AI Art Community Newsletter

Happy Friday folks!! Welcome to newsletter # 37 ❤️ Grab some tea and get cozy - it’s time for the latest in AI & Art. A plethora of updates from Midjourney, Runway and OpenAI. To boot, abominations, memes, daily champs and more…

🗞️ AI News

Thank you to twilight_dreams123 and @barbara.chira.ai.art, who provided a few links below!

• Per the above, RunwayML just released Multi Motion Brush, which lets you get even more granular with your animations, targetting multiple independent subjects within an image at the same time.

• RunwayML is hosting their second AI Film Festival, 40 days left to submit a 1-10 minute short. In the balance: $60k prize pool and 2M+ worth of Runway credits

• Midjourney Zoom, Pan and Vary Region coming in the next few days (+ a few more details from office hours this week, courtesy of @saana_ai)

• Midjourney team created a short 3m video showing the new organizational features available for everyone through their new website (folders, bulk selection/download, different gallery layouts, etc)

• Leonardo AI posted an in-depth article about how to build a full game asset suite with their array of tools

• Famous artist Ai Weiwei has a new public art exhibition coming up, called Ai vs AI

• Brilliant (viral) bait post or tone-deaf AI artist “finishing” Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting (1989) - you decide

Not art, still noteworthy

• The first of many AI-native hardware devices just obliterated pre-order sales and went broadly viral this week - called Rabbit. Unlike other hardware, this one is an action-oriented language model. Meaning, it was trained primarily on website interactions, not just the language. So Rabbit can both plan and book your next trip. Cool keynote to watch.

• Zuck sent out a video, in which he describes their long-term goals with AI: “Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit.” They’re training LLama 3 right now, with the help of 350,000 state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs 🤯. Insane.

• A few recent words from OpenAI have captured renewed ire from the crowd: paraphrased, “creating AI would be impossible without copyrighted material”. To which critics are saying, “Yes. That’s the point.”

• I spent some time on Character AI this week for the first time. There are a few absolutely hilarious conversation gifs from the all-time most liked convos (I tried returning to this Feed a second time and it showed me excerpts by recency, not by most popular, so enjoy your one hit of their funniest convos, if it’s your first time visiting their site!). An article about Character AI + AI chatbot therapy.

• OpenAI’s open response to the New York Times lawsuit, in a clear and concise blog post

• Google’s DeepMind achieves new level of mathematical reasoning through its AlphaGeometry model, beating out Silver Medalist in Math Olympiad (top math minds in high school)

• Remember that “AI Pin” product that seemed insane (and still has not yet shipped)? They just laid off 10 people (4% of workforce) - uh oh 😬

Got a link? Just reply or join us in #AI News in Discord.

Whirl 🌀

Two New Releases: 1.20 & 1.21 🎊

In version 1.19, we released in-app image generation. Since then, two new releases, including user mentions, a new comment section, new game mode, new home screen and more. 🎉 Releases 1.20 & 1.21 feature:

• Mention other users in comments, and reply to replies.

• Customize your device notifications.

• Crucial comment section rewrite (esp. big for Android folks)

• New game mode, in addition to the daily theme: “Daily favorites”. A casual daily art sharing mode, in which there is a simple “recent” and “top”. Posts appear as they’re posted & there is no prescribed theme!

• Dozens of significant bug fixes & UI improvements direct from feedback in Discord.

As mentioned in Discord, the key areas of focus right now are fully eliminating persistent bugs, improving app performance, and investing heavily in features that contribute to feelings of live, communal presence. Then the website will get a much-deserved glow up. ✨

Next release - 1.22 - should arrive shortly! (As early as this evening.) If you haven’t upgraded to 1.21, definitely do. The app feels much better with it in place.

For more specific info, check out “Release Notes” in your app or #new-releases in Discord.

👑 Daily Champs

Daily champs from Whirl this week!

“Opalescent” - Champ - @catill2020

“Reflections” - Champ - @yippee_ai_yay

“Open Door“ - Champ - @malkoartz

“Skull and Bones” - @claire_edits123

“Minimalism“ - Co-champ @rendeto_ai

“Minimalism“ - Co-champ @ai.art.erinrads

“Vintage Futuristic Gadgets“ - @cyberselkie (Whirl)

🏔️ Whirl Explore - Top 15

Each week in Whirl, a few posts make their way to the top of Explore that were not posted as part of the daily theme - dubbed the “Top 15“. Here are a few of them! All came from the new game mode “daily favorite” 🤠

By @theparkinglotcities

By @thelefthandtree - Silhouette of Life: The Tree Within

By @aidreamartistry - Galaxy inspired

Not part of the app?? Come on down → to whirl.

X Tips: “Bubble Silhouettes” “Ukiyo-e art” + some cool Sci-Fi upscales w Magnific

X provides great bounty for all manner of AI learnings. Here are some proper fun prompts to try, plucked from the feed:

Weekly Abomination

MJ casually exorcism-ing its subjects… 😭

From @barbara.chira.ai.art via #abominations channel in Discord

Fin

As always, many thanks to the Patron Saint squad: Mischief, Oracular_angel, whitehatgfx, momhugssss, danb3ach, Midjourney.portraits, Mauriciotonon, x0alliecat0X, troplanduniverse, Marcus (formerly catsndogs.ai), dreamingr0b0ts, evelynsaiart, adaaiart, freakydreams.ai. And now 200+ who’ve joined the ranks of Lvl 2 or Patron.

→ Consider supporting!

See you next week 🙂

❤️ - Jackson (connect on LinkedIn, if you’d lik