AI Content Creation, Podcasts from Balajis + Palmer Luckey, Elon Buys Twitter and Reddit NFTs.

Good day folks,

The email this week looks a little different and that's because in true Shiny Object fashion we thought we'd give the new kid on the block Beehiiv a try. It's got some pretty sweet features for growing a newsletter so if you like it or not, let me know in reply.

Oh by the way, you're getting this email if you're a member of Shiny or signed up to the newsletter. Just a heads up 👋🏻

Right let's take 3 minutes and tuck into some of the good stuff that happened this week.

Top 4 links if you only have 10 seconds.

• Lex Fridman dropped an 8 hour podcast with Balaji Srinivasan.

• Reddit launches 'digital collectables' - 3 million wallets + 40k sold.

• Nat Eliason publishes a new article called "What AI Can't Write".

• Palmer Luckey, ex Oculus and Founder of Aduruil Industries goes on My First Million Podcast.

Community Highlights

• Danny fine tuning Stock AI - Find exactly the image you need. And if it doesn't exist, they'll create it for you instantly.

• Bens AI newsletter Bens Bites is booming! - The daily dose of what's going on in AI. In 5 minutes or less.

• Finn joins the Belong team - The web3 profile that helps you connect with others by turning your social tokens into social signals.

• Trist joins HireChain as head of Product.

Let's kick things off today with the topic that's been taking the internet by storm over the last few week and that's Content Creation powered by Artificial Intelligence.

Let's ask Jasper.ai to write a quick intro on what the f it is exactly.

While using AI to aid with content creation isn't a brand new idea, until recently it's main use-case was to create text. But now, aided by tools like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Dalle-2, AI Creation Imagery and Video is now a thing and it's available to the masses.

By signing up to Midjourney and joining the Discord you're able to type the image you want to create and the AI will generate the image for you. Now a little disclaimer. It may take you a little while to fine tune the image to exactly what you want and having a solid grip on language does help but the results will blow your mind.

Here's an image of a cat wearing armour plucked from Midjourney this morning. How good!

If you're hearing about this whole AI Content Creation thing for the first time here's a few beginner friendly links and a video to get you off the races.

• Open AI Playground - start with tapping in some text prompts and seeing what the AI comes up with in response. Completely free.

• Hugging Face - an app layer for Stable Diffusion, a state of the art text-to-image model that generates images from text.

• Rytr - super simple AI writing tool which takes just a few seconds.

• Jasper.ai - try this if you're looking to go beast mode. They've got some great learning materials here too.

If you're brain is on fire for all things AI content creation there's a bit of a gold rush right now and I highly recommend Bens Bites, a daily AI newsletter written by Ben Tossell.

One final thing that popped up this morning is Astria, a tool that let's you create images of yourself in different styles based off of 20 uploaded training images.

Here's a video showing how it works.

Right onto NFTs.

It's still pretty much bear market season right now with spending down across the board but every so often a little something pops up that pushes us further along the adoption curve.

Introducing, Reddit NFTs (or to use the term Redditors like to use, Digital Collectibles).

Here's some of the key points worth noting.

• Reddit has launched NFT avatars, similar to NBA Top Shot sports digital collectibles. Users are recognizing value of having unique collectibles that can easily be bought and sold.

• They could be onboarding millions of people to the world of non-fungible tokens and Web3. Some users may have their first NFT ever thanks to an airdrop and sale by Reddit.

• Many of the collectible avatars were free airdrops to loyal users on Reddit.

• According to Dune Analytics, there are currently 2.8 million holders of Reddit collectible avatars.

Related Link: "Generation Coming Up Has More Fundamental Understanding Of Markets": Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian On Meme Stocks And NFTs

One of the key things to note here is that they're called Avatars and that they can be customised. Here's the one that I got dropped for one of my Reddit Accounts.

Whether you're pro NFTs, Digital Collectibles or not, they're here to stay so to see this come out of Reddit is awesome.

Podcasts of the week

• Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA | Lex Fridman Podcast #331 - 7.5 hours long covering some huge ideas and topics.

• Oculus Founder: From Flipping iPhones On Ebay To Selling For $2Bn To Facebook | My First Million #378 - Awesome podcast if you have a general interest in tech.

Finally, Elon Musk buys Twitter, let that sink in.

That's it for this week!

If you want to join the conversation then join the community here. It's a great place to meet other like-minded individuals, learn new things, and get help with your projects. We have members with a variety of skills and experience, so there is always someone to help you out.

If you're interested in what's going on in tech, Shiny is the place for you.

Catch you on the next one,Tom