Democratizing Visual Creation: A Double Edged Sword
Democratizing Visual Creation: A Double Edged Sword
Top Gun Maverick's Invisible VFX, Shadow Aliens in Miami and AI Surveillance Tech
🪄 Creative Technology Digest 🗝️
Your Gateway to the Future of Creation & Computing
🍇 This Week's Juicy Topic: With AI you can encapsulate reality, but you can also manipulate it. Case in point: Top Gun Maverick and Shadow Aliens in Miami (33M+ views).
Happy New Year, everyone! 2023 was a milestone year for creative technology, with foundational AI models hitting the market across all modalities — we're talking text, image, video, audio, and 3D.
In this edition, we’ll explore how AI is shaping our visual world and redefining reality by influencing our perception of it. Chain these modalities together and you’ll very quickly realize that with AI, you can encapsulate reality, but you can also manipulate it.
imagine getting a ring camera notification on your phone, and seeing this at your front door 👽
with ai getting so good, i don’t know how we’ll trust our eyes anymore 🧐
Some obvious questions follow: Are we empowering the next generation of creators, or proliferating an increasingly immersive illusion? What does this mean for truth in the internet age? Is it memory preservation or manipulation? How might AI transform our connection with people, places, and events occurring in the real world? On balance, will it be good or bad for society?
🌶️ My Hot take: It’ll be both things simultaneously. More stories will be told that might never have been conceived. Democratization of visual expression is a good thing, but we will also contend with mis/disinformation campaigns the likes of which we’ve never seen. We will find a way to level up our abilities to discern real content in the short term. But soon we will reach a point where the visual Turing test is all but shattered, and it becomes a game of algorithmic whack-a-mole to stay ahead in the ability to identify synthetically generated content at a billion user scale with minimal latency and human intervention.
We are only 5 days into 2024 and there’s allegedly 8-10 feet aliens roaming Miami mall 😅 Here is some rare and exclusive footage of the cr... See more
🎥 Creation Corner:
1. Encapsulating You: Your Digital Twin & Modern Surveillance 👁️
From wiretapping to AI surveillance, our reality has been hacked. And it’s not just Big Brother watching anymore. Every click, like, and purchase creates your “digital twin”. In this video, I’ll peel back the layers of digital observation that have silently integrated into our daily lives.
We’ll examine the evolution of surveillance, revealing how it extends beyond the clutches of government agencies to a network of AI-driven monitoring that shadows our every move - online and offline.
This is my stab at a narrative video essay covering topics across tech, society and geopolitics. It’s an experiment of sorts to include a historical bent too — so I’d love your feedback on if you’d watch more of these! (reminder: simply hit reply in your email client)
Topics covered:
00:00 Your AI Digital Twin
00:44 Act 1: The Illusion of Privacy
06:34 Act 2: The Harsh Reality
09:32 Act 3: I’m Not A Robot
2. Encapsulating Reality: 3D Scanning People/Places/Things 🤳
You can now scan all the people/places/things that matter to you and conjure them up on demand in the future. Photo scanning is probably the most future proof medium we have access to today. Soon, we’ll also have spatial video on iPhone. But regardless of the methods today, the best part is we can always reprocess our raw datasets with the latest algorithmic advances.
I'm still convinced the killer use case for 3d reconstruction tech is memory capture. No surprise Apple is headed in this direction.
Here's a massive scan of the backyard + rooftop of my parent's old house. They're retired now, but their home is immortalized forever.
Photo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
3. Augmenting Cinema: Experiencing Modern Aviation 😎
A beautiful mix of reality capture and visual effects can be found in Top Gun: Maverick — one of the biggest blockbusters in the recent history. The VFX team literally rotated F-18 jets on the tarmac and photogrammetry scanned them with the help of the US Navy, and that’s just scratching the surface. Check out the full thread below:
Top Gun Maverick. For a movie with no CGI, it sure has a lot of it.
A whopping 2,400 (!!) visual effects shots in fact.
But wait, wasn't everything filmed practically? 😉
Sure was. Yet almost every jet you see on-screen is CGI.
Let's dive into this "invisible" movie magic 👇
4. Observing & Assisting You: Rabbit, a pocket companion AI agent
This startup is attempting to free you from the tyranny of multi-tasking and jumping between a plurality of apps to get simple things done. The idea is that an AI will look at you doing stuff (similar to how a VA might see you complete tasks in a Loom video) and then replicate it for you autonomously. Simply put, Rabbit focuses on a so-called ‘action model’ - not merely a ‘language model’.
“Infer and model human actions on computer interfaces by learning users’ intention and behavior when they use specific apps, and then mimic and perform them both reliably and quickly.”
What do y’all think? Personally, more keen to try this over Humane.
5. LangSplat: Content-Aware Selection for 3D Gaussian Splats.
This AI paper explores how to query anything captured in your 3d capture with natural language. The performance is particularly impressive making it viable for applications requiring semantic 3d maps.
LangSplat dropped and it’s a promising AI paper
TL;DR Search what you see – now in 3D! Basically like "content aware selection" for 3D scenes. 🪄
→ Capture a 3D scan with Gaussian Splatting and query anything in natural language
→ Immaculate segmentation quality with clear… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
6. Best AI video creation tool?
I ran a poll on X/Twitter, Runway and Pika are the two forces to reckon with in the AI video creation space. But this is an ever-evolving field. It will be interesting to see what things look like at the end of 2024.
Who is the very best at AI video creation right now?
💌 Closing Thoughts
That’s all for this week! Look out for the next edition in the coming weeks, where we'll close out the first month of 2024 with a recap of 2023 and share exciting plans and collaborations planned for this year.
Got feedback, questions, or just want to chat? Reply to this email or catch me on the interwebz.
-Bilawal Sidhu