PJH Studios

Tag: AI

  • AI animation acceleration

    Disney is giving animators an AI tool to accelerate character animation.

    To maintain the “creator-first approach” that centers human artists — a hallmark of last century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney looked into “pretty much all of the AI companies.”

    “We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small, and what Animaj does well is that the artist is really driving the process,” he says, adding that you don’t really see this in video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text prompts and spit out (usually nonsensical) videos. “This is the artist drawing the key frames from A to Z, and then allowing things to be filled in in between. That’s why we selected Animaj.”

  • The value of AI art

    Josh Collinsworth delves into the value of AI art.

    The public reaction to AI-generated art, of every kind, might have been awe or joy at first. But the longer time goes on, and the more of this newly cheap material floods the figurative market, the more the reaction becomes decidedly negative.

    The output of generative AI is novel, to be sure, and it can even be enjoyable at times. But what it isn’t any longer is: valuable.

  • AI Agents and the DoorDash problem

    If you are a business owner, what happens when your customer tells the robot to buy something for you based on only set parameters, and ignores everything else such as discounts, loyalty, rewards, or upsells? That’s the possible future with AI agents performing tasks such as ordering a sandwich, or the DoorDash problem.

    But if people stop using the apps and websites and start sending agents instead, that business really starts to break down. Because DoorDash and all the other service providers make their money by having a direct relationship with customers they can monetize in lots of different ways. It’s basic stuff like promotions, deals and discounts, ads for other stuff, their own subscriptions like DashPass and Uber One, and whatever other ideas they might have to make money in the future.

    But AI doesn’t care about any of that stuff — if you ask for a car to the airport, an AI might just open Uber and Lyft and always pick the cheapest ride. These big App Store era services might just become commodity databases of information competing on price alone, which might not actually be sustainable, even if it might be the future.

  • The rise of chatfishing

    ChatGPT and its contemporaries are becoming dating tools, or at worse, crutches to mask social conversational deficiencies, aka chatfishing.

    Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

    Which is why the man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. “I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she says. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me. That’s when I suspected he’d been using AI.”

  • AI is gonna drink your milkshake

    Not only are AI data centers hungry for electricity, they are thirsty for water. So much that towns and cities are experiencing water shortages.

    Nearly 60 percent of the 1,244 largest data centers in the world were outside the United States as of the end of June, according to an analysis by Synergy Research Group, which studies the industry. More are coming, with at least 575 data center projects in development globally from companies including Tencent, Meta and Alibaba.

    As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times examination.

  • The Oatmeal on AI art

    The Oatmeal on AI art. Astute and poignant.

  • AI for science research

    Top AI technologists are spurning major offers to start an AI focused company specializing in advancing science

    Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move.

    As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

    “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”

  • AI teaches college English

    A long but insightful article where a college English professor allowed students to use ChatGPT for assignments. What makes the usage interesting is that he encouraged to evaluate and compare human centered writing versus the AI output. In the end, still began to critically evaluate how to use a technology.

    There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. There are also reasons I consider less valid (detailed in a despairing essay that went viral recently), which amount to opportunistic laziness: if you can get away with using AI, why not?

    It was this line of thinking that led me to conduct an experiment in my English classroom. I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.

  • AI ruined lo-fi music

    AI tools are making it easier to create generic, meditative music. Kieran Press-Reynolds at Pitchfork explores lofi, music, landscape, and the impact of AI.

    Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI breeding ground, crammed with hourlong mixes full of soporific dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated.

  • Have AI attend that meeting for you

    AI bots are attending meetings in people’s stead.

    Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call — others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was startingto impede human interaction.

    “I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he hasoccasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.