Microsoft launches new AI projects with Bladee, Yaeji, Cuco, and more

thefader.com:

Microsoft has launched Artifacts, a new collaboration with TBA Agency collecting new work made with generative technology by different groups of artists.

The teams participating are Bladee and James Ferraro, Yaeji and Andrew Thomas Huang, and Cuco with Paul Trillo and Paul Flores.

The creations were made using Copilot's Microsoft's AI suite as well as open source AI tools, with the goal of showing "how cutting-edge innovation can amplify deeply personal artistic expression while remaining fundamentally guided by human imagination." Sanctuary, Bladee and James Ferraro's collaboration, is a first-person desktop adventure game (or "visual poem", as Ferraro calls it).

Stuck in a decaying labyrinth, players can explore and interact with different chatbots designed as characters. “I think that is like the point of the game," Bladee says on the project's landing page. "Being interactive lets people access this vast body of material and extract meaning from it,” Bladee explains.