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EPIK. Really, yearbook photos going viral? Yes, with a little help of AI. And smartphone selfies. And popular influencers. And yes, make note: no school photographers.
The AI app EPIK hits No. 1 on the App Store for its viral yearbook photo feature. EPIK lets users generate nostalgic, 90s-inspired “yearbook” photos of themselves as one of its many templates. Similar to Remini and Photo Lab, which I both covered recently, EPIK works by having users first upload a series of selfies, which EPIK then uses to generate the AI images – in EPIK’s case: most importantly throwback yearbook photos – featuring the user in different poses, with different looks and hairstyles. (Past Visual 1st presenter Photo Lab just launched yearbook-like templates as well, while leveraging its unique capabilities to only require the user to upload a single photo for creating the AI images).
How can the school photography industry take advantage of these types of AI-innovations by not just using cool AI to sell their digital services, but also to trigger photo print product purchases? I look forward to the discussion in our “What’s next for the photo printing market” panel at Visual 1st, which includes Jordan Moore, VP Marketing and Product, Chief Privacy Officer of school photography and yearbook company, Edge Imaging.
Meta. Generative AI features for advertisers. OK, Meta was a little late to the generative AI party, thanks to its obsession with the Metaverse, but the company is on full steam now. After treating its consumer customers with AI-powered chat bots to engage with 28 animated AI characters of celebrities the likes of 28Tom Brady, Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dog and Paris Hilton — built in cooperation with those celebs but running entirely on AI – Meta now also announces how it’s enabling their advertisers to use generative AI.
Meta's new AI biz features enable advertisers to create and swap backgrounds, expand images (allowing advertisers to adjust their assets to fit different aspect ratios required across various products, such as Feed or Reels) and to generate multiple versions of ad text based on their original copy.
Canva. The not totally gigantic yet elephant in the AI imaging room. Or: Adobe, here we come! Canva announces Magic Studio — a new suite of AI-powered design tools for DIY creators. Canva added a new text-to-video feature to its Magic Media tool (previously called text to image), powered by Runway AI. New photo editing tools include Magic Grab — which can select and automatically separate any subject in an image to edit, reposition, or resize it — and Magic Expand, which expands an image outside of its frame, similar to Photoshop’s Generative Expand tool.
Mediaclip & Picsart. Upscaling. Past Visual 1st presenters Mediaclip and Picsart are partnering: Mediaclip has integrated Picsart’s AI Image Upscaling tool with Mediaclip Designer, enabling Mediaclip customers to print at the required resolution even if their uploaded images were too low res for print.
Unitary. AI-based AI content moderation. As we’ll discuss at Visual 1st with Dr. Ilke Demir, Sr. Staff Research Scientist of Intel Labs in her fireside chat session: you can fight the flipsides of AI – with AI! Unitary, a startup raised $15M for its approach to use contextual AI to automate content moderation and keep the bad actors, such as NSFW images, at bay. The idea is: their solution can tell the difference between footage of a white supremacist rally and documentary footage used to illustrate the dangers of said actions. All sans human intervention.
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