Today in Generative Media

Apple stops AI news summaries; Most Americans use AI, most dislike it; UK AI safety

News and Opinion

• Apple Plans to Disable A.I. Features Summarizing News Notifications (New York Times)

• Nearly all Americans use AI, though most dislike it, poll shows (Axios)

• Inside the U.K.’s Bold Experiment in AI Safety (Time)

• Labour’s AI plan could be good for British people – except the creatives it will throw under the bus (The Guardian)

• What Happens When You Turn Your Life Over to an AI Assistant? (Wired)

Software

• You can now fine-tune your own version of AI image maker Flux with just 5 images (VentureBeat)

• Luma AI releases Ray2 generative video model with ‘fast, natural’ motion and better physics (VentureBeat)

• Today we are releasing Frames. Our most advanced base model for image generation, offering unprecedented stylistic control and visual fidelity. (X) [RunwayML]

• ComfyUI now supports Nvidia Cosmos: The best open source Image to Video model so far. (ComfyUI blog)

Research

• SynthLight: Portrait Relighting with Diffusion Model by Learning to Re-render Synthetic Faces (project page)

• Go with the Flow: Motion-controllable video diffusion models using real-time warped noise (project page)

• MagicQuill: An Intelligent Interactive Image Editing System (project page)

• LayerAnimate Layer-specific Control for Animation (project page)

• CaPa: Carve-n-Paint Synthesis for Efficient 4K Textured Mesh Generation (project page)

• Zero-shot mono-to-binaural speech synthesis (project page)

• Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation (project page)

• Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models beyond Scaling Denoising Steps (arXiv)

Misc

• KC Crowne, “International bestselling author and Amazon top 10 bestseller”, has 11,553 Booksprout reviews for 4.5 stars. Her latest novel ‘Dark Obsession’ (13 Jan 2025) released to 125 positive reviews before a glaring editorial error was revealed by a few readers. The published book contained an unedited AI-generated suggestion. An apology was issued on FB, the book removed from Amazon and GR, and the author’s Insta account appears to have been deleted. (Threads)

• Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media: Our book explores how generative AI is transforming our understanding of aesthetics, creativity, design, and art appreciation.

• The Large Language Model Course (HuggingFace)

• An open call for the next Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI (Google Blog)

• AI Product Management has a bright future! (Andrew Ng)