News/Image
Survey: Claude outranks ChatGPT among tech-savvy AI users, and other findings
PCMag's inaugural survey of generative AI tools reveals surprising preferences among tech-savvy users, with Anthropic's Claude emerging as the top choice for personal use despite being less well-known than industry giants like OpenAI and Google. The comprehensive survey, conducted from February 22 to March 12, 2025, gathered responses from PCMag readers about their experiences with AI chatbots and image generators. The results paint a nuanced picture of AI adoption: while 68% of respondents believe AI will replace human jobs, they rate their personal job security concerns at just 4.2 out of 10. Meanwhile, 91% want government regulation of AI development,...
read Jun 18, 2025Google Meet adds AI-generated backgrounds powered by Gemini. Here’s how to partake.
Google Meet has quietly rolled out one of its most engaging new features: AI-generated backgrounds powered by Gemini, Google's advanced artificial intelligence assistant. This capability transforms the standard video conferencing experience by letting users create custom, unique backgrounds through simple text prompts rather than choosing from the same tired selection of conference rooms and coffee shops that everyone else uses. For professionals spending significant portions of their workday in virtual meetings, this represents more than just visual novelty. Custom AI backgrounds offer a way to maintain professional presentation standards while adding personality to remote interactions. Rather than cycling through Google...
read Jun 17, 2025Adobe launches Firefly AI image and video generator for iPhone
Adobe has officially launched its Firefly AI image and video generation tool as a dedicated iPhone app, bringing professional-grade creative AI capabilities directly to mobile devices. This marks a significant expansion of Adobe's AI strategy, making sophisticated content creation tools accessible anywhere inspiration strikes. Adobe Firefly, the company's flagship generative AI platform, gained popularity as a web-based tool for creating images and videos from text prompts. The new iPhone app delivers the same core functionality in a mobile-optimized interface, addressing the growing demand for on-the-go content creation among creative professionals and business users. What sets this app apart from other...
read Jun 17, 2025Lessons from photo restoration on how AI prompting skills matter more than the tech
A recent Reddit discussion about restoring the world's oldest photograph has become an unexpected masterclass in the difference between thoughtful AI prompting and generic image generation. The comparison reveals why AI literacy—understanding how to effectively communicate with artificial intelligence systems—increasingly determines whether you get professional-quality results or what the community calls "AI slop." The photograph in question, captured around 1826-1827 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor, represents a pivotal moment in visual history. Due to the primitive photographic technology of two centuries ago, the image appears grainy and unclear, making it an intriguing challenge for modern AI restoration tools....
read Jun 16, 20258 best AI PNG generators transform business visual content creation
Businesses today face constant pressure to create visual content quickly and cost-effectively. Marketing campaigns need custom graphics, presentations require professional imagery, and social media demands a steady stream of visual assets. Traditional design workflows—hiring freelancers, purchasing stock photos, or learning complex software—often create bottlenecks that slow down projects and inflate budgets. Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed this landscape. AI-powered PNG generators can now create professional-quality transparent images in seconds, transforming simple text descriptions into polished visuals ready for immediate use. These tools eliminate the traditional barriers between having an idea and seeing it realized as a finished graphic. PNG files,...
read Jun 16, 2025ByteDance’s free AI tool Pippit transforms photos into talking videos
Social media's latest viral sensation isn't a dance or a meme—it's artificial intelligence creating talking baby podcasts. This unexpected trend showcases the growing influence of AI-powered video creation tools that are transforming how businesses and creators produce content at scale. At the center of this phenomenon is Pippit, a free AI video generator developed by CapCut, ByteDance's video editing platform. While ByteDance is best known for owning TikTok, CapCut has emerged as a major player in the content creation space, and Pippit represents the company's push into AI-generated video content. The tool allows users to transform static images into dynamic...
read Jun 13, 2025Shutterstock’s AI tool removes photo backgrounds in seconds for small businesses
Visual content drives modern business success, yet many small business owners struggle with creating professional-looking images. Whether you're showcasing products on an e-commerce platform, crafting social media campaigns, or developing marketing materials, removing cluttered backgrounds can transform amateur photos into polished, professional assets. Shutterstock's Background Removal Tool addresses this challenge by leveraging artificial intelligence to automatically isolate subjects from their backgrounds. This browser-based solution requires no design expertise or expensive software subscriptions, making professional image editing accessible to entrepreneurs and marketers who need results without the learning curve. The tool's significance extends beyond simple convenience. In today's visually-driven marketplace, clean...
read Jun 12, 2025Not allowed to regulate deepfakes? Pennsylvania penalizes fraudulent likeness amid proposed AI law moratorium
Pennsylvania's Senate unanimously passed legislation making it a crime to distribute deepfake AI images while misrepresenting them as authentic, expanding the state's forgery laws to include digitally-generated likenesses. However, the bill faces potential nullification from a federal budget provision that would ban states from enforcing AI regulations for the next decade, threatening Pennsylvania's entire slate of AI-related legislation. What you should know: The new bill would criminalize passing off deepfake images "with intent to defraud or injure anyone," building on last year's law that addressed AI-generated child pornography and non-consensual explicit material. In plain English: Deepfakes are AI-generated images that...
read Jun 12, 2025Meta sues company behind AI “nudifying” apps in landmark legal action
Meta has filed a lawsuit against the company behind CrushAI apps for promoting "nudifying" applications on Facebook and Instagram, marking its most aggressive legal action yet against AI-powered non-consensual intimate image creation. The lawsuit follows a months-long battle to remove thousands of ads promoting apps that use artificial intelligence to create fake nude images without consent, highlighting the platform's struggle to combat this growing form of digital abuse. What you should know: Meta's legal action targets a company that persistently evaded advertising restrictions through sophisticated workarounds. In January, researchers found 8,010 instances of CrushAI ads promoting nudifying apps across Facebook...
read Jun 11, 2025Beyond the screen: MIT student creates AI that restores paintings with polymer film “masks”
MIT mechanical engineering graduate student Alex Kachkine has developed a revolutionary method to physically restore damaged paintings using AI-generated polymer film "masks" that can be applied directly to original artworks. The breakthrough technique completed a restoration of a 15th-century oil painting in just 3.5 hours—approximately 66 times faster than traditional methods—while maintaining a digital record of all changes for future conservators. How it works: The method combines AI analysis with physical application through a sophisticated multi-step process. First, conservators clean the original painting and remove previous restoration attempts to reveal the underlying damage. The cleaned painting is scanned, and existing...
read Jun 10, 2025Chronicle AI launches with 100K users, reimagines presentations as websites
Chronicle AI Presentations has launched publicly after accumulating a waitlist of over 100,000 users, including 10,000 businesses, following months of stealth development. The AI-powered presentation platform, co-founded by Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande, aims to transform how people create and deliver presentations by replacing traditional slide formats with interactive, web-like experiences that prioritize visual storytelling and design quality. What you should know: Chronicle fundamentally reimagines presentation creation by abandoning the traditional slide format in favor of a scrollable, interactive canvas powered by AI assistance. Users can start with a blank canvas or generate drafts by uploading PDFs, pasting text, or...
read Jun 9, 2025MIT alumni’s AI platform turns visual chaos into business insights
Coactive, an AI-powered platform founded by MIT alumni, has raised significant attention for its ability to analyze unstructured visual data like images, audio, and video at enterprise scale. The company addresses a critical business blind spot—while 80-90% of global data is unstructured, most companies lack tools to extract insights from their visual content, creating massive untapped value in their data repositories. What you should know: Coactive's platform serves as an "AI operating system" that can instantly search, organize, and analyze visual content without manual tagging or sorting. The model-agnostic system allows businesses to swap out AI models as technology improves,...
read Jun 9, 2025Getty vs Stability AI trial in London begins first major copyright case for generative AI
Getty Images and artificial intelligence company Stability AI are facing off in London's High Court in the first major copyright trial targeting the generative AI industry. The three-week trial, which began Monday, centers on Getty's claims that Stability's widely-used Stable Diffusion image generator constitutes "brazen infringement" of Getty's photography collection "on a staggering scale," potentially setting crucial precedents for how AI companies can legally train their models on copyrighted content. What you should know: Getty Images, a Seattle-based stock photography company, filed copyright infringement lawsuits in both the US and UK in early 2023, challenging the common tech industry practice...
read Jun 6, 2025Get on this! AI Magicx lifetime deal drops to $60 from $972 until July 20
9to5Toys is offering a lifetime subscription to AI Magicx's Rune Plan for just $59.97, down from its regular price of $972, through July 20. The deal provides permanent access to a comprehensive suite of AI-powered creative tools designed for logo design, content creation, artwork generation, chatbot building, and coding assistance. What you should know: AI Magicx positions itself as an all-in-one creative platform that combines multiple AI-powered functions typically requiring separate tools or teams. The platform includes logo generation, article and story writing, visual artwork creation from text prompts, chatbot development, document editing, and AI coding capabilities. Users receive commercial...
read Jun 6, 2025New AI image leaderboard ranks 9 models using 281K user votes
LMArena.ai has launched a new leaderboard that ranks AI image generators based on user voting, helping users navigate the increasingly crowded field of text-to-image models. The platform, which evolved from UC Berkeley's Chatbot Arena research initiative, uses an anonymous voting system where nearly 281,000 votes have been cast to evaluate nine different AI image generation models. How it works: The platform ranks AI models based on their ability to generate images from text descriptions using the Elo rating system originally designed for chess rankings. • Users vote on image quality without knowing which model created each image, reducing bias in...
read Jun 4, 2025A whole ad from just a product image? Meta plans automated ad campaigns rollout by 2026
Meta's push toward fully automated advertising by 2026 represents a significant evolution in digital marketing, potentially transforming how businesses approach ad creation and campaign management. This AI-driven approach would eliminate the need for advertisers to create assets or determine targeting parameters, instead allowing Meta's systems to handle the entire advertising process autonomously based on minimal inputs like a business URL and budget goals. The big picture: Meta plans to launch completely AI-automated advertising systems by 2026, enabling advertisers to create campaigns by simply providing their business URL and letting Meta's AI handle creative development and targeting. The Wall Street Journal...
read Jun 3, 2025AI models learn human-like sketching techniques via MIT, Stanford research
MIT and Stanford researchers have developed a new AI drawing system that mimics the human sketching process, offering a more intuitive way for people to visually communicate ideas with artificial intelligence. The system, called SketchAgent, represents a significant advancement in how AI understands and creates visual representations, potentially transforming how we collaborate with machines on creative and conceptual tasks. By leveraging the stroke-by-stroke, iterative nature of human sketching rather than focusing solely on photorealistic output, this technology addresses a gap in current AI drawing capabilities. The big picture: MIT CSAIL and Stanford researchers have created SketchAgent, an AI drawing system...
read May 23, 2025Honor AI tech transforms photos into videos on new 400 series
Honor's latest mid-range smartphone series introduces powerful AI photography features alongside premium hardware specifications at competitive price points. The Honor 400 and 400 Pro represent a significant step up from the earlier 400 Lite model, placing artificial intelligence at the center of their photography capabilities while promising extended software support that exceeds industry standards. The hardware lineup: Honor has launched two new mid-range devices that emphasize computational photography powered by dedicated AI features. The base Honor 400 starts at €499/£399.99 with a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor, 8GB RAM, and either 256GB or 512GB storage options. The premium Honor 400...
read May 23, 2025Pruna speeds up ComfyUI nodes for Flux and Stable Diffusion
The integration of Pruna optimization techniques into ComfyUI represents a significant advancement for image generation workflows, addressing growing computational demands as AI models become increasingly complex. By offering specialized nodes that accelerate both Stable Diffusion and Flux inference, Pruna enables faster, more efficient image generation with minimal quality degradation—effectively making these powerful tools more accessible and environmentally sustainable for creators across experience levels. The big picture: Pruna now offers custom optimization nodes for ComfyUI that make image generation models faster, smaller, and more efficient without significantly compromising output quality. Key details: The integration provides four specialized nodes that can be...
read May 23, 2025TikTok researchers contribute to AI-powered satellites that map ocean depths
Depth Anything V2, a powerful AI depth estimation model, is demonstrating remarkable potential when applied to satellite imagery analysis. In a recent experiment, this model trained on hundreds of thousands of synthetic images and millions of real ones was tested on Maxar's high-resolution satellite imagery of Bangkok, Thailand. This intersection of satellite technology and AI depth estimation represents a significant advancement in remote sensing capabilities, particularly for urban analysis, where understanding building heights and terrain features from aerial views has traditionally been challenging. The big picture: Mark Litwintschik successfully tested Depth Anything V2's largest model on satellite imagery to generate...
read May 22, 2025New Google feature lets shoppers see themselves in outfits before buying them
Google's new AI-powered "try it on" feature transforms online clothes shopping by creating realistic visualizations of how garments would look on users. This virtual fitting room technology addresses a crucial pain point in e-commerce by reducing the uncertainty of online purchases while potentially decreasing costly returns for retailers. The feature represents a significant advancement in making digital shopping more personalized and confidence-inspiring for consumers. How it works: Google's AI shopping feature allows users to virtually try on clothing items through Google Search Labs by uploading a full-length photo of themselves. After enabling the feature in Google Search Labs, users can...
read May 22, 2025AI both aids and threatens creative freelancers as content generation becomes DIY
The rise of generative AI has created a paradoxical relationship for creative professionals, who simultaneously benefit from its capabilities while facing disruption to traditional income streams. David Neal's personal experience illustrates this tension, highlighting how AI tools have enhanced his creative process while dramatically reducing demand for his illustration side hustle. This evolving dynamic mirrors historical patterns where technological innovation has both eliminated traditional crafts and opened entirely new creative possibilities. The big picture: A creative professional who works across software, content, illustrations, and music experiences both love and hate for generative AI based on its contradictory impacts on his...
read May 22, 2025AI art sparks backlash from Jersey’s creative community
Jersey artists are raising concerns about AI-generated images threatening the creative industry as the technology becomes increasingly normalized. This conflict between traditional artists and AI platforms highlights growing tensions in the creative sector, where artists fear losing work to automated systems that have been trained on human-created content without proper attribution or compensation. The issue points to broader questions about copyright protection, creative authenticity, and the future sustainability of artistic careers in the age of artificial intelligence. The big picture: Jersey artist Abi Overland has publicly expressed frustration over AI-generated images and their impact on the island's creative community. She...
read May 21, 2025Diffusers’ quantization backends boost AI model efficiency
Quantization techniques are transforming how resource-intensive diffusion models can be deployed, making state-of-the-art AI image generation more accessible. By reducing precision requirements without significantly sacrificing quality, these approaches are democratizing access to powerful models like Flux that would otherwise require substantial computational resources. Understanding the trade-offs between different quantization backends is becoming essential knowledge for AI practitioners looking to optimize their deployment strategies. The big picture: Hugging Face Diffusers now supports multiple quantization backends that can significantly reduce the memory footprint of large diffusion models like Flux. These techniques compress models by using lower precision representations of weights and activations,...
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