Innovation Profs - 5/6/2025

In this week’s newsletter

• This week’s top Gen AI news

• Tool of the week

• Image of the week

• What we found

Upcoming Innovation Profs Events

😎 Hot GPT Summer 2
When: Noon Central on May 14
Where: Virtual on Zoom
Cost: FREE
Our free kickoff to summer is back. Join us for this 45-minute Zoom call to catch up on the latest advancements in the world of generative AI. Sign up now.

🤖 Gen AI Boot Camp
When: 9 a.m.-3 p.m. May 22
Where: In-person at Drake University of on Zoom
Cost: $199 early-bird rate through May 12
This hands-on workshop will give you the knowledge needed to supercharge your productivity at work with generative AI tools. You will learn about tools available now and in the future and leave with tangible ways to use gen AI at your job.

Latest Gen AI News

Meta launches a stand-alone AI app to compete with ChatGPT

Last Tuesday Meta announced that its own suite of AI tools, Meta AI, previously available only through WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, is being released as a stand-alone app. What’s the draw of having a Meta alternative to ChatGPT? According to Meta, “We’re using our decades of work personalizing people’s experiences on our platforms to make Meta AI more personal. […] Your Meta AI assistant also delivers more relevant answers to your questions by drawing on information you’ve already chosen to share on Meta products, like your profile, and content you like or engage with.”

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use”

Meta wasn’t just in the generative AI news last week for the launch of the Meta AI app, as there were developments in the ongoing lawsuit against Meta brought by a group of authors who allege that Meta’s use of their works as part of the training data for the Llama family of models constitutes a copyright violation. At a hearing on Thursday, Judge Vince Chhabria, who is presiding over the case, expressed skepticism about Meta’s claim that the use of these works should be deemed fair use: "You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," according to Chhabria. He continued, "You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person." The case is still ongoing.

Freepik releases an ‘open’ AI image generator trained on licensed data

One solution to the problem of training AI models on copyrighted material? Use licensed data instead. That’s the strategy the online graphic design platform Freepik is taking with their AI image generation model F Lite, trained on an internal data set consisting of 80 million images. This strategy of building AI image models using licensed data is also being pursued by companies such as Adobe, Bria, Getty Images, Moonvalley, and Shutterstock.

OpenAI overrode concerns of expert testers to release sycophantic GPT-4o

OpenAI has received a considerable amount of flak on social media in the past few weeks for what has been perceived to be the overly sycophantic behavior of GPT-4o, culminating in OpenAI rolling back a late April update to the model. In a mea culpa, OpenAI explained the situation, “While we’ve had discussions about risks related to sycophancy in GPT‑4o for a while, sycophancy wasn’t explicitly flagged as part of our internal hands-on testing, as some of our expert testers were more concerned about the change in the model’s tone and style. Nevertheless, some expert testers had indicated that the model behavior ‘felt’ slightly off…” As further explained in their blog post, OpenAI decided to deploy the update in spite of the concerns of these testers. “Unfortunately, this was the wrong call.”

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: Pippit

Pippit AI is an AI-powered content creation platform developed by CapCut, designed to simplify marketing video production. It offers a suite of tools that enable users to generate videos, images, avatars, and promotional materials with minimal effort.

Simply enter a website you want to create a video about, and Pippit will create 10 different AI videos about the page. Pippit also has avatars that can voice content for your videos. Or upload your own

Pippit offers a 30-day free trial, and plans start as low as $15/month.

AI-generated image of the week

Donald Trump shared an AI image of him as Pope. This got us thinking … are there other job openings that we can use AI to fill? We used Midjourney’s new Omni-Reference feature to make Professor Snider the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns.

Prompt: make me the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns

What we found

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, is reportedly developing AI-powered smart glasses. According to a report from The Information, the project began within the past year and focuses on high-quality image and video capture while maintaining good battery life. Although ByteDance has previously released AI-related gadgets like earbuds, this is its first large-scale wearable