Happy Veterans’ Day, everyone. I’m proud of my first-responder brother (who volunteers his time to drive an ambulance in rural Illinois), and of my employer for helping vets & others better serve their communities:

A challenging, but often unrecognized, aspect of this work is the preparation required ahead of potential disasters. Therefore, Google.org is giving a $1 million grant to Team Rubicon to build out teams of volunteers, most of them military veterans, who will work alongside first responders to build out disaster preparedness operations.

[YouTube]

Oh my—impressive:

Barack Obama’s voice was provided by Stable Voices, synthesized using an AI model trained on his speech patterns.

[YouTube]

I’m so proud of Margot “Hollywood” Nack 😝🤘 and her team for helping make this happen! 🤖🔥 And if you’re a fellow Old, you might join me in marveling at Premiere Pro’s long journey from 90’-s has-been to industrial-strength collaborative platform.

Get an inside look from Director Tim Miller and the creators of Paramount’s Terminator: Dark Fate as they take you behind the scenes into their workflow & production for editing and creating visual effects using Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other tools inside the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

[YouTube]

Racks on racks on racks o’ cloud GPUs mean we’re setting up to deliver some awesome experiences. Check out these PM gigs:

• Product Manager, Infrastructure, Stadia – Mountain View
• Product Manager, Graphics, Stadia – Waterloo or Munich

If you apply, please tell ‘em who sent ya. 😌

🎶 DUN-duhn dun dun, duh dun… DUN-duhn dun dun, duh dun… 🎶🤖💀

We’re giving you the chance to remix the Terminator: Dark Fate trailer with Adobe Premiere Pro or Premiere Rush. Use source files from the film, plus a collection of free Adobe Stock assets — this is your moment to choose your fate.

The prizes don’t suck:

$10,000 cash
One-year Creative Cloud membership
Private screening for you + 50 friends
Chance to showcase your work at Adobe MAX

There are additional prizes for a young creator & runners-up. Let’s see what you can do!

At risk of making this an all-Adobe week of posts (no subtext there, honest!), you should think about coming to work with my wife & her crew in the rockin’ Digital Video & Audio group:

• Manager, Engineering (Seattle)
• Software Engineering Developer (Seattle)
• Data Science Analyst (Seattle)
• Data Science Analyst (Seattle)
• Data Science Analyst (Seattle)
• Senior Computer Scientist (Seattle)
• DVA Program Manager (Seattle or San Jose)
• Senior Computer Scientist (San Jose)
• Senior Computer Scientist (San Jose)
• Senior Automation Quality Engineer (San Jose)

I need to get this & make some really poor decisions with the boys. 😛🔥

[YouTube] 

We’ll see whether Facebook reverses course & deletes this deepfake now that it involves Mark Zuckerberg:

Oh my god. Artists uploaded a deep fake of Mark Zuckerberg to Instagram, saying he's in control of billions of people's stolen data and ready to control the future. Facebook previously said it would not delete similar videos under its policies. We'll see https://t.co/ufwV7zMyed pic.twitter.com/CBfVtGoaQd

— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) June 11, 2019

There’s no way this can end badly—no way.

The Verge writes,

When someone edits a text transcript of the video, the software combines all this collected data — the phonemes, visemes, and 3D face model — to construct new footage that matches the text input. This is then pasted onto the source video to create the final result.

In tests in which the fake videos were shown to a group of 138 volunteers, some 60 percent of participants though the edits were real. That may sound quite low, but only 80 percent of that same group thought the original, unedited footage was also legitimate.

See previous: “Audio Photoshopping” using Adobe VoCo:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

For the last couple of years I’ve randomly observed colleagues waving at Frankenstein-looking circuit boards & displays. As with many odd things at Google, I’ve channeled Bob Dylan—”Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”—and moved right along.

Now some of the fruits of that labor are coming to light, as the new Nest Hub Max has been announced, complete with the ability to recognize gestures (e.g. to stop music or an alarm) and faces (to show you personalized info like your calendar). Dieter Bohn offers a nice overview here:

[YouTube]