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It’s Sunday, meaning it’s time for us to pick our winner and loser of the week.
This week marked some exciting launches, including an affordable tablet and smartwatch from OnePlus, a nostalgic 6-disc CD changer from Bang & Olufsen, and the Snapdragon X Plus chip for future laptops.
Meanwhile, Meta teamed up with Microsoft to create a limited edition Xbox-inspired version of the Meta Quest, while Apple is rumoured to have cut production of its own Vision Pro mixed reality headset due to low demand.
But who are our main winners and losers of the week? Keep reading to find out.
Winner: Adobe
It was a busy week for Adobe as the company hosted its annual Adobe Max conference in London.
No doubt the most exciting news from the event surrounded the company’s latest Firefly Image 3 model generative image model, which marked some substantial upgrades for both Firefly and Adobe Photoshop.
The generative AI model is both better at understanding prompts and more skilled at structuring images and producing detail. These improvements should be apparent in instances that might usually be dead giveaways that AI has been used, such as wonky straight lines and a lack of detail in faces when generating crowds.
The new model is also capable of drawing from a broader range of art styles and producing a more varied range of human emotions.
For Photoshop users, Firefly Image 3 is the magic behind several new features rolling out in Generative Fill this week.
New tools include Reference Image, a feature that allows users to upload photos or illustrations as prompts instead of typing words. Photoshop will then generate an object with similar characteristics and place that item in the scene.
There’s also Enhance Detail, a tool that uses AI to improve the clarity of your image, and Generate Background which generates entire backgrounds from a written prompt. Lastly, there’s the Generate Similar tool to finetune generated images when the results aren’t quite what you wanted but are very close.
Despite what your opinion is on generative AI, there’s no doubt the Firefly Image 3 model is an impressive update with a huge amount of potential for Photoshop users.
Loser: TikTok
Our loser this week is TikTok, as US president Joe Biden signed a bill that will ban TikTok in the country if ByteDance does not sell the app in the next year.
The bill – which gained widespread support from US senators – was initially introduced to address concerns that TikTok shares user data with the Chinese government. This is something that the app has continuously denied, stating that ByteDance “is not an agent of China or any other country”.
Of course, TikTok is not going down without a fight. Singaporean businessman and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew posted a response to the news in a video titled ‘Response to TikTok Ban Bill’:
“Make no mistake, this is a ban. A ban on TikTok, and a band on you and YOUR voice. Politicians may say otherwise, but don’t get confused, many who sponsored the bill admit a TikTok ban is their ultimate goal,” said the CEO.
“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere. We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts. The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we expect to prevail again”.
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