On August 20, 2011, Marc Andreessen published a pivotal story on'Why Software is Eating the World' in the Wall Street Journal. He says that more than 10 years since the peak of the '1990s dot-com bubble', a dozen new internet companies like Facebook and Twitter sparked controversy due to their growing private market valuations and occasionally successful IPOs. He writes, "My theory is we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy." This was a decade ago, but still stands true. The only difference is that the technology today has advanced to Web3 – a new iteration of the world wide web – which incorporates concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based systems.

Darth Vader, the villain of the Star Wars franchise, is now voiced by artificial intelligence after the retirement of actor James Earl Jones. Jones, who is 91 years old, has voiced the helmeted menace since 1977's Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (originally titled Star Wars). His voice as Darth Vader was last heard in the 2019 film The Rise of Skywalker. The space opera will now use an AI replication of Jones's voice, created by Ukrainian start-up Respeecher. The voice was first heard in the show Obi Wan Kenobi.

Imagine producing your own film filled with big-budget scenery, but from a computer. A tech entrepreneur in Germany named Fabian Stelzer(Opens in a new window) is trying to do just that by using AI-powered programs to create the footage, sound effects, and voices for a 70s-inspired sci-fi film. The experimental project is called Salt(Opens in a new window), and it's built entirely with AI-generated art. To create the visuals, Stelzer has been tapping publicly available programs such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2, which can essentially draw anything you want by relying on a mere text description from the user. On Twitter, Stelzer has been releasing Salt in short clips, called "story seeds."

A photographer challenged the well-known AI image generator DALL-E to recreate real-life photos that he had taken on a Leica camera, and the results are incredible, to say the least. After some prompt engineering to perfect the results from DALL-E, he presented the artworks next to one another with the text he had used to instruct the machine. The DALL-E images are marked by a multi-color band. Stelzer, a Berlin-based tech entrepreneur, shot the reference photos on a Leica M9 and a Leica M4-P and prioritized subject variety rather than aesthetics when selecting the photos to test DALL-E. "I got the idea while on vacation, and only had access to an extremely limited number of my photographs on my laptop," he tells PetaPixel.

A guy with no background in film or artificial intelligence is working on making an entire movie -- in a provocative attempt to demonstrate that generative AI art models can open ambitious levels of filmmaking to the masses. German tech entrepreneur Fabian Stelzer told PC Magazine that his 70s-style sci-fi film "Salt" will feature all artificial voices except his own, and that generative models will also create the film's footage and sound effects, too. From what Stelzer's been posting to Twitter to tease his progress, the film apears to be about space travelers who encounter a planet with an overgrowth of bizarre salt -- but beyond that basic premise, the neuroscientist is allowing his Twitter followers to determine which specific directions the film will go in a sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" style for the AI age. "I definitely want to have a'Director's Cut' at some point, or a'Community's Cut,' but the real goal is to transcend the medium of film into something new," he said. "Like enable everyone in the community to eventually use a model that lets them write their own scenes."

Berlin-based Fabian Stelzer (opens in new tab), who describes himself on Twitter as a'prompt intern' working on three AI-based projects, carried out the image comparison experiment using the text-to-image AI art generators Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. He entered the same prompts on each tool and used a 1:1 aspect ratio for the resulting images. With prompts ranging from "low poly game asset, Cthulhu monster, 2000 video game, isometric view" to "1990s clip art of a laughing crazy fax machine, windows 3.1, MS-DOS, early computer clip art", the results that Stelzer shared in his Twitter thread allow us to compare how the tools handle different types of requests. Midjourney's creations often feel very dark – almost apocalyptic. After all, this is the tool that was used to create the "last selfie on Earth" images that were going around recently (see our roundup of the weirdest AI art). We think this AI art generator definitely needs counselling, but it also seems to often produce the most natural results when it comes to artistic styles, particularly with textural details. Any artefacts appear natural, whereas in DALL-E 2 artefacts often look like obviously digital glitches. DALL-E 2 has a tendency to throw in random invented words, but it seems to be the best tool for creating photorealistic images and for handling facial expressions. Meanwhile, Stable Diffusion seems to often produce the cleanest results – Stelzer notes that it can create incredible photos too but that you need to be careful not to "overload" the scene.

Erich Stelzer, 25, died after being arrested for stabbing a woman, authorities say. A Massachusetts man whom police spotted outside a home, as he was on top of a woman and repeatedly stabbing her, suddenly died after being arrested Thursday night, according to reports. The man, identified as Erich Stelzer, 25, of Cohasset, reportedly died on the way to a hospital after police used a stun gun in an effort to subdue him, Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey's office said in a statement Friday. The woman had suffered "extensive stabbing and slashing injuries," the statement said. Prosecutors said she managed to escape from Stelzer and seek medical treatment, the Boston Globe reported.