While many fear a future in which AI-powered media becomes unique from traditional media, destroying society and/or civilization in the process, we are not quite there yet. Exhibit A is a surreal AI-generated beer ad that went viral over the weekend.

entitled “Synthetic buzzer,” The 30-second video first appeared on instagram about a week ago, created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of London manufacturing company called Privateisland.tv. The couple weren’t available for comment before this story was posted, but judging by the look of the video, it looks like they probably created it using a new version of Runway. generation-2 An AI model that can create short video clips based on written cues, similar to how Stable Diffusion can create still images.

Set to a raucous crowd backing track and “All Star” Smash Mouth, the video features simulacra of people having fun at a stereotypical American backyard barbecue, sometimes physically blending in with impressionistic beer vessels. The women laugh with their jaws open. Beer glasses turn into beer cans. The blazing grills take on the status of a columnar fire tornado and arc across the yard. It is a vision of a surreal hell that is both familiar and impressively alien.

Why is this so weird? Currently, AI video generators are still primitive. As their creators train the models, they work with a much smaller set of inputs than AI still image synthesis models, and these models require significantly more computational resources to run. The impressionistic take on beer ads likely comes from imbibing the essence of real beer ads in the Gen-2 dataset. Runway has not disclosed the dataset used for Gen-2 training, but in paper for Gen-1 (older model) it specified “an internal dataset of 240 million images and a user dataset of 6.4 million video clips”.

We’ve been experimenting with Gen-2 (which is currently in closed testing), and creating even weird alien clips like these still requires human perseverance, running and discarding many generations to even get a satisfying result. Even so, the resulting clip is only a few seconds long. In the case of Synthetic Summer, Privateisland.tv created the clips, selected the best ones, and combined the segments into a sequence, adding music and sound effects.

But wait, beer isn’t the only product fictionalized by AI for memetic purposes. On April 24, someone called “Pizza Later”. tweeted a video for a fictional restaurant called “Pepperoni Hug Spot”, heavily AI-generated, which includes distorted video clips of people eating pizza created by Gen-2 Runway. In addition, its creator reportedly generated script with GPT-4, used Midjourney for still images and voice-over Eleven Laboratories. They put it all together with the help of Adobe. after effects.

Both these human-initiated and human-collected works show that generative AI still has a long way to go before it independently dazzles the masses with society-changing memes. Humans are still driving these alien jobs, and we could potentially get some semblance of comfort from that. May be

However, no video can match the purity and grandeur of AI-created Will Smith eating spaghetti, which will forever remain in our hearts as our first AI-created nightmare video meme.

Microsoft Edge is a good browser, but for some reason Microsoft keeps trying to shove it to everyone and make it harder for competitors like Chrome or Firefox to use. Microsoft has now begun to notify IT administrators that will force Outlook and Teams to ignore the default web browser on Windows and open links in Microsoft Edge instead.

Reddit users posted messages from the Microsoft 365 admin center that outline how Microsoft is going to implement this change. “Web links from Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts and Microsoft accounts (MSA) in the Outlook for Windows app will open in Microsoft Edge in the same view, showing the open link next to the email it came from,” it says in the message. message for IT administrators from Microsoft.

While this won’t affect your default browser settings in Windows, this is another part of Microsoft 365 and Windows that completely ignores your choice of default browser for links. Microsoft is already doing this with the widget system in Windows 11 and even with search, where you’ll be forced to go to Edge if you click a link, even if you have a different default browser set.

IT administrators are unhappy with numerous complaints in various topics on redditnoticed Neovin. If Outlook wasn’t enough, Microsoft says “a similar experience is coming to Teams soon” with web links from chats opening in Microsoft Edge next to Teams chats. Microsoft appears to be rolling this out gradually to Microsoft 365 users, with IT admins receiving a 30-day notice before it rolls out to Outlook.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT administrators will be able to change the policy, but those using Microsoft 365 for business will need to manage this change on individual computers. This will leave many small businesses with the unnecessary headache of figuring out what has changed. Imagine being less tech-savvy, clicking a link in Outlook, and thinking you’ve lost all your favorites because they won’t open in your regular browser.

The notices to IT administrators come just a few weeks after Microsoft promised to make significant changes to how Windows manages which default apps open certain files or links. At the time, Microsoft stated that it believed “we have a responsibility to ensure that users’ choices are respected” and that “it’s important that we lead by example with our own Microsoft products.” Forcing people to use Microsoft Edge and ignoring default browsers is anything but respectful of user choice, and it’s terrible that Microsoft continues to abuse this.

Windows 11 also launched with a confusing and cumbersome default app installation process, which was a step backwards from Windows 10 and caused concern among rival browser makers such as Mozilla, Opera and Vivaldi. The Windows 11 update has improved this process, but it’s clear that Microsoft is still interested in finding ways to bypass the default browser selection.

CNN
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In the six months since Elon Musk finalized the Twitter acquisition, the billionaire has turned the platform on its head by overhauling how it decides which accounts to check.

Once issued to authenticate a limited number of accounts from celebrities, government agencies and media organizations, the coveted checkmark is now available for purchase through Twitter Blue’s subscription service. The result: more checks and more confusion.

There were at least 550,000 Twitter Blue followers as of April 23, according to estimates provided to CNN by Travis Browne, a Berlin-based software developer, just days after Musk stripped all users of the outdated blue checks. In comparison, over 400,000 accounts were verified with stale blue checks prior to being cleared.

But with Musk gifting the favor to some celebrities, it’s unclear how much customers are actually paying. It’s also unclear how much more Twitter can increase followers, which Musk has made the centerpiece of his plan to boost Twitter’s revenue.

The change in Twitter’s review process is just one of the many ways Musk has rocked the company since taking over Twitter in October. He fired 80% of his staff and changed the site’s policies, drawing criticism for how the moves could affect security and transparency. Many top advertisers have left the platform, and Musk valued it at about $20 billion last month, less than half of what he paid for it.

But one of Musk’s boldest and most ambitious changes was Twitter Blue. Advertised as a successor to the old checkout system, the subscription model allows anyone to pay $8 a month for a blue badge and other features like priority ranking in conversations and search.

The backlash was swift. Twitter Blue has sowed chaos and confusion. The program was initially suspended just a few days after it was launched, when the account impersonate Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company tweeted that “insulin is now free,” sending stocks plummeting.

More recently, the removal of blue checks has brought about a cultural change on the platform. Once a popular status symbol, many users find the blue badge not cool anymore. Last week, after the blue tick started appearing on prominent accounts, celebs like Lil Nas X and Chrissy Teigen furiously rejected service payment.

Here’s a look at the rise and fall of the blue Twitter badge: