Elvis Was . . . August 17, 2022August 16, 2022 Jewish! Who nu? Artificial Intelligence is gaining traction. Shelly Palmer: Want to know how fast virtual worlds are going to appear? TikTok recently added a new effect called “AI greenscreen.” Users type a description, then the AI does its best to interpret the prose and output an image that can be used as a background for a TikTok video. The filter is very primitive and it is nowhere near as powerful as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Google’s Imagen, but it is an amazing next step in the evolution of social video production tools. Just open your TikTok app, click the “green screen” filter, then click AI. Fun! Here’s why you should care. The cover of this month’s Cosmopolitan magazine was created by a human/machine partnership, based on an image created by AI. The human (Karen X. Cheng) typed the sentence, “wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art,” into OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. After a little editing by the human, here are the results: Click to see. It took the computer 20 seconds. The implications for TikTok are nice. The implications for “deep fakes” and so much else that will be racing toward us? Fasten your seatbelts. And finally, there’s SO much to cheer about the Inflation Reduction Act! Yesterday was an exceptionally good day for America — and, because we all share the same planet, humanity.