This Week in AI: What AI Thinks Your Life Looks Like

Image: Dall-E; Prompt: Dan Ackerman 

Coca-Cola's holiday ads have become a staple of holidays. But the beverage company may be getting some coal in its stocking after releasing one of its annual holiday ads this week, made with an AI video tool. The visuals we all know are there, complete with snowy vistas, glowing lights, polar bears and red delivery trucks. But commenters overwhelmingly said the warm and fuzzies had fallen flat.

Some of the most biting criticism came from the entertainment world, where the debate over AI has led to protests and union strikes, including from Alex Hirsch, creator of the Disney animated series “Gravity Falls," who contrasted the AI ad against the work of traditional animators or live performers.

For its part, Coca-Cola told the New York Times that it's "dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology." Coca-Cola isn't the first company to receive backlash for using AI-video. Toys "R" Us also became a target of criticism when it released an AI-generated ad earlier this year. 

Gemini remembers things better now

Google announced this week that Gemini will begin to remember things like your food preferences, what you do for work, the tone you typically like in writing, and so on.

OpenAI has offered a similar "memory" feature for a while, and users are increasingly paying attention to it. A popular trend on social media has been to ask ChatGPT what it knows about you, or even to create an image based on what it knows about you and your life. For some, it's become a mix of scarily accurate and shockingly wrong. 

[Editor's note: I asked ChatGPT for a similar image, using the trending prompt, "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like," and it came up with the image you see above, which is pretty dead-on. -DA]

Harper Collins asks author to embrace AI

Harper Collins has begun asking authors to license access to their work in order to train an AI, offering some $2,500 for the deal. One email pitch shared by an author online suggested that "several hundred" authors had already agreed to such an effort.

The Author's Guild, a professional organization, commended the effort as a step forward toward respecting writers' copyrights. "It is important to understand that the licensed use of books must replace AI companies’ current unlicensed, uncontrolled, and infringing use," the group wrote in a statement. "Moving to a regime of licensed AI use gives authors the power to say 'no' or to insist on limits on output uses and be compensated."

NVIDIA keeps chugging

Wall Street is continuing its AI-fuelled bull run with NVIDIA. Shareholders pushed the company’s shares near all-time highs after the chipmaker announced sales had nearly doubled, once again driven by demand for its AI chips.

During a conference call with investors, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said demand for the company’s next-generation Blackwell chips was strong, and that the company was on track to sell more than it had anticipated. “Blackwell production is in full steam,” Huang said.

Google Lens ups its holiday game

Just in time for Black Friday, Google is coming out with a new shopping technology that leans on its Gemini AI. The new feature is part of its Lens app, which was first designed as a way to be able to "search" for information on whatever is in front of the camera from a smartphone. Now, Google says that for products its app sees, the company will provide pricing information and local retail inventory, effectively turning Lens into a shopping companion. 

TechCrunch reported that the new lens features will start with beauty products, toys, and electronics at stores that share their local inventory with Google. 

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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.