Exploration #108

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• If You Click Only One…

• Things to Think About…

• Things to Know About…

• And finally…

Hi all. This week we’ve got stories on the future of MR experiences, the use of AI in hiring, nuances in the use AI in copyrighted work, how United Airlines uses AI, and (yet) another product announcement from Adobe. But first…

Greetings from high above the North Atlantic, east of Greenland and south of Iceland. I’m on my way to the UK (Shropshire, specifically) for a bit of R&R, so this week’s intro will be short, like the nap I took before writing this. I’m notoriously bad at sleeping on planes. So instead, I’ve been perusing a backlog of think pieces.

One thing to keep in mind as your reading these is that what is happening now with AI and other compute power is happening exponentially, and exponential curves are something that can be hard to grasp. Humans are wonderfully linear, but to a fault when it comes to understanding advances like AI. So, here’s an example I’ve always found helpful. Imagine a chessboard, which has 64 squares. Now imaging someone would pay you a penny on the first square and double the total with each additional square. By the end of the first row, on square number eight, you’d have $2.56. By the time you reached the halfway point on the board, square 32 would be worth over 40 million dollars. By one row after that and square 40 would be worth more than 1 trillion dollars. And you’d still have three rows to go.

When people talk about exponential growth, or Moore’s Law, that’s the type of growth they mean. Of course, what matters is what we do with that growth, but trying to grasp the scale helps us understand why things feel like they are changing so fast (and speeding up).

The next exploration will be May 15 from the PBS Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, but there should be enough food for thought to tide you over for the next couple of weeks.

We also do plan to have our 3rd Thursday webinar on May 16 at 1pET. The topic will be generative AI video tools and our guest speaker will be Evo Heyning, a thinker and consultant in emerging media. You can sign up for the webinar here.

Okay, on to the links…

If You Click Only One…

For women playing video games, it’s (still) a man’s world (Jana Arbanas, Kevin Westcott, Chris Arkenberg, Jeff Loucks - Deloitte) - I see huge opportunity here for public media. Key Quote: "To expand gaming audiences—and expand intellectual property—studios should also continue to deliver rich, story-driven solo adventures that have more universal appeal. Unlike with mobile games and live service games, women gamers are just as likely to engage with these games as male gamers. Although these games can be very expensive to produce, developers and publishers may be able to recoup more costs if more women are playing."

Things to Think About…

Spring AI Trilogy (The Ezra Klein Show) - Ezra and his editorial team return to the topic of AI after a bit of a break. This trilogy starts by looking at the now, and the progresses out into the foreseeable future (so about 5 years). In order:
—How Should I Be Using AI Right Now? (Ethan Mollick) - our February webinar speaker is moving into the big leagues with the release of his new book. If you tune in for that webinar, a lot that you hear will seem familiar. If you missed it, here is your chance to catch up.
—Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It? (Nilay Patel) - A look at the intersection of AI-driven content and the internet.
—What if Dario Amodei is Right A.I. (Dario Amode) - A look into the near-term future of these models, with some surprising predictions for the next couple of years form the head of Anthropic.

The Future of MR Experiences: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Building for Mixed Reality (Jesse Schell - Meta Developers via YouTube) - When I first started to explore game design as a potential avenue for public media Jesse Schell's name came up again and again. His book on game design is foundational if you want to begin developing for this space. So I was excited to see that he is speaking on mixed reality (MR) experience development as well.
—To whet your appetite, here's a summary from Janko Roettgers, from whom I learned of the talk: The future of mixed reality, according to Jesse Schell

Can ChatGPT Change Your Mind? (Steve Rosenbaum - Sustainable Media) - Use any of the major bots for very long and there's an obsequiousness that can be low-key grating (for me, at least). But one person's servile is another's supportive, and I found the perspective in Rosenbaum's piece (which is focused on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model) helpful.
—Anthropic (coincidentally?) also published research recently on Measuring the Persuasiveness of Large Language Models.

AI Has Lost Its Magic (Ian Bogost - The Atlantic ($)) - The dropline is "That's how you know it's takin over." And I think that is spot on. Any new technology that goes the distance becomes a part of the background of our daily existence. AI is definitely on that arc.

This is the most consequential technology in America (Shira Ovide - Washington Post) - I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I will say that it's not AI.

Things to Know About…

Adobe’s new Firefly model makes it easier to use Photoshop’s AI tools (Jess Weatherbed - The Verge) - Another week, another Adobe announcement. At least that's the way it feels. This past week, we saw an upgrade announced to Firefly. A little over a year after the initial launch of Firefly and we're now up to v3. Photoshop (naturally) gets the latest model first, with other users getting access later this year. Reviews thus far are mixed, with folks saying it still doesn't measure up to Midjourney 6. But Adobe is making Firefly easier to use, and that may make it good enough.
—Ryan Morrison's review in Tom's Guide is also helpful: I tried Adobe's Firefly 3 image generation tool — it takes photorealism to a new level
—And one with more of a Photoshop angle from Sabrina Ortiz at ZDNet: The new Adobe Photoshop gets an in-app image generator, major Generative Fill upgrades

VideoGigaGAN: Towards Detail-rich Video Super-Resolution (Yiran Xu, Taesung Park, Richard Zhang, Yang Zhou, Eli Shechtman, Feng Liu, Jia-Bin Huang, Difan Liu - Adobe) - In other Adobe news, their video upsampling tool is getting a lot of buzz for its ability to greatly increase the resolution of 'fuzzy' videos. It's not hard to see how this could have some utility in remastering classic productions from your station.

How I use generative AI in branding (Charlota Kolar Blunarova) - A nice, brief case study that doubles as content marketing for the creative. But that means she shows her work, which is useful.

Author granted copyright over book with AI-generated text—with a twist (Kate Knobs - Wired (via ArsTechnica) - For those tracking the twists and turns of how gAI content fits into the complicated puzzle of copyright, the situation is becoming far more nuanced as creatives poke and prod.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now (Victoria Song - The Verge) - There's actually been quite a bit of buzz this week about Meta's smart glasses as an underrated bit of AR-meets-AI tech.

Insta360 X4 review: A significant step forward for consumer 360 video (Simon Wyndham - RedShark News) - I've previously mentioned that Insta360 had announced a new version of their two-lens 360-camera that can produce 8K video at 30fps. This week we have a review that further reinforces that you may want to put this on your FY25 equipment lists.

Employers and job candidates are dueling with AI in the hiring process (Rani Molla - Sherwood) - How is your organization using AI in the hiring process. How are your candidates using it to get your attention?
—Related, Jamie Ballard, a data journalist at YouGov, reports on How Americans feel about AI’s role in their careers and in K-12 schooling
—And also related, this essay by David Autor offers a more optimistic perspective: AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class

How United Airlines uses AI to make flying the friendly skies a bit easier (Frederic Lardinois - TechCrunch) - Found this interesting, as I'm currently on a United flight. But also, I think enough of us are familiar with flying that this provides an interesting perspective.

Unreal Engine 5.4 is here, and it's good news for filmmakers and animators (Ian Dean - Creative Bloq) - Dean could have also included broadcasters in that headline. If you are on the TV side of the public media and are not thinking about using Unreal Engine, you should check this out.

Games are helping the New York Times thrive amid media chaos (Alex Fitzpatrick - Axios) - Found this one sitting in an open tab from a bygone era (i.e., February). I've shared other stories about the NYT and gaming, but the stats and strategy here are interesting. The Times doesn't just focus on games, they focus on puzzle games.

And finally…

Flightradar24’s new GPS jamming map (Ian Petchenik - Flightradar24) - And finally, I love the intersection of maps and tech, so I'm finding this live map something I come back and re-loop every couple of days. 
—Go straight to the live map

Have a creative, productive couple of weeks!