Welcome to The Satellite, your monthly newsletter for brand builders, creatives and marketers curious about the intersection of brands, design and emerging technology.
This month, if you thought NFTs were a polarizing technology, AI has a few things to show you. New generative AI tools are being released at an astonishing rate, while the number of skeptics, haters and lawsuits are piling up. Meanwhile, NFTs aren't dead. The new year has seen a resurgence in NFT activity and a renewed push from big brands into the Web3 space.
Since generative AI tools are seeping into all sorts of creative mediums, we thought it was a good time to get our hands a little dirty and try some experiments of our own. We do love an adventure! The result was our first animation with AI assisted styling. And, we wanted to share what we learned along the way. This year promises to be eye-opening at the very least. See you on the other side.
It seems we aren't the only ones trying out the new generation of generative AI models. Several agencies and big brands think the only way to understand these new tools is to try them out in the real world. While there are a handful of generative AI driven campaigns from the likes of Heinz and Pantone over the last year, we should expect to see dozens if not hundreds more in 2023.
Matthew Ball is one of the preeminent writers on the topics of the metaverse and VR/AR/XR. He has deeper insights than most on where we stand and where we're going with these emerging technologies. And, he's generally very bullish on the future of the metaverse. But, he's also honest about what's holding us back. Right now, as software is rapidly evolving with AI integration, its largely hardware causing the issues. In this deep dive, Ball outlines many of the factors keeping us from full digital immersion and what it might take to get us closer.
Remember NFTs?: After beginning to decline in May of 2022, NFTs sales continued to tumble through the rest of the year, that is, until December when sales volumes rose for the first time in over 6 months. Now, January NFT sales have climbed higher than December, surpassing $300M, with a few days left in the month. The giant NFT sales bubble may have popped, but there are still signs of life in the digital asset markets with renewed interest in blue-chip projects and new innovations fetching consumer attention.
NFTs in your feeds: Some of that renewed interest in Web3 digital assets may be due in part to continued support from Web 2.0 stalwarts, Instagram. After announcing plans to let artists sell NFTs directly on Instagram last year, some positive signs are now emerging. Several high-profile artists have launched NFTs on the mega-social platform, selling out in seconds.
All that tech, and a bag of chips: The year kicked off with the CES Conference, where loads of journalists and curious technophiles lined up to try insane gadgets that mostly won't even make it to market (fingers crossed for that AI-enabled anti-snore pillow). But, the overall trends from the annual event often set the tone for technology in year ahead. The big themes this year, perhaps unsurprisingly, included AI, VR, robotics, virtual avatars, and convergence.
All that tech, and a bag of chips: There is no way that AI image generation would be where it is today without the massive amounts of training data scrapped from the open web. But, does that constitute copyright infringement when the output is something unique? We might soon find out as at least two new lawsuits seek to make that claim in court. One suit, brought by 3 artists in the U.S., is aimed at both Stability AI and Midjourney for their image models, and is represented by a firm already working on a similar suit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI for a generative code-building model called Co-Pilot.
Meanwhile, Getty Images, who has raised several red flags around AI generated imagery has launched a suit in the UK, targeting just Stability AI, claiming that the open source Stable Diffusion model "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” during its training process.
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Oodles of Doodles: The popular NFT-native brand, Doodles, has made a few headlines already this year. Last week, the heavily funded upstart that touts Pharrell Williams as its chief brand officer, announced acquisition plans for the Emmy-nominated animation studio Golden Wolf. The deal gives Doodles direct access to a talented team of artists for brand content creation, but the soon to be owners plan to keep the studio open to other client work, at least for the foreseeable future.
This week, Doodles finally revealed the details on the Doodles 2 launch, a new line of NFTs first announced last June. Unlike the scarcity model used by many early NFT projects (Including the original Doodles), Doodles 2 promises to be a much wider release of avatars with updatable accessories. The biggest surprise in the news was the move from the Ethereum blockchain to Flow for the next chapter. The change appears to be an attempt to make the collectibles more accessible to a wider audience.
The dawn of blockchain digital loyalty: At the end of 2022, Nike launched Swoosh.nike, a dedicated platform for Nike's push into Web3 where users will one day mange their Nike branded digital goods and earn rewards for engagement on the platform. Yesterday, Nike launched it's first contest for Swoosh members, with the winners earning an opportunity to help design a "virtual" creation inspired by their work.
Meanwhile, after capturing a lot of headlines last year with their Odyssey announcement, Starbucks has finally launched its revamped loyalty program on the blockchain. Waitlisters got access this week to the new platform that grants points for purchases as well as interactions and activities completed. Points earned can be exchanged for limited edition digital stamps (NFTs) that can be traded, bought, and sold though the Nifty Gateway NFT marketplace.
What the stock?: The biggest players in the creative stock asset market have been at odds over the rise of generative AI imagery. Getty Images banned the sale of AI generate assets all the way back in September over fears of copyright complaints. And, their point-of-view has been made further clear by the lawsuit mentioned above.
Shutterstock, on the other hand, announced a partnership with OpenAI in October to bring AI image generation directly to their platform. This week, that tool went live, giving Shutterstock members the ability to generate their own assets alongside the ones they are purchasing from human creators, or at least we think they are human.
This voice doesn't exist: While most people are fascinated by generative AI for image and text generation, not everyone has an eye, or ear, on generative speech. We've gotten used to generative speech models sounding like a 1980's sitcom robot. But not anymore. The AI research firm, Eleven Labs, opened beta access this week to its voice cloning tools that run vocal circles around existing platforms. With just a minute of decent quality audio, the software can generate a realistic voice clone that would fool more than a few attentive listeners.
