Microsoft prices its image model at $106 per million, and its new voice runs 32% cheaper.
Sell on Amazon with a photorealistic AI-generated person in your product shots and you now have to say so, tagged as metadata before upload, with Amazon adding its own label to the listing. New York's new synthetic performer rules are behind it, and cartoon characters and lightly retouched real people are exempt. The tagging happens at upload, so it belongs in your export step.
Shorts finally get proper thumbnails. Partner Program creators can upload a custom image, pick from three frames YouTube pulls out of the video, or have Ask Studio generate one from the video and your usual style. You can also add thumbnails to Shorts you already posted, which is the part worth an afternoon. Monetising creators only for now.
Microsoft opened previews of two models in Foundry and, unusually, published what they cost. The image model runs $106 per million image output tokens and handles text rendered inside the image, still where most generators fall over. The voice model is $15 per million characters, twice as fast as the one it replaces and about a third cheaper. Worth pricing against your current stack before previews become paid tiers.
A clip where the character stood still for four seconds still rated fine, because the thing grading it rewarded polish over whether anything happened. A single frame looks great, and holding together across frames is exactly what a still cannot show you. So Character.ai's team stopped rating clips one at a time and started comparing them in pairs, asking which of two tells the better story. Compare, do not rate.
The badly made AI walking ads filling your feed are not a budget problem, they are a filter. Anyone who notices the strange movement scrolls past, leaving an audience already inclined not to look too closely, which is exactly who the fraudulent fitness app behind them wants. Uncomfortable reading if you have treated obvious AI artefacts as purely a craft failure. Sometimes the slop is the targeting.