From Midjourney to UNESCO: The Ongoing Debate on AI Ethics

Balancing AI's potential and ethical concerns - plus new tools and my free AI toolkit.

Visually AI by Heather Cooper is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Total reading time is about 4 minutes.

Major Headline AI News this Week

Midjourney Cancels Free Access Amid Deepfake Concerns

Midjourney recently stopped offering its free trial version due to an increase in viral deep fakes created with its technology.

Although efforts to prevent deep fakes are ongoing, it might be too late for a straightforward solution.

Examples of the viral posts that led to this decision:

• Buzzfeed interview with the creator of viral AI image of the Pope in a designer puffer coat.

• Twitter post with fake AI image of Donald Trump being arrested.

We’ll have to wait to find out if Midjourney’s free subscription plan will return in the future.

UNESCO Calls for Immediate AI Ethics Implementation

Following a letter by Elon Musk and other tech leaders, UNESCO urged countries to implement its "Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence."

This framework, unanimously adopted by 193 member states, addresses discrimination, stereotyping, disinformation, privacy rights, personal data protection, and human and environmental rights.

The goal is to create a global framework for ethical AI use.

Open Letter Urges Pause on AI Development

Elon Musk, along with 1,000+ high-profile figures, has signed an open letter calling for AI labs to pause training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months.

The letter highlights risks to society and humanity, the need for shared safety protocols, AI governance systems, and a focus on improving current AI systems in terms of accuracy, safety, interpretability, transparency, robustness, alignment, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

The debate continues about the risk of this technology being used to cause harm to individuals or society in general.

We had a great discussion about these topics at my weekly Generative AI Twitter Space, and you can listen to insights, concerns, and predictions for what comes next here:

Heather Cooper @HBCoop_

https://t.co/SaMFJBnhGK

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My Favorite Tweets this Week

This week was much slower than the past two weeks for AI breaking news and we had a chance to try different techniques and prompts for AI-generated images.

1. Interior Design with AI

I used Lexica Art’s Aperture model to generate my version of Ikea fused with Ethan Allen-inspired living rooms.

Link to Twitter

Heather Cooper @HBCoop_

Interior Design with AI 6 living room styles with Ikea + Ethan Allen themes: (Prompt in thread) @LexicaArt

2. App Icon Images

This post has tons of user-submitted images in the comments with fantastic images!

Link to Twitter

Heather Cooper @HBCoop_

🔹A quick Midjourney v5 prompt Thanks @followmarcos for sharing the prompt that inspired me. Prompt: "iOS app icon, cute [blue bird] head, happy, colorful, minimal, detailed, fantasy, 8k, volumetric, UHD, [metallic silver gradient] background" Try it & reply w/ results 👇

3. Blockade Labs Skybox Lab text-to-360 degree

I used this amazing tool and the results are stunning. You can try it yourself at Blockade Labs.

Link to Twitter

Heather Cooper @HBCoop_

I just got access to @BlockadeLabs Skybox Lab text-to-360 degree generation. Here's a quick look:

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Cool AI Tools

• Stable Diffusion’s SDXL Beta image generator is available on DreamStudio. (link)

• Latent Labs introduced StudioGPT with ControlNet to reimagine images with AI. (link)

• Easy-Peasy-AI is now integrated with GPT-4, with doubled chat context words, more creative responses, and additional templates. (link)

• Watch videos quickly with a clickable transcript with YouTube Transcript. (link)

• Talk to your books with ChatGPT-powered Book AI Chat. (link)

• Playlist AI creates custom playlists from text prompts, videos, images, or most-listened-to music. (link)

• Genmo Chat introduced a creative copilot powered by GPT-4 to create and edit videos or images. (link to waitlist)

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Get it free: The AI Visual Creator’s Toolkit

I’ve spent the last few weeks curating a database of visual AI tools anyone can use to level up content – and now I’m giving it to you free!

I’ve broken tools into these categories:

• Visual AI Generation Tools

• AI Image Generation Tools

• AI Editing Tools

• AI Animation Tools

• AI Gaming Assets

• Prompt Generation Tools

• Styling Resources

Want access? Grab it here.

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Thank you for reading.