Journalist traffic jam and a roadmap for AI in cinema
The best links for this week and more
Hi! I’m Ronit Novak and welcome to the new weekly newsletter from THE GRAIN—featuring five newsworthy items about the future of creativity, the latest from my ongoing interview series, and more grains of thought about the pleasure and peril of AI. Subscribe to THE GRAIN here on Substack along with wherever else you get your podcasts, and follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
UP NEXT: A dialogue about the role that AI is playing in creative arts education
1. Their traffic has been jammed
Google’s introduction last year of AI Overviews, which summarize search results at the top of the page, dented traffic to features like vacation guides and health tips, as well as to product review sites. Its U.S. rollout last month of AI Mode, an effort to compete directly with the likes of ChatGPT, is expected to deliver a stronger blow. AI Mode responds to user queries in a chatbot-style conversation, with far fewer links. “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” The Atlantic chief executive Nicholas Thompson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”
News sites are getting crushed by Google’s new AI tools [Wall Street Journal]
2. New report from the British Film Institute
“AI has long been an established part of the screen sector’s creative toolkit, most recently seen in the post-production of the Oscar-winning The Brutalist, and its rapid advancement is attracting multi-million investments in technology innovator applications,” said Rishi Coupland, the BFI’s Director of Research & Innovation. “However, our report comes at a critical time and shows how generative AI presents an inflection point for the sector and, as a sector, we need to act quickly on a number of key strategic fronts.”
3. TaTa takes some heat she can’t feel
The legendary producer hopped on Instagram on Friday to share a post about the situation amidst all the controversy that’s stemmed from him revealing that he’s introducing the world to his first AI-generated artist, TaTa. "I know I’m trolling but let’s have real conversation," Timbaland wrote in his post. "I love my independent artists. This doesn’t mean I’m not working with real artists anymore." Timbaland then dispelled the belief that the AI artist has learned from real artists’ music. "And nah I don’t train ai off y’all music," he explained. "This just means more creativity for creators."
Timbaland Faces Backlash For Defending His AI Artists: 'This Isn’t Disruption. It’s a Cash-In' [Complex]
4. Did the camera ever tell the truth?
The camera is a tool—but to do what? Images shape our daily life, yet we rarely question how they’re made or why. As filmmakers, we’re fascinated by how humans use cameras and by the immense influence images have. For 15 years, we’ve investigated the history of the camera, and we’ve turned the material we gathered into a feature documentary, chronicling how people behind the camera went from capturing the image of a backyard to today’s multibillion-dollar content industry.
5. What comes after Shrimp Jesus
When I was growing up, it seemed like religious organizations were very worried that video games, for example, were corrupting young souls and turning them against God, especially when they overlapped with Satanic Panics around games like Doom or Diablo. When it comes to AI, it seems like it’s mostly secular culture—academics, artists, and other creatives—who shun generative AI for exploiting human labor and the creative spirit. In fact, many AI accelerationists accuse any critics of the technology or a desire to regulate it as a kind of religious moral panic. Christians, on the other hand, see AI as part of the inevitable march of technological progress, and they want to be a part of it.
Why do Christians love AI slop? [Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media]
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UP NEXT: A dialogue about the role that AI is playing in creative arts education
For more on the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity, subscribe to THE GRAIN wherever you get your podcasts, and follow me for more on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Questions or comments? ronit@thegrain.ai.