🥟 Chao-Down #352 ElevenLabs allows people to listen to their favorite books by past famous voices, Google search starts ranking AI spam higher than original reporting, The end of AI drive-thrus?
Plus, how good is AI at grading papers?
Would you listen to a deceased celebrity read to you?
ElevenLabs, the startup known for AI speech generation, just released a feature where users can listen to their favorite books and articles voiced by past celebrities like Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and more.
In order to do this ethically, the startup made deals with each celebrity’s estate allowing ElevenLabs to license and train AI models on old recordings of the people’s voices. The tech has progressed to a point where the most recent AI models don’t need much data to produce a good enough recording. Even just a minute’s worth of audio can produce an impressive result.
It’s good to see the startup do right by the people and compensate their family’s estates. The question is, will this feature be well-received by the public?
-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.
What happened in AI? 📰
AI resurrects deceased actors’ voices to read audiobooks (CNN Business)
Google Search Ranks AI Spam Above Original Reporting in News Results (WIRED)
260 McNuggets? McDonald’s Ends A.I. Drive-Through Tests Amid Errors (The New York Times)
AI Influencers Are Growing Fast But Still Far Behind Their Human Counterparts (twicsy.com)
Teachers Use AI to Grade Papers. Is It Any Good? (WSJ)
Consulting Firms Are the Early Winners of the AI Boom (The New York Times)
Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖
Death, Taxes, and AI: How Generative AI Will Change Accounting (a16z.com)
Why you shouldn't use AI to write your tests (Swizec Teller)
Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build (Substack)
Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠
SynaLinks/HybridAGI: The Programmable Neuro-Symbolic AGI that lets you program its behavior using Graph-based Prompt Programming: for people who want AI to behave as expected (Github)
iMeanAI/WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments (Github)
comfyanonymous/ComfyUI: The most powerful and modular stable diffusion GUI, api and backend with a graph/nodes interface. (Github)
The Latest in AI Research 💡
Magic Insert: Style-Aware Drag-and-Drop (arxiv)
Transcendence: Generative Models Can Outperform The Experts That Train Them (arxiv)
Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data (arxiv)
The World Outside of AI 🌎
The ultimate blood substitute? The U.S. military is betting $46 million on it (AAAS)
Half of Americans can't afford a summer vacation: survey (qz.com)
You Can Thank Private Equity for That Enormous Doctor’s Bill (WSJ)
To Hike Prices, Companies Are Refreshing Old Products For New Uses (Bloomberg)
Bionic leg moves like a natural limb — without conscious thought (Nature)
Airline profits lag even as travel demand breaks records (CNBC)
One Last Bite 😋
