"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #36
Your weekly roundup of what’s happening in the digital land(scape). Metaverse ethics, governance and interesting trends from crypto, AI, gaming and regulation.
👁️🗨️What's going on:
Will interoperable avatars be essential for the open metaverse? | Timmu Tõke
More on => venturebeat.com
Meta is testing new Quest hand-tracking features that let you directly touch virtual objects in VR, a way to tap and scroll on virtual elements with only your hands, no controllers required.
More on => TheVerge.com
The Internet Is Ruined, but the Metaverse Can Still Be Saved. In this nascent stage, there are opportunities for virtual worlds to avoid the mistakes of the past.
More on =>Wired.com
Tom Graham, the CEO of generative AI startup Metaphysic, has filed for copyright registration of the AI-generated likeness of himself with the U.S. Copyright Office. Graham claims to be the first person to do so as he and Metaphysic seek to create new intellectual property rights. To generate his AI avatar, Graham had to record a three-minute video of himself on a mobile phone to capture his likeness, voice, and biometric data, which were then fed into Metaphysic’s AI content creation tool.
More on => mpost.io
Blockchain messaging protocol LayerZero raises $120M, hitting $3B valuation.
More on => techcrunch.com
Apple’s Tim Cook says AR and VR are for ‘connection’ and ‘communication’.
More on => theverge.com
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
Midjourney has announced a new “/describe” command that allows users to leverage the powerful artificial intelligence (AI) platform to transform images into words.
More on => petapixel.com/
Here are some experiments I have been doing,
a) going from painting-to-text description and then recreating the artwork from the description
b) using a visual aid description of the painting, as a prompt for the text-to-image generation. Even without the “Van Gogh” style vector, results are pretty close, but of course the control example is a very well known (and trained!) masterpiece.
Plagiarism-sniffing Turnitin tries to find AI writing by students – with mixed grades. “Even OpenAI, which built ChatGPT, warned that its own AI Text Classifier can only correctly identify text as likely to be written by AI 26 per cent of the time.”
More on => theregister.com and washingtonpost.com
Meta releases AI model that can identify items within images
More on => reuters.com
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
Tesla Employees Have Been Sharing and Meme-ing Your Private Car Videos.
More on => gizmodo.com
“Former Tesla employees are confessing to having shared, laughed at, played back in slow motion, and just generally had a great time watching, the videos that were taken with customers’ in-vehicle cameras. Reuters reports that close to a dozen former employees have revealed that sharing drivers’ personal videos was one of their favorite pastimes at the office—a good way to stave off boredom and to keep their co-workers entertained.”
🎮Gaming news
Activision Blizzard sued by US government over esports salaries. Department of Justice says soft salary cap in Overwatch League and Call of Duty League violated antitrust laws
More on => gamesindustry.biz
💸CryptoLand:
Yuga Labs Joins Gucci to Announce Otherside-Themed Jewelry
3,333 KodaPendants will come with a unique silver Gucci necklace and other digital perks.
More on => cointelegraph.com
🧠Neurotech:
Neuralink’s FDA Troubles Are Just the Beginning. Facing animal-abuse investigations, Elon Musk’s neurotech company is stumbling.
More on => gagadget.com
😬Meme corner:
✍️Ending nugget:
Jenka, “AI and the American Smile: How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression.”
“How we smile, when we smile, why we smile, and what it means is deeply culturally contextual. “ Which is how an AI trained on a dataset dominated by a culture that takes photos like this:
Rather than how actual historical photos look like:
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse! .
If you want to continue the conversation, find me at @https://twitter.com/whoisgallifrey And if you want to support my work, please do so by sharing this newsletter!!