Top-5 Weekly AI News Stories
Five stories this week, and they cover more ground than usual. An artist trying to stop being entirely human. Two image generators opening their doors. A Forbes piece arguing the Singularity is closer than most people assume. And Apple finally saying something concrete about Siri.
Here is each one, plus what we make of it.
1. An Artist Who Wants to Merge With AI
Gizmodo: “I Don’t Want to Use It. I Want to Be It: This Artist is on a Quest to Become One with AI”
The headline is the whole story. This is not someone using a model as a tool. The stated goal is to merge with it, to end up as something that is part person and part system, with no clean boundary between the two.
Our take: It is easy to file this under performance art and move on. We think that would be a mistake. Every question worth asking about this technology eventually lands on identity, and this is someone asking it with their own life rather than in a paper. Where does a tool stop and a self begin? Nobody has a good answer, and the question stops being theoretical the moment somebody actually tries it.
2. Google Releases Imagen 3 for Free
PetaPixel: “Google Releases Powerful AI Image Generator You Can Use for Free: Imagen 3”
Imagen 3, which powers ImageFX, is out and it costs nothing. Text prompts in, detailed images out, with quality that puts it in direct competition with DALL-E and MidJourney.
Our take: The quality matters less than the price. Free removes the last real barrier for anyone who was curious but not curious enough to pay a monthly fee, and that is how a tool goes from niche to everywhere.
We put it through its paces ourselves, mostly by making pictures of cats in hats, which is a legitimate benchmark whatever anyone tells you.
The full write-up is in our ImageFX post.
3. MidJourney Opens to Everyone
ZDNet: “MidJourney’s AI Image Generator Website is Now Officially Open to Everyone”
The website is now open to the public rather than a selected group. If you have wanted to try the platform known for its distinctive, slightly unearthly house style, you can.
Our take: The timing is not a coincidence. Google puts out a capable free generator and MidJourney drops its gate in the same week. Competition is doing what competition does, and the people who benefit are the ones who were previously locked out of both.
The thing that keeps this platform interesting is that its output still looks like itself. Plenty of generators produce technically correct images with no particular character. This one has a recognizable aesthetic, which is harder to build than resolution.
4. Forbes Says the Singularity Is Close
Forbes: “The Singularity is Coming Soon—Here’s What It May Mean”
The Singularity, the point at which machine intelligence passes human intelligence, has been argued about for decades. This piece makes the case that the timeline is decades rather than centuries, and walks through what that would mean for work, the economy and everything downstream.
Our take: Predictions in this area have a poor track record in both directions. People have been calling it imminent for forty years, and people have been calling it impossible for just as long.
What we would say is that the useful conversation is not about the date. Whether it arrives in twenty years or eighty, the decisions that shape how it goes get made long before it happens, and they get made by whoever is paying attention at the time. Arguing about the timeline is a comfortable way of avoiding the harder question of who is actually steering.
5. Apple Puts Generative AI Into Siri
The Guardian: “Apple Intelligence: iPhone iOS 18 to Launch Siri GPT”
Apple is rebuilding Siri on generative AI for iOS 18, with the promise of an assistant that handles natural requests instead of the rigid command set people have learned to work around.
Our take: Siri has been the weakest of the major assistants for years, and everybody including Apple knows it. This is the catch-up move.
The advantage Apple has is placement. Google and Amazon have to convince you to open something. Apple’s version is already on the device in your pocket, wired into your calendar, messages and mail. If the quality gets close to the competition, the distribution decides the rest. That is a real if, and Siri has burned this much goodwill before.
What Ties These Together
Two threads run through the week.
The first is access. Two of the five stories are about capable tools becoming free or open in the same seven days. The competitive pressure between the big labs is being paid out to users, at least for now.
The second is that the questions have gotten personal. An artist merging with a model, an assistant living inside your phone, a Forbes column about the end of human cognitive supremacy. This stopped being a story about software a while ago.
Which of these mattered most to you? Tell us in the comments. More of the same every week on our AI blog.
About the Author: Gavin Stacey
