Largest AD agency partners with the devil

I am absolutely humbled by all the new subscribership, we are up 28% since the last edition. Clearly, some of you are enjoying this and are sharing it with your friends and family, but not your co-workers because you wouldn’t want them to know where you’re getting your secret sauce from. Now, if you're digging our stuff, absolutely brilliant! But let's not forget, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Our deal? It's as clear as day, even if we've never spelled it out: you need to share the love. That means slinging this newsletter far and wide. Your mates, your desk buddies, your mini-me's. Spread the love, because that's the fuel that keeps this ship sailing.

👨🏽‍⚖️ ChatGPT hallucinates in court

🤖 NVidia partners with the largest ad agency ever to make on-demand ads

📸 AI Camera that generates the image based on your real-time data

🏁 QR Codes are about to be exciting

💰 Web3: Binance AND Coinbase sued by the SEC

🛠️ Founders Toolbox: 3 free tools that I’ve personally used this week

📷 A destination you should probably travel to once you leave your screen brought to you by an image that is not AI

Estimated read time: 8-10 minutes

So, you won't believe this. A lawyer, Steven Schwartz, was representing this guy, Roberto Mata, who's suing an airline because of some accident. Schwartz decides to use ChatGPT to dig up some legal precedents for his case. Here's where it gets wild - the cases he cites, thanks to our friend ChatGPT, don't actually exist! Now, the court's seriously considering whether to punish Schwartz and his law firm for this. Schwartz, however, insists he was just confused, thinking ChatGPT was a search engine. He's also saying the hit to his reputation's been punishment enough.

All of this mess was uncovered when the airline's lawyers couldn't find these "phantom" cases. The judge, P. Kevin Castel, has ordered Schwartz and another lawyer to explain why they shouldn't face penalties. No decision's been made yet, but it's definitely a sticky situation. The whole incident's a reminder of the potential risks of AI tools like ChatGPT, which can sometimes provide incorrect or fabricated information. So next time you're thinking of using AI for something serious, remember to double-check everything, or don’t, for the jokes.

WPP, the world's second-largest advertising conglomerate, has officially turned to the dark side. They recently partnered with NVIDIA to build an artificial intelligence platform that generates marketing materials at impossible speeds.

While ad agencies have long relied on underpaid creatives and interns to produce ads, WPP decided human beings are fallible, inefficient sacks of meat. So they ripped out their Creative Departments and replaced them with NVIDIA's dystopian AI platforms, merging 3D design tools, stock photos, and video libraries into a massive, self-creating advertising monster.

During a keynote, NVIDIA demoed their AI platform along with Omniverse which showcased how brands can now churn out content that's product-accurate, brand-compliant, and generated quicker and more efficiently than ever.

The process kicks off by creating a precise digital twin of a product with Omniverse Cloud, linking product design data from prevalent industry tools.

WPP has effectively built a doomsday device for mass-producing advertising at the push of a button. An endlessly optimizing, self-improving AI that will allow brands to micro-target people with machine precision and in humanly impossible volumes.

Here's an example of how WPP's new AI tool could work in real life:

Say you're Coca-Cola and you want to launch a new flavored soda targeting health-conscious Millennials. You go to your ad agency, WPP, and say "we need a social media marketing campaign for our new low-sugar, gluten-free, vegan-friendly soda."

WPP's AI kicks into action:

1. It taps into its database of Millennial consumer data and personalities to identify key segments to target - like yoga moms, college students, and organic foodies.

2. It pulls from its collection of stock photos, designs, and video clips to quickly generate hundreds of social media ads tailored for each target segment. The ads feature young, diverse models enjoying a can of the new soda at the gym, at home, on campus, etc.

3. It optimizes all the ads for different social platforms - square ads for Instagram, vertical ads for Snapchat stories, longer videos for YouTube and Facebook. All customized for the right audiences.

4. It A/B tests the different ads at large scale across social channels to see which ones resonate the most. It tracks engagement, views, and click-throughs to identify the high-performing winners.

5. It takes the winning ads and scales them massively across Millennial audiences on social media. It tweaks and optimizes them over time based on new data to maximize the effectiveness.

6. Meanwhile, it's generating thousands of additional banner ads, email ads, and other digital assets to blanket Millennials everywhere and drive buzz and trial for the new soda all powered by AI, big data, and automation at a scale and efficiency never possible with human creatives alone.

That's a glimpse of how WPP's new AI could revolutionize marketing campaigns and serve up mass customized ads for major brands.

A gentleman from the Netherlands has invented a contextual camera that uses your location data and AI to “visualize” a photo. The camera taps into open APIs to soak up data from its surroundings. It's like a sponge, absorbing everything from the address, weather, time of day, to nearby hotspots. It then weaves this data into a narrative that paints a picture of the here and now.

Next, it's time for the AI to step in. Using a text-to-image AI, Paragraphica takes this narrative and morphs it into a "photo". But this isn't your grandma's Polaroid.

These "photos" are complex, nuanced, and layered. They're not just capturing a moment in time, they're reflecting the essence of the location, and giving us a glimpse into how the AI "sees" the world.

What’s really interesting is that these photos have a way of capturing the mood and emotion of a place. But it's not a mirror image. It's like looking at your location through a funhouse mirror - familiar, yet intriguingly different. It's a whole new way to experience the world around you.

The hardware he used its interesting, not much is required:

Now, because it’s all tech - you can actually test it right now in your browser. This has been blowing up so the server might be a little slow.

The days of old QR codes are over. A bunch of students from Asia got together pre-pandemic and worked on a project called (translated) ControlNet for QR Code. However, due to the pandemic, the project was halted. It was also halted due to the lack of available technologies at the time. The idea was revisited when Stable Diffusion and ControlNet started revolutionizing major industries.

The initial attempts with ControlNet, coupled with Stable Diffusion, led the team to generate a QR code that looks like a regular picture. The images thus generated were modified using three positioning points to become scannable as QR codes.

Training the ControlNet requires large data volumes and high computing power, as the paper notes a need for between 80,000 to 3 million images and a training time of up to 600 A100 GPU hours. The team had access to Google TPU v4 for the training of 3 million images.

Founders’ Toolbox: A Spotlight

Every week, I play with dozens and dozens of new tools and I’ll derive a few that are worthy of your experimentation.

• Uncrop - fresh off the press from a reputable company, Stability AI. This does what Adobe’s generative fill does, but for free, no signup, no app. Give it a try! (uses stable diffusion XL)

• Runway Gen-2 - Text-to-Video. We covered gen-1 before, but Gen-2 was released this week for web & iOS.

• Rude Clippy - This is more for fun, chat with a rude clippy in a WinXP environment. You can even play the classic minesweeper use paint.

The Renegade Explorer

As some of you may know, I embarked on a backpacking journey across the globe in 2022/2023, and I've been lucky enough to explore some amazing off-the-beaten-path locations along the way. As we all know, life can be overwhelming at times, and it's important to take a break and nurture our sense of curiosity. Each week I feature a breathtaking destination alongside some beautiful photography that will inspire your next adventure.

In a landscape teeming with vitality, a solitary monument stands as an eerie specter of the past. This week's haunting intrigue, a skeletal edifice, bears the indelible scars of a horrific event that forever altered the course of history. Its bare bones, a chilling testament to a moment when the very fabric of existence was torn asunder by an explosion of unthinkable magnitude.

While life around it thrives, this structure stands frozen in time, whispering tales of devastation in the shadow of humanity's deadliest invention. The serene parklands and tranquil rivers that surround it only heighten the disquieting contrast.

Its existence serves as an enduring reminder of a catastrophic era. As one of the few remaining witnesses to the destructive power of the atomic age, it imparts a deeply humbling lesson, as chilling as it is poignant. Far from a casual exploration, this monument is a journey into the darkest corners of human history.