The first piece of AI-generated video I ever made moved me to tears – tears of laughter. Given the chance to fool around with Runway AI's Gen-3 Alpha, I dropped in an image of an eagle carrying off a wolf. Moments later, the picture sprang into life. Except the bird only had one leg – and its plummeting prey sprouted wings from its tail and morphed into a wolf-headed goose. It was weird and hilarious.

The last year was a roller coaster ride in the AI world, and no doubt many people are dizzied by the number of advances and reversals, the constant hype and equally constant fearmongering. But let's take a step back: AI is a powerful and promising new technology, but the conversation isn't always genuine, and it's generating more heat than light. AI is interesting to everyone from PhDs to grade school kids for good reason. Not every new technology both makes us question the fundamental natures of human intelligence and creativity, and lets us generate an infinite variety of dinosaurs battling with lasers. This broad appeal means the debate over what AI is, isn't, might or mustn't be has spread from trade conferences like NeurIPS to specialist publications like this one, to the front page of impulse-purchase news mags at the grocery store.

The last year was a roller coaster ride in the AI world, and no doubt many people are dizzied by the number of advances and reversals, the constant hype and equally constant fearmongering. But let's take a step back: AI is a powerful and promising new technology, but the conversation isn't always genuine, and it's generating more heat than light. AI is interesting to everyone from PhDs to grade school kids for good reason. Not every new technology both makes us question the fundamental natures of human intelligence and creativity, and lets us generate an infinite variety of dinosaurs battling with lasers. This broad appeal means the debate over what AI is, isn't, might or mustn't be has spread from trade conferences like NeurIPS to specialist publications like this one, to the front page of impulse-purchase news mags at the grocery store.

How long will the naked eye be able to spot the difference between images made by generative artificial intelligence and art created by humans? Ari Melenciano, an artist who works at Google's Creative Lab, squints at her computer screen during our Zoom chat and scans artwork created with generative AI. "I mean, I can barely tell the difference now," she says. The public release of AI art tools, like Midjourney and DALL-E 2, has ignited contentious debates among artists, designers, and art fans alike. Many are critical of the fact that the technology's rapid progress was fueled by scraping the internet for publicly posted art and imagery, without credit or compensation to the artists who had their work stolen. "I think the current model of AI art generators is unethical, because of how they collected their data--against the knowledge of, basically, everybody involved," says Jared Krichevsky, a concept artist who designed the memeable AI-bot for the M3GAN movie.

When the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021's Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world's first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of "generative AI". The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google's Imagen Video and Meta's Make-A-Video.

When the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021's Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world's first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of "generative AI". The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google's Imagen Video and Meta's Make-A-Video.

It's August 2022, and by now you've no doubt read (or more likely seen) something about AI art by now. Whether it's random jokes made for Twitter or paintings that look like they were made by actual human beings, artificial intelligence's ability to create art has exploded onto the scene over the last few months, and while this has been great news for shitposts and fans of tech, it has also raised a number of important questions and concerns. If you haven't read or seen anything about the subject, AI art--or at least as it exists in the state we know it today--is, as Ahmed Elgammal writing in American Scientist so neatly puts it, made when "artists write algorithms not to follow a set of rules, but to'learn' a specific aesthetic by analyzing thousands of images. The algorithm then tries to generate new images in adherence to the aesthetics it has learned." Currently there are a handful of prominent platforms that people are using, with three of the most popular being Midjourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.

On Friday, influencers and press crowded into an exclusive Discord server to organize groups of ten for custom matches on "Valorant's" upcoming map, Breeze. Amid hushed conversations about soon-to-be-leaked roster changes and complaints about worsening sleep schedules, there was a general sensation of optimism, one that had been noticeably absent the last time Riot Games released a "Valorant" map. Maybe it was just the sunshine talking. Breeze, inspired in part by creative director David Nottingham's time living in Trinidad, unleashes "Valorant's" agents upon a tropical playground. Look up; aren't those seagulls hovering overhead?

We all love the fact that computers can execute annoying work for us. Work we already know how to do, work that is repeatable and, often, also repetitive. For the past few decades, new processes such as procedural generation have been helping us achieve diverse results with minimal input, leaving us to focus on being creative. Be it in the shape of procedural level generation of early rogue-like games, procedural nature such as Speedtree or, lately, the vast possibilities of procedural texturing with noise procedurality as seen in Substance Designer. Neural networks that generate new data and in the case of so called StyleGAN's it creates images or sequences. These machine learning frameworks are making two AI's play against each other to test and learn what would be considered to be a realistic result. This is based on the library you are feeding the network.

Futurist and artist Syd Mead has passed away at 86 due to complications from lymphoma. Even if you don't know his name, you've probably felt his impact on Hollywood, especially on the science fiction genre. Mead designed Blade Runner's world and technologies by serving as Ridley Scott's concept artist, and he conjured up the lightcycle for Tron, among other fictional vehicles and gadgets. His ideas of the future also helped shape other sci-fi films' universe, including Elysium and Tomorrowland. Mead's background in industrial design may have helped him think up advanced technologies that are still believable.