Luma's On Hold; I'm Making an AI Film
Everyone wants to get in
Quickies
I’m glad I was able to generate a few AI videos on Luma Lab’s new Dream Machine, before it became completely overloaded. Even though your video can be generated in 120 seconds, I’m reading reports of waiting in the queue for up to ten hours. Hopefully they will resolve this soon, but if you lack that sort of patience, you can just read this excellent article with examples from Tom’s Guide. Check it out
If you’re still bitter about Adobe spying on you and you needed just one more little push to make you quit forever, ACDsee is a photo editor that is offering their tool for free to K-12 and university students. Yeah, I think the brand name needs a little help, but free is free. Check it out
And remember, Meta is using your images to train their next generation AI tools. Fortunately, the MIT Technology Review has a step-by-step guide for exactly how to opt out of this. Oh wait, I’m sorry. I meant if you’re a citizen of the EU or the UK because they have laws about this. Check it out
Users in the US or other countries without national data privacy laws don’t have any foolproof ways to prevent Meta from using their data to train AI, which has likely already been used for such purposes. Meta does not have an opt-out feature for people living in these places.
Here’s another free course to learn the basics of generative AI, but designed for leaders in higher education. It looks like it take about six hours and I’m going to force myself to do it, just so I have a point of reference. If you work in education, you should really check it out
If you’re new here or your new to Midjourney, here’s an excellent beginners guide about prompt structure and syntax from Christie C. I’ve been reading her articles for the past year and getting a lot of great results with Midjourney. Check it out
Stability.ai, the people who make Stable Diffusion have released Stable Diffusion 3 and it promises to be everything, but appears to have regressed about 18 months on the AI image generator timeline. You can read about how awful it is here, or just look at this image. Oh yeah, they’re going broke and key staff are leaving. Sorry Open Source folks, it was fun while it lasted.
What Will Figma Launch at Config Next Week?
Figma’s annual conference, CONFIG, will take place on June 26 and 27 in San Francisco and the big question is, what will they do with that huge pile of cash they’re sitting on from the Adobe breakup? Obviously, there will be some new AI features and probably some way to speed up the designer-developer pipeline. I’m predicting that there will be some sort of expansion of Figma Community into a paid marketplace and there will be entire page templates with prebuilt components to launch products even faster.
The other big question I have is what will Imran Choudry (co-founder of Humane, the AI pin) do in his role as one of the speakers now that his company is dead on arrival. That would be a brave act to get up on stage and talk about the future of AI and UI in light of recent news. My prediction is that he cancels.
Decent Folks fighting for Good UX in AI
Seen on LinkedIn, sign of the times.
I’m Entering an AI Film Competition!
There I was, feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t possibly launch my AI filmmaking career until Sora came out. The I saw this advertisement about a contest right here in Seattle with a deadline that’s six weeks out and I snapped out of my slumber. Because I believe in setting goals in public, I’m just going to put it out there: I’m going to enter the Bumbershoot Bike Fake Deep Foot AI Film Competition!
I’ll be posting regular updates to my YouTube channel if you’d like to follow my process. Here’s a brief overview of how I’m going to build it.
Happy Monday everyone! I hope you’re excited about the week ahead and making great progress on your creative projects. If you’re curious about something, send me a message and I’ll dive right in.