A week or so after launching its video-generation app Sora, OpenAI is allowing users more options to restrict how their likenesses appear in videos. Previously, users had the option to either allow or disallow their likeness (called a “cameo” in OpenAI parlance) in Sora videos. Now, users can give instructions like “don’t put me in videos that involve political commentary” or “don’t let me say this word,” according to OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles.
Not an article this time, but a highly readable book that has been doing the rounds about China’s inexorable rise. Dan Wang’s main argument is that China is an engineering state, focused on building at all costs, whereas the U.S. is a lawyerly society, where it is easier to stop things from being built than to build them. The result, as Wang lays out in compelling detail, is that China now has gleaming public infrastructure and a robust manufacturing economy, while the U.S. has built no major public works in decades, and is forgetting its manufacturing know-how. Breakneck raises a sobering question about AI, as the U.S. economy doubles down on the technology: What use is abundant digital intelligence if it arrives into an economy that has forgotten how to apply it?