Visit Us at Booth C4858 with our partners MAP Digital and Rooom. We’ll be podcasting right from the booth, asking exhibitors and attendees how their digital journey is going. We’ll also be providing a daily recap “Live from IMEX.”

With apologies to James Joyce (I’m even better than an AI generator when it comes to mash-ups), I spent the week playing with the new AI image generators, mostly with DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. Both work by letting you create art from text prompts. They have a humongous (scientific word) database of images and descriptors and create a mashup based on your text prompts. So you might, for example, say “Fall leaves on a lakefront painted in the style of Claude Monet.” An image of the scene you described in words is immediately generated for you. Here’s something quick I created using Midjourney by prompting it with “root vegetables falling out of cornucopia spilling onto the table.” It could very well be our new logo. 

“Root vegetables falling out of cornucopia spilling onto the table.”
Figure credit: Midjourney

But then I got to pondering. Who made this art? Not me. I didn’t pick up a single tool other than a keyboard. Not the computer. It knows nothing about art or composition. It doesn’t even understand what the words mean. This has huge implications for what we think of as art and the creative process. You can read about this in my column in Tehconomy. 

Who’s going to make money off of all of this AI-generated art? Quartz took a thorough look at how DALL-E 2 and Midjourney plan to charge for the images created. 

Also, friend of VEG Michael Hassard of TorEkland wrote to us about Craiyon, an AI engine that uses DALL-E and was once called DALL-E mini. Try it. It’s fun.

I made this using Craiyon from the prompt “Fall leaves on lake pointillist style.”

“Fall leaves on lake pointillist style.” Image credit: Craiyon

Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg previewed Make-A-Video, which critics are calling a mashup of Build-A-Bear and AI generators. We’ll delve deeper into what many are calling an eerie nightmare of a program next week, but you can get a good idea of the memes that will flow as you watch Meta’s movie of a bear painting a bear video. 

Disasters — weather, plague, terrorism — once were covered in pro forma clauses in an event’s contracts. Something you signed without giving it much thought. Today they are top of mind, possibly read before anything else in the contract. Skift covered last week’s hurricane closures as Ian came bearing down on the state. Some of these events were rescheduled, some went virtual, and some moved to safer locations (with generators on the premises). 

A force majeure has typically been used to describe events that are unforeseeable, but according to Investopedia, new questions are being raised about what is and is not foreseeable in a legal sense. Given the increased awareness of pandemics, asteroids, supervolcanoes, cyber threats, and nuclear warfare, every event has greater risks than ever.

I suspect you’re going to see longer clauses filled with much more legalese as we move to the new normal. And event planners of both the in-person and virtual variety need to do some homework about each venue’s backup plans, including onsite generators, postponement dates, backup servers and more.

You know an app has made it when it becomes the subject of an SNL skit. especially a skit on the season’s opening show. BeReal, for the uninitiated, asks you to put away your Instagram filters and “Be Real.” The photo-sharing app prompts users to post one unfiltered photo per day by sending notifications at random times. Users have two minutes to snap a photo and share it with their followers.

The SNL skit features two bank robbers trying to do their thing the very instant that Bowen Yang and the rest of the cast get their BeReal alerts for the day. Hilarity ensues as the robbers become intrigued with BeReal. The punchline? BeReal is at the top of the charts on the Apple App Store as of Sunday, the day after the skit aired.

PS Extra points for thinking about imaginative ways to use BeReal at your next event! 

Zoom One is Zoom’s way of tidying up its offerings by bringing “a variety of tools” into one package. Zoom One is now basically the consumer product (as opposed to enterprise). The big idea is to make Zoom Meetings, and Webinars in particular, a bit friendlier by adding sign language interpretations and the ability to attach a profile card including your name, company position, location and photo. Zoom Whiteboard adds tables to organize content and mindmaps to create flow charts. It’s all summarized in this blog on the Zoom website accompanied by a pretty, if still confusing, look at Zoom’s product lines. Good luck reconciling the plan you have now with the plan you’ll want moving forward. 

For me, the scariest new Zoom capability is support for Apple CarPlay. You can now hop onto a meeting from your car via the CarPlay CallKit controls. Please do us a favor and pull off to the side of the road before using this one! 

New Tools Worth Noting 
Summarize.tech lets you take the world’s longest lecture or most boring interview and leave it to AI to summarize the contents. Words of caution. This is a GPT-3 project, the same folks who work with OpenAI and DALL-E. But rather than images they work with natural language processing. Summarize will only work with videos that have been stored on YouTube and captioned. And while they had great examples in their online demo, my own tests did not fare as well. 

Center Cam addresses what may be the main problem of lame video conferencing was the focal angle of the camera, Ian Foster, the Center Cam’s creator, realized that having a middle screen cam lets you maintain eye contact while talking. The product is available for pre-order now.

One-to-One on Zoom 
Lawrence Coburn from twine shares this hack to make one-to-one connections easier with Zoom. Just install twine for Zoom, it’s free for Zoom meetings up to 15 people, and only the host of the Zoom meeting needs to install it. Open your Zoom meeting and then open the twine for Zoom App. Give people a theme verbally before you launch the twine, such as “How was your weekend?” or “What’s the best book you’ve ever read?” Tap the purple “Shuffle” button in your twine for Zoom app. This will send everyone in your Zoom room (whether they have the app or not) into timed, auto-rotating, three-minute one-on-one conversations. (Think speed dating for work.) Read more on the company’s blog post.