🎵 Google's text-to-music AI is really good.
Plus, Buzzfeed jumps on the AI content train.
In today’s email:
Buzzfeed announces plans to use OpenAI for their content.
Google has a text-to-music AI that sounds pretty, pretty, good.
Don’t know what to watch? This AI will tell you.
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Let AI find your next movie or show.
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Midjourney artist imagines a Sesame Street / Game of Thrones mashup.
🤓 2 Big Stories About AI
1. Buzzfeed announces plans to use OpenAI for future content.
BuzzFeed has announced that it will use OpenAI's text-generation software to enhance its quizzes with personalized responses. The CEO of BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti, also said that he expects AI to create, personalize, and animate content in the next 15 years.
BuzzFeed has announced its content machine will be assisted by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
AI will become more central to BuzzFeed's content operations.
OpenAI's text-generation software will be used to enhance BuzzFeed's quizzes with personalized responses.
Human content creators will still provide ideas, social currency, and prompts for the algorithms.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti expects AI to create, personalize, and animate content in the next 15 years.
The announcement comes after news of CNET using AI to write articles.
BuzzFeed has seen rounds of layoffs, including 12% of its staff after being acquired by a private holding company. So this announcement probably isn’t helping their content creators’ morale.
Though, The WSJ report does not mention job cuts in Peretti's memo to staff.
The use of AI continues to raise concerns about its potential as a replacement for human writers inside entertainment content sites like Buzzfeed.
CNET and Buzzfeed have closely aligned themselves with OpenAI and AI-generated content recently. And these are just the companies admitting to it. I guess I know who to blame next time the personalize quiz tries to place me in Hogwarts.
2. Google’s new AI turns text into music.
Before you read, I’ll burst your bubbles: It’s unlikely Google will release this to the public. Too many concerns over copyright infringement and lack of control over things like cultural appropriation. But…Google has released some samples of their text-to-music AI generator, and it sounds really good.
Google researchers have developed a new AI system called MusicLM that can generate musical pieces from text prompts.
Check it out and listen to some samples here.
The system can produce 30-second pieces from paragraph-long descriptions, five-minute pieces from one or two word prompts, and can even simulate human vocals.
MusicLM can also convert whistled or hummed melodies into other instruments and outperforms other AI music systems in terms of quality and adherence to the input.
Google has uploaded various samples of the AI's outputs, including "story mode," music for a prison escape, and a beginner vs advanced piano player.
Google has released a research paper explaining the system in detail and is publicly releasing a dataset of 5,500 music-text pairs.
The company is being cautious with MusicLM, citing risks of plagiarism and cultural appropriation or misrepresentation.
MusicLM is not available to the general public at this time, but Google says it could show up in one of its musical experiments in the future.
AI-generated music has a long history and has been used to compose pop songs, copy Bach, and accompany live performances.
So far, Google seems to be playing the AI game really safely. Probably for good reason, as I’m sure one of the largest companies in the world isn’t unfamiliar with lawsuits. But dang, this is one I wish I could waste downtime with this week.
🤣 1 LOL
ChatGPT has officially learned that the wife is always right.
