligence action plan’ — CNN

• Intel CEO Says U.S. Is Winning AI Race Over China, and a Tech Boom Is Coming — Barron’s

Ethics & Safety

• NYC Mayor Eric Adams uses AI to make robocalls in languages he doesn’t speak — The Verge

• None of Your Photos Are Real — WIRED

Privacy & Security

• Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models' — Scientific American

• AI Chatbots Can Guess Your Personal Information From What You Type — WIRED

Legal & Copyright

• Music publishers sue Amazon-backed AI company over song lyrics — The Guardian

• The latest AI copyright lawsuit involves Mike Huckabee and his books — The Verge

• Hollywood's AI issues are far from settled after writers' labor deal with studios — CNBC

In the Workplace

• Bosses Deploying AIs in Video Meetings to Lecture Employees for Bad Behavior — Futurism

• Robots, AI, and the future of labor: An economic opportunity ‘way bigger than the steam engine’ — GeekWire

• ‘Here is the news. You can’t stop us’: AI anchor Zae-In grants us an interview — The Guardian

🎧 Listen: My Interview on AI & Work!🎙️

My 1st Course Filled Up! New One is Out…

Announcing my latest online class, the AI Boost for Professional Communicators and Marketers! The 3-session certificate course, based on my curriculum at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, will cover the essentials of Generative AI for media and marketing professionals for novice and beginner-level students.

The live course will take place on Tuesdays, Nov. 14th, 28th, and December 12th, at 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT. The 90-minute Zoom sessions will be split into lectures, hands-on exercises, and activities — and come with individualized AI coaching. Want to get up to speed and get ahead? Now’s your chance: act now before it fills up!

(If you’re interested in learning about future cohorts, please sign up for the waitlist here.)

🎥 If You Watch One Video on AI This Week…🍿

🎵Musician’s Voice Sings in Languages She Does Not Speak 🌏

🎙️Interview: Jeremy Toeman, CEO & Founder of Aug X Labs

Jeremy is the CEO of Aug X Labs, which uses AI to make video creation more accessible to storytellers and content creators. Before Augie, he led Product and Technology Innovation at WarnerMedia.

Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Peter: Tell me about Augie, your video editing assistant, and who it's for.

Jeremy: Everybody's a storyteller, right? And it's because humans have been telling stories to each other for literally 60,000-plus years. But the act of video editing requires an orthogonal skill set, right? It's almost like linear algebra. It's not the way our minds naturally function.

So when we sit there and try to make a video using some of the standard tools designed for professionals, we all run into that blank canvas effect where it's hard even to get started. What Augie does is we help you take your story and give you an instant rough cut of what that story would look like visually, and you go from there.

Let's say you record yourself on a webcam about promoting your pizza shop. We take that! We match your words with the content you upload to Augue. Whatever you don't have content for, we supplement that with stock video or stock photography. We have a license with Getty, so the user gets that content through Augie.

If you start with text, say a script, we use AI text-to-speech technology so that it has a very natural voice, and you can even clone your own voice. If you start with an upload like a voiceover or even another video, we use that. We listen to all the words in the transcript, and then we build an initial storyboard that uses a combination of your assets. We help people turn their words into video for whatever their needs might be.

Peter: I've been impressed at how fast the product has evolved and improved. I know you recently partnered with Eleven Labs for audio cloning capabilities. Tell me more about why you chose to partner with them.

Jeremy: Sure, many players have been addressing text-to-speech for a long time. When we saw the tech from Eleven Labs earlier this year, we found that they could deliver a higher-quality narrative-sounding voice than some of the other providers.

And so, as we assessed the technology, we felt Eleven Labs was the leader. When they introduced voice cloning, we seized the opportunity and integrated it days after the API came out. That's our way of doing things. We see amazing technology being developed by companies like them, and we find ways to integrate it into our product as fast as possible to bring it to our users. Our ability to take very high-tech stuff and make it simple for the average business person is one of the strengths of our company.

Peter: Can you tell me a little bit about your team's ethical compass when it comes to these tools? As we know, it's the Wild West out here in the AI world in many ways.

Jeremy: I don't think you're gonna get any two of the same answers from any two people these days on this topic. Here's how we're looking at it: don't empower badness. We've decided that we're going to do everything we can within reasonable efforts not to be a platform for hate, not be a platform for harassment, or misinformation. Here are some of the things we've done before implementing our paywall. We did a hate speech filter. It was one of the first things we integrated. And we've taken a fairly strict approach to it, including a one-strike, you're out policy if you trigger certain things.

Peter: What about intellectual property issues?

Jeremy: So, you brought up voice cloning earlier. We come from a background with people on the content and rights ownership side. While the internet has created a culture that it's okay to remix anyone else's stuff, when you put effort into producing content, we understand there should be some guardrails.

Our system requires you to have an active microphone on and record what you are speaking out loud instead of letting a user upload an MP3 to clone that voice. You could give us anything from Billy Joel to Donald Trump. Those voices can all be cloned. Is there a way around things? Of course, we're not perfect. But I think we are taking all of what I consider the most ethical steps possible to ensure that if a user is creating content, it's their content, not someone else's content, not someone else's identity.

Peter: What do you think is one of the most hyped areas of AI when it comes to storytelling?

Jeremy: I actually don't think AI is being overhyped at all. However, in certain industries, it's probably being incorrectly hyped. That’s the way I look at it. So if you're listening to this and think AI is just like the next blockchain, the next VR, the next etcetera, I think there's already way too much evidence to say that's incorrect.

Will it put all artists out of work? Absolutely not. Will it put all speech writers out of work? Absolutely not. Will it put creatives out of work? If anything, it will create more creatives. One of the biggest gifts AI gives people is if you are creative in any way–visually creative, musically creative, storytelling creative, or business creative–the tools can help scale and supplement what you do.

I will say to virtually anybody that AI is not overhyped, but you might find a little too much going on in your particular field. I think the death of everything due to AI is greatly exaggerated, with the exception of a few fields where it will have devastating effects.

Peter: In what fields do you think AI will have adverse effects?

Jeremy: I think analysts are in trouble along with accountants and a lot of legal roles: things where your job is taking a lot of content, dissecting it, putting it through sort of an internal algorithm per se, and then creating a report on that – AI's really good at that. That's not to question work efforts, smartness, skills, etcetera. If the job you have is a very repeatable process, it may be at risk. If, on the other hand, your job is to interpret someone else's analysis, I think you're in a great place.

The best food for thought I give my colleagues and friends when they ask me, “Is my job in trouble?” What AI will leave a vacuum of in its wake is human judgment and human expertise.

🎥 Watch a short clip of our interview here, made with Augie! 👀 

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

Psst… Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here!