Today in Generative Media

Meta pulls AI ad; A ban on AI regulations; GenAI aids productivity, but kills motivation

News and Opinion

• Meta pulled a 'totally AI fake' ad of Jamie Lee Curtis after the actor wrote an open letter about it to Mark Zuckerberg (Business Insider)

• Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill (404 Media)

• Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive—and Less Motivated (Harvard Business Review)

• Google’s Gemma AI models surpass 150M downloads (TechCrunch)

• Perplexity Selects PayPal to Power Agentic Commerce (paypal-corp.com)

Software

• PixVerse V4.5 is here!! Take your AI videos to a cinematic level: 20+ Cinematic Camera Control Multi-Element Reference and Fusion Smoother and better handling of complex movements (X)

• Blazingly fast whisper transcriptions with Inference Endpoints (HuggingFace)

• SmolVLM in a web-browser with transformers.js. All running locally with no installs. Just open the website. (X)

• Tile Language (tile-lang) is a concise domain-specific language designed to streamline the development of high-performance GPU/CPU kernels (e.g., GEMM, Dequant GEMM, FlashAttention, LinearAttention). (GitHub)

• Google’s Gemini chatbot can now more easily analyze GitHub projects (TechCrunch)

• Stability AI and Arm Collaborate to Release Stable Audio Open Small, Enabling Real-World Deployment for On-Device Audio Generation

Research

• Step1X-3D: Towards High-Fidelity and Controllable Generation of Textured 3D Assets (project page)

• TeGA: Texture Space Gaussian Avatars for High-Resolution Dynamic Head Modeling (project page)

• Practical Inverse Rendering of Textured and Translucent Appearance (project page)

• CompleteMe: Reference-based Human Image Completion (project page)

• Gaussian Wave Splatting for Computer Generated Holography (project page)

• Articulate AnyMesh Open-Vocabulary 3D Articulated Objects Modeling (project page)

• Monocular Online Reconstruction with Enhanced Detail Preservation (project page)

• Stop treating `AGI' as the north-star goal of AI research (arXiv) "...the cultural associations of these terms risk stoking the flames of unscientific thinking about AI. This enables ...parties to loosely project utopian or dystopian characteristics onto AGI in ways that support their calls for more power and resources."

Misc

• America’s Funniest AI Home Videos – Episode 1 (Reddit)

• The “AI Scientist” work, while interesting, sort of mischaracterizes the process of science as generating hypotheses and running experiments. The actual thing is so much more interesting: interpreting unclear evidence, reasoning about unsteady foundations, etc. (BlueSky)

  • This pattern is going to repeat in one domain after another, and gradually force us to admit that 60% of every job is networking, knowing who to trust, and doing poorly justified risk/benefit assessment. (BlueSky)

• An NYU professor AI-proofed his assignments. The students complained they were too hard and that “he was interfering with their ‘learning styles.’” (X)