🙃 Oh, Snap!

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Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, CEO of Autoblocks and founder of AI For Anyone, and I share the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

In today’s episode of unique World Records: a man from Idaho passed a 40-pound weight from hand to hand 100 times in 16.44 seconds. That’s impressive. Best I ever did was carry groceries from the car to the house in one trip.

Anyhoo, let’s dive into some AI news…

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 🙃 Oh, Snap!

• 🎙️ Grimes is calling all AI-singer/songwriters

• 🇬🇧 UK creates an AI taskforce

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🙃 Oh, Snap!

Snap (modified by TechCrunch)

The reviews for Snapchat’s new “My AI” chatbot feature are in, and they aren’t pretty.

Over the past week, Snapchat’s average U.S. App Store reviews dropped from 3.05 to 1.67, with 75% of reviews being one-star, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

Since its global launch last week, the chatbot has garnered some harsh critiques:

• The feature sits at the top of Snap’s main chat tab and cannot be unpinned, blocked, or removed unless - you guessed it - you cough up some money for Snap+ (it's giving Twitter Blue).

• It knows user locations even if they aren’t sharing it on Snap Map - the age-old “data privacy” saga continues.

• It doesn’t have parental controls, which has led to inappropriate exchanges with underaged users.

• Last but certainly not least - no one asked for it.

These complaints sound familiar, though, because we’ve heard variations of them with almost every AI product launch over the past few months. Companies need more time to tinker with their models to ensure that these chatbots are truly trustworthy, a word that’s currently being thrown around like candy at Halloween.

All in all, it’s safe to say that users have the right to be concerned with the product. If not resolved quickly, it could lead to serious trouble for Snapchat, with many users threatening to leave the app.

Let’s see if Snapchat can snap out of this one.

Read more: TechCrunch

🎙️ Grimes is calling all AI-singer/songwriters

While most of the music industry is concerned about AI-generated vocals, Grimes is inspired by the possibility of infusing humans with machines.

Through a late Sunday night tweet, Grimes offered to split royalties 50-50 with anyone who could produce a successful (aka viral) AI-generated song using her voice.

Grimes isn’t the first artist to embrace AI. In 2021, an experimental musician, Holly Herndon, introduced her artificial voice, Holly Plus, through her DAO. Users could submit audio clips that would be converted into her voice and were also able to profit from the model.

General reaction: With the prevalence of AI in our lives, anyone with some talent could create a viral song that features an artist's vocals straight from their basement.

This raises a plethora of questions:

• In what ways will AI augmentation shape our understanding and perception of creative art?

• What are the intellectual property ownership guidelines for AI-generated songs?

• Are royalties going to be the preferred revenue model for artists in the age of AI-generated music?

• What methods can be employed to determine if an AI-generated song is replicating the voice or style of an established artist?

We do know one thing, though - some AI-generated songs are a bop, like Drake x Weeknd’s ‘Heart on my Sleeve.’ And if the artists themselves support this form of music, who knows what the future of the music industry will look like ten years down the line.

Read more: The Verge

🇬🇧 UK creates an AI taskforce

It looks like more governments are starting to fancy this AI thing.

In yesterday’s issue, we discussed Japan welcoming AI into its backyard, using ChatGPT in its municipal government offices in Yokosuka.

Today, the UK announced a £100 million effort ($124.5 million) to develop its own “sovereign” AI through a Foundation Model Taskforce to help spur the economy while avoiding ethical and technical pitfalls.

They aim to:

1. Work with the industry to make these systems safer and more reliable.

2. Make the country "globally competitive."

3. Cement UK’s position as a science and technology “powerhouse” by 2030.

Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan sees trustworthy AI as an edge in the field that can help “create medical treatments, aid public services and fight climate change.”

This funding comes at the back of £900 million devoted in the UK budget to “an exascale’ supercomputer and dedicated AI Research Resources” to help support the next generation of AI innovation.

Can’t wait till they officially grant AI a knighthood.

Read more: Engadget

🤑 AI Fundraising News

Qdrant Raises $7.5M - a Berlin, Germany-based provider of a vector database and search platform.

Cosmose AI Valuation Reaches $500 Million - a retail-focused artificial intelligence company.

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

The Future of AI Relies on a High School Teacher’s Free Database [Yahoo Finance] - LAION, short for “Large-scale AI Open Network,” is a free AI training data set created by teacher Christoph Schuhmann & used by generative AI companies such as Stability AI to create new images. The open-source dataset has been downloaded thousands of times, raising legal and ethical questions surrounding publicly-available materials being used to feed databases. (Read more)

The AI Marketing Blueprint: Your Cheatsheet to the new AI-enabled MarTech Stack [Jocelyn DeGance] - Check out Jocelyn’s ‘cheat sheet’ for marketers, a guide for those who are seeking to update their MarTech stacks with AI-enabled capabilities and tools. (Read more)

🐦️ Tweet of the day

This sounds like an awesome opportunity 😤

I've been bumping A.I Drake for a week.

I wanna give:

1) $10,000
2) a space in SF to work for 3-mo
2) a weekly chat w/ me.

To whoever wants to build a Soundcloud-type experience full of A.I generated tracks w/ artists who opt-in

How I'd ship it in a week 🧵

— Farza 🇵🇰🇺🇸 (@FarzaTV)
9:58 PM • Apr 24, 2023

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter