My grab from the latest photo & video industry news

US Copyright Office. No copyright protection for generative AI-created images. Wasn’t “prompt artist” going to be the creative profession of the future? Well, it will be a lot harder to make money this way, as the US Copyright Office ruled that images created using the AI-powered Midjourney image generator for the comic book Zarya of the Dawn are not copyright-protected. With no laws specific to AI yet existing in most of the world, generative AI is very much a legal minefield. Read Axios’ high-level attempt to entangle it.

Canon. AI-based image enhancement technology. For our loyal readers or attendees of Visual 1st, AI-based image enhancement is nothing new, so it’s easy to shrug one’s shoulders when Canon showcased AI-powered image processing tech to improve image noise, color and various lens imperfections – were it not for the fact that Canon has trained its deep learning algorithms on a massive database of images that it has accumulated through the development of cameras and lenses, and have access to both RAW files (which have a significant amount of information) and JPEGs. No word yet as to how Canon plans to productize this technology. 

Sony. Creator’s Cloud. Sony is developing Creator’s Cloud, a web platform that in essence will be a suite of Sony and third-party apps designed to make workflows easier for creative professionals, providing features such as cloud storage and ways to connect with creator peers. Ultimately, the core of Sony’s platform is a camera-to-cloud system similar to the one Adobe’s Frame.io announced last year, with should enable seamless connections between camera, smartphone and cloud.

University of Chicago. AI against AI image generators. Don’t want your images to be used by generative AI algorithms? University of Chicago researchers developed “Glaze,” a technology that “cloaks” images by introducing subtle changes to the defining characteristics of the image style, such as brushstroke, palette, texture or use of shadow. The differences, however, are minimal to the naked human eye. But when a generative AI model uses cloaked images, it produces substandard image output, even if the training set was a combination of cloaked and uncloaked images. 

Apple. Web push notifications for web apps. Long overdue but great news for web app developers or those considering building web apps in addition to or instead of native apps: with iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1 Apple has added push notification support for Home Screen web apps.

March 15, 8:00 – 9:30 am PST

(5:00 – 6:30 pm CET)

Photo Print App Innovation

Live demos & discussions with up to 8 innovative photo print app developers

Buy your ticket now! More info.

$19 Early Bird Tickets TOMORROW,

February 28.

Presenters to date:

More info about the presenting companies.

Sponsors:

BeReal. You’re a viral hit, then what? BeReal, last year’s viral photo-sharing app that randomly notifies everyone to capture and share a photo within 2 minutes, appears to be sizzling. App intelligence firm Apptopia reports that BeReal’s daily active user figures have dropped by 48% from its peak of 20M DAUs in October 2022. Oops, said the investors who poured in $60M last year at a valuation of ~€600M. 

Like AI image creation app Lensa AI, which suffered a similar sizzling fate recently, it proves that it just requires a lot of ingenuity to appeal beyond being the “let’s try this new thing out” app to one that becomes central to the fabric of a consumer’s daily image consumption, creation or sharing life. 

Who did manage to pull this off? You guessed it: Snapchat – from ephemeral images to Stories to AR filters and anything in between, Snap managed to keep innovating, while engaging and growing its user base, even with big guys on their heels who mimicked Snapchat every step of their way. 

Meta. You’re a big, slow-moving incumbent seeking viral hits, then what? Then you mimic BeReal, even with BeReal already past its peak. Meta is internally testing a BeReal-like “Roll Call” feature in Messenger. The not yet publicly announced feature invites users to add a photo or video to a prompt to share what they’re up to at that particular moment. Only people who add to the roll call can see other responses. Unlike BeReal, where users are asked to share images at a random time, Messenger’s new feature doesn’t automatically ask users to post content. Perhaps a useful tweak to the to the original idea, but is it differentiating enough for users to adopt it in droves? Or does it not really matter for a company that could simply turn this feature on to its ~1 billion Messenger users and be happy if only of a portion of these users adopt it and generate a pile of extra advertising $s?

Microsoft Bing. Image creation at your Search fingertips. Bing is not only aiming at ChatGPT-created text that answers your queries, Bing is apparently also testing offering image creation right in your search results. Sounds a lot like the YouChat service from You.com, beta-launched a few months ago.

Best,

Hans Hartman