Creativity, Ads and AI #1

Never a dull moment in the world of artificial intelligence, here are a few things that have caught our attention over the last few weeks. 

Back to the Deepfake 

Courtesy of deepfake video, Back to the Future has been recast, placing Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland in the fray. Check it out below, it’s scarily good. For more on the potential of synthetic video, here’s one we wrote earlier. 

AI rap melodies 

An agency has produced a song with lyrics and melodies generated by a machine learning model, trained on rapper Travis Scott’s music. According to Adweek, the agency wanted to “test the bounds of such neural network tech in creative capacities in order to determine where it might fit into brand work in the future.” Judge the results for yourselves. 

The dark side  

From mad to rather serious; a team of researchers in Japan have created what’s been dubbed the “Dark Emulator” - AI that uses astrophysics data to build simulations of our universe. The team leader on the project said: “We built an extraordinarily large database using a supercomputer, which took us three years to finish, but now we can recreate it on a laptop in a matter of seconds. I feel like there is great potential in data science.” True that. 

In your ears 

Finally, some light listening recommendations this week from our Shiny New Object Podcast, exploring marketers’ thoughts on the future of our industry; Diageo’s Stuart Le Brooy, Missguided’s Nick Bamber and Pandora’s Lizzie Widhelm.