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Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind

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Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind

Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.

In an interview with The Verge, Costin said that he “isn’t aware” of any plans for Adobe to launch products that don’t include generative AI for creators who prefer to manually complete tasks or oppose how AI is changing the creative industry.

“We have older versions of our products that don’t use gen AI, but I wouldn’t recommend using them,” Costin said. “Our goal is to make our customers successful, and we think that in order for them to be successful, they need to embrace the tech.”

And according to Adobe’s President of Digital Media, David Wadhwani, the company is unlikely to accommodate creators who think otherwise.

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“We’ve always innovated with conviction, and we believe in the conviction of what we’re doing here,” said Wadhwani, acknowledging that some creatives have loudly criticized Adobe’s adoption of generative AI technology. “People will either agree with that conviction or they won’t, but we think our approach is the one that wins frankly in the short term, but certainly in the long term.”

Most of Adobe’s generative AI tools have very focused purposes, like Photoshop’s new Remove Distractions feature.
Image: Adobe

Adobe is in a difficult position — while many of its customers, particularly businesses and large creative teams, are hungry for AI features that can increase productivity, many artists openly detest the technology and fear how it will impact their livelihoods. Given the demand already exists, however, Adobe would be risking its dominant position in the creative software market if it ignored what many customers are asking for. If Adobe doesn’t develop these tools, other companies will, and they may not make the effort to do so in a way that respects artists’ work.

There are also communities of people online who harbor an extreme hatred of AI regardless of how it’s been applied, and will go out of their way to condemn and avoid interacting with it. For example, when a “shot-for-shot” remake of the Princess Mononoke movie trailer made with Kling recently went viral, it was briefly taken offline by its creator following intense backlash from fans of the original Hayao Miyazaki classic who felt the video was disrespectful or outright ugly.

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But the generative AI features like those powered by Adobe’s Firefly models are the most adopted products Adobe has ever released, according to Wadhwani, which is all the signal the company needs to continue on the same path. There are plenty of generative AI models that already compete with Adobe’s Firefly lineup, from both heavy hitters like OpenAI and Google, and smaller niche startups that are trying to carve out their own place in the industry. And in many cases, Adobe is the one playing catch up. The forthcoming “Project Concept” collaborative canvas, which also includes text-to-image tools and an AI remixing feature, is similar to existing apps like Figma’s FigJam and Kaiber’s Superstudio, for example.

Adobe says it aims to implement AI in a way that gives artists more time to focus on actually being creative rather than replacing them entirely, such as making tools more efficient and removing tedious tasks like resizing or masking objects. The company is essentially trying to appeal to both sides by giving its AI tools very specific purposes inside its Creative Cloud applications, rather than pitching them as a means to replace every aspect of content creation.

“If you just rely on AI for all this stuff, you’re going to end up with a lot more content that looks like the same content everyone else is making.”

“We think that demand for content is insatiable. We also think that human creativity will be a critical part of it,” said Wadhwani. “If you just rely on AI for all this stuff, you’re going to end up with a lot more content that looks like the same content everyone else is making.”

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What we’re likely to see is a greater divide between smaller artists and the wider creative industry. The demand for effectively every kind of content, from images and copy for advertising, to the TV shows and other media we consume, is growing rapidly. An Adobe survey reports that it increased two-fold between 2021-2023, and could increase up to 2000 percent by 2025, which is pushing companies to find new ways to affordably increase production. 

Generative AI tools — many of which promise to automate repetitive or technically challenging tasks — are a highly appealing solution to meet such demands. But plenty of people still value the work that goes into manual creative processes, and I don’t see that going away entirely.

Adobe now has a generative AI model that can produce video clips from text descriptions, which may eventually impact cinematographers. animators, and VFX artists.
Image: Adobe

“I think there will be a thirst for artists who do things by hand,” said Wadhwani. “In the last decade I can take a picture and run it through a process that makes it look like a painting, but I’m not going to value that ‘painting’ the same way I would an artist who actually took the time to make a real painting.”

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There’s little doubt that generative AI is changing the creative landscape though. Adobe says the technology will create new jobs, but those jobs will be different, and some specialized roles may disappear entirely. It’s also just difficult to avoid AI art generally these days — platforms like Etsy that were created for creators to sell hand-made wares are now inundated with it, and it’s harder for artists to find exposure online now they have to compete with AI content farms.

Adobe is the dominant provider of creative design software and few other companies provide a similarly connected ecosystem of products. That makes it hard for customers to simply jump ship if they don’t agree with the direction it’s taking, even if it is trying to be considerate about how generative AI is being implemented. But if its endorsement of AI ruffles enough feathers, then that could give way for new competitors to appease the users that Adobe is leaving behind.

And if the backlash presented by online creators is any indication, that’s a sizable market that Adobe is at risk of losing. It seems Adobe just thinks the opportunity that AI adopters present is even larger.

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OpenAI CEO calls GPT-5 Orion report ‘fake news out of control’

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OpenAI CEO calls GPT-5 Orion report 'fake news out of control'

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The Verge last night published an exclusive and seemingly well researched and sourced report (it’s great in my opinion, read it here) from journalists Kylie Robison and Tom Warren stating that OpenAI plans to launch another new frontier AI model, codenamed Orion — which may or may not be GPT-5 — by December.

Yet two hours after the article went live, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, took to X to respond by replying directly to Robison’s share of the article, writing “fake news out of control.”

Altman hasn’t elaborated much since then from what I’ve seen, and the response is notably not exactly a direct denial of the claims — he didn’t write “No” or “this is false,” much less describe which part of the detailed article is wrong: is OpenAI not working on a new frontier model called Orion? That would contradict prior reporting from outlets including The Information that it does have such an effort internally — which to my knowledge, OpenAI never directly denied. Is it not planning to release later this year?

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But it is clearly an attempt to push back on the reporting as it stands.

It’s an interesting quasi-denial given how precise The Verge report is, noting specific details about Orion’s supposed release plans and the fact that it appears to be geared toward enterprise customers and possibly would be served up through an application programming interface (API) only at first:

“Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally.

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OpenAI’s last release of a new frontier modelo1 preview and o1-mini — occurred in early September, a little more than a month ago. Yet the wider reception of these large language models (LLMs) has been largely muted, in part because they are expensive for both the company and developers to operate, and also because they are of a new “reasoning” architecture and are more limited in many ways than OpenAI’s GPT family of models, unable at this time to accept file uploads, or to generate and analyze imagery.

A new frontier model would help OpenAI capture the limelight again from rivals including Anthropic, who just this week unveiled a promising new agentic mode called “Computer Use” and new version of its Claude family of LLMs. OpenAI is not in ppor

Whether OpenAI does end up releasing a new frontier model later this year or not, we’ll be following closely. For now, it seems, fans of the company and its models shouldn’t get their hopes up too soon.


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YC startup Pharos lands a $5M seed led by Felicis to bring AI to hospital quality reporting

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Pharos

Medical and administrative staff are increasingly overwhelmed with piles of paperwork they have to fill out every day.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of startups, are seeing opportunities to make those bureaucratic processes less burdensome with the help of generative AI. These companies are building AI medical scribes, platforms for pre-authorizing health insurance payments, and products for automatically extracting medical coding from patients’ electronic medical records (EMRs.)

But Pharos, a company that was a part of Y Combinator’s summer 2024 cohort, is applying AI to tackle another somewhat under-the-radar administrative function for hospitals: quality reporting to external clinical registries.  

Organizations like Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American College of Surgeons aim to measure each healthcare centers’ record on delivering safe and effective care for patients. Although reporting to these registries is not always mandatory, it’s often in the best interest of hospitals. These external organizations play a crucial role in identifying quality issues (such as an increase in post-surgery infections), which can be addressed to improve patient care.

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However, reporting to the registries is extremely time-consuming. Nurses and other staff must manually sift through each patient’s electronic health record to extract the precise data required for each registry. “A single case can take up to eight hours” to report, said Ryan Isono, a partner at Felicis, “It’s a big problem, but one that you only know about if you’re deep in the industry.”

Indeed, Pharos was co-founded by Felix Brann and Matthew Jones, who had some exposure to the challenges of reporting data to medical registries from their prior work at Vital, a startup that develops software for emergency rooms. They recognized that AI can take unstructured data from EMRs and automatically populate forms required by registries. As they went through YC earlier this year, they added another co-founder – Alex Clarke, a medical doctor who also holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College London.

On Friday, Pharos announced that Felicis, with participation from General Catalyst, Moxxie and Y Combinator, led its $5 million seed round.

Pharos caught Felicis’ eye not only because the company could save hospitals money and free up nurses’ time for taking care of patients, but also because the area still doesn’t have other startups going after it, Isono said.

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Brann (pictured center above) predicts that other quality reporting companies will emerge soon. “We have five years of experience selling and deploying into hospitals, and we have top-tier AI talent,” he said.” That Venn diagram doesn’t normally overlap. That’s why we think we’re going to win.”

For now, the entire Pharos team consists only of the three co-founders, but they will be using the capital to hire a team that will help the company sell the product and maintain relationships with hospitals. 

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UnitedHealth data breach leaked info on over 100 million people

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The Internet Archive hackers still have access to its internal emailing tools

On February 12, criminals used compromised credentials to remotely access a Change Healthcare Citrix portal, an application used to enable remote access to desktops. The portal did not have multi-factor authentication. Once the threat actor gained access, they moved laterally within the systems in more sophisticated ways and exfiltrated data. Ransomware was deployed nine days later.

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Nearly a million users affected by Landmark data breach

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An abstract image of a lock against a digital background, denoting cybersecurity.

Landmark Admin, a third-party administrator (TPA) specializing in administrative support services for life insurance and annuity companies, has confirmed suffering a serious ransomware attack recently.

The company revealed the news in a filing with the Maine Office of the Attorney General, in which it said that people’s data was stolen in an attack which took place in mid-May 2024.

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Black Ops 6 launches with eyes on Game Pass plan

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Black Ops 6 launches with eyes on Game Pass plan
Microsoft Activision Blizzard A screengrab from the game showing three characters dressed in armour, holding assault rifles, surrounded by small buildings, grass and treesMicrosoft Activision Blizzard

The Call of Duty series is one of the best-selling games in history

It has been eagerly anticipated, but this year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally dropped for gamers to get stuck into.

The Call of Duty (CoD) series is one of the best-selling in history with more than 425 million lifetime sales and has made billions of dollars.

But this latest edition comes with a bit of a difference, with it being available straight away to subscribers of Microsoft’s Game Pass service – a first for a game of this size.

It means those with the existing Netflix-style subscription do not need to pay anything extra to play.

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Game Pass, like Sony’s rival PlayStation Plus service, lets Xbox and PC players play hundreds of video games for a monthly fee.

Earlier this year, Microsoft raised prices for all subscribers and added a tiered system.

As it’s the first mainline CoD game to be released since Microsoft completed its takeover of maker Activision Blizzard in the gaming industry’s biggest ever deal, there’s naturally a lot of focus on this approach.

Some experts feel it could bring more subscribers to the Game Pass service, but at the expense of actual game sales, with its true impact only being revealed in the coming months.

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CoD content creator BennyCentral feels Game Pass is “one of the biggest elements this year”.

“The fact that it’s going to give people so much access, whether they’re playing on Xbox or they’re playing on PC, they’re going to be able to play the full game as part of that subscription,” he says.

Benny CoD streamer Benny Central, wearing a black hoody, looking into the distance with a green curtain backgroundBenny

BennyCentral loves the fast-paced nature of CoD

Benny, who has Game Pass, tells BBC Newsbeat it will “widen the player base” of people that may not have played Black Ops in the past.

“They might be more likely to kind of hop on and try it for the first time.”

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Fellow creator OllMS, who uses the Battlenet platform instead, agrees and thinks this approach by Microsoft can make the game “more accessible to a wider range of audience”.

“Especially younger people who may not be able to buy the game straight away, who would maybe wait until Christmas to get the game given to them by their parents.”

CoD has regularly topped PlayStation charts for its top-selling game, and Microsoft signed a 10-year deal to keep the game on Sony and Nintendo gaming platforms.

But while there have been some concerns around what it could mean for PlayStation users, who still have to pay the full price, OllMS thinks it’s also a boost from the perspective of content creators.

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“It’ll be really exciting to be able to make content for even more people right from the launch.”

Microsoft Activision Blizzard A screengrab from the game, of several characters battling zombie-like figures in the game, with one character at a higher vantage point on a roof, as several others fight below. There are palm trees in the distance with pink lasers being shot into the sky.Microsoft Activision Blizzard

Benny and OllMS are fans of the omnimovement in the new game

The CoD Black Ops spin-offs are generally well-regarded by fans for their single-player campaigns and the developers will be hoping this one lands well after the poor reception of last year’s Modern Warfare 3.

Benny and OllMS, who both had access to the beta version, are excited for the game because of some of the newer features.

With Black Ops 6, Benny points to omnimovement as a feature he is excited for, saying he feels it could “revolutionise how CoD is played”.

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“The fact that you’ve got that complete 360-degree movement, is going to give players a huge opportunity to shoulder opponents, kind of bait people in and create some incredible plays,” he says.

“We saw a few in the beta already, with people doing some incredible things with sniper rifles.”

OllMS is also a fan of some of the weapons, which he says were in earlier versions and have been brought back, such as the AS VAL – a type of assault rifle.

“Which is going to be fun to use, in combination with the omnimovement,” he says.

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“There’s going to be ways of making content and making plays that people have never seen before.”

OllMS OllMS, a male CoD content creator, wearing a white tshirt while playing on a games console holding a black controller and looking into a screen while smiling. Behind him are several other gamers sitting on sofas.OllMS

OllMS is looking forward to getting his hands on weapons like the AS VAL

The story mode is set in the 1990s and part of the Gulf War, with the game reportedly being banned in Kuwait as a result.

Going back several decades for its setting is something Bennie is a fan of, particularly as he likes Black Ops games which contain things happening “behind the curtain”, and wants to see how that will play into this setting.

“It will be nice to see what kind of elements that they use, because it’s not an era where we’ve got smartphone technology.

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“It’s the way that world is built up, and how they’ve built up the missions.

“Every single mission is supposed to be a unique experience that you’re going to take away and be like ‘wow’.”

But with regular yearly releases, is there such a thing as too much Call of Duty which could dull excitement?

Not for OllMS.

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“I don’t think there can be too many CoD games that come out, because it’s something brand new,” he says.

“It’s something that a lot of young people and older people can get invested in, whether that’s playing with friends or playing solo.”

And they both think the game will continue to generate excitement because of what it means to gamers.

Benny says he loves Black Ops “especially because of the fast-paced nature of the game”.

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“There’s incredible score streaks and kill streaks.”

OllMS meanwhile loves teaming up with people online.

“And I think especially with Warzone, being part of a squad of four and making memorable plays with your friends, that you absolutely love is just one of the best things.

“And you can make content out of that so easily, because you’re doing something you enjoy,” he says.

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How to play the market for small nuclear reactors that tech is creating

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How to play the market for small nuclear reactors that tech is creating




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