This week's best things

Art UK: Our impact in 2023

"1.4m people read one of our stories and we now have over 2,000 ‘evergreen’ stories about art on the site."

Art UK's 2023 Impact report is a real digital success story.

It highlights the potential for digital to help reach and engage new audiences, and deepen your connection with existing audiences.

"Watching my pupils’ enthusiasm in the classroom grow after The Superpower of Looking lessons has been inspiring. For children who may never have been to a gallery before, it’s been transformative"

We Should All Be Scared of OpenAI's New AI Video Generator

You have probably seen the buzz (and flood of examples) from OpenAI's new video generator, Sora.

Like the text and image generators that preceded it, it allows users to generate content based on text (and image) prompts.

Some people have been surprised (and alarmed) by the quality of the video it's able to produce, whereas others are less impressed citing the continued presence of many long-standing issues around AI generated video such as issues with fingers, physics, and text rendering.

Either way, it's a big step forward and if other AI developments are anything to go by, the speed of improvement from here is likely to be very fast.

This LifeHacker article is on the more alarmed end of things, and the AI arms race certainly isn't show any signs of slowing down.

"We're pushing past the things that can trick you at first glance, but in hindsight look fake. Now, some of these videos are tough to believe aren't real. If this stuff can impress those of us who stare at AI content for a living, how is the average social media user supposed to know the realistic video on their Facebook feed was made by robots?"

When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever

An interesting article in the New York Times that explores the impact that AI tools might have on work, and the jobs market.

"Communication is already the most in-demand skill across jobs on LinkedIn today. Even experts in A.I. are observing that the skills we need to work well with A.I. systems, such as prompting, are similar to the skills we need to communicate and reason effectively with other people.

Over 70 percent of executives surveyed by LinkedIn last year said soft skills were more important to their organizations than highly technical A.I. skills. And a recent Jobs for the Future survey found that 78 percent of the 10 top-employing occupations classified uniquely human skills and tasks as “important” or “very important.” These are skills like building interpersonal relationships, negotiating between parties and guiding and motivating teams."

‘Music is the language of the world’: how a Syrian refugee became the toast of the Irish folk scene

A beautiful and sad interview with Mohammad Syfkhan, about the power of music to connect.

"Singing was his way of communicating, he says. “I did not speak English well, so music was the language I spoke to everyone because music is the language of the world. It talks about love of all kinds, the love of people for each other, and love of the homeland.”"

This might seem, at first glance, very technical and nerdy.

But it is discourse (and decisions) like this that shapes the tools and culture of the internet we will all be using before too much longer.

"Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.

The conflict harks back to blogging culture in the early 2000s, when people worried about their innermost thoughts and feelings being indexed on Google. These bloggers wanted their posts to be public, so that they could try to form communities with like-minded people on platforms like LiveJournal, but they didn’t want their intimate musings to accidentally fall into the wrong hands.

Barrett has no affiliation with Mastodon or Bluesky, but since the protocols are open source, any third-party developer can build on the existing code. As Bluesky federation draws nearer, some Mastodon users caught wind of Barrett’s project and lashed out."

I tried out an Apple Vision Pro. It frightened me

A very Guardian article but one that raises some interesting considerations.

"These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.

“What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,” Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford and one of the lead researchers of the study, recently told Business Insider."

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it, in a society where most digital experiences divide and isolate, cultural organisations have an opportunity (maybe even a duty?) to explore how to use these spaces and tools for meaningful connection.

There's also this article in The Verge about how "Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros".

“Despite being as magical to use as I’d hoped, it was simply way too uncomfortable to wear even for short periods of time both due to the weight and the strap designs. I wanted to use it, but dreaded putting it on”

Podcast interview with VIVE Arts' Sam King

My chat with Head of Programme at VIVE Arts, Sam King. We talked about immersive experiences and lots more.

Related to our conversation, a website launched this week which maps virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality projects around the world.

RY X live from Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, in Brazil

I'm a sucker for nicely produced videos of musicians performing in amazing locations (a teenage fascination with Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii may be partly to blame).

This video is enjoyable for a few reasons, firstly I really like RY X, a bearded, hat-wearing Australian who specialises in sort of minimal 'indietronica', and who I first saw live playing a barnstorming set at the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago.

But secondly this video introduced me to the incredible Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in Brazil which is a) very beautiful and b) absolutely not what I imagine when you say 'Brazillian National Park' to me.

Anyway, it's a good watch/listen, I'm a big fan of his song The Water.

This week's best things