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AI voices are about to be all over the internet. If they sound real, does that make it okay? Generative AI continues to flood into every creator category. Some creatives are weary (we feel you Nick Cave), while others, like Grimes and The Corridor Crew are fully embracing what’s around the corner. Here’s what you need to know.

In this edition of Strange Magic…

• 🎵 AI voices are getting freaky good

• 🍎 Google might’ve cracked mind reading

• 🖼️ Grimes is still the coolest futurist around

• ✨ A tiny Westworld opens for everyone

Read time: 6 minutes

🔮 What’s New

The voice in your head isn’t real

Last week, music tech stole the spotlight as a plethora of new tools and platforms propelled text-to-music music AI to new levels, making the idea of listenable (even catchy) AI generated music a reality for the first time.

Months prior, one company managed to do the same with AI generated voices. That company, ElevenLabs, absolutely changed the landscape for text-to-voice AI when they first launched VoiceLab 6 months ago. Since then, it seems like every other text-to-voice platform has been trying to catch up. But, ElevenLabs isn’t slowing down, and this week they increased their moat around their voice cloning dominance.

Here’s a quick rundown of the kind of month ElevenLabs is having.

It was a big week for partnerships with ElevenLabs taking part in at least three. Perhaps the biggest involves their plan to add their voice clones to the AI driven video game NPCs from Inworld.ai. This means, our games could be soon voiced by ElevenLabs synthesized actors.

They’re also partnering with the AI avatar generator D-ID to bring more realistic voices to D-ID’s videos. (We actually used ElevenLabs and D-ID for our conversation between Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Cage.)

Not stopping there, they also partnered with the AI video editing platform Augie to bring voice cloning directly to the application. More on Augie in “Try These” below.

On the product side, ElevenLabs opened up professional voice cloning to subscribers, allowing you to get a highly trained clone of their own voice that can read back to them in 28 languages. 🤩 They added new “crisp and diverse” default voices to the platform. And, they even launched input streaming to pave the way for real-time AI voice conversations.

Did researchers just solve technology, probably not 🤷🏼‍♀️

The world has been going crazy over a newly synthesized material from a team of scientists in South Korea that could usher in wave technological leaps across everything from quantum computing to high speed rail.

Proclaimed to be the worlds first room-temperature superconductor (look it up), the new substance, called LK-99 (straight out of a William Gibson novel) threatened to do something nothing else could, displace AI in the news cycle.

But, perhaps the researchers should’ve called it Hopium, as new reports question if LK-99 is even a superconductor at all, much less the Earth shattering discovery everyone believed it to be.

We may not have cracked this code yet, but that AI thing we can’t stop talking about may eventually help us get there.

In Other News

• Voters trust government more than companies on AI: The headlines says it all here. A recent poll from Axios showed that voters from both sides of the aisle are concerned about leaving AI to be regulated by tech companies, with a majority supporting a federal agency to regulate the tech. Not wanting to fall to corporate robot overlords… finally something we can all agree on.

• Keep your AI on the ball: It should be no surprise that AI would come to sports sooner than later. An announcement this week from Major League Soccer (MLS) highlights how AI is already there. Working with ai.io, MLS will use AI to analyze tracking data for precise player scouting.

• This is your brain on music: Are you ever in the mood for a certain type of music, but you just can’t find it in your Spotify playlist? One day, you might just think about it and conjure it existence. Google’s new Brain2Music AI was able to record brain activity and convert it into song clips that the person had listened to. It’s a promising advance in the frontier of idea to reality computing, or a step towards Google reading more than your emails.

📖 Good Reads

Grimes on living forever, dying on Mars, and giving Elon Musk Ideas for His Best (Worst) Tweets

In an interview with WIRED, Grimes discusses her relationship with Elon Musk, her children's obsession with space, her interest in brain-machine interfaces, and her vision for the future of art and AI. She also talks about her upcoming album, her involvement in crypto and NFTs, and her desire to create children's content that teaches about civilization building and AI.

The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year

According to a survey by McKinsey, generative AI (gen AI) is already relatively common, and respondents expect the new capabilities to transform their industries. One-third of all respondents say their organizations are already regularly using generative AI in at least one function—meaning that 60 percent of organizations with reported AI adoption are using gen AI. Respondents predict that the adoption of AI will reshape many roles in the workforce, with more employees being reskilled than separated. However, the survey also shows that these are still early days for managing gen AI-related risks, with less than half of respondents saying their organizations are mitigating even the risk they consider most relevant: inaccuracy.

More Reads

• AI-enhanced images a ‘threat to democratic processes’, experts warn

• When you gaze into the AI, the AI also gazes into you

• ChatGPT Is the Perfect Creative Machine—Except For One Big Little Thing

⚙️ Try These

• Recast: Recast offers a unique spin on audio newsreader. It not only summarizes any online article, in reads it back in a podcast style conversational format between multiple AI generated narrators.

• Augie: Augie combines a huge library of stock video clips with editing and graphics tools. But, Augie’s magic is in turning an uploaded script into a full video complete with AI chosen clips and generated voiceover (thanks to ElevenLabs).

• Kidgeni: Kidgeni is a text-to-image and doodle-to-image generator designed for kids, to teach them about generative AI, and maybe to sell a few t-shirts. Generated designs can be printed on shirts and purchased through the app.

🧪 The Lab

• Is this AI Art, or is This Something New?
  The visual effects wizards at Corridor Crew made headlines, and apparently controversy, with the released “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors” a year ago. The animated short used cutting edge AI at the time. Now, they’re back with the brand new, and much more complex “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors 2”, featuring today’s cutting edge AI. Here’s how they did it.

• 5 More Ways To Use AI Fill In Your Videos

  Generative fill effects have been popping up all over social media. Here are 5 great uses cases (with instructions) that move beyond the basic generative fill effects for even more professional looking shots.

✨ We’re Diggin’

• Westworld for everyone: The Stanford Smallville AI project is best described by Stanford PhD Jim Fan like this, “25 AI agents inhabit a digital Westworld, unaware that they are living in a simulation. They go to work, gossip, organize socials, make new friends, and even fall in love. Each has unique personality and backstory.” Stanford has just open sourced the project now giving anyone the opportunity to watch over a digital Delores of their own.

• The guy behind Black Mirror has some things to say about technology: As the creator of the super popular near-future tech-dystopian Netflix series, Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker is a big reason a lot of us are afraid of technology in the first place. In this podcast interview with Vox, Brooker explains that he to loves computers and technology, he just understands how things can take a bad turn every once in a while.

• On the other side: With the motto of “useful, open-source and planet-friendly hardware,” a 16 year old has developed and open sourced the plans for a working cell phone that anyone can build with access to a 3D printer and about $30 in parts. What were we doing when we were sixteen?

🌤️ Fresh Air

Some magical things are totally real!

• Ace of Shades: I promise you did not know that lampshades could look this good! Ace of Shades hand makes vintage inspired lampshades that are truly works of art.

• What lives in these woods: Thomas Dambo is a Danish artist who builds giant and delightful troll statues around the world out of reclaimed and recycled wood. He’s currently documenting his road trip across the US as he leaves troll friends dotted around the country.

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