The European Parliament on Wednesday took a major step to legislate artificial intelligence, passing a draft of the AI Act, which puts restrictions on many of what are believed to be the technology’s riskiest uses. The EU has been leading the world in advancing AI regulation, and observers are already citing this developing law as a model framework for global policymakers eager to place guardrails on this rapidly advancing technology. Among the Act’s key tenets: it will dramatically curtail use of facial recognition software and require AI firms such as OpenAI to disclose more about their training data. Read more

Meta Platforms has debuted what’s being called “ChatGPT for audio.” MusicGen is an AI music generator that can create tunes from natural language or song snippets. The company says MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 hours of “high-quality” licensed songs and 390,000 instrumental tracks. Meta released MusicGen on GitHub this past weekend, and is currently demoing the app on Facebook’s Hugging Face page. Visitors can generate tunes by describing the sound they want. Among Meta’s prompts: “80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background.” Read more

Entertainment and communications leaders explored the impact of artificial intelligence and anticipated the larger changes ahead at the inaugural Synthetic Media Summit, presented by the Entertainment Technology Center at USC in partnership with NAB Amplify, SMPTE and sponsor Wizeline, in conjunction with the USC School of Cinematic Arts and USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Speakers addressed how new technology will make VFX cheaper and faster for studios, while for indies it will open new frontiers. Teaming AI with tools such as Unreal Engine is expected to level the playing field and launch a new era of virtual production. Read more

Meta Platforms continues to make progress on a mission to develop artificial intelligence that can teach itself to learn how the world works. Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has taken a special interest in developing the new model, called Image Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or I-JEPA, which learns by building an internal representation of the outside world and analyzing image abstracts instead of comparing pixels. The approach allows AI techto learn more like humans do, with their ability to figure out complex tasks and adapt to new situations. Read more

Amazon has tapped artificial intelligence to summarize some of its product reviews. The feature, currently being tested, sifts through customer reviews to create lists of what purchasers like and dislike. The summaries carry the disclaimer “AI-generated from the text of customer reviews.” The move comes as Amazon is also deploying AI to weed out “fake” reviews supplied by “review brokers” who are also now able to leverage the power of AI. Amazon, which has identified phony reviews as a major problem, now uses machine learning models to detect fraudulent behavior by analyzing thousands of data points. Read more