Churches, RPG's and Salesforce All Go AI!

Plus the EU readies a vote on its AI Act

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
June 13, 2023

The AI Breakdown First Five - Tuesday June 13, 2023

Today on the First Five:

  • 5. AI Generates A Church Service

  • 4. AI-Powered RPG In A Day

  • 3. Meta’s MusicGen

  • 2. EU Prepares AI Act Vote

  • 1. Salesforce Lays Out Complete AI Suite

5. AI Church Service in Germany

As part of a protestant convention in Bavaria last week, University of Vienna theologian Jonas Semmerlein used ChatGPT to write a 40-minute sermon, which was then delivered by AI avatars. People started queueing an hour before the event. Ultimately some worshippers reported being impressed while others found the avatars soulless and monotonous.

4. Building a Fully-Functional RPG In a Day With AI

As part of the LA Tech Week virtual worlds hackathon, a team used a variety of AI tools including Anthropic’s Claude, Blockade Labs skybox generator and more to build a full functioning role playing game loosely inspired by Dungeons and Dragons in a single day. The team says that — hold aside the specific game — what it represents is a new paradigm of software development.

3. Meta’s MusicGen

Natural language music creation tools are on the rise. A few weeks ago, Google announced their MusicLM and last week Meta announced MusicGen, which takes a slightly different approach and allows users to provide a reference track (including the option to record themselves whistling or humming!) to help improve the output. MusicGen’s model was released open source.

2. EU’s AI Act Is Coming Up For A Vote

43 technical meetings and 12 political meetings later, the EU’s AI Act is slated to come to a vote this week. Of the Act’s 85 articles, 82 focus on risks from AI. OpenAI’s Sam Altman at one point said that his company would be forced to abandon Europe if the proposed rules passed, before backtracking after anger from European regulators.

What to expect if the EU passes the AI Act

EU documents suggest new rules have been added to the AI Act to address models like ChatGPT, but biometric surveillance remains an issue.

www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/eu-ai-act-what-to-expect

1. Salesforce’s AI Everything

Well hello enterprise AI. Salesforce held a big event yesterday to announce a slate of AI-related news, including notably the doubling of the size of their generative AI venture fund to a half-billion dollars, as well as the launch of AI Cloud powered by what they call their “Einstein GPT Trust Layer.” Indeed, “trust” seems to be the big theme, with the word being used 37 times in the official announcement blog post.

Bonus: A New Beatles Song Thanks to AI?

Before he died, John Lennon had recorded a tape of demos on a boombox with the label “for Paul.” Since being given the tape by Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney has always wanted to finish a track called “Now and Then,” but because of the quality of the tape, it hadn’t been possible. Now, it seems, AI has been used to actually finish it, and we get a “new” Beatles song later this year.

Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a 'final' Beatles song

The star says machine learning helped lift John Lennon's voice from a demo and turn it into a song.

www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65881813

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW