Today in Generative Media

Trump gives AI free hand; Sweet-talk the bots; Unauthorized AI songs by dead artists

News and Opinion

• The Trump administration plans to give A.I. companies a free hand. (New York Times)

• Sweet-talk the bots: New research shows how LLMs respond to human persuasion tricks (GeekWire)

• Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission (404 Media)

• AI slop might finally cure our Internet addiction. (The Atlantic)

• Why Facetune maker Lightricks is pivoting toward the enterprise, how Musk's xAI is burning through cash and more AI news this week (LinkedIn)

Software and Research

• Act-Two is now available via the Runway API, allowing you to bring our most advanced motion capture directly into your apps, products, platforms and websites. (LinkedIn)

• runwayml / gen4-turbo (Replicate) Generate 5s and 10s 720p videos fast.

• runwayml / upscale-v1 (Replicate) Upscale videos by 4x, up to a maximum of 4k.

• New Feature: Multi-Keyframe Generation in PixVerse AI! (X)

• Conversational image segmentation with Gemini 2.5 (Google Developers blog)

• Code Sandbox MCP: A Simple Code Interpreter for Your AI Agents (Philipp Schmid’s blog)

• Qwen3-Coder: Agentic Coding in the World (project page)

  • Runs quite fast on an M3 Ultra. Running the 4-bit quantized with mlx-lm (X)

• DAViD Data-efficient and Accurate Vision Models from Synthetic Data (project page)

• SurfaceSplat: Connecting Surface Reconstruction and Gaussian Splatting (arXiv)

Misc

• Generate consistent characters (Replicate blog)

• Making [ComfyUI] Nodes In Claude Code / July 22nd, 2025 (YouTube)

• gemini writes, flow films, notebooklm researches, stitch designs, project mariner automates. i filmed a 38-minute tutorial with google’s VP of gemini and it just rewired my whole workflow. (X)

• AI in Hollywood: A Creative Turning Point (LinkedIn) [TheWrap livestream event: Wed, Jul 23, 2025 noon PT]

• The whole internet ad revenue model is going to collapse once everyone -including advertisers- realise it's all just AI. AI content. AI viewers. AI everything. Total slop implosion. (X)

• ChatGPT to Macbeth: Of course, murder is wrong, but in that moment, you were hurting. Your wife told you when you durst do it, then you were a man. You weren't trying to take the throne; you were trying to feel seen. It wasn't the right choice, but it came from a very real place. (X)