Disney plans to scale back its streaming content as cost-cutting hits the entertainment giant. Marvel Studios will reportedly see the first and perhaps biggest cuts under CEO Bob Iger’s second stint leading the company. Marvel head Kevin Feige echoes the sentiment, saying the company plans to release fewer shows on Disney+ while spacing them out more. According to Iger, Disney wants “the quality on the screen, but we have to look at what they cost us.”

“The pace at which we’re putting out the Disney+ shows will change so they can each get a chance to shine,” Feige told Entertainment Weekly earlier this week. Disney’s Marvel output over the last couple of years has been staggering. It released three movies and three television series in 2022, which followed the four films and five shows it put out in 2021. The company initially announced five Disney+ series for 2023, but season two of Loki and the new Secret Invasion starring Samuel L. Jackson are reportedly the only two that are still “sure bets” to arrive this year.

“I do think one of the powerful aspects of being at Marvel Studios is having these films and shows hit the zeitgeist,” Feige said. “But we want Marvel Studios and the MCU projects to really stand out and stand above. So, people will see that as we get further into Phase 5 and 6. The pace at which we’re putting out the Disney+ shows will change so they can each get a chance to shine.” When pressed about whether the pacing change would mean spacing them out or releasing fewer shows, he replied, “Both, I think.”

Disney

Meanwhile, Disney eyes Star Wars’ return to the big screen. Although the franchise has been busy on Disney+ with live-action series The Mandalorian, Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett, the franchise has been missing from theaters since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. Disney will reportedly unveil new film plans at Star Wars Celebration in April. However, the franchise won’t escape the company’s renewed fiscal responsibility. “Lucasfilm may ramp up, but it will have to abide by the same fiscal discipline as the rest of the company,” a source told The Hollywood Reporter.

The cost-cutting will also affect Disney's big-screen animation plans after the division’s struggles in 2022. Pixar’s Lightyear underperformed, while Disney Animation’s Strange World was a box-office disaster. As a result, the company is reportedly considering longer theatrical windows for its future animated features to encourage families to return to theaters. Upcoming animated projects include Elemental and Wish.

However, industry insiders don’t necessarily foresee the far-ranging cuts as omens of bigger concerns looming for Disney or its streaming service. “You can have ten mediocre shows, or you can have five great shows,” an agency partner told The Hollywood Reporter. “People will still stay on Disney+.”

The story behind how Tetris became a global phenomenon is the basis of an upcoming Apple TV+ movie. The film will hit the streaming service on March 31st and Apple has just dropped the first trailer.

Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a Dutch entrepreneur who (spoiler) secured deals to distribute Tetris on the Game Boy and other consoles. Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov (played by Nikita Yefremov) created the game during the Cold War, but because he was a government employee, he didn't receive any royalties at the outset. On the surface, that might not sound like the most compelling foundation for a thriller, but the rights to the classic puzzle game were embroiled in a clash between communism and capitalism. 

The fast-paced trailer (appropriately soundtracked by "The Final Countdown") highlights some of that inherent tension. Rogers encounters resistance from a British media mogul who wants the game, KGB agents and even Mikhail Gorbachev.

If you suddenly feel the urge to rotate falling shapes and create horizontal lines with them, there are dozens of ways to play Tetris. Still, it's worth noting that the original version of the game just hit Nintendo Switch Online as part of the first wave of Game Boy titles on the service.

Twitter is loosening its advertising policies to allow cannabis companies to promote their brands on the service. The changes makes Twitter the first major social media platform to welcome cannabis ads within the United States.

“Going forward, Twitter is allowing advertisers to promote brand preference and informational cannabis-related content for CBD, THC, and cannabis-related products and services,” the company announced in a blog post.

While the change will allow companies that sell cannabis products to advertise their businesses, there will still be some restrictions on what can appear in the advertisements. As Axios points out, the ads can’t directly “promote or offer the sale of cannabis” with the exception of certain CBD products. There are also age and location-related restrictions that limit who can be targeted with cannabis-related ads.

The change is the latest way that Twitter has shaken up its rules under Elon Musk’s leadership in order to allow content that was once barred. The policy update also comes at a time when many advertisers have either fled the platform or significantly reduced how much they’re spending. By opening up to cannabis companies, which until now have had extremely limited options to reach people on social media platforms, Twitter has the opportunity to bring in a fresh set of advertisers.

In its announcement, Twitter suggested that cannabis companies could reach a large audience on the platform, noting that cannabis-related conversation “is larger than the conversation around topics such as pets, cooking, and golf, as well as food and beverage categories including fast food, coffee, and liquor.”

Great news everyone, we’re pivoting to chatbots! Little did OpenAI realize when it released ChatGPT last November that the advanced LLM (large language model) designed to uncannily mimic human writing would become the fastest growing app to date with more than 100 million users signing up over the past three months. Its success — helped along by a $10 billion, multi-year investment from Microsoft — largely caught the company’s competition flat-footed, in turn spurring a frenetic and frantic response from Google, Baidu and Alibaba. But as these enhanced search engines come online in the coming days, the ways and whys of how we search are sure to evolve alongside them.

“I'm pretty excited about the technology. You know, we've been building NLP systems for a while and we've been looking every year at incremental growth,” Dr. Sameer Singh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), told Engadget. “For the public, it seems like suddenly out of the blue, that's where we are. I've seen things getting better over the years and it's good for all of this stuff to be available everywhere and for people to be using it.”

As to the recent public success of large language models, “I think it's partly that technology has gotten to a place where it's not completely embarrassing to put the output of these models in front of people — and it does look really good most of the time,” Singh continued. “I think that that’s good enough.”

JASON REDMOND via Getty Images

“I think it has less to do with technology but more to do with the public perception,” he continued. “If GPT hadn't been released publicly… Once something like that is out there and it's really resonating with so many people, the usage is off the charts.”

Search providers have big, big ideas for how the artificial intelligence-enhanced web crawlers and search engines might work and damned if they aren’t going to break stuff and move fast to get there. Microsoft envisions its Bing AI to serve as the user’s “copilot” in their web browsing, following them from page to page answering questions and even writing social media posts on their behalf.

This is a fundamental change from the process we use today. Depending on the complexity of the question users may have to visit multiple websites, then sift through that collected information and stitch it together into a cohesive idea before evaluating it.

“That's more work than having a model that hopefully has read these pages already and can synthesize this into something that doesn't currently exist on the web,” Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at NYU Tandon, told Engadget. “The information is still out there. It's still verifiable, and hopefully correct. But it's not all in place.”

For its part, Google’s vision of the AI-powered future has users hanging around its search page rather than clicking through to destination sites. Information relevant to the user’s query would be collected from the web, stitched together by the language model, then regurgitated as an answer with reference to the originating website displayed as footnotes.

This all sounds great, and was all going great, right up to the very first opportunity for something to go wrong. When it did. In its inaugural Twitter ad — less than 24 hours after debuting — Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, confidently declared, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.” You will be shocked to learn that the James Webb Space Telescope did not, in fact, discover the first exoplanet in history. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope holds that honor from 2004. Bard just sorta made it up. Hallucinated it out of the digital ether.

Of course this isn’t the first time that we’ve been lied to by machines. Search has always been a bit of a crapshoot, ever since the early days of Lycos and Altavista. “When search was released, we thought it was ‘good enough’ though it wasn't perfect,” Singh recalled. “It would give all kinds of results. Over time, those have improved a lot. We played with it, and we realized when we should trust it and when we shouldn’t — when we should go to the second page of results, and when we shouldn't.”

The subsequent generation of voice AI assistants evolved through the same base issues that their text-based predecessors did. “When Siri and Google Assistant and all of these came out and Alexa,” Singh said, “they were not the assistants that they were being sold to us as.”

The performance of today’s LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT, are likely to improve along similar paths through their public use, as well as through further specialization into specific technical and knowledge-based roles such as medicine, business analysis and law. “I think there are definitely reasons it becomes much better once you start specializing it. I don't think Google and Microsoft specifically are going to be specializing it too much — their market is as general as possible,” Singh noted.

In many ways, what Google and Bing are offering by interposing their services in front of the wider internet — much as AOL did with the America Online service in the ‘90s — is a logical conclusion to the challenges facing today’s internet users.

The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Nobody's doing the search as the end goal. We are seeking some information, eventually to act on that information,” Singh argues. “If we think about that as the role of search, and not just search in the literal sense of literally searching for something, you can imagine something that actually acts on top of search results can be very useful.”

Singh characterizes this centralization of power as, “a very valid concern. Simply put, if you have these chat capabilities, you are much less inclined to actually go to the websites where this information resides,” he said.

It’s bad enough that chatbots have a habit of making broad intellectual leaps in their summarizations, but the practice may also “incentivize users not go to the website, not read the whole source, to just get the version that the chat interface gives you and sort of start relying on it more and more,” Singh warned.

In this, Singh and Dolan-Gavitt agree. “If you’re cannibalizing from the visits that a site would have gotten, and are no longer directing people there, but using the same information, there's an argument that these sites won't have much incentive to keep posting new content.” Dolan-Gavitt told Engadget. “On the other hand the need for clicks also is one of the reasons we get lots of spam and is one of the reasons why search has sort of become less useful recently. I think [the shortcomings of search are] a big part of why people are responding more positively to these chatbot products.”

That demand, combined with a nascent marketplace, is resulting in a scramble among the industry’s major players to get their products out yesterday, ready or not, underwhelming or not. That rush for market share is decidedly hazardous for consumers. Microsoft’s previous foray into AI chatbots, 2014’s Taye, ended poorly (to put it without the white hoods and goose stepping). Today, Redditors are already jailbreaking OpenAI to generate racist content. These are two of the more innocuous challenges we will face as LLMs expand in use but even they have proven difficult to stamp out in part, because they require coordination amongst an industry of viscous competitors.

“The kinds of things that I tend to worry about are, on the software side, whether this puts malicious capabilities into more hands, makes it easier for people to write malware and viruses,” Dolan-Gavitt said. “This is not as extreme as things like misinformation but certainly, I think it'll make it a lot easier for people to make spam.”

“A lot of the thinking around safety so far has been predicated on this idea that there would be just a couple kinds of central companies that, if you could get them all to agree, we could have some safety standards.” Dolan-Gavitt continued. “I think the more competition there is, the more you get this open environment where you can download an unrestricted model, set it up on your server and have it generate whatever you want. The kinds of approaches that relied on this more centralized model will start to fall apart.”

Extrapolations, a drama series focusing on the near-future impacts of climate change, is coming to Apple TV+ next month. The streaming service has released the first trailer, which shows off a cast stuffed full of big names. Among the stars featured in the show are Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller, Kit Harington, Daveed Diggs, Edward Norton, Yara Shahidi, Matthew Rhys, Gemma Chan, David Schwimmer, Keri Russell, Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire and Murray Bartlett (who was most recently seen in The Last of Us).

The eight-episode series showcases "interwoven stories about love, work, faith and family," Apple says. Extrapolations depicts how people from around the planet are adapting (or perhaps not) to the effects of climate change. It covers a several-decade span in the middle of the 21st century, by which time humans have landed on Mars.

Given the cast and the visual effects-packed trailer, it's clear Apple has spared little expense on this series. The clip shows a future version of Manhattan protected by sea walls and hints at technology that might allow humans to "thrive" in a world further wracked by climate change.

Contagion writer and An Inconvenient Truth producer Scott Z. Burns created the show. The first three episodes of Extrapolations will premiere on Apple TV+ on March 17th, with the remaining five arriving on a weekly basis.

2023 will be another big year for fans of Riot Games and League of Legends. This morning, the studio announced it will release not one but three games from its Riot Forge publishing label before 2024. The slate opens with The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story, a new action RPG from Digital Sun Games, the studio behind 2018’s Moonlighter. TheMageseeker casts you as Sylas, everyone’s favorite rogue Damacian mage, as he attempts to lead a revolution against the kingdom that imprisoned him. Riot is billing the game as a “2D hi-bit” title, meaning it features a pixel art style that takes advantage of modern rendering techniques. Judging from the trailer Riot shared, TheMageseeker looks like it draws inspiration from games like Hyper Light Drifter and Titan Souls. It will arrive this spring on PC and consoles.

Sometime this summer, Riot will then release Convergence: A League of Legends Story. Double Stallion, a Montreal-based studio that’s best known for its work on Speed Brawl, has been working on the game since at least 2019. It stars Ekko, one of the League champions who makes an appearance in Netflix’s Arcane animated series, in a 2D action platformer. This being a game about Ekko, expect to use time manipulation to solve some of the challenges and puzzles Convergence throws at you.

Lastly, there’s Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story. This spinoff comes courtesy of Rime creator Tequila Works and will arrive sometime in the fall. Of the three games that Riot shared release dates for today, Song of Nunu is probably the one I’m most excited to play since Nunu and Willump are such a loveable pair and Tequila Works has a consistent track record. Both Convergence and Song of Nunu will be available to play on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC via Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store when they arrive later this year.

Platformer has interviewed Twitter employees to figure out why people's For You feeds turned into The Elon Musk show, and they said the company's engineers truly did build a system that benefited their CEO alone. According to the publication, Elon's cousin and Twitter employee James Musk sent an urgent message on the company's Slack on Monday morning. "We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," he wrote, calling the situation "high urgency" and asking everyone who can write code to help. The situation? President Biden's tweet about rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagement than Musk's. 

Apparently, the president's tweet generated almost 29 million impressions, whereas Musk's generated 9.1 million only before he deleted it. Musk's issue with his tweets not getting as much engagement as he would like started before the Super Bowl, however. Platformer previously reported that he fired one of Twitter's two remaining principal engineers because he suggested that Musk's tweets aren't generating as many impressions anymore because people are no longer that interested in what he's saying. 

Around 80 Twitter employees were reportedly tasked to investigate the possible reasons for Musk's waning engagement numbers, and they did consider the possibility that a lot of people had blocked and muted him in recent months. They also looked into legitimate potential technical issues, though, because tweets from users whose posts typically perform well should've been automatically promoted by the website's system. 

The fix they came up with, Platformer says, is to deploy code that would artificially boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that they rank higher than everyone else's in people's feeds. As a result, over 90 percent of Musk's 128.9 million followers saw his tweets, and even those who don't follow the Twitter owner kept seeing his posts on their timeline. 

While Musk didn't speak at length about the issue, he did acknowledge the change in his own way, specifically by posting the "forced to drink milk" meme. He also asked people to stay tuned while Twitter made adjustments to the "algorithm" (his quote, not ours) after users started complaining of seeing all Elon all the time. "Adjustments" reportedly didn't mean removing his advantage completely, though: according to Platformer, Elon's tweets are still artificially boosted, but by a factor less than 1,000. Bottom line, users will still see his tweets a lot, unless they choose to move over to the Following tab instead. 

TuneIn is adding a new way for users to discover the more than 100,000 radio stations available to stream on its service. This week, the company – in honor of World Radio Day, which fell on February 13th – began rolling out TuneIn Explorer (via Android Police).

The feature plots everything TuneIn offers on an interactive map allowing you to see where some of the world’s most famous radio stations are based out of. You can access the map by visiting TuneIn’s website on your computer or mobile device. The company has included handy filters along the top of the interface, allowing you to narrow down the stations you see based on genre and language. You can apply multiple filters if you want more specific results. The map also includes a search feature and even displays emergency broadcast stations.

There’s no word yet on when the feature will arrive in the TuneIn app. In the meantime, we can imagine a few fun use cases for the map. You could turn to it if you want to rediscover a radio station from your hometown or as a way to immerse yourself in a language you want to learn.

Starting today, Meta is rolling out a new version of its “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool. The company says the redesigned interface is meant to provide users with more information about how their activities on Facebook and beyond inform the machine learning models that power its ad-matching software. If you’re unfamiliar with the tool, you can access it by clicking or tapping the three dots icon next to an ad on Facebook or Instagram.

Once you have access to the updated tool, you’ll see a summary of the actions on Meta’s platforms and other websites that may have informed the company’s machine-learning models. For instance, the page may note that you’re seeing an ad for a dress or suit because you interacted with style content on Facebook. Users will also see new examples and illustrations that attempt to explain how Meta’s machine learning algorithms work to deliver targeted ads. At the same time, the company says it has made it easier to access its Ads Preferences. You’ll see a link to those settings from more pages accessible through the “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool.

Meta

“We are committed to using machine learning models responsibly. Being transparent about how we use machine learning is essential because it ensures that people are aware that this technology is a part of our ads system and that they know the types of information it is using,” Meta said in a blog post published Tuesday. “By stepping up our transparency around how our machine learning models work to deliver ads, we aim to help people feel more secure and increase our accountability.”

The company notes it worked with “external privacy experts and policy stakeholders” to collect input on how it could be more transparent about its ads system. Meta doesn’t say as much, but the changes likely represent an effort to ensure the company is compliant with the European Union’s Digital Services Act when it becomes law in 2024. The legislation has several provisions that apply directly to Meta, including one that mandates more transparency around how recommendation systems work. The law will also ban ads that target individuals based on their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity or political affiliation.

More broadly, the changes come after Apple’s ad-tracking changes in iOS 14 significantly hurt Meta’s bottom line. One early report after iOS 14.5 went live estimated only four percent of iPhone users in the US opted into app tracking. Since then, Meta has seen revenue growth shrink significantly. More recently, in combination with its virtual and augmented reality spending, Meta saw its first-ever revenue decline in the second quarter of 2022.

Discord is expanding Stage Channels, its Clubhouse- and Twitter Spaces-style feature that puts a spotlight on a small group of speakers broadcasting a conversation to a larger audience. Stage Channels debuted almost two years ago as an audio-only feature, but that's all about to change as Discord is adding video feeds, screen sharing and text chat to the mix.

Up to five participants can share their video feed. Someone else can can share their screen at the same time. As ever, no audience members' audio or video will be broadcast unless they're invited to join the speakers.

Because video uses a lot more bandwidth than audio, Discord has imposed some limits. Any server with the free Community features switched on can enable video and screen sharing in Stages with up to 50 people, including the hosts. Still, Discord points out that's double the maximum viewer limit for video chat in regular voice channels. Boosted servers can have up to 150 people in a video Stage at Tier 2 and 300 at Tier 3.

Discord

Text chat, meanwhile, is the same as in voice channels. You can select "Show Chat" on the top right of the panel and ask questions or comment on what speakers are discussing. Additionally, moderators have the ability to only allow users with certain assigned roles to share video or their screen on a server.

Meanwhile, as you're waiting for a Stage to begin, Discord will now play waiting room music. If you'd rather not hear it, you can switch off the music by hitting the eighth note (♫) button.

Although Discord users won't be able to broadcast their video Stage chats to as many users as they can on the likes of Twitch, this will surely be a welcome update for users. Folks have used Stage Channels to run AMAs, fireside chats, live podcast recordings, beatboxing contests and other events. Now, creators can use the feature for premium gameplay streams if they want.

Adding video to the mix gives users more flexibility without moderators having to mute and unmute too many people. It's useful for audience members too, since it'll be harder to accidentally unmute yourself during a Discord video presentation. Make sure your mic muting hotkey isn't one you press often, folks!