1 844.742.7448

Email Us

Remote Support

Contact

Posts tagged "content"

  1. Home
  2. Posts tagged content

OpenAI’s Sora will one day add audio, editing, and may allow nudity in content
  • No Comments

OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati recently sat down with The Wall Street Journal to reveal interesting details about their upcoming text-to-video generator Sora.

The interview covers a wide array of topics from the type of content the AI engine will produce to the security measures being put into place. Combating misinformation is a sticking point for the company. Murati states Sora will have multiple safety guardrails to ensure the technology isn’t misused. She says the team wouldn’t feel comfortable releasing something that “might affect global elections”. According to the article, Sora will follow the same prompt policies as Dall-E meaning it’ll refuse to create “images of public figures” such as the President of the United States. 

Watermarks are going to be added too. A transparent OpenAI logo can be found in the lower right-hand corner indicating that it's AI footage. Murati adds that they may also adopt content provenance as another indicator. This uses metadata to give information on the origins of digital media. That's all well and good, but it may not be enough. Last year, a group of researchers managed to break “current image watermarking protections”, including those belonging to OpenAI. Hopefully, they come up with something tougher.

Generative features

Things get interesting when they begin to talk about Sora's future. First off, the developers have plans to “eventually” add sound to videos to make them more realistic. Editing tools are on the itinerary as well, giving online creators a way to fix the AI’s many mistakes. 

As advanced as Sora is, it makes a lot of errors. One of the prominent examples in the piece revolves around a video prompt asking the engine to generate a video where a robot steals a woman’s camera. Instead, the clip shows the woman partially becoming a robot. Murati admits there is room for improvement stating the AI is “quite good at continuity, [but] it’s not perfect”.

Nudity is not off the table. Murati says OpenAI is working with “artists… to figure out” what kind of nude content will be allowed.  It seems the team would be okay with allowing “artistic” nudity while banning things like non-consensual deep fakes. Naturally, OpenAI would like to avoid being the center of a potential controversy although they want their product to be seen as a platform fostering creativity. 

Ongoing tests

When asked about the data used to train Sora, Murati was a little evasive. 

She started off by claiming she didn’t know what was used to teach the AI other than it was either “publically available or license data”. What’s more, Murati wasn’t sure if videos from YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram were a part of the training. However she later admitted that media from Shutterstock was indeed used. The two companies, if you’re not aware, have a partnership which could explain why Murati was willing to confirm it as a source.

Murati states Sora will “definitely” launch by the end of the year. She didn’t give an exact date although it could happen within the coming months. For now, the developers are safety testing the engine looking for any “vulnerabilities, biases, and other harmful results”.

If you're thinking of one day trying out Sora, we suggest learning how to use editing software. Remember, it makes many errors and might continue to do so at launch. For recommendations, check out TechRadar's best video editing software for 2024.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

OpenAI’s new Sora text-to-video model can make shockingly realistic content
  • No Comments

OpenAI breaks new ground as the AI giant has revealed its first text-to-video model called Sora, capable of creating shockingly realistic content.

We’ve been wondering when the company was finally going to release its own video engine as so many of its rivals, from Stability AI to Google, have beaten them to the punch. Perhaps OpenAI wanted to get things just right before a proper launch. At this rate, the quality of its outputs could eclipse its contemporaries. According to the official page, Sora can generate “realistic and imaginative scenes” from a single text prompt; much like other text-to-video AI models. The difference with this engine is the technology behind it. 

Lifelike content

Open AI claims its artificial intelligence can understand how people and objects “exist in the physical world”. This gives Sora the ability to create scenes featuring multiple people, varying types of movement, facial expressions, textures, and objects with a high amount of detail. Generated videos lack the plastic look or the nightmarish forms seen in other AI content – for the most part, but more on that later.

Sora is also multimodular. Users will reportedly be able to upload a still image to serve as the basis of a video. The content inside the picture will become animated with a lot of attention paid to the small details. It can even take a pre-existing video “and extend it or fill in missing frames.” 

See more

You can find sample clips on OpenAI’s website and on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). One of our favorites features a group of puppies playing in the snow. If you look closely, you can see their fur and the snow on their snouts have a strikingly lifelike quality to them. Another great clip shows a Victoria-crowned pigeon bobbing around like an actual bird.

A work in progress

As impressive as these two videos may be, Sora is not perfect. OpenAI admits its “model has weaknesses.” It can have a hard time simulating the physics of an object, confuse left from right, as well as misunderstand “instances of cause and effect.” You can have an AI character bite into a cookie, but the cookie lacks a bite mark.

It makes a lot of weird errors too. One of the funnier mishaps involves a group of archeologists unearthing a large piece of paper which then transforms into a chair before ending up as a crumpled piece of plastic. The AI also seems to have trouble with words. “Otter” is misspelled as “Oter” and “Land Rover” is now “Danover”.

See more

Moving forward, the company will be working with its “red teamers” who are a group of industry experts “to assess critical areas for harms or risks.” They want to make sure Sora doesn’t generate false information, hateful content, or have any bias. Additionally, OpenAI is going to implement a text classifier to reject prompts that violate their policy. These include inputs requesting sexual content, violent videos, and celebrity likenesses among other things.

No word on when Sora will officially launch. We reached out for info on the release. This story will be updated at a later time. In the meantime, check out TechRadar's list of the best AI video editors for 2024.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Apple Vision Pro content can be beamed to other Apple devices via AirPlay
  • No Comments

Now that Apple Vision Pro preorders have gone live, we're learning more about Apple's expensive mixed reality headset – including the ways in which it will interact with other Apple devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

As per the Vision Pro tech specs page (via MacRumors), the device supports Apple's AirPlay standard for wirelessly transmitting video and audio. In other words, you'll be able to beam whatever's happening inside the Vision Pro to the screen of an iPhone, iPad, Mac computer, or Apple TV – anything that also supports AirPlay.

It's something we've seen in other headsets like the Meta Quest 3, the ability to mirror the display somewhere else, and it means if you're doing a presentation in a meeting or just playing around with friends and family, everyone you're with will be able to see whatever it is you're looking at in mixed reality.

If you're using a desktop Mac or a MacBook, then the connection can apparently go the other way too – so you can get whatever's on the macOS screen to show up inside the Vision Pro, and use your computer that way.

Getting hold of a Vision Pro

There is one bit of information to take note of here, which is that mirrored video can only be shown at a resolution of 720p (which has apparently been revised down from 1080p). It's not going to be the sharpest of pictures that you get.

Nevertheless, it's handy to be able to share what's inside your headset with other people, for all kinds of reasons. It's perhaps something that Apple Store staff will take advantage of as they demo the device to potential buyers too.

There were several months between the time the Apple Vision Pro was announced and when preorders went live, and you're not going to be able to walk into an Apple Store and buy a Vision Pro until Friday, February 2.

Everyone outside the US is going to have to wait even longer: it is possible to buy the headset internationally, but we wouldn't recommend it. We haven't heard when the device will go on sale in other regions, but we'll keep you posted.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

YouTube reveals powerful new AI tools for content creators – and we’re scared, frankly
  • No Comments

YouTube has announced a whole bunch of AI-powered tools (on top of its existing bits and pieces) that are designed to make life easier for content creators on the platform.

As The Verge spotted, at the ‘Made on YouTube’ event which just took place, one of the big AI revelations made was something called ‘Dream Screen’, an image and video generation facility for YouTube Shorts.

See more

This lets a video creator just type in something that they’d like for a background. Such as, for example, a panda drinking a cup of coffee – given that request, the AI will take the reins and produce such a video background for the clip (or image).

This is how the process will be implemented to begin with – you prompt the AI, and it makes something for you – but eventually, creators will be able to remix content to produce something new, we’re told.

YouTube Studio is also getting an infusion of AI tools that will suggest content that could be made by individual creators, generating topic ideas for videos that might suit them, based on what’s trending with viewers interested in the kind of content that creator normally deals in.

A system of AI-powered music recommendations will also come into play to furnish audio for any given video.

Analysis: Grab the shovel?

Is it us, or does this sound rather scary? Okay, so content creators may find it useful and convenient to be able to drop in AI generated video or image backgrounds really quickly, and have some music layered on top, and so on.

But isn’t this going to just ensure a whole heap of bland – and perhaps homogenous – content flooding onto YouTube? That seems the obvious danger, and maybe one compounded by the broader idea of suggested content that people want to see (according to the great YouTube algorithm) being provided to creators on YouTube.

Is YouTube set to become a video platform groaning under the collective weight of content that gets quickly put together, thanks to AI tools, and shoveled out by the half-ton?

While YouTube seems highly excited about all these new AI utilities and tools, we can’t help but think it’s the beginning of the end for the video site – at least when it comes to meaningful, not generic, content.

We hope we’re wrong, but this whole brave new direction fills us with trepidation more than anything else. A tidal wave of AI-generated this, that, and the other, eclipsing everything else is clearly a prospect that should be heavily guarded against.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Google Bard content should be fact-checked, recommends current Google VP
  • No Comments

If you need any more reason to be skeptical of generative AI, look no further than a recent BBC interview with Debbie Weinstein, Vice President of Google UK. She recommends people use Google Search to fact-check content generated by the Bard AI.

Weinstein says in the interview that Bard should be considered more of an “experiment” better suited for “collaboration around problem solving” and “creating new ideas”. It seems like Google didn’t really intend for the AI to be used as a resource for “specific information”. Besides fact-checking any information offered by Bard, she suggests using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons at the bottom of generated content to give feedback to improve the chatbot. As the BBC points out, Bard’s homepage states “it has limitations and won’t always get it right, but doesn’t repeat Ms. Weinstein’s advice” to double-check results via Google Search.

On one hand, Debbie Weinstein is giving some sound advice. Generative AIs have a massive problem when it comes to getting things right. They hallucinate, meaning that a chatbot may come up with totally false information when generating text that fits a prompt. This issue has even gotten two lawyers from New York in trouble as they used ChatGPT in a case and presenting “fictitious legal research” that the AI cited.

So it's certainly not a bad idea to double-check whatever Bard says. However, considering these comments are coming from a vice president of the company, it's a little concerning.

Analysis: So, what's the point?

The thing is Bard is essentially a fancy search engine. One of its main function is be “a launchpad for curiosity”; a resource for factual information. The main difference between Bard and Google Search is the former is relatively easier to use. It's a lot more conversational, plus the AI offers important context. Whether Google likes it or not, people are going to be using Bard for looking up stuff. 

What’s particularly strange about Weinstein’s comments is it contradicts with the company's plans for Bard. During I/O 2023, we saw all the different ways the AI model could enhance Google Search from providing in-depth results on a topic to even creating a fitness plan. Both of these use cases and more require factual information to work. Is Weinstein saying this update is all for naught since it uses Google's AI tech?

While it's just one person from Google asserting this on the record (so far), she is a vice president at Google. If you’re not supposed to use the chatbot for important information, then why is  it being added to the search engine as way to further enhance? Why implement something that's apparently untrustworthy?

It’s a strange statement; one that we hope is not echoed throughout the company. Generative AI is here to stay after all, and it’s important that we trust it to output accurate information. We reached out to the tech giant for comment. This story will be updated at a later time.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Even OpenAI can’t tell the difference between original content and AI-generated content – and that’s worrying
  • No Comments

Open AI, the creator of the incredibly popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has officially shut down the tool it had developed for detecting content created by AI and not humans. ‘AI Classifier’ has been scrapped just six months after its launch – apparently due to a ‘low rate of accuracy’, says OpenAI in a blog post.

ChatGPT has exploded in popularity this year, worming its way into every aspect of our digital lives, with a slew of rival services and copycats. Of course, the flood of AI-generated content does bring up concerns from multiple groups surrounding inaccurate, inhuman content pervading our social media and newsfeeds.

Educators in particular are troubled by the different ways ChatGPT has been used to write essays and assignments that are passed off as original work. OpenAI’s classifier tool was designed to address these fears not just within education but wider spheres like corporate workspaces, medical fields, and coding-intensive careers. The idea behind the tool was that it should be able to determine whether a piece of text was written by a human or an AI chatbot, in order to combat misinformation

Plagiarism detection service Turnitin, often used by universities, recently integrated an ‘AI Detection Tool’ that has demonstrated a very prominent fault of being wrong on either side. Students and faculty have gone to Reddit to protest the inaccurate results, with students stating their own original work is being flagged as AI-generated content, and faculty complaining about AI work passing through these detectors unflagged.

Turnitin’s “AI Detection Tool” strikes (wrong) again from r/ChatGPT

It is an incredibly troubling thought: the idea that the makers of ChatGPT can no longer differentiate between what is a product of their own tool and what is not. If OpenAI can’t tell the difference, then what chance do we have? Is this the beginning of a misinformation flood, in which no one will ever be certain if what they read online is true? I don’t like to doomsay, but it’s certainly worrying.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

This extension could make Firefox the ideal browser for content creators
  • No Comments

Mozilla has released a new extension for Firefox that allows users to manage color calibration in its browser across devices.

By default, Firefox uses color management from Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems to optimize and render colors and images to enhance users’ browsing experience. However, with its new Extended Color Management Add-On, users can disable color management and then restart Firefox so that the colors of graphics and videos are consistent across devices.

By doing this, media engineers and content creators can make consistent and reliable assumptions about the color pipeline between content shown in a browser and the actual pixel values sent to a computer’s display.

While most users are completely unaware of this, different monitors, operating systems and browsers vary in color output. In order to ensure each workstation is able to see consistent color output across images and video, color management applications need to be calibrated to the same specifications which can be quite tedious.

While creative applications like Photoshop allow you to disable color management, most browsers don’t allow you to do so. This is why Mozilla’s Extended Color Management extension can be very useful for those that need to have material reviewed by another party remotely through a browser on a well-calibrated display.

Extended Color Management

In a new blog post, Mozilla’s Extensions and Add-Ons team revealed that some of the world’s leading visual effects studios including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) use Firefox as part of their creative process when making movies and TV shows.

As visual effects studios and their vendors began working from home during the pandemic, color calibration became especially difficult when compared to how easy it was to manage in-office. This is why Mozilla worked with ILM over the past year to develop its new Extended Color Management add-on.

Read more

> The most popular Firefox extensions of 2021 were both adblockers

> Firefox will no longer be so slow to boot up

> Firefox Focus wants to help keep your web searches private

With the company’s new extension, Lucasfilm and its remote partners are now able to see the intended colors and view ‘dailies’ more easily than ever before, especially when working remotely.

Global imaging supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, J. Schulte explained how the company worked with Mozilla to make it even easier to view content with color accuracy in Firefox, saying:

“At ILM we want to ensure that all content is as color accurate as possible no matter where we view it. The updates to Firefox have allowed us to increase the color accuracy of content viewed in a browser further than any other browser. When we identified a new use case for Firefox, their team was responsive and updated their browser to fill the need.”

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

This extension could make Firefox the ideal browser for content creators
  • No Comments

Mozilla has released a new extension for Firefox that allows users to manage color calibration in its browser across devices.

By default, Firefox uses color management from Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems to optimize and render colors and images to enhance users’ browsing experience. However, with its new Extended Color Management Add-On, users can disable color management and then restart Firefox so that the colors of graphics and videos are consistent across devices.

By doing this, media engineers and content creators can make consistent and reliable assumptions about the color pipeline between content shown in a browser and the actual pixel values sent to a computer’s display.

While most users are completely unaware of this, different monitors, operating systems and browsers vary in color output. In order to ensure each workstation is able to see consistent color output across images and video, color management applications need to be calibrated to the same specifications which can be quite tedious.

While creative applications like Photoshop allow you to disable color management, most browsers don’t allow you to do so. This is why Mozilla’s Extended Color Management extension can be very useful for those that need to have material reviewed by another party remotely through a browser on a well-calibrated display.

Extended Color Management

In a new blog post, Mozilla’s Extensions and Add-Ons team revealed that some of the world’s leading visual effects studios including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) use Firefox as part of their creative process when making movies and TV shows.

As visual effects studios and their vendors began working from home during the pandemic, color calibration became especially difficult when compared to how easy it was to manage in-office. This is why Mozilla worked with ILM over the past year to develop its new Extended Color Management add-on.

Read more

> The most popular Firefox extensions of 2021 were both adblockers

> Firefox will no longer be so slow to boot up

> Firefox Focus wants to help keep your web searches private

With the company’s new extension, Lucasfilm and its remote partners are now able to see the intended colors and view ‘dailies’ more easily than ever before, especially when working remotely.

Global imaging supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, J. Schulte explained how the company worked with Mozilla to make it even easier to view content with color accuracy in Firefox, saying:

“At ILM we want to ensure that all content is as color accurate as possible no matter where we view it. The updates to Firefox have allowed us to increase the color accuracy of content viewed in a browser further than any other browser. When we identified a new use case for Firefox, their team was responsive and updated their browser to fill the need.”

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

YouTube sets out its plans for 2022 – but is it too late for content creators?
  • No Comments

YouTube has set out its plans to try and help its creators more, such as being able to shop within a YouTube Shorts video, better monetization options for channels, and better insights into how their videos are performing.

The content-creation company has had its fair share of controversy over the years, most recently in its decision to change how dislikes on videos are displayed. But with TikTok fast becoming a social media network focused on video, Google-owned YouTube is trying to bring out some features that can better help its creators, not only to earn a living, but also to prevent them from leaving for TikTok, Vimeo or another rival video platform.

Back in 2003, you would find it a challenge to discover a site that would only show free content, and the thought of being able to make money from your videos would be a dream.

But YouTube has grown into a place where you can freely upload a video and, if the views are there, build up a following and make some money. But its past mistakes have made its users wonder if these features are simply covering up the cracks of a larger issue.

Analysis: Reversing the polarity

In its blog, the company reveals that it is aware that it needs to offer features to rival TikTok via its YouTube Shorts feature. Going live with another content creator for joint videos is on the horizon, alongside gifted memberships, and guidelines for the live chat are on the way.

However, the point comes back to how creators have been treated across the years. A recent example was a YouTuber called TotallyNotMark, who delves into the history of Japanese Anime, manly Dragon Ball. He had most of his videos removed in December 2021 with no explanation, which wiped out his income overnight.

This was due to TOEI Animation, the owners of Dragon Ball, claiming copyright infringements on most of Mark's videos, with no opportunity for the YouTuber to challenge these before they were taken down.

However, Mark was able to resolve this after five weeks, and his videos are back up.

While he was able to get the copyright claims resolved, he spoke in detail about how the appeals process by YouTube was unhelpful, slow, and non-transparent, especially in regards to why the videos were removed in the first place. And this has been a problem for years, where some content creators have left the platform.

We reached out to YouTube about this and TotallyNotMark's issues, and Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, told us that “YouTube doesn't mediate copyright disputes—it is between the parties involved. We give copyright holders tools to make Content ID claims covering their copyrighted content and uploaders tools to dispute claims they believe are made in error,” Malon explained. “We also take the abuse of our tools seriously, and when we find instances of misuse, we take appropriate action in accordance with our policies.”

While it's encouraging to see the company announce more features to better support its creators, there was no mention of any improvements to the appeals process in the blog post. Perhaps eventually, YouTube will be able to look at how the content creators can appeal against copyright strikes, and save them the anxiety that it could cause them, as it did to Mark.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More