Improvements to Zoom and Instagram, and AI News
Today's Topics
Apple’s Podcast App Now Runs on Your Browser
You can now easily listen to your favorite podcasts in any major browser by going to https://podcasts.apple.com and signing in. I can see this being useful for editors who are iPhone users but edit on a PC and for those using a work computer.
Procreate Vows Not to Use AI in Image Editing App
Procreate, a popular image editor for iPad, has boldly announced to never incorporate generative AI into their software. On their website’s AI page, they say this:
“We're not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity.”1
Procreate’s CEO, James Cuda, also posted a brief video where he shares his and his company’s thoughts on the matter.
At the moment, I’m unaware of any other photo editing software where the company has officially made a stance against the use of generative AI. However, if you have similar views as Procreate and want a Photoshop alternative that doesn’t use generative AI and runs on Windows or macOS, then Gimp might be your best bet. It’s a free and open source image editor that doesn’t use generative AI, but some third-party plugins do. Just be aware that the UI isn’t as polished at Photoshop, and it has a steep learning curve. You can find it here: https://www.gimp.org/
Zoom Now Supports a Million Attendees
Zoom has just announced a major update on their blog. They’ve increased their attendee limit for webinars from 10,000 to a staggering 1,000,000! This is groundbreaking for large conferences because it allows people to attend events from around the globe without paying for travel expenses.
Interestingly, Zoom is offering event plans based on the expected attendee size, which is great since none of us want to pay more than what’s needed.
Here’s the official post if you want to learn more: https://news.zoom.us/zoom-unveils-1-million-attendee-zoom-webinars/
Instagram Expands Carousel Limit to 20 Slides
Instagram first introduced their carousel feature in 2017, and it allowed users to share multiple photos and videos in one post. This feature was previously limited to 8 slides, but the limit has now been increased to 20! This extra capacity gives us more space per post to be creative. We can share a lot of testimonials, books covers of manuscripts we’ve edited, or perhaps videos or photos of behind-the-scenes. It may seem like a small change, but for me, it’s big difference knowing I have that extra wiggle room.
Beware: More Deceptive AI-Generated Images Coming to X
X, formerly Twitter, has released Grok 2.0 to their paid users. This AI tool can generate highly realistic images, and unlike other AIs like Firefly by Adobe, it doesn’t seem to have as many restrictions. I’m assuming we’ll need to be even more vigilant about what we believe is real with how easy it’s becoming to create convincing AI-generated images.
I don’t feel comfortable sharing any examples of images making their rounds because I usually avoid topics like politics, but if you’re curious, you can see examples in this article: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220173/xai-grok-image-generator-misinformation-offensive-imges
On a serious side note, I can only hope more people don’t discover Flux, which is the AI model made by Black Forest Labs. Flux, which is open source and can be run locally on powerful computers, has ZERO image creation restrictions. Now that’s scary!
Footnotes
1. “Creativity is Created, Not Generated,” Procreate, accessed August 19, 2024, https://procreate.com/ai.
AI-Assisted Editing
While this newsletter is written by me, AI tools are used to help me copyedit my content, format the newsletter, brainstorm titles, troubleshoot issues, and generate alt text for images.