This app wants you to be fake! 🤯

Time flies, and it's not really fun when you realize even September is flying. This weekend, I'm planning to slow down and read Matthew Binder's Pure Cosmos Club. I've heard so many great things about it. ✨

What do you folks do to slow down time? Read or take long walks?

Reply and tell me — but only after going through our weekly round-up of updates in the creator economy. 👇

In today's Going Solo

• Advice of the week: Ken Robinson on originality

• Discover a new creator: Andy Adams for photography & storytelling

• News that caught our eye: Heard of BeFake yet?

• Stuff you've got to read: Public libraries are under threat

Ken Robinson on Originality

We’re all afraid of making mistakes. It's no surprise! But, will they set us back on our paths or haunt us forever? When we’re learning and experimenting with something new, we’re bound to fail. But that’s how we find our niche and voice. ✨

British author and teacher Ken Robinson has a few wise words on originality. 👇🏼

Andy Adams for Photography & Storytelling

We cannot get enough of Andy Adams’ photographs and storytelling! 📸

Andy is a photographer and founder of Flak Photo and manages a community of 18K members. He also writes a newsletter Flak Photo Digest on Substack, where he talks about visual imagery, his experiments with long-form and short-form video and audio content, and photographs. ✨

Two reasons why you should follow him: mind-blowing photographs and super interesting and opinionated stories. Check out his stack here. 👇🏼

There's a New App in Town & It Wants You to Be Fake

When BeFake dropped its app, everyone thought it's a BeReal parody! But looks like the app is real, and doesn't want you to be your unabashed self.

Just like BeReal, BeFake users also get daily notifications urging them to post photos using their front and rear cameras. However, you post highly-edited photos, which BeFake's AI helps you edit. Why be real when you can be fake, is what BeFake says.

ZDnet says, “Because the editing process takes longer than snapping a photo and uploading, users have a 20-minute window to upload their AI photos on BeFake. To edit the photo, you can use the predetermined prompts or personalize your own, similar to how you would on DALL-E or other AI art generators. Once you are satisfied with your photo, you can upload your edited picture. However, there is a catch. Despite posting a picture that doesn't resemble the original photo, users can swipe to see the original photo and the AI-transformed one.”

Earlier last week, this app has raised $3M seed funding to build an AI-augmented social network, with an intent to be more creative.

What do you think about this? Have you used this app yet?

Read the full announcement. 👇🏼

Public libraries are under threat. What impact will this have on creativity? - Lola Olufemi

Libraries are sacred, and let's not allow someone say otherwise. But public libraries are under threat — that's what Lola Olufemi writes for It's Nice That. This piece discusses the important of public libraries, the role they play in our lives, and how they uplift communities.

Lines from the piece that resonate with us: All the Libraries in London: Reader is the product of an artistic collaboration; it lists every library currently publicly accessible in London, but it is more than just an index. This is a political and artistic listing, one that invites the reader to rediscover their own memories of their local library as a site of discovery.

Read the entire piece here. 👇🏼

🔥 Brewing Hot

• Isn't Meta doing pretty much everything to get people to use Threads? Although the desktop version isn't helping Threads engagement much, Meta hopes to bring users back to Threads by showing Threads carousels on Instagram. Read more here.

• Donald Trump's upcoming court trial will be streamed on YouTube. Find more details here.

Creators, it's about time you help fellow creators out!

We're conducting a research on how much Asian creators make through brand deals, courses, affiliate marketing, and sponsorships, and we'd love to understand your revenue methods.

We’d love to chat with you about this. You can also fill out this survey to help us in this study. 👇

And that’s it for this week!

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We’ll be back with more updates next Friday. 👋 

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