Creating Actors for Your Movies with AI

Good day, humans.

One of the most important tools of AI art now allows for recreating the same character in different images, which represents a significant advancement in the process of creating films and stories.

In today's newsletter we include:

1. Creating movie stars in Midjourney

2. Cognition AI introduces Devin, an AI for software engineering

3. The top 50 AI apps in use

4. Mexico among the countries considering AI improves productivity

5. OpenAI announces agreement with newspapers El País and Le Monde

Creating movie stars in Midjourney

One of the problems creators faced when using Midjourney for large projects like a short film, a graphic novel, or any type of story was character consistency. This involves being able to use the same character over and over in different poses, locations, and costumes.

Midjourney solves this by introducing the Character Reference option, which allows us to create a character based on one or more images of an existing character provided via URLs.

To use it, simply type --cref URL after your prompt with the URL of the character image you want to replicate.

You can use --cw to modify the influence of the reference in your description within a range of 0 to 100.

--cw 100 (default) uses the face, hair, and clothes of the reference character.

--cw 0 focuses only on the face. For more detail, How to use different poses for your consistent character in Midjourney

Cognition AI introduces Devin, an AI for software engineering

Cognition AI claims to have created the world's first AI software engineer, i.e., an AI-driven software engineering platform that can complete entire programming projects from scratch.

What can it do? Cognition's platform, known as Devin, can:

• Complete an entire software project by itself (most AI programming assistants only offer code suggestions)

• Anticipate programming problems before they occur and adjust decision-making accordingly

• Create new websites and AI applications from scratch

• Create custom Chrome extensions and complete some programming jobs on Upwork

• Solve nearly 14% of GitHub issues found in real-world open-source projects without human assistance (far surpassing the 2% resolution rate of most models)

While there has long been talk of AI agents replacing jobs, Devin may prove to be an aid rather than a replacement for software engineers and developers. We'll see.

The top 100 AI apps in use

A16z has released its semi-annual list of the top 100 most popular AI applications for web and mobile devices. Obviously, ChatGPT remains the king, while "the rest" consists of a selection of productivity, education, and company applications.

It's worth reading the full report; you might find an app that suits you.

India among the countries considering AI improves productivity

Workers in India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico are much more likely to adopt generative AI in their work compared to Western nations, according to a recent YouGov survey.

Two-thirds of employees in India stated that generative AI has improved their productivity at work. Meanwhile, only 17% of Americans said the same. Americans were also the nationality most likely to report that AI had hindered their productivity, with 12% reporting that AI had played a negative role.

OpenAI announces agreement with newspapers El País and Le Monde

In the process of improving ChatGPT, OpenAI announced partnerships with Le Monde and Prisa Media, along with their publications such as El País, Cinco Días, As, and El Huffpost. Access to content will contribute to the training of AI models.

Do these notes serve you? Are they interesting? I would appreciate any feedback you can give me to improve.

Thank you for reading. See you next week!

Hello 👋 I'm Erik Knobl, Product Designer during the day and Generative Artificial Intelligence Explorer on weekends. I share my learnings in this newsletter.