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- #37 RIP Photoshop
Kicking off the week with AI training resources, big corporation caution towards AI tools, and mind-blowing graphic design research.
This issue’s too hot to dilly-dally, so let’s dive in.
In today’s newsletter:
Top News: RIP Photoshop, Apple blacklists AI tools, and crypto miners struggle with AI cloud offerings
TL;DR Rundown: Amazon’s new toys, Khan Academy 1-2-1 teaching, and AI con-artistry
Free resources: Microsoft’s free beginner-friendly courses on AI
TLDR AI: (For Apple users)
Don’t sleep on it: AI everywhere
Top News 🔝
Three biggest stories if you’re in a rush
Remember the good ol’ days when Microsoft Paint’s copy, paste, and rotate functions were the design functions we relied on? Maybe you do maybe you don’t - either way - those days are “♪Gone, like yesterday is gone♪” (remember Switchfoot?). DragGAN, a new AI research tool, lets users;
“Click and drag images to manipulate them in seconds. It’s like Photoshop’s Warp tool, but instead of smushing pixels around, you’re using AI to re-generate the underlying object.”
Released in a recent research paper, the team behind DragGAN highlight the benefits of a “flexible, point-based manipulation, which enables control of many spatial attributes like pose, shape, expression, and layout across diverse object categories.”
We’re still playing around with DragGAN, as it’s not easily-accessible as of yet. Next issue, we’ll try and include a step-by-step guide on how you can use this immensely powerful tool - stay tuned for Wednesday’s issue.
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“But they improve my productivity by so MUCH,” said Samsung and Apple employees. In a bid to protect sensitive company data, Apple has added generative AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub’s Copilot to a list of restricted software. Samsung already did this back in May, after the company reported three separate incidents of employees accidentally feeding “proprietary company data to the chatbot.” Apple hasn’t reported any such events, but as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. Big corporations like Apple and Samsung making restrictive internal moves like these does go to show, though, how insecure information shared with these tools is. Take note.
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If you know a crypto miner who is thinking of pivoting from mining to hosting AI services, they’ve got a harder time coming than they might think. While crypto mining was hugely lucrative at the end of the 2021 bull run, the same hardware, unfortunately, isn’t sufficient to host AI services. With significant investment, some miners will be able to reconfigure some of their GPU units, but most won’t have “the specialized processors AI requires…AI needs different servers, motherboards, CPUs, software, and more powerful GPUs compared to crypto mining.” Some mining firms, namely Hut 8, have successfully made the pivot, but by and large, the infrastructure investment is too much for most smaller miners.
TL;DR Rundown 🐂
Summary of note-worthy trending articles
Amazon unveils new gadgets as the AI race gets hotter and hotter. (link)
Khan Academy is using ChatGPT to bring one-on-one teaching to scale. (link)
Artificial intelligence’s potential for great promise and peril discussed. (link)
How Congress fell for Sam Altman’s AI magic trick. (link)
Sci-fi author ‘writes’ 97 AI-generated books in nine months. (link)
China is using AI to raise the dead, and give people one last chance to say goodbye. (link)
Tech wants AI chatbots to help ease loneliness, but experts are skeptical. (link)
Why AI is the future of offshore oil drilling. (link)
The rise of AI coincides with all-time debt highs - and one startup is using AI to collect. (link)
How con artists use AI, apps, and social engineering to target the vulnerable and elderly. (link)
Gary Marcus is happy to help regulate AI for the US government. (link)
Stability AI releases StableStudio, the open-source future of DreamStudio. (link)
AI booms might expose investors’ natural stupidity. (link)
Free Resources ⚒️
AI resources we’ve used, loved, and highly recommend
Microsoft is offering FREE courses in:
Given how rapidly AI is taking over many jobs, upskilling and getting a fundamental understanding of AI and its related fields is probably a really good idea. Take one, two, or all of these free courses to either better understand your competition, or learn how to use it to your advantage (and maybe save your livelihood).
TLDR AI
Sorry Android users, this one’s for iOS
Using AI to summarize articles or text into five key points, TLDR AI, a super-handy app, summarizes any webpage in just two clicks. It also breaks through any paywall.
It’s only available on iOS (for now), and we’re on the lookout for a similar offering for Android users.
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