Latest news with #Midjourney
International Business Times
4 hours ago
- Business
- International Business Times
Tengr.ai: A privacy-by-design generative AI platform
Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping industries from media to medicine, although with concerns around privacy, transparency, data integrity and ethics on the rise. A recent report from Deloitte indicated heightened skepticism with over 78% of users finding it challenging to control the data collected about them. AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion raise serious privacy concerns, from using personal photos without consent in training data to unintentionally recreating real faces. They've also been used to create fake identities in online scams. As the technology evolves, experts warn that safeguards, especially for vulnerable groups like children; are lagging behind. Hungary based company aims to tackle that, with its privacy-by-design creativeGenAI platform, which is used by over 500,000 users worldwide. What is is the ethical image generation infrastructure that lets users create without censorship issues or data harvesting designed for creators, businesses, educators and more with a strong emphasis on user privacy and creative freedom. The company employs its proprietary Hyperalign™ technology to balance uncensored creative expression with safety. This allows the generation of diverse content while preventing misuse, such as deepfakes or harmful imagery. "Users retain full ownership of the images they create, enabling them to use their creations for commercial purposes without restrictions," says Péter W. Szabó, CEO and co-founder of How Works Unlike competitors that harvest personal data or impose restrictive licenses, is designed with privacy at its core. It does not collect or store any personal information, and users maintain full commercial rights to all images they create. Its Hyperalign™ technology quietly converts risky prompts into safe, compliant results, avoiding the constant battle of traditional filters while maintaining seamless creative freedom. also recently announced its Quantum 3.0; an upgraded image generation engine which sets a benchmark for prompt fidelity, rendering speed, photorealism, all while retaining the existing infrastructure. "Quantum 3.0 Engine uses advanced diffusion-transformer technology to accurately interpret complex prompts, reducing image revisions by 38% and enhancing fine details like hair and typography," says Peter. The Detailer Upscaler 3.0 claims to boost images up to 8x resolution with lifelike textures, offering "Details Only" and combined upscale modes for crisp prints. Its One-ClickBackground Swap, powered by ScenaNova, claims to isolate subjects and create custom backdrops. Why privacy and personal data is important "AI image generators are raising serious privacy concerns," says Peter. From models unintentionally recreating real people's faces to fake profiles used in scams, these tools can misuse personal data in harmful ways. Lawsuits like Getty Images vs. Stability AI highlights the unauthorised use of private photos in training data. Protecting personal data isn't just about compliance, it's about respecting individual rights and preventing real-world harm and to be ethical in an increasingly digital world. introduction into Web3 Brands like Jack Wolfskin and Tesa SE are already using for product visualisation, while the company's architectural partner Zindak AI uses the platform to turn sketches and CAD renders to photorealistic imagery. is also introducing its native $TENGR utility token into its platform to enhance user engagement and expand its ecosystem. Earlier this year, completed an equity funding round aimed at developing and launching its $TENGR utility token, integrating blockchain tech into its platform. Through Web3 initiatives and a utility token, the platform aims to empower and monetise its community in a more collaborative way, ensuring that no personal data is collected or stored, and users retain full commercial rights to every image they generate with ethical solution.
Business Insider
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
MrBeast is killing his video thumbnail generator after creators revolted — but it won't stop the AI tide
MrBeast is shuttering an AI thumbnail generator after backlash from the creator community. YouTube's biggest star was receptive to criticism from his peers. Will Meta, TikTok, or YouTube listen if their AI tools spark similar outrage? The feature allowed users to generate video thumbnails by mimicking aspects of existing video art, including swapping in faces and other modifications. "You've made something that can steal my (and my artists) hard work without a thought," Twitch and YouTube streamer PointCrow (Eric Morino) wrote on X. Now, MrBeast is backpedaling. In a video posted Thursday, he said he's killing the AI feature and instead directing users of his Viewstats platform to hire human designers. "I care more than any of you could ever imagine about the YouTube community," he said. "It deeply makes me sad when I do something that people in the community are upset by." The backlash to MrBeast's tool shows the tightrope walk that companies must navigate when introducing AI features for creators. There's a fine line between automating work to help influencers save time, and offering shortcuts that creators view as displacing or stealing their work. AI is coming hard for creators MrBeast's thumbnail generator is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to disruptive AI tech hitting the creator community. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube are all marching forward with AI tools that will change how videos are made, and what ultimately gets watched. And I'd wager they're going to be less receptive than MrBeast to backlash. TikTok users can now turn static photos into AI-generated videos, and YouTube is planning to bring its AI video generator tool Veo 3 to Shorts this summer. If Veo 3 is good enough to produce a TV commercial, it's likely to make a big splash on YouTube. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said earlier this month that he's "incredibly excited by the potential of AI tools to empower human creativity." You'd be hard pressed to find a creator platform that's not getting overrun with AI these days. Pinterest users are finding AI images are taking over their grid, and music streamer Deezer recently revealed that 18% of all new songs uploaded to its platform are fully AI-generated. There's even a wave of startups helping users automate the entire process of creating and uploading videos to TikTok. Creators can rage against MrBeast, but the biggest players in generative AI are racing ahead. Even as MrBeast has shuttered his short-lived AI thumbnail generator, it's still incredibly easy for creators to generate thumbnails using other AI tools from the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney.
Business Insider
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
MrBeast is killing his video thumbnail generator after creators revolted — but it won't stop the AI tide
MrBeast, the world's top YouTuber, is shutting down an AI thumbnail generator he released last week after receiving heavy criticism from the creator community. The feature allowed users to generate video thumbnails by mimicking aspects of existing video art, including swapping in faces and other modifications. "You've made something that can steal my (and my artists) hard work without a thought," Twitch and YouTube streamer PointCrow (Eric Morino) wrote on X. Now, MrBeast is backpedaling. In a video posted Thursday, he said he's killing the AI feature and instead directing users of his Viewstats platform to hire human designers. "I care more than any of you could ever imagine about the YouTube community," he said. "It deeply makes me sad when I do something that people in the community are upset by." The backlash to MrBeast's tool shows the tightrope walk that companies must navigate when introducing AI features for creators. There's a fine line between automating work to help influencers save time, and offering shortcuts that creators view as displacing or stealing their work. AI is coming hard for creators MrBeast's thumbnail generator is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to disruptive AI tech hitting the creator community. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube are all marching forward with AI tools that will change how videos are made, and what ultimately gets watched. And I'd wager they're going to be less receptive than MrBeast to backlash. TikTok users can now turn static photos into AI-generated videos, and YouTube is planning to bring its AI video generator tool Veo 3 to Shorts this summer. If Veo 3 is good enough to produce a TV commercial, it's likely to make a big splash on YouTube. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said earlier this month that he's "incredibly excited by the potential of AI tools to empower human creativity." You'd be hard pressed to find a creator platform that's not getting overrun with AI these days. Pinterest users are finding AI images are taking over their grid, and music streamer Deezer recently revealed that 18% of all new songs uploaded to its platform are fully AI-generated. There's even a wave of startups helping users automate the entire process of creating and uploading videos to TikTok. Creators can rage against MrBeast, but the biggest players in generative AI are racing ahead. Even as MrBeast has shuttered his short-lived AI thumbnail generator, it's still incredibly easy for creators to generate thumbnails using other AI tools from the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney. MrBeast described his AI thumbnail tool at launch as "the future of YouTube thumbnails" in a since-deleted video. He was probably right.
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
How AI Is Rewriting Grief, Memory, and Death
On June 18, AI image-generation company Midjourney released a tool that lets users create short video clips using their own images as a template. Days later, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian posted on X about how he used the tech to animate a photo of his late mother, which shows him as a child wrapped in her embrace. In the artificial video, she laughs and smiles before rocking him in her arms. 'Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel,' he wrote. 'This is how she hugged me. I've rewatched it 50 times.' Ohanian's post, viewed almost 30 million times, has reignited a longstanding debate over how technology mediates grief and memory—and whether it's magical or dystopian. TIME spoke with experts on grief and memory to understand how this latest advance in 'digital resurrection' is changing our relationship with the dead. False Memory Human memory has always been fallible: while we typically remember the gist of an event, details are forgotten or distorted. Memory is not "a personal library of all the things that have ever happened to you," says Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist specializing in false memories. 'It was meant to help you survive." While Shaw feels positive about using AI to reanimate people, she says the technology poses the risk of contaminating and overwriting our memories. 'AI is a perfect false memory machine,' she says. Of course, people are capable of distorting their memories without technological assistance. 'My grandfather used to yell at my grandmother all the time, but after he died, he was the most wonderful man in the world,' recalls Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law and pioneer in memory research. And it's well-established that tools like Photoshop and doctored videos affect what people remember about the past. But AI changes the ease and extent to which content can be altered. A recent study that Loftus conducted with the MIT Media Lab found that exposure to even a single AI-edited visual affected people's memory of the original. Participants 'reported high levels of confidence in their false memories,' with younger people proving particularly susceptible. The researchers also found that while this technology could have beneficial uses, such as reframing traumatic memories or enhancing self-esteem, there is a considerable risk of creating false memories in high-stakes contexts like courtrooms, and using the technology to spread misinformation. Grief, Interrupted One possible harm: engagement with digital simulacra of the deceased could complicate the grieving process. Mary-Frances O'Connor, a neuroscientist and author of The Grieving Body, explains that grieving is a process by which one learns to reconcile the reality of a person's death with the sense—encoded at the neurobiological level in one's brain—that they should still be here. She notes that for many people, the dead continue to live amongst us, insofar as people report experiencing their presence. 'Many bereaved people describe how every time they walk into a room, they see a hole that no one else is seeing.' O'Connor notes that 'all cultures, in all periods of history, have used whatever technology they could to connect with their deceased loved ones.' Once cameras were invented, for example, people began keeping photos of the deceased in their homes. In 2020, documentarians in South Korea used virtual-reality to create a structured experience for a mother to reunite with her daughter, who she lost to a rare medical illness. While the experience helped the mother process her daughter's death, it was met with concern by Western media. Perhaps the key question, she says, is whether AI helps us connect to our late loved ones, or reinforces the idea that they are everlasting. Given the unprecedented nature of the current moment, it may be too early to tell. 'We're in a massively novel situation: the dead have never been this talkative before,' says Elaine Kasket, a cyberpsychologist and author of All the Ghosts in the Machine. Between traces left online and the ability to digitize old letters, photos, and other records, we have access to more 'digital remains' than ever. Kasket believes she has access to sufficient material from her friend, for example, to have a conversation with a machine that would be 'functionally indistinguishable' from one with his human counterpart. As human memory is already hallucinatory and reconstructive, she wonders: 'is the fiction from the machine unhealthier than the fiction from within our own heads?' It depends what function it serves. Dead Intelligence With frontier AI companies investing billions of dollars in creating 'agents,' AI systems may become increasingly convincing stand-ins for the dead—it is not difficult to imagine, for example, soon being able to videocall a simulacra of a grandparent. 'I think that would be a beautiful future,' says Shaw, while emphasizing the need to prevent the AI being weaponized against the person. 'It feels like an atheist version of being able to talk to ghosts,' she says. Alongside the questions of whether this is good or bad, and whether it is truly distinct from what has come before, is the question of who stands to benefit. O'Connor notes that people have long profited from the bereaved, from mediums and seances to intercessionary prayers in the Catholic church, where a priest would only pray for the soul of the deceased for a fee. There may be real therapeutic and emotional value in being able to reconnect and potentially achieve closure with lost loved ones, in the same way that some people find value in texting or posting to somebody's social media feed after they're gone, says Shaw. 'If people want to do this in their own private world, because it makes them feel happier, what's the harm?' says Loftus. For O'Connor, cause for concern arises when somebody is engaging with the deceased to the exclusion of other important aspects of their life, or when they become secretive about their behaviour. On the whole, though, she emphasizes the remarkable resilience of human beings: 'this will be one more thing we learn to adjust to.' Kasket sees a risk that reliance on digital reincarnates renders us brittle: if all the 'difficulty and mess and pain' associated with human relationships can be scrubbed away, we may be left vulnerable to life's unexpected challenges. At the point where we 'pathologize and problematize the natural finitude and impermanence of carbon-based life forms such as ourselves, we really need to take a beat and think about what we're doing here,' she says.
Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Business
- Time Magazine
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Anysphere
Even among AI startup unicorns, Anysphere stands out for its rocket-like ascent. Coding might be the first industry already being widely outsourced to AI, and Anysphere's popular AI-powered coding assistance software, Cursor, is redefining how many developers do their jobs. Able to generate code in any programming language, Cursor creates new functions, and offers suggestions and edits, based on software engineers' prompts. In June, the three-year-old company hit a valuation of $9.9 billion, and this year, it became one of the fastest companies to achieve $100 million in annual recurring revenue. 'It is clear to us that software engineering will change,' says Anysphere President Oskar Schulz. 'Anysphere's mission is to accelerate this evolution and reimagine what coding will look like in the future.' With developers at OpenAI, Midjourney, Shopify, Instacart and other businesses now using Cursor, that future is already arriving.
