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13 November 2023
Author: The Future Laboratory
Image: Photography by Dibakar Roy, India
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Photography by Cottonbro Studio, Russia
US – TikTok is breaking into the live music scene with its inaugural In The Mix festival, which will feature an impressive line-up including Cardi B, Niall Horan, Anitta and Charlie Puth, along with emerging artists and surprise guests. In The Mix will also showcase talents from TikTok’s Elevate programme.
This new branded festival will come to life at Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona, on 10 December 2024, and will be globally streamed via TikTok Live. It aims to bring the TikTok community’s creative and communal spirit to a live event, with activities inspired by top trends on the platform.
In a press release, Paul Hourican, TikTok’s global head of music partnerships and programming, emphasised TikTok’s unique blend of music, creativity and community. He also explained that In The Mix is designed to transform the digital For You feed into a tangible experience for both in-person and online audiences, aligning with the platform’s vision for a music-focused global community. The launch of In The Mix also highlights the fervent enthusiasm with which audiences are willing to engage with in-person events, as revealed in our Great Concert Comeback Op-ed.
US – A pioneering tool named Nightshade is placing the power back into the hands of artists by enabling them to sow chaos in AI models that appropriate their creations without consent. This follows outrage from swathes of artists condemning AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta and Stability AI for using their work to train their generative AI models.
Ben Zhao and his team at the University of Chicago found inspiration in poison to create Nightshade. As AI training models often associate images with text descriptions found in metadata, the tool will manipulate the latter to create confusion. A dog picture, for example, is usually paired with the word dog in its metadata. Nightshade disrupts this pairing by making subtle alterations to the image, making it appear like a cat to AI models while still looking like a dog to humans. The goal is to contaminate future AI models so that companies have to revert to older versions or stop using artists’ works altogether.
As explored in The Future of Responsible AI, consumers and elected officials can and will have the potential to compel technology companies to do better. Acknowledging artists’ rights and providing compensation is the start of worldwide calls for more AI regulation.
Gaudism AI
Fingernail Fungi by Jihyun Kim, created with red coral fungi, was inspired by Korean folklore about fingernails and the mouse, London
Sustainability is entering a new era. We’ve cycled through eco-anxiety, eco-grief, climate doom and are now in a state of eco-fatigue.
Greenwashing and misinformation combined with the paralysing experience of watching the climate crisis play out in real time have left consumers feeling numb. Meanwhile, many brands seem to have all but given up: over the past three years, only 4% of advertisements contained sustainability messaging, with the number of ads centring around sustainability falling by 47% at the beginning of 2023, compared with December 2023 (source: CreativeX).
Brands have turned to Subversive Sustainability Ads to cut through the noise, but in the creative world, designers are taking a different tack and exploring refreshing narratives.
If there’s one thing the world isn’t in short supply of, it’s waste. By 2050, global waste is expected to have increased to 3.4bn tonnes, an increase of 70% since 2016, yet less than 20% is currently recycled (source: Statista).
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