While the use of AI tools is not new, public awareness of, and debate around, these tools will continue to increase as these tools become more widely available. Talk of AI and in particular generative AI is now ubiquitous in mainstream news media and on social media sites. 

• Deepfakes Go Mainstream. AI startup Metaphysics – perhaps best known for its viral deepfakes of Tom Cruise – was a contestant in the most recent season of America’s Got Talent, one of the most popular TV shows in the United States. The company’s act involved displaying hyperreal AI-generated deepfakes of famous celebrities (including the hosts) singing live. The company made it to the semi-finals and finished in fourth place.
• Lensa’s Magic Avatars. [GJL1] It is virtually impossible to spend time on any social media platform today and not come across the artistic AI-generated portraits (“magic avatars”) created using Prisma Lab’s Lensa app. The app is powered by the open-source text-to-image diffusion model of Stable Diffusion, which was trained on 2.3 billion images. Debates about the use of artists’ works to train Stable Diffusion’s AI and the use of Lensa have followed.

This post is a part of a series on trends in the artificial intelligence space for 2023, authored by MoFo lawyers.