Be Amazed, Be Terrified
· Veo3 & Runway · an OpenAI bromance · One shot at life · Hallucinatory summer reads · an Indian PS5 game ·
Dramatic, numerous announcements in AI. Do they excite you? Concern you? Exhaust you? Bore you, even? A bit of all?
The choo-choo train of generative AI, powered by big ideas, bigger pockets and unfettered momentum, continues to thunder down a track that is very much forming as we go. The destination is entirely up for debate. Whether this locomotive is hurtling to delight or is the proverbial train wreck, is anyone’s guess.
Depending on how plugged into the gen-AI scene you are (or how flooded your feed is with AI showcases) today’s pieces could delight, disappoint, startle, infuriate or just inspire eye-rolls.
Welcome to The Colour Bar this week, where technology, creativity and entertainment chug long together. Explore stories on OpenAI, Google, Runway and more.
▶️ Curated/Cuts shares life lessons from a golfing grandpa, coloured legal strips, and reflective landscapes.
Round it off with a new PS5 game from India, a Hollywood veteran’s memoir and a cult plushie taking the world by storm.
Behold, be amazed, be terrified: a Gen AI roundup
The cycle of Generative AI updates and new releases is rapid, with frequent genuinely impressive leaps. The last couple of weeks saw two more.
Runway released its latest Gen 4 ‘References’ to all paid users. This video shows us the remarkable consistency/control they are starting achieve over characters. Unlike a lot of gen-AI fluff out there, they are not mere eye candy. “With References, you can use photos, generated images, 3D models or selfies to place yourself or others into any scene you can imagine.”
The bigger story followed soon after, when Google released Veo3 amidst much buzz. Improved photorealism, better prompt adherence, consistency… you get the drift. But the most buzzy new feature? Sound. The ability to add sound effects, ambient noise, and most crucially, dialogue, to what you create; Veo3 generates all audio natively. The results are definitely wow-worthy; the potential for abuse is exponentially wow-worthy.
We have already seen plenty of examples of nearly-believable fake studio news pieces being generated, this experiment at creating fake news, and also a pharma ad to, erm, attract puppies.
A chasm of unverifiable, unregulated, uncontrollable proliferation of content.
Veo3 comes with (and as part of) ‘Flow’. The persuasively named AI filmmaking tool— think getting ‘into’ the creative flow, unimpeded by anything— is a workspace built for (and supposedly by) creatives, custom-designed for Google’s most advanced models: Veo, Imagen, and Gemini. It brings them together with the intent of making the storytelling process more seamless, more empowered (more hands off?). Flow brings vastly improved prompt adherence and cinematic outputs that excel at physics and realism. “Behind the scenes, Gemini models make prompting intuitive, so you can describe your vision in everyday language. Bring your own assets to create characters, or use Flow to make your own ingredients with Imagen’s text-to-image capabilities.”
As we have come to grow accustomed to, many of the showpiece creations continue to have a ‘montagey’ feel- shorter shot durations, unrelated cuts, diverse visuals… and of course, a creative thread to justify those. I’ll save that quibble for later… the visual quality is undeniable.
While many (justifiably) prefer to debate the ethical aspects of Generative-AI, demos like these show us the strides technology is making. When combined with proprietary training data, legal use of characters/actors, you can easily see how the windows of possibilities are being thrown dramatically open.
The technology and its rapid development are staggering; they sometimes sweep me away. If we find ethical ways to use it for creative efforts (which many will), it could help take giant, meaningful strides in storytelling. At the same time, the way we are rushing headlong toward this chasm of unverifiable, unregulated, uncontrollable proliferation of content and all the harms it can carry, is far more staggering; its implications mind-boggling.
Some Soup?
The Google I/O event also announced a “strategic partnership” with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and his generative AI storytelling company called Primordial Soup. [Which, depending on your view on all this, is either very clever- oh look, the beginning of creation; or a piss-take- where is the core of creative life, as human agency gets upended?] Its first film, ‘Ancestra’ is to premier at Tribeca. To be clear- it is a mix of live-action and generative-AI visuals.
Meanwhile, still with AI (and ‘IO’)..
The Jony & Sam Show.
This week OpenAI revealed it was buying Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup
Together, we’re building something bold: a new generation of AI-native hardware products… tools that help people think, create, and dream in ways we’ve only begun to imagine.
What exactly has it acquired for $6.4 billion? io, the artificial intelligence device firm led by Ive, with no product whatsoever. Yet. Or I should say Sir Jony Ive, who will step into a creative leadership role at OpenAI, where he'll oversee a family of new consumer devices. “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, to this moment,” said Ive rather dramatically.
You could be puzzled by the admittedly insane numbers around this deal (nothing that yet exists- this is very much a valuation of Ive and his team).
You could also be amused at the beautiful, engagement-announcement kind photo of the two freshly minted best buds.
You could be a bit of an AI cynic who looks at this as another hollow announcement in a land-grab, money-grab, headline-grab world.
You could acknowledge that Jony Ive is a legend in his field, his work at Apple has influenced many of our lives and the world at large- the mac, the iPod, the iPhone. Steve Jobs called him a “spiritual partner”, Tim Cook described him as “a singular figure in the design world.” You could let that excite you about what he has in store, why he has decided to team up with Altman, and what this could mean for all our lives in the near future.
You could also notice that this promo video is an attempt at a kind of soft, human, persuasive storytelling. Featuring the two in some gorgeous golden-hours San Fran light, it is shot in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope cafe.
I think it works in its own way, though it says very little. After all, once you have sat through nearly 9 minutes of Jony and Sam waxing eloquent about each other and San Francisco, a slate reads, "We look forward to sharing our work next year”.
Right. Thanks then.
As user @rix2177 commented, “I asked ChatGPT to make a limerick about this video:
Two visionaries sipped macchiatos,
While flexing their bold bravadoes.
“We’re shaping the dawn!”
But specifics? All gone—
Just vibes and some vague innuendos.
As for the accompanying photograph of the two?
Depending on your slant, this image is either charming, intimate, slightly odd or cliched. The internet never holds back, of course- reactions for the image and the video range from reverent and amused to skeptical and biting. Some felt it was like an engagement announcement (there is certainly an overall bromance vibe), some like me were reminded of Simon & Garfunkel’s album cover for Bookends, and others believe it is a not so subtle attempt at growing into the Steve Jobs mood (and space).
Ideas. If you think all they have is an idea, or a suggestion of one, and marvel at how this deal came about (“Jony finessed Sam for $6.5B”), then you could do well to remember Ive said once, ideas are, after all fragile. “If they were resolved, they wouldn’t be ideas, they would be products”. Shorn of scepticism around this announcement, I have always found that a nice little clip, to consider how ideas need to be nurtured.
A couple of highly sceptical takes here and here.
Summer Dreams
Hallucination alert. The Chicago Sun Times published an article recommending books for the summer. The list included books that don’t exist at all, books that existing authors never wrote, and oh, some real books too. In fact, only five of the fifteen in the list exist. It was an embarrassing- and frankly, ridiculous- AI snafu.
Once you get past the fact that a reputable, journalistic publication manages to let this slip through, we can probably acknowledge that this is only going to be more common. Such lists are meant to reflect taste and curation. That still means human taste. The use of AI to dream up such a piece negates that basic premise.
It is symptomatic of a wider, widely held ambition that AI will provide us with increased productivity, efficiency and speed. Arguably this is resulting in quite the opposite- a great loss in time, productive hours spent in managing the situation, and loss of credibility.
Not very helpfully, the immediate response was quite hands-off. “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.” Sure, but it was published by you. So what if it was distributed by an agency and written by a freelancer, whose mea culpa was relatively quick, “100% on me, I just kind of republished this list that [an AI program] spit out,” said the freelance journalist Buscaglia. “Usually, it’s something I wouldn’t do.”
Brian Merchant’s critical approach to AI and hardline stance on writing with AI is unambiguous, but he makes a worthy point about how we should not be surprised, nor wildly judgemental, of the increasingly common fact that people. will. use AI. for writing.
“(Let’s) acknowledge the extent that Google, Meta, and big tech have corroded the economy for writing and journalism—through, what a coincidence, their monopolization of platforms that facilitate digital content distribution.”
🎬 Curated/Cuts.
1. One Shot
You don’t have to be an athlete to imbibe the learnings from sport; not only a fan can grasp the lessons a life in sport hands out.
Here’s clothing brand Fantl Sport with their thoughts on ‘one shot at life’.
· Production Supernormal · Director Reagan Butler · DP Aidan Rogers · Composition. Liquid Studios
2. I Accept
An artist visualised the lengthy terms of services of large corporations like Facebook and Instagram, into an installation piece. This, from a couple of years ago by Dima Yarovinsky, was part of an infographics course at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. The project aimed to visualise how small and helpless users are, against large corporations.
3. OFFF
The OFFF 2025 title sequence, ‘Echoes of Creation: A Visual Poem’, marks 25 years of the design festival. It looks to gentle, even reflective visuals, to convey a message of inspiration, of the past, of timelessness. The message of the enduring power of creation, the inspiration we draw from it, and the role of OFFF as a catalyst for future works that, one day, may also stand the test of time.
Mukti
We get the first look at an atmospheric game from Underdog Studios in India. Launching later this year on PS5, Mukti is a first-person narrative adventure game set in an abandoned museum. It is said to grapple with “the underrepresented issue of human trafficking.”
Here’s the gameplay video.
This is the first title coming out of the Sony India Hero Project, announced in 2023.
· Underdog Studio · Vaibhav Chavan ·
Diller Time
If you are not of a certain vintage or disposition, you should know that Barry Diller is an American media exec / mogul whose sprawling career has included stints at ABC, CEO of Paramount and then Fox, launching titles like Beverly Hills Cop, Flashdance, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Simpsons. He has a new book out so is doing the press rounds- this interview with THR is wide-ranging and makes for an engaging read. Sample these nuggets.
On Hollywood: Everyone is more cautious and conformist now. Worried about being canceled or sued. The rough edges have been sanded off. We’ve gone from a town to a spreadsheet. And obviously that can’t help but impact the creative output as well.
On data : Utter nonsense. Garbage in, garbage out. You have to trust your gut. That’s the only thing that works. Most people are so insecure about keeping their jobs that they need data to justify their every decision. It’s like, don’t blame me, blame the data!
➕Quickies
Youtube TV & Film? Research by UK-based Ampere Analysis has found that 38% of YouTube’s global monthly active users are watching traditional TV and film content on the platform. Is this another great sign of how Youtube is something for everyone? Or a dampener that ‘Youtube content’ is singularly central to viewing and entertainment?
King’s League, the seven-a-side football league founded by football legend Gerard Piqué is landing in MENA. The seventh in the Kings League’s portfolio after Latin America, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, this comes with a JV with SURJ sports.
Coco+ Last week we saw Sesame Street move to Netlfix; this week Cocomelon leaves the streamer to head for kids central, Disney +.
Labubu? Pop Mart, the Chinese blind box toy giant powered by surprise toys and celebrity-backed collectibles, is now worth more than the makers of Barbie, Hello Kitty, and Transformers- combined!
Its recent surge is courtesy the Labubu doll- most sought-after, a full-blown hit selling out worldwide, and seen dangling from the bags of Rihanna and Dua Lipa.
If ideas were resolved, they wouldn’t be ideas, they would be products.