Is AI Democratizing Creativity? And New Alzheimer’s Research is Exciting.

A few artificial intelligence readings for your Tuesday.

Morning y’all!

Let’s jump into it! I’ve got a really busy day and my hope is to clear most of my work in the first half of the day so I have time for a new project that I’ve started working on.

Can you really have enough side-quests? Can you have enough generative AI image builders? Probably not:

Presti just raised $3.5m in VC funding so I supposed they’ve got something going on.

Google is testing out new video presentations via AI and their Gemini platform. You can enable it if you’re an admin.

The one thing I immediately thought of was created a digital signature that isn’t terrible and ugly, but, that’s not precisely what this tool does: It simply understands your bad handwriting. Humanity is saved!

If AI isn’t “democratizing creativity” then what is it really doing? Perhaps centralizing power and wealth? This person has thoughts:

There’s plenty that companies like OpenAI could do if they were earnestly interested in “democratizing” anything. To start, they could compensate writers, artists, coders, and other creative workers for the material they’re already training their automation systems on. They could seek meaningful consent from these workers as to how or whether they’d like their stuff treated in the training corpuses. But they won’t. Because the major AI companies aren’t interested in democratizing creativity—they’re interested in transmuting it into profit.

Oh, but, wait a second there. What about this?

This experiment finds that AI is boosting creativity for the individual (but lowers it collectively):

While these results point to an increase in individual creativity, there is risk of losing collective novelty. In general equilibrium, an interesting question is whether the stories enhanced and inspired by AI will be able to create sufficient variation in the outputs they lead to.

Which way is it AI man?

Researchers from Cambridge University just developed new tool that can predict whether folks are showing mild cognitive impairment that may eventually progress to Alzheimer’s, with over 80% accuracy. Yikes! That’s great news!

YouTube Music is rolling out a series of new AI-powered features: Search with sound and conversational radio, whatever that means (like, the telephone?).

The folks at Microsoft just shared some new research around your favorite technology: Spreadsheets. Have fun with that.

The screenshot says it all. New app powered by Google’s Cloud for governments.

Apple hit new highs on their stock price after Morgan Stanley pumped them.

The transition from text-based interfaces to GUIs in the 1980’s changed computing forever by making it user friendly. Generative AI has potentially the same amount of effect (and affect) on this generation and it’s interaction with computers.

And that’s it! Have a great one folks!

※\(^o^)/※

— Summer