For those that are new around here, this is weekly newsletter where I highlight new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

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Happy Friday! We’re back for another Product of the Week!

In this issue, you have:

📍🎙️ The Product Report has got you on-location coverage! 🎙️📍

The AI Product Report attended StartupFest 2024 in Montreal last week!

This awesome conference assembling the whole startup community in Eastern North America! Venture Capitalists, Founders, Members of the Media and other players in the Tech scene all gathered to trade ideas, talk shop, and meet new folks.

AND
Turns out that the Wednesday News of this week didn’t load the embeds correctly in your inboxes. So here’s take 2, in the shape of some recap slides.

Click this link or the image below to get to the good stuff.

I want to give you more from the event! This is a fast recap of the event, I’d love to tell you about it all, but I want to make sure I’m bringing you the core of what you want, so vote!

After reviewing dozens of AI-powered products, here’s my top pick!

Ethics in training data sourcing is always a concern - regardless of what AI model you’re building because most AI models need one thing, and they need a lot of it: DATA.

GenAI image generation raises several ethical concerns. The main stake is copyright infringement; where AI developers might use artists' work without permission to train their models. OpenAI is under fire because of it, and so are many other AI LLM giants (Source). Just because the gig players are doing it, doesn’t mean it’s fair. This week, I felt that it was a theme that I should explore a bit deeper, on top of finding a cool application of AI.

So I went looking for ethical alternatives to the most popular models, and I stumbled upon This week’s Product Of The Week: Tess.Design

Tess.design is an AI image generator that pays artists for their work. Artists can create unique AI models in their own styles, ensuring they get credited and compensated. Users can generate custom, legally compliant images that match these styles. The platform focuses on ethical AI usage and supports artists financially.

Tess.design’s 2 ex-Google creators’ answer to the ethics issue is to make the problem part of their strength! "Tess serves the same mission, allowing artists to reclaim their work from large AI companies who copy it without credit, revenue sharing, or permission." (Source) In their same press release, they highlight another interesting element; the will of the people: “A 2023 survey by The Verge showed that 70% of people believe that artists should be compensated when AI copies their work. Tess enables this, allowing customers to generate in a consistent visual style without fear of copyright infringement.”

ENOUGH CONTEXT, ON TO THE REVIEW! 👉🏼

My field tests speak for themselves frankly.

Tess has its fundamental usability is up to par: it’s got a minimalist layout - not everyone’s favorite, but it definitely makes software easy to pickup. The sequence of actions for choosing a model, and starting generations are simple, intuitive and still contain all the good stuff you’d expect out of a more classic SaaS, but don’t let that fool you. This thing is strong, and it’s fast.

Whether it’s prompt, image uploads, or other variants of seeding the generation, this platform performs well, is stable and is very intentional with its options to cater to a direct action-to-result relationship.

Let’s Talk AI Tech:

This platform is versatile on its inputs! The basics of how it works obviously includes small dataset extrapolation to produce what’s called style transfer on top of generative AI elements. The total list of input options features GenAI text-to-image, image-to-image with text enhancements. It even describes images as you upload them and supports idea-based generation. Plus, if you give it an article, it’ll create blog header images inspired by your content.

Growth Avenues

Tess.Design has great potential as a force for good in the image generation market. I’d see that by partnering with big brands as part of its marketing efforts, it can achieve substantial growth. Gaining accolades from known artists would help establish, and distribute its credibility in the field. Positioned similarly to a marketplace, Tess.Design provides a platform for artists to showcase and monetize their work. In the long term, expanding into 3D modeling could offer even more value, opening new avenues for creativity and collaboration.

Closing notes

This one is a force for good, though ultimately we are trusting that the underlying infrastructure & base models are also equally as ethically trained. Tess.Design is a fantastic tool, ethically built and a joy to use. It's reliable, artist-approved, and something I'll definitely be using for future art projects. I suspect that even my artist friends will personally approve.

Developer Sidenote: If you’re interested in a super grassroots open-source initiative looking to achieve an ethically sourced, creative commons GenAI Image generator, have a look at Project Mitsua on Hugging Face.

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Stay well, and until next week.

-✌🏽 Sam