Combining AIs creates realistic AI News Videos.

Powerful AI tools like Chat GPT-3 are trending. Have you combined AIs?

The 1-minute fake news video below is startlingly realistic. Artificial Intelligence developed NASA's Mars exploration breakthrough video (AI). However, integrating the aforementioned AIs generated it.

• AI-generated text for the Chat GPT-3 based on a succinct tagline

• DALL-E-2 AI generates an image from a brief slogan.

• Artificial intelligence-generated avatar and speech

This article shows how to use and mix the three AIs to make a realistic news video. First, watch the video (1 minute).

Talk GPT-3

Chat GPT-3 is an OpenAI NLP model. It can auto-complete text and produce conversational responses.

Try it at the playground. The AI will write a comprehensive text from a brief tagline. Let's see what the AI generates with "Breakthrough in Mars Project" as the headline.

Amazing. Our tagline matches our complete and realistic text. Fake news can start here.

DALL-E-2

OpenAI's huge transformer-based language model DALL-E-2. Its GPT-3 basis is geared for image generation. It can generate high-quality photos from a brief phrase and create artwork and images of non-existent objects.

DALL-E-2 can create a news video background. We'll use "Breakthrough in Mars project" again. Our AI creates four striking visuals. Last.

Synthesia

Synthesia lets you quickly produce videos with AI avatars and synthetic vocals.

Avatars are first. Rosie it is.

Upload and select DALL-backdrop. E-2's

Copy the Chat GPT-3 content and choose a synthetic voice.

Voice: English (US) Professional.

Finally, we generate and watch or download our video.

Synthesia AI completes the AI video.

Overview & Resources

We used three AIs to make surprisingly realistic NASA Mars breakthrough fake news in this post. Synthesia generates an avatar and a synthetic voice, therefore it may be four AIs.

These AIs created our fake news.

• AI-generated text for the Chat GPT-3 based on a succinct tagline

• DALL-E-2 AI generates an image from a brief slogan.

• Artificial intelligence-generated avatar and speech

Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency. The Merge, a mid-September event that will convert Ethereum's consensus process from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake if all goes according to plan, will be a game changer.

Why is Ethereum ditching proof-of-work? Because it can. We're talking about a fully functioning, open-source ecosystem with a capacity for evolution that other cryptocurrencies lack, a change that would allow it to scale up its performance from 15 transactions per second to 100,000 as its blockchain is used for more and more things. It would reduce its energy consumption by 99.95%. Vitalik Buterin, the system's founder, would play a less active role due to decentralization, and miners, who validated transactions through proof of work, would be far less important.

Why has this conversion taken so long and been so cautious? Because it involves modifying a core process while it's running to boost its performance. It requires running the new mechanism in test chains on an ever-increasing scale, assessing participant reactions, and checking for issues or restrictions. The last big test was in early June and was successful. All that's left is to converge the mechanism with the Ethereum blockchain to conclude the switch.

What's stopping Bitcoin, the leader in market capitalization and the cryptocurrency that began blockchain's appeal, from doing the same? Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he or she is, departed from public life long ago, therefore there's no community leadership. Changing it takes a level of consensus that is impossible to achieve without strong leadership, which is why Bitcoin's evolution has been sluggish and conservative, with few modifications.

Secondly, The Merge will balance the consensus mechanism (proof-of-work or proof-of-stake) and the system decentralization or centralization. Proof-of-work prevents double-spending, thus validators must buy hardware. The system works, but it requires a lot of electricity and, as it scales up, tends to re-centralize as validators acquire more hardware and the entire network activity gets focused in a few nodes. Larger operations save more money, which increases profitability and market share. This evolution runs opposed to the concept of decentralization, and some anticipate that any system that uses proof of work as a consensus mechanism will evolve towards centralization, with fewer large firms able to invest in efficient network nodes.

Yet radical bitcoin enthusiasts share an opposite argument. In proof-of-stake, transaction validators put their funds at stake to attest that transactions are valid. The algorithm chooses who validates each transaction, giving more possibilities to nodes that put more coins at stake, which could open the door to centralization and government control.

In both cases, we're talking about long-term changes, but Bitcoin's proof-of-work has been evolving longer and seems to confirm those fears, while proof-of-stake is only employed in coins with a minuscule volume compared to Ethereum and has no predictive value.

As of mid-September, we will have two significant cryptocurrencies, each with a different consensus mechanisms and equally different characteristics: one is intrinsically conservative and used only for economic transactions, while the other has been evolving in open source mode, and can be used for other types of assets, smart contracts, or decentralized finance systems. Some even see it as the foundation of Web3.

Many things could change before September 15, but The Merge is likely to be a turning point. We'll have to follow this closely.

Few sentences can have global significance.

Ethan Zuckerman invented the pop-up commercial in 1997.

He was working for Tripod.com, an online service that let people make little web pages for free. Tripod offered advertising to make money. Advertisers didn't enjoy seeing their advertising next to filthy content, like a user's anal sex website.

Zuckerman's boss wanted a solution. Wasn't there a way to move the ads away from user-generated content?

When you visited a Tripod page, a pop-up ad page appeared. So, the ad isn't officially tied to any user page. It'd float onscreen.

Here’s the thing, though: Zuckerman’s bit of Javascript, that created the popup ad? It was incredibly short — a single line of code:

window.open('http://tripod.com/navbar.html'
"width=200, height=400, toolbar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=no, target=_top");

Javascript tells the browser to open a 200-by-400-pixel window on top of any other open web pages, without a scrollbar or toolbar.

Simple yet harmful! Soon, commercial websites mimicked Zuckerman's concept, infesting the Internet with pop-up advertising. In the early 2000s, a coder for a download site told me that most of their revenue came from porn pop-up ads.

Pop-up advertising are everywhere. You despise them. Hopefully, your browser blocks them.

Zuckerman wrote a single line of code that made the world worse.

I read Zuckerman's story in How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World. Torie Bosch compiled a humorous anthology of short writings about code that tipped the world.

Most of these samples are quite short. Pop-cultural preconceptions about coding say that important code is vast and expansive. Hollywood depicts programmers as blurs spouting out Niagaras of code. Google's success was formerly attributed to its 2 billion lines of code.

It's usually not true. Google's original breakthrough, the piece of code that propelled Google above its search-engine counterparts, was its PageRank algorithm, which determined a web page's value based on how many other pages connected to it and the quality of those connecting pages. People have written their own Python versions; it's only a few dozen lines.

Google's operations, like any large tech company's, comprise thousands of procedures. So their code base grows. The most impactful code can be brief.

The examples are fascinating and wide-ranging, so read the whole book (or give it to nerds as a present). Charlton McIlwain wrote a chapter on the police beat algorithm developed in the late 1960s to anticipate crime hotspots so law enforcement could dispatch more officers there. It created a racial feedback loop. Since poor Black neighborhoods were already overpoliced compared to white ones, the algorithm directed more policing there, resulting in more arrests, which convinced it to send more police; rinse and repeat.

Kelly Chudler's You Are Not Expected To Understand This depicts the police-beat algorithm.

Even shorter code changed the world: the tracking pixel.

Lily Hay Newman's chapter on monitoring pixels says you probably interact with this code every day. It's a snippet of HTML that embeds a single tiny pixel in an email. Getting an email with a tracking code spies on me. As follows: My browser requests the single-pixel image as soon as I open the mail. My email sender checks to see if Clives browser has requested that pixel. My email sender can tell when I open it.

Adding a tracking pixel to an email is easy:

<img src="URL LINKING TO THE PIXEL ONLINE" width="0" height="0">

An older example: Ellen R. Stofan and Nick Partridge wrote a chapter on Apollo 11's lunar module bailout code. This bailout code operated on the lunar module's tiny on-board computer and was designed to prioritize: If the computer grew overloaded, it would discard all but the most vital work.

When the lunar module approached the moon, the computer became overloaded. The bailout code shut down anything non-essential to landing the module. It shut down certain lunar module display systems, scaring the astronauts. Module landed safely.

22-line code

POODOO    INHINT
    CA  Q
    TS  ALMCADR

    TC  BANKCALL
    CADR  VAC5STOR  # STORE ERASABLES FOR DEBUGGING PURPOSES.

    INDEX  ALMCADR
    CAF  0
ABORT2    TC  BORTENT

OCT77770  OCT  77770    # DONT MOVE
    CA  V37FLBIT  # IS AVERAGE G ON
    MASK  FLAGWRD7
    CCS  A
    TC  WHIMPER -1  # YES.  DONT DO POODOO.  DO BAILOUT.

    TC  DOWNFLAG
    ADRES  STATEFLG

    TC  DOWNFLAG
    ADRES  REINTFLG

    TC  DOWNFLAG
    ADRES  NODOFLAG

    TC  BANKCALL
    CADR  MR.KLEAN
    TC  WHIMPER

This fun book is worth reading.

I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Mother Jones. I've also written Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds. Twitter and Instagram: @pomeranian99; Mastodon: @clive@saturation.social.

Reddit's NFT market is alive and well.

NFT owners outnumber OpenSea on Reddit.

Reddit NFTs flip in OpenSea in days:

Fast-selling.

NFT sales will make Reddit's current communities more engaged.

I don't think NFTs will affect existing groups, but they will build hype for people to acquire them.

The first season of Collectibles is unique, but many missed the first season.

Second-season NFTs are less likely to be sold for a higher price than first-season ones.

If you use Reddit, it's fun to own NFTs.

Monkey jpegs and shitcoins have tarnished Web3's reputation. Let’s move on.

Web3 was called "the internet's future."

Well, 'crypto bros' shouted about it loudly.

As quickly as it arrived to be the next internet, it appears to be dead. It's had scandals, turbulence, and crashes galore:

• Web 3.0's cryptocurrencies have crashed. Bitcoin's all-time high was $66,935. This month, Ethereum fell from $2130 to $1117. Six months ago, the cryptocurrency market peaked at $3 trillion. Worst is likely ahead.

• Gas fees make even the simplest Web3 blockchain transactions unsustainable.

• Terra, Luna, and other dollar pegs collapsed, hurting crypto markets. Celsius, a crypto lender backed by VCs and Canada's second-largest pension fund, and Binance, a crypto marketplace, have withheld money and coins. They're near collapse.

• NFT sales are falling rapidly and losing public interest.

Web3 has few real-world uses, like most crypto/blockchain technologies. Web3's image has been tarnished by monkey profile pictures and shitcoins while failing to become decentralized (the whole concept is controlled by VCs).

The damage seems irreparable, leaving Web3 in the gutter.

Step forward our new saviour — Web5

Fear not though, as hero awaits to drag us out of the Web3 hellscape. Jack Dorsey revealed his plan to save the internet quickly.

Dorsey has long criticized Web3, believing that VC capital and silicon valley insiders have created a centralized platform. In a tweet that upset believers and VCs (he was promptly blocked by Marc Andreessen), Dorsey argued, "You don't own "Web3." VCs and LPs do. Their incentives prevent it. It's a centralized organization with a new name.

Dorsey announced Web5 on June 10 in a very Elon-like manner. Block's TBD unit will work on the project (formerly Square).

Web5's pitch is that users will control their own data and identity. Bitcoin-based. Sound familiar? The presentation pack's official definition emphasizes decentralization. Web5 is a decentralized web platform that enables developers to write decentralized web apps using decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and decentralized web nodes, returning ownership and control over identity and data to individuals.

Web5 would be permission-less, open, and token-less. What that means for Earth is anyone's guess. Identity. Ownership. Blockchains. Bitcoin. Different.

Web4 appears to have been skipped, forever destined to wish it could have shown the world what it could have been. (It was probably crap.) As this iteration combines Web2 and Web3, simple math and common sense add up to 5. Or something.

Dorsey and his team have had this idea simmering for a while. Daniel Buchner, a member of Block's Decentralized Identity team, said, "We're finishing up Web5's technical components."

Web5 could be the project that decentralizes the internet. It must be useful to users and convince everyone to drop the countless Web3 projects, products, services, coins, blockchains, and websites being developed as I write this.

Web5 may be too late for Dorsey and the incoming flood of creators.

Web6 is planned!

The next months and years will be hectic and less stable than the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. 

• Web1 was around 1991-2004.

• Web2 ran from 2004 to 2021. (though the Web3 term was first used in 2014, it only really gained traction years later.)

• Web3 lasted a year.

• Web4 is dead.

Silicon Valley billionaires are turning it into a startup-style race, each disrupting the next iteration until they crack it. Or destroy it completely.

Web5 won't last either.

Price Intelligently put out amazing content on pricing your SaaS product. This blog's link to the whole report is worth reading. Our key takeaways are below.

Don't base prices on the competition. Competitor-based pricing has clear drawbacks. Their pricing approach is yours. Your company offers customers something unique. Otherwise, you wouldn't create it. This strategy is static, therefore you can't add value by raising prices without outpricing competitors. Look, but don't touch is the competitor-based moral. You want to know your competitors' prices so you're in the same ballpark, but they shouldn't guide your selections. Competitor-based pricing also drives down prices.

Value-based pricing wins. This is customer-based pricing. Value-based pricing looks outward, not inward or laterally at competitors. Your clients are the best source of pricing information. By valuing customer comments, you're focusing on buyers. They'll decide if your pricing and packaging are right. In addition to asking consumers about cost savings or revenue increases, look at data like number of users, usage per user, etc.

Value-based pricing increases prices. As you learn more about the client and your worth, you'll know when and how much to boost rates. Every 6 months, examine pricing.

Cloning top customers. You clone your consumers by learning as much as you can about them and then reaching out to comparable people or organizations. You can't accomplish this without knowing your customers. Segmenting and reproducing them requires as much detail as feasible. Offer pricing plans and feature packages for 4 personas. The top plan should state Contact Us. Your highest-value customers want more advice and support.

Question your 4 personas. What's the one item you can't live without? Which integrations matter most? Do you do analytics? Is support important or does your company self-solve? What's too cheap? What's too expensive?

Not everyone likes per-user pricing. SaaS organizations often default to per-user analytics. About 80% of companies utilizing per-user pricing should use an alternative value metric because their goods don't give more value with more users, so charging for them doesn't make sense.

At least 3:1 LTV/CAC. Break even on the customer within 2 years, and LTV to CAC is greater than 3:1. Because customer acquisition costs are paid upfront but SaaS revenues accrue over time, SaaS companies face an early financial shortfall while paying back the CAC.

ROI should be >20:1. Indeed. Ensure the customer's ROI is 20x the product's cost. Microsoft Office costs $80 a year, but consumers would pay much more to maintain it.

A/B Testing. A/B testing is guessing. When your pricing page varies based on assumptions, you'll upset customers. You don't have enough customers anyway. A/B testing optimizes landing pages, design decisions, and other site features when you know the problem but not pricing.

Don't discount. It cheapens the product, makes it permanent, and increases churn. By discounting, you're ruining your pricing analysis.