The worst thing about this hyperspeed artificial intelligence race is that, even if you are used to expecting the unexpected, the bloody thing keeps surprising you by opening new cans of worms every other day. And this weekly roundup has truck-size cans overflowing with worms the size of elephant trunks among the release of Stability.ai’s open source text-to-image tool StableStudio, the end of cel animation (again), and a resurrected John Lennon.

STUDIO PARANORMAL CAN CHANGE YOUR RACE

Did I say elephant trunk-size worms? More like sandworms from Dune. Check out this wild reskinning demo released by Studio Paranormal, a visual effects, post-production, IP pre-production, and technology development company:

The demo left me speechless. Studio Paranormal has developed a process that can seamlessly (and seemingly) change a person’s race. Nobody really knows what its workflow is or which AI technologies it’s using, but other AI wizards are guessing a complex combination of Stable Diffusion and other neural networks that can control the output to perfection.

Eventually, that complex workflow will likely be condensed into a simple tool that anyone can use. So the question is: Given America’s problems with cultural appropriation, how will the ability to change anyone’s race—in movies, TV series, or even just social media videos—affect society? Whatever the answer, this is definitely yet another step toward the end of reality.

STABLESTUDIO: OWN YOUR AI

Stability.ai has announced yet another Stability.ai product called StableStudio, which is the open-source version of DreamStudio. DreamStudio has been the consumer front-end to all Stable Diffusion technologies since the organization released its text-to-image technology. More than MidJourney and DALL-E, DreamStudio has single-handedly catapulted millions of users and studios—like Studio Paranormal above—into the world of visual generative AI, which users fully control.

The organization says that DreamStudio will continue as Stability’s own StableStudio implementation, but also that StableStudio will give all the power of its technologies to any user, company, or developer. What this means is that everyone will be able to build their own tools and keep them for themselves, along with their private information, out of the hands and eyes of the data-hungry greedy corporations like Microsoft, OpenAI, or Google.

ALL YOU NEED IS PROMPT!

Freelance AI director—yes, that’s what he calls himself—Jona Rotting is showing us a glimpse of the near future with his AI-generated video of John Lennon back from the dead.

Leaving aside the pun overdrive and the imperfections, Rotting’s video is just a preview of what’s sure to be one of the biggest trends in AI: historical personalities coming back to life, for better or worse. Personally, I hope Iman allows someone to take everything ever written or said by David Bowie and resurrect his intellectual spirit in AI form. I just want to listen to his words of infinite wisdom, like this interview with BBC’s James Paxman:

Swap “internet” for “AI” in this interview, and everything clicks so hard. The aliens have arrived, friends. It just turns out that we birthed them.