Together with
Out of the ordinary. ICYMI, the term Pelé was added to a Portuguese dictionary last week to honor the life of the late soccer star following a month-long campaign from fans. The freshly minted word will be used to describe someone who is “exceptional, incomparable, unique.” What a way to be remembered. When we go, we hope our readers commemorate us just like this. #LifeGooooooooals
In other news… A tech writer experiments with cloning, AI slides into our DMs, and Indiana Jones discovers the fountain of youth.
Top Trends
YouTube → Twisted Metal
Twitter → James Gunn
Google → Michael J. Fox
Reddit → Jack Nicholson
TikTok → “Snooze” - SZA
Spotify → “No More Lies” - Thundercat, Tame Impala
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
WSJ’s Joanna Stern cloned herself with AI, fooling her own family
The Future. Tech columnist Joanna Stern cloned herself using AI tech in an experiment to see if she could offload some of her video work to her deepfake. Not everyone was convinced, but it did show a scary amount of promise. Whenever the tech is perfected, expect many people to sub in their own AI clones to handle anything that can be pre-recorded.
JoannaGPT
Joanna Stern’s AI clone had some mixed results in fooling people.
Using voice-cloning from ElevenLabs, it was able to fool Chase Bank’s voice biometric system to connect with a representative.
It even fooled her dad and sister on the phone, as well as Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who had a scheduled interview with her — but they all admitted that something was off.
Using a custom voice and video clone created by Synthesia, AI Joanna was less convincing in a TikTok video and Zoom meeting.
Colleagues and audiences noted that it had a voice that was too bot-y, had too perfect of a posture, didn’t use her hands, and lacked any wit.
It’s only a matter of time until the kinks are worked out, and a more-convincing AI clone can be created for anyone that wants one (Synthesia costs $1,000/year with additional monthly fees; ElevenLabs costs $5/month).
That’ll be great for people that want to increase their productivity… and terrible for anyone that hopes to avoid the inevitable explosion in AI-related scam artists.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI wants to automate dating
The Future. A bevy of new tools are enabling people to leverage AI to up their dating app game and sound better in messages. It’s still early days for the features, so there’s definitely a stigma on sharing that you used AI to score a date. But watch for Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and others to roll out their own versions (as a paid feature, of course) to give people the option to take the pressure off of stranger-to-stranger communication and automate their dating life.
Generate a relationship
What if avatars could be your wingman or chat on dating apps for you? Some apps are trying to make that a reality.
Rizz, YourMove.ai, and Keys AI help users come up with opening lines and respond to messages. And others are taking their chats straight to ChatGPT.
YourMove also can be used to craft optimized dating profiles — think of it as SEO for your love life.
Personal.ai and Snack let users create personalized avatars that can do all the chatting for you.
AI users told WaPo that apps mostly made them sound more clever, thoughtful, and forward (which helped set up dates faster). Others said that it would make them sound tone-deaf or just end relationships before they began.
So, you know, your mileage may vary.
TOGETHER WITH SHORTFORM
Reading, but better
Do you have an endless pile of business and self-help books next to your bed that you can’t catch up on? No worries because Shortform’s got your back.
With Shortform, you can get the key points of 1000+ non-fiction titles without committing hours, days, or years to reading them all from cover to cover. They create concise summaries of each book, complete with a clever analysis of the main concepts. Plus, they connect the dots between various sources, so you can know-it-all in no time at all.
We've been using Shortform for half a year, and it's nothing short of life-changing. And guess what? As a FutureParty reader, you’ll get a free trial and 3 months off the annual sub ($50 off!)
ENTERTAINMENT
Harrison Ford gets de-aged for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
The Future. Thanks to tech from Industrial Light & Magic, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens with a roughly 25-minute sequence set in 1944… with Harrison Ford playing a 35-year-old Indy. Ford was 79 at the time of shooting. The goal was to remind people why they love this character so much. If the de-aging feels seamless to audiences (along with some other high-profile projects using similar tech), older actors may find fresh opportunities to reprise roles that they always wanted to play again.
Dial back time
Harrison Ford got quite the makeover to step back into Indiana Jones’ shoes.
To de-age Ford to the same age he was when they shot the original trilogy (the last of those, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade released in 1989), he acted with a “myriad dots on his face” to capture his performance.
Other than that, Ford just acted as though he was 35 (is there anything Harrison Ford can’t do?).
ILM then went to work using its AI tech, with the director, James Mangold, able to see the results two days later.
What made the de-aging possible amid an incredibly complicated sequence (Indy fights Nazis in a castle; we’re psyched) was that ILM had hundreds of hours of footage of him at that age in every angle and lighting scenario imaginable. That body of work was instrumental in developing the young Indy.
You can see the magic yourself on the big screen on June 28th.
TOGETHER WITH THE SKIMM
Technically, it’s gonna be a great year
Want 2023 to be easier? Check out all the tech products theSkimm rounded up to make your life easier this year. From a mini humidifier you can place anywhere to AirTags that’ll help you avoid the daily frantic search for your go-tos, they’ve got you covered.
And if you just want to shut out the world and have some quiet time, they also put Bose noise-canceling headphones to the test (so you don’t have to). You’re welcome.
Highlights
The best curated daily stories from around the web
Clubhouse cuts an ear off
Clubhouse, the live audio app that was a phenomenon in the early days of the pandemic and garnered multi-billion dollar takeover attempts, hasn't drawn anywhere near as much interest these days. So, hoping to “reset,” the company has laid off half of its staff, citing that, as the world has opened up, people don’t have time to sit around and have long conversations on the app. So, the platform “needs to evolve.”
Read more → deadline
Ed Sheeran plays “Thinking Out Loud” for the jury
Ed Sheeran is defending himself in court against three heirs of songwriter Ed Townsend, a co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” who believe that the artist ripped off their father’s song. To demonstrate that’s false, Sheeran picked up his guitar on the stand and played the first iteration of the song, which had the lyric “singing out now” instead of “thinking out loud.” Sheeran is probably hoping he doesn’t have to do an encore if there’s ever an appeal.
Read more → variety
Walmart would rather talk to AI
The big box retailer revealed that it’s using Pactum AI to negotiate deals with suppliers for things like shopping carts and other items. Amazingly, it’s saving Walmart an average of 3% on contracts. Even more surprising is that three out of four suppliers prefer doing deals with the AI over humans… at least according to Walmart.
Read more → engadget
Did social media cause a bank run?
According to a new report from the Federal Reserve, the quick collapse of Silicon Valley Bank — the second largest bank failure in US history — was accelerated due to “social media-fueled panic.” The Fed said that the narrative on platforms like Twitter “reinforced a run dynamic” among a “concentrated network” of venture capital investors and tech companies. That’s the dark side of trending.
Read more → forbes
MSCHF rates your hotness
MSCHF has released a dating platform, Hot Chat 3000, to talk with hot singles in your area. But here’s the catch: you can only speak to people who the platform’s AI has rated as hot as you are on a scale of one to 10. So if the AI, a model trained by OpenAI, determines you’re a five, you only get to talk to other fives. It’s all a ploy to show users that AI models are inherently biased toward standard definitions of beauty. Hilarious and insightful.
Read more → highsnobiety
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Editing by Nick Comney. Publishing by Sara Kitnick.