Adobe’s Running Circles + Chrome’s New Tricks 

PLUS: Green Screens are dead

Hello hello, let’s dive right in! 

Chrome’s Crawling With Features

Google Chrome’s introducing 3 new AI features for the US region. Soon expected to be ruled out in the rest of the world. 

• Smart tab organization

• Custom AI-generated themes

• Writing assistant - “Help me write” 

I am most excited about the 1st one. The demo looks promising. The AI quickly searched through all the open tabs and created tab groups, which seem largely accurate. Users can edit them if needed, of course.

While other browsers have boasted of smarter tab organization features for a while now, I like this move because a lot of native Chrome users are hesitant to migrate to other browsers. 

Read about all the updates here and watch the full demo here.

Adobe’s Running Circles

In a new paper, Adobe introduced ActAnywhere, a new AI model that can insert a moving subject into a new background video, while making it realistic enough that the subject moves and interacts within the scene. 

Does that ring a bell? While it might sound similar to green screen tech, it’s different and much more powerful. For example, you could use a video of your Swiftie friend playing their guitar at home and generate a new video with them embedded into the scene from the Eras Tour with proper motion, scale, lighting, and shadows. 

All in due time though - Adobe will add this model to its existing suite of products to stay competitive. So we’ll all be paying for their subscriptions *checks notes* indefinitely. 

Here’s a demo from their paper: 

Input #1: a video of a woman running* 

^{*Separated from the original background. The tech to do this (subject segmentation sequence) has existed for a while now, it’s the ‘Green Screen’ effect on IG and TikTok.}

Input #2: the same woman on a desired background, a waterbody

Output: a hyperrealistic video of the woman running in the water, with the lighting corrected, angles recalibrated, and water splashing and smoke wafting as she runs. Watch here.

Real-world Applications 🎥 

Currently, such visual effects are expensive and time-consuming to produce for the movie industry, and nearly unaffordable for hobbyists. The model unlocks new possibilities for the general public to bring their imagination to life. For example, an in-house marketing team of a shoe company would be able to quickly create REALISTIC videos of a subject sporting their new product in different terrains in just a few minutes.

I’ve shown the most basic example here 👆. They’ve presented the results of many diverse experiments. And it’s largely a visual paper, so it should be easy to consume.

Download their paper here, and see the GitHub here. I highly recommend visiting both the links to get a more complete idea, but if you have to pick one, go with the GitHub link.  And make sure you click on all the different toggles to get a proper idea.

Long (slightly technical) watch!

Understanding how AI tools work is an important step in making the most of them. (Note that I said ‘understand..how they work’, not ‘how they’re built’.)

While the workflow demonstrated in this video is far from perfect, given the pace of things in this space, we might very soon end up using this on the consumer side. 

You’ll see a code screen at the 3.5-minute mark, but if you resist the urge to switch tabs, you’ll realise that the video is very ELI5. And quite relevant for marketers in the near future! 

She’s walked us through 2 main experiments here: 

1. Built a team of 3: a marketer, a techie, and a bizdev agent to plan the GTM of her business idea through various perspectives

2. Used LLMs to write a newsletter for her. LLMs are only as good as the data they have, so she’s tweaked them to pick the top posts on Reddit. 

The 2nd part of the video might get a bit technical, but I recommend absorbing as much as you can and not bothering about the rest! 

Happy watching!

Hope you liked today’s issue! I had a lot of fun putting it together.

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