The AI Breakdown First Five - Friday June 2, 2023

5. Director’s Guild Wins AI Concessions, But Not Everyone is Happy

One of the central issues surrounding the Hollywood writers strike has been protections around AI displacement. Before the strike, studios offered nothing other than an annual meeting to discuss AI. In a tentative deal reached yesterday, however, the Directors Guild of America said that it had received a “groundbreaking agreement confirming that A.I. is not a person and that generative A.I. cannot replace the duties performed by members.” Folks on the Writers side are looking at the fine print.

4. Drama at Stability AI

In an extensive new piece by Forbes, the magazine accuses Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque of exaggeration, misleading and even lying to get the company ahead. They cite as sources interviews with 13 current and former employees, dozens of investors and former colleagues and business partners, and internal company documents. Emad wasted no time responding:

3. Google Styledrop

This is one of the cooler visual AI tools we’ve seen for a moment. One of the challenges with text-to-image is style consistency across multiple images. This can be really important for a variety of creative and business design tasks. Google’s new StyleDrop research solves that by using a single image as a stylistic reference point.

2. Slow Your Doom-Roll, Says AI Researcher

In an interview, prominent AI researcher Kyunghyun Cho has said that the discourse on AI risks has gotten out of wack. He argued that we should be careful not to glorify “hero scientists” and that the extinction risk narrative is crowding out space for other important discussions. Recent Congressional witness Gary Marcus said something similar.

1. AI Replaced 3900 Jobs In May

According to a study from Challenger, Gray and Christmas, last month US employers laid off 80,000. Employers said AI was responsible for 3,900 of those layoffs - around 5%. That makes it the 7th largest cause of job losses in May. You have to think these types of stories are going to impact public opinion - especially given they’re hitting the Twitter engagement chaser set now.

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW