TOGETHER WITH

Good morning, human brains, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• Abandon your loved ones and buy them a doll 👴 ❤️ 🪆

  South Korea deployed 7,000 AI dolls for lonely seniors and patients.

• Make Photoshop-level graphics on your phone 😴 🖼️

  Adobe launched the new Adobe Express App on iOS and Google Play.

• The Real Housewives of Midjourney & Stability AI 🚨 🤬

  Midjourney banned Stability AI employees for alleged data scraping.

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MAIN COURSE

“All the lonely people…” 👴 ❤️ 🪆

Peek-a-boo 🧸

Two weeks ago, Hyodol, launched its AI companion doll at the Mobile World Congress. The aim is to combat loneliness among seniors and dementia patients.

What is Hyodol?

It’s a South Korean company that won the Mobile World Congress’s award for “Best Mobile Innovation for Connected Health and Wellbeing” for its $1800 doll.

Why?

The Hyodol doll offers motion detection, touch interaction, health coaching, exercise programs, and more. For seniors, it can provide medication reminders, hold conversations, give safety alerts, and more.

It’s an overpriced doll, so what?

The South Korean government sent about 7,000 dolls to seniors and dementia patients. According to studies of over 9,000 people, interactions with the doll dropped depression levels from 5.73 to 3.14 and raised medication compliance from 2.69 to 2.87.

Will it make me coffee?

Nope. It comes with an app, so caretakers can monitor motion, send voice messages, make announcements, and more from afar. It also sends alerts when no movement has been detected.

Now I want a friend…

I got you. Back in June, we reported on virtual pets that live in augmented reality. They have their own personalities, interact with real-life objects, and more.

In October, we covered Spot, the robot dog from Boston Dynamics. The four-legged robot can walk, run, jump, dance, parkour, communicate, and more.

In January, we reported on Samsung’s Ballie. It is a sphere-shaped AI companion with a built-in projector that is the size of a bowling ball.

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SIDE SALAD

Make dope graphics from your phone 😴 🖼️

On Thursday, Adobe introduced its new Express mobile app. This allows you to use Adobe’s generative AI features on Android and iOS.

What does the app do?

It brings Adobe's Firefly Generative Fill, Text to Image, Text Effects, and video editing capabilities to your phone.

I have too many apps. Why would I want this one?

The app contains a social media content scheduler, brand kits for consistent marketing, and real-time collaboration features. It allows you to generate images, manipulate objects in photos, edit 4K videos, and more from your phone.

Let me guess. I have to wait.

Android users can download it now from Google Play. iOS users have to join the waitlist.

Awesome. What else has Adobe been up to?

Back in October, we reported on Adobe’s Icon of Transparency. It’s an AI watermark that Adobe claimed you couldn’t edit out.

In January, we covered Adobe’s new Premiere Pro features. It rolled out Enhanced Speech, Audio Categorization, and more.

Two weeks ago, we reported on Adobe’s Project Music GenAI Control. It’s a music generation/editing tool with advanced editing capabilities.

RECOMMENDED READING

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A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA

Midjourney banned Stability AI 🚨 🤬

Last week, Midjourney banned Stability AI employees from its service. It claims Stability AI caused a 24-hour outage by attempting to scrape data.

What went down?

Midjourney claims its service outage was caused by two accounts linked to Stability AI that tried to scrape data. In response, it announced a policy to ban employees from any company engaging in “aggressive automation.”

Did Stability AI squeal?

Of course not. Stability AI's CEO, Emad Mostaque, said it might’ve been an unintentional act by an employee, and he was conducting an internal investigation. Midjourney's founder, David Holz, reportedly sent information to assist with the search.

Doesn’t Mostaque get in trouble a lot?

Oh, yeah. Back in June, we reported on Stability’s drama. Its COO and Head of Research both quit, and a former partner sued Mostaque.

Then in July, we covered Stability AI’s co-founder, suing Emad Mostaque. He claimed Emad deceived him into selling his 15% share for just $100.

Oh, Emad. 😈

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Tools

100DaysOfNoCode Challenge — learn life-changing no-code/AI skills with free, fun, and effective 30-minute lessons delivered daily to guide your no-code journey.

Travelicious — get the most out of your travels with a personalized itinerary.

Semiform — get usable customer feedback with forms and AI agents.

Dola — sync your calendar and life events with an intuitive chat interface.

Think Pieces

Should artists be compensated for training data? OpenAI’s Vice President refused to answer on SXSW’s stage on Monday.

Kate Middleton’s AI photo controversy. She said, “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

Are Reddit’s IPO prices overpriced? Its price is set at $31 to $34 per share, and it sold $203 million worth of contracts to AI companies this year.

Startup News

Cohere launched Command-R. It’s an AI model that allows enterprises to automate reasoning/decision-making tasks.

NVIDIA’s CEO claims GPUs are more cost-effective than free chips. He says that price isn’t the major factor in the total cost of ownership.

Midjourney launched Fast, Relax, and Turbo Mode. It caused controversy with artists who felt their work had been stolen to train the model.

Research

ELLA — enhances text-to-image diffusion-based models by enabling them to comprehend more complex prompts.

DeepSeek-VL — an open-source Vision-Language model that aims to tackle the weaknesses of similarly sized models.

Gemini 1.5 Pro — achieves state-of-the-art recall in long-context text, video, and audio tasks.

MEMES FOR DESSERT

TWEET OF THE DAY

LLMs are surprising good at analyzing pictures and accurately guessing where they are taken.

Tag us on Twitter @BotEatBrain for a chance to be featured here tomorrow.

AI ART-SHOW

Until next time 🤖😋🧠