Today in Generative Media

Freelancing ruined by AI; AI slop suffocates the web; Bluesky weighs AI data consent

News and Opinion

• Freelancers Are Getting Ruined by AI (Futurism)

• AI slop is suffocating the web, says a new study (Fast Company)

• Bluesky is weighing a proposal that gives users consent over how their data is used for AI (TechCrunch)

• How Freepik Transformed From a Stock Image Platform Into a Generative AI Powerhouse (Decrypt)

• Manus probably isn’t China’s second ‘DeepSeek moment’ (TechCrunch)

• The great software rewiring: AI isn’t just eating everything; it is everything (VentureBeat)

• How Gen AI Could Change the Value of Expertise (Harvard Business Review)

• Tammy Nam joins AI-powered ad startup Creatopy as CEO (TechCrunch)

Research

• Gaussian RBFNet: Gaussian Radial Basis Functions for Fast and Accurate Neural Fields Representation and Reconstruction (project page)

• Breaking the Algorithmic Ceiling in Pre-Training with Inductive Moment Matching (project page)

• Avat3r: Large Animatable Gaussian Reconstruction Model for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars (project page)

• TrajectoryCrafter: Redirecting Camera Trajectory for Monocular Videos via Diffusion Models (project page)

• A Distractor-Aware Memory (DAM) for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2 (project page)

• Factorio Learning Environment (project page)

• CADDreamer: CAD object Generation from Single-view Images (arXiv)

• D2GV: Deformable 2D Gaussian Splatting for Video Representation in 400FPS (arXiv)

Misc

• CLAUDE + MAGNIFIC + RUNWAY WORKFLOW (X)

• Manus AI is pretty good at vibe coding games. Just gave one prompt: "code a threejs game where you control an f-117 nighthawk and can drop bombs over a data center and accumulate points for how many runaway AGIs you destroyed." (X)

• The game community in shambles, throwing tantrums and melting down because an indie hacker built a $100k/mo game in a week is worth of studying. (X) [This is in reference to fly.pieter.com. It’s pretty unusable IMO. Good marketing blitz, tho.]

• Vibe-coded this game this morning with 0 code edits. (X) [This is a parody, in case you weren’t sure. It’ll be at LEAST three more weeks before AI can vibe-code a game this well. :) ]