Instant messaging and VoIP social platform Discord is experimenting with a feature that requires some users to verify their age by scanning their face or a photo ID. The technique is being implemented in Australia and the United Kingdom, where recently passed laws seek to crack down on minors accessing potentially harmful online content. The safeguard applies only to users who haven’t previously verified their age on the chat platform. Discord says age verification aims “to help users manage content filter settings and sensitive content visibility,” explaining it is a one-time process that can be completed when users first adjust their settings. Continue reading Discord Testing Facial Scans to Verify Age in UK and Australia

Generative AI program Midjourney has issued V7 in alpha, marking its first new model in almost a year. Notable updates include personalization turned on by default, which users must first set up — a process Midjourney says takes 5 minutes — and can then toggle on or off at any time. Another new flagship feature, Draft Mode, lets users render lower resolution images at “half the cost and 10 times the speed,” according to Midjourney, emphasizing “it’s so fast that we change the prompt bar to a ‘conversational mode’ when you’re using it on Web.” Draft Mode also supports voice prompts. Continue reading Midjourney Launches V7 Image Generator with Voice Prompts

A new Discord Social SDK allows developers to integrate the platform in-app for games. Discord is massively popular with gamers; the company estimates PC players alone spend more than 1.5 billion hours each month on the platform. This free SDK can extend the user experience beyond the third-party content in which it becomes embedded to reach the platform’s community of over 200 million monthly active users. “Developers can power friends lists, cross-platform messaging, voice and more for all players — with or without a Discord account,” the company announced. Continue reading New Discord Social SDK Integrates Platform In-App for Games

Butterfly Effect is the latest Chinese AI firm to get global attention, having drummed up interest in Manus, positioned as a “general agent” that can scour online resources to produce reports. Companies like OpenAI and Google are competing in this space, called deep research. Butterfly Effect says Manus has surpassed OpenAI Deep Research on the GAIA benchmark and the world is listening. The Manus Discord server swelled to more than 138,000 members in the past weeks, and “invite codes” to gain access at this “invitation-only” phase are allegedly going for thousands of dollars on Chinese sales app Xianyu. Continue reading Startup Claims AI Agent Manus Is an Autonomy Breakthrough

Instagram is experimenting with a community chat feature that lets users gather in groups of up to 250. Meta’s photo- and video-sharing network is prototyping the feature internally, though external sources with knowledge of it are comparing it to Discord since it reportedly allows users to form chats around different topics and control who can join. While participation is said to be capped at 250 simultaneous users per community, all are invited to join and message. Instagram has had a flurry of new features, among them a video tool called Edits, and “profile cards” geared toward small businesses that want a more professional presence on the app. Continue reading Instagram Is Internally Testing Discord-Style Community Chat

With AI powering a range of new world-building apps, 2025 could be the year the metaverse finally makes an impact. Midjourney joins the world-building club with Patchwork, a collaborate canvas for creating “infinite” fictional worlds. Now in research preview, the tool is being developed as a standalone app, though preview access requires a Midjourney Discord account linked to a Google account. Users are able to connect characters and worlds, and “share” their developing world — evolving as a “board” — with up to 100 collaborative partners on Midjourney (though the company recommends fewer participants for a more focused experience). Continue reading Midjourney Touts Collaborative World-Building App Patchwork

Midjourney is turning heads with its new image editor, which lets users upload images and then make adjustments. The company’s models — most recently Midjourney 6.1 — accept uploaded images as a reference to use for generative results. Now the Midjourney image editor allows precise adjustments to aspects of the frame. An “image retexturing mode” is also being introduced, as is v2 of its “AI moderator.” The new features are only available to users with yearly memberships, monthly memberships for the past 12 months, or those who have generated at least 10,000 Midjourney images. Continue reading Midjourney Makes Powerful AI Image Editor Available in Alpha

TikTok is updating its Live subscription offering, renaming the monetization offering simply “Subscription,” opening it up to eligible non-Live creators in regions including the U.S., Japan, Brazil, France, the UK and Germany. Like the third-party subscription platform Patreon, TikTok’s Subscription allows fans to pay creators for exclusive content and other perks. In participating regions, creators can offer fans monthly subscriptions at three price tiers, each with its own parameters and perks. TikTok launched Live subscriptions in 2022 and announced in March that it would be revamping the feature to allow more users to monetize. Continue reading New TikTok Live Subscriptions Help More Creators Monetize

Canadian generative video startup Viggle AI, which specializes in character motion, has raised $19 million in Series A funding. Viggle was founded in 2022 on the premise of providing a simplified process “to create lifelike animations using simple text-to-video or image-to-video prompts.” The result has been robust adoption among meme creators, with many viral videos circulating among social media platforms powered by Viggle, including one featuring Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker mimicking the movements of rapper Lil Yachty. Viggle’s Discord community has four million members including “both novice and experienced animators,” according to the company. Continue reading Viggle AI Raises $19 Million on the Power of Memes and More

Artificial intelligence imaging service Midjourney has been embraced by storytellers who have also been clamoring for a feature that enables characters to regenerate consistently across new requests. Now Midjourney is delivering that functionality with the addition of the new “–cref” tag (short for Character Reference), available for those who are using Midjourney v6 on the Discord server. Users can achieve the effect by adding the tag to the end of text prompts, followed by a URL that contains the master image subsequent generations should match. Midjourney will then attempt to repeat the particulars of a character’s face, body and clothing characteristics. Continue reading Midjourney Creates a Feature to Advance Image Consistency

On the heels of ElevenLabs’ demo of a text-to-sound app unveiled using clips generated by OpenAI’s text-to-video artificial intelligence platform Sora, Pika Labs is releasing a feature called Lip Sync that lets its paid subscribers use the ElevenLabs app to add AI-generated voices and dialogue to Pika-generated videos and have the characters’ lips moving in sync with the speech. Pika Lip Sync supports both uploaded audio files and text-to-audio AI, allowing users to type or record dialogue, or use pre-existing sound files, then apply AI to change the voicing style. Continue reading Pika Taps ElevenLabs Audio App to Add Lip Sync to AI Video

Microsoft has added generative music capabilities to its Copilot chatbot by integrating a plugin from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup Suno AI. Microsoft calls Suno “a leader in AI music technology, pioneering the ability to generate complete songs — lyrics, instrumentals, and singing voices — from a single sentence.” Suno offers a generative tool on Discord. The Copilot plugin is specific to Microsoft, though the biggest difference is it will only generate one song per prompt as opposed to the app offered directly by Suno, which provides two. The songs are generally a minute or two in length, and come with lyric sheets. Continue reading Suno Plugin Gives Microsoft Copilot a Music Creation Feature

Teenagers in the U.S. are finding it hard to tear themselves away from YouTube and TikTok, according to a new study of 13- to 17-year-olds by the Pew Research Center. Pew found that “nearly 1 in 5 saying they use the video-streaming apps ‘almost constantly.’” YouTube topped the chart for the second consecutive year, with 93 percent, “roughly 9 in 10 teens” saying they regularly use YouTube. That far outstrips TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, which manage to creep to about 70 percent among a subset of teens 15 to 17. Among the total teen sample, that falls to 63 percent for TikTok, 60 percent for Snapchat and 59 percent for Instagram, according to Pew. Continue reading Pew: U.S. Teens Fixated on Video Apps YouTube and TikTok

After introducing the Chat Lock feature in May, WhatsApp has added something called “secret code,” for an additional layer of privacy protection for extremely sensitive conversations. A secret code makes sensitive chats “harder to find if someone has access to your phone or you share a phone with someone else,” the Meta Platforms subsidiary says. With a secret code, users can set a unique password — different from that which normally unlocks the phone — to give locked chats an extra layer of privacy. An additional option allows the Locked Chats folder to be hidden from the general chatlist. Continue reading WhatsApp Rolls Out ‘Secret Codes’ Privacy for Locked Chats

Meta Platforms-owned instant messaging and VoIP service WhatsApp has updated its Voice Chat feature for mobile so it can now host group calls of up to 128 participants. Voice chats allow WhatsApp users to instantly talk live with members of a group chat while still being able to message within the group. The new feature, which is being compared to a Discord server, is being rolled out globally. The idea is to have the Voice Chat be less disruptive than group calling, which rings-in all group members. Voice chats can be quietly started with an in-chat bubble users tap to join. The updated version will have end-to-end encryption by default. Continue reading Meta’s WhatsApp Launches Voice Chat for Up to 128 People