Wearable startup Humane has officially unveiled its first device, the Ai Pin. For months, the company has drip fed information, only offering a glimpse of the device, wielded by Naomi Campbell, of all people, at Paris Fashion Week in October.
The Ai Pin is a pocket-worn wearable AI assistant that can reportedly perform the tasks our current phones and voice assistants do, but without a screen, instead operating primarily through voice commands and, occasionally, a virtual screen projected onto the user’s hand. It works independently of other devices, connected to its own phone network through T-Mobile, but on Humane’s own MVNO because that’s even more complicated.
The device will cost $700, and another $24 per month for unlimited talk, text and data, and will ship in early 2024.
We’re still waiting for deeper hands-on impressions and demonstrations of the technology. I’m skeptical, and not just because it’s been just over ten years since Google Glass tried to be a thing.
Have a great weekend, and make sure you check out our new TMA series on YouTube, where I try to make more work for our wonderful video team, every Saturday.
— Mat Smith
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The $550 Steam Deck OLED is not the Steam Deck 2. This is a mid-cycle refresh from Valve, similar to the Switch OLED upgrade, but there’s a lot more going on internally here. Its screen is better, its battery life is better and its chip and thermals are better — but it’s still a big ole handheld. The updated display is the device’s highlight, while things like faster charging, improved antennas and smoother controls are welcome bonuses.
The TP-7 and CM15 balance out the company’s pocket-sized studio gear.
Making even the most specced-out Steam Deck OLED look reasonably priced, Teenage Engineering has completed its Field series of studio gear, and the whole kit will set you back $5,900. Now, for the TE faithful who are still reading, its more playful design and solid hardware can be creativity inducing, according to Engadget’s James Trew.
Some people used it to ‘commit unspeakably heinous crimes,’ its founder admits.
Omegle, a chat service that pairs users with a random person so they can talk via text or video, is shutting down. Leif K-Brooks, who launched the service when he was 18 years old, announced its closure and talked about its humble beginnings. He admitted “some people misused [the service], including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.” Critics have raised concerns about the website’s safety over the past years, with some even calling it a “magnet for pedophiles.”
Bundles include Spider-Man 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III.
Following the news that Sony has now sold over 46.6 million PS5 consoles, its refreshed hardware is bubbling up in stores. A standard model with a copy of Marvel’s 'Spider-Man 2 at no extra cost has hit Dell and Walmart, but the $500 bundle is going in and out of stock. The PS5 Slim (which isn’t the official name) will likely be available at other retailers soon.
Listings for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III bundles have appeared at Walmart too, but they cost $609 and come with your choice of accessory. Sony initially suggested the PS5 Slim would only be available in the US initially, but standard models have popped up in Canada.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-humanes-ai-pin-wearable-costs-699-and-ships-in-early-2024-121529700.html?src=rss
At an event in June, all Netflix made public was a quick 37-second teaser showing the four nations' (Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation and Air Nomads) symbols and that the show would come out in 2024. At the time, cast members discussed memorable parts of filming Avatar: The Last Airbender, such as haircut day, but now we get to see their transformation firsthand. The cast includes Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara, Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai and Ian Ousley as Sokka.
Despite a deeper look into the upcoming series, questions remain about how it will compare to the original. Back in 2020, co-creators of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender, Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, left the project. "I realized I couldn't control the creative direction of the series, but I could control how I responded," DiMartino said at the time. "So, I chose to leave the project. It was the hardest professional decision I've ever had to make, and certainly not one that I took lightly, but it was necessary for my happiness and creative integrity." He added that the show had "potential" but wouldn't align with his vision for it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflixs-live-action-avatar-the-last-airbender-series-gets-its-first-trailer-104024809.html?src=rss
A Parkinson’s patient can now walk 6km (3.7 miles) thanks to an implant targeting the spinal cord. The Guardianreports that the man — 62-year-old “Marc” from Bordeaux, France — developed severe mobility impairments from the degenerative disease. “I practically could not walk anymore without falling frequently, several times a day,” he said in a press release announcing the breakthrough. “In some situations, such as entering a lift, I’d trample on the spot, as though I was frozen there, you might say.” Wearing the spinal implant allows him to walk “almost normally” as the research team eyes a full clinical trial.
Marc underwent a “precision neurosurgical procedure” two years ago at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), which helped facilitate the research. The surgery fitted him with an electrode field placed against his spinal cord and an electrical impulse generator under the skin of his abdomen. Although conventional Parkinson’s treatments often target brain regions affected by the loss of dopamine-producing neurons, this approach instead focuses on the spinal area associated with activating leg muscles for walking.
The procedure used a personalized map of Marc’s spinal cord, identifying the specific locations signaling leg movements. He wears a movement sensor on each leg that tells the implant he’s trying to walk; it then switches on and sends electrical impulses to the targeted spinal neurons, adapting to his movement in real-time.
GABRIEL MONNET via Getty Images
“In response to precise stimulation of the lumbar spinal cord, I’ve observed for the first time remarkable improvements of gait deficits due to Parkinson’s disease,” project supervisor Jocelyne Bloch, professor and neurosurgeon at CHUV Lausanne University hospital, said in a webinar discussing the patient’s success. “I really believe that these results open realistic perspectives to develop a treatment.”
The patient says he could walk practically normally with the stimulation after several weeks of rehab. He now wears it for around eight hours daily, only turning it off when sleeping or lying down for a while. “I turn on the stimulation in the morning and I turn off in the evening,” he said. “This allows me to walk better and to stabilise. Right now, I’m not even afraid of the stairs anymore. Every Sunday I go to the lake, and I walk around 6 kilometres. It’s incredible.”
The researchers caution that there’s still a vast chasm between tailoring the approach to one person vs. optimizing it for wide-scale use. Co-leads Grégoire Courtine and Bloch are working on a commercial version of the neuroprosthetic in conjunction with Onward Medical. “Our ambition is to provide general access to this innovative technology to improve the quality of life of Parkinson’s patients significantly, all over the world,” they said.
Michael J. Fox (right) with Sting.
Michael J. Fox Foundation
In the meantime, research on six new patients will continue in 2024. The team says a “generous donation” of $1 million from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research is funding the upcoming work. In 2021, the actor’s organization announced it had contributed over $1.5 billion to Parkinson’s research.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spinal-implant-allows-parkinsons-patient-to-walk-for-miles-193637427.html?src=rss
The internet's "enshittification," as veteran journalist and privacy advocate Cory Doctorowdescribes it, began decades before TikTok made the scene. Elder millennials remember the good old days of Napster — followed by the much worse old days of Napster being sued into oblivion along with Grokster and the rest of the P2P sharing ecosystem, until we were left with a handful of label-approved, catalog-sterilized streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify. Three cheers for corporate copyright litigation.
In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, Doctorow examines the modern social media landscape, cataloging and illustrating the myriad failings and short-sighted business decisions of the Big Tech companies operating the services that promised us the future but just gave us more Nazis. We have both an obligation and responsibility to dismantle these systems, Doctorow argues, and a means to do so with greater interoperability. In this week's Hitting the Books excerpt, Doctorow examines the aftermath of the lawsuits against P2P sharing services, as well as the role that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "notice-and-takedown" reporting system and YouTube's "ContentID" scheme play on modern streaming sites.
The harms from notice-and-takedown itself don’t directly affect the big entertainment companies. But in 2007, the entertainment industry itself engineered a new, more potent form of notice-and-takedown that manages to inflict direct harm on Big Content, while amplifying the harms to the rest of us.
That new system is “notice-and-stay-down,” a successor to notice-and-takedown that monitors everything every user uploads or types and checks to see whether it is similar to something that has been flagged as a copyrighted work. This has long been a legal goal of the entertainment industry, and in 2019 it became a feature of EU law, but back in 2007, notice-and-staydown made its debut as a voluntary modification to YouTube, called “Content ID.”
Some background: in 2007, Viacom (part of CBS) filed a billion-dollar copyright suit against YouTube, alleging that the company had encouraged its users to infringe on its programs by uploading them to YouTube. Google — which acquired YouTube in 2006 — defended itself by invoking the principles behind Betamax and notice-and-takedown, arguing that it had lived up to its legal obligations and that Betamax established that “inducement” to copyright infringement didn’t create liability for tech companies (recall that Sony had advertised the VCR as a means of violating copyright law by recording Hollywood movies and watching them at your friends’ houses, and the Supreme Court decided it didn’t matter).
But with Grokster hanging over Google’s head, there was reason to believe that this defense might not fly. There was a real possibility that Viacom could sue YouTube out of existence — indeed, profanity-laced internal communications from Viacom — which Google extracted through the legal discovery process — showed that Viacom execs had been hotly debating which one of them would add YouTube to their private empire when Google was forced to sell YouTube to the company.
Google squeaked out a victory, but was determined not to end up in a mess like the Viacom suit again. It created Content ID, an “audio fingerprinting” tool that was pitched as a way for rights holders to block, or monetize, the use of their copyrighted works by third parties. YouTube allowed large (at first) rightsholders to upload their catalogs to a blocklist, and then scanned all user uploads to check whether any of their audio matched a “claimed” clip.
Once Content ID determined that a user was attempting to post a copyrighted work without permission from its rightsholder, it consulted a database to determine the rights holder’s preference. Some rights holders blocked any uploads containing audio that matched theirs; others opted to take the ad revenue generated by that video.
There are lots of problems with this. Notably, there’s the inability of Content ID to determine whether a third party’s use of someone else’s copyright constitutes “fair use.” As discussed, fair use is the suite of uses that are permitted even if the rightsholder objects, such as taking excerpts for critical or transformational purposes. Fair use is a “fact intensive” doctrine—that is, the answer to “Is this fair use?” is almost always “It depends, let’s ask a judge.”
Computers can’t sort fair use from infringement. There is no way they ever can. That means that filters block all kinds of legitimate creative work and other expressive speech — especially work that makes use of samples or quotations.
But it’s not just creative borrowing, remixing and transformation that filters struggle with. A lot of creative work is similar to other creative work. For example, a six-note phrase from Katy Perry’s 2013 song “Dark Horse” is effectively identical to a six-note phrase in “Joyful Noise,” a 2008 song by a much less well-known Christian rapper called Flame. Flame and Perry went several rounds in the courts, with Flame accusing Perry of violating his copyright. Perry eventually prevailed, which is good news for her.
But YouTube’s filters struggle to distinguish Perry’s six-note phrase from Flame’s (as do the executives at Warner Chappell, Perry’s publisher, who have periodically accused people who post snippets of Flame’s “Joyful Noise” of infringing on Perry’s “Dark Horse”). Even when the similarity isn’t as pronounced as in Dark, Joyful, Noisy Horse, filters routinely hallucinate copyright infringements where none exist — and this is by design.
To understand why, first we have to think about filters as a security measure — that is, as a measure taken by one group of people (platforms and rightsholder groups) who want to stop another group of people (uploaders) from doing something they want to do (upload infringing material).
It’s pretty trivial to write a filter that blocks exact matches: the labels could upload losslessly encoded pristine digital masters of everything in their catalog, and any user who uploaded a track that was digitally or acoustically identical to that master would be blocked.
But it would be easy for an uploader to get around a filter like this: they could just compress the audio ever-so-slightly, below the threshold of human perception, and this new file would no longer match. Or they could cut a hundredth of a second off the beginning or end of the track, or omit a single bar from the bridge, or any of a million other modifications that listeners are unlikely to notice or complain about.
Filters don’t operate on exact matches: instead, they employ “fuzzy” matching. They don’t just block the things that rights holders have told them to block — they block stuff that’s similar to those things that rights holders have claimed. This fuzziness can be adjusted: the system can be made more or less strict about what it considers to be a match.
Rightsholder groups want the matches to be as loose as possible, because somewhere out there, there might be someone who’d be happy with a very fuzzy, truncated version of a song, and they want to stop that person from getting the song for free. The looser the matching, the more false positives. This is an especial problem for classical musicians: their performances of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart inevitably sound an awful lot like the recordings that Sony Music (the world’s largest classical music label) has claimed in Content ID. As a result, it has become nearly impossible to earn a living off of online classical performance: your videos are either blocked, or the ad revenue they generate is shunted to Sony. Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as painstakingly produced, free online lessons are blocked by Content ID or, if the label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the ad revenue they earn is shunted to a giant corporation, stealing the creative wages of a music teacher.
Notice-and-takedown law didn’t give rights holders the internet they wanted. What kind of internet was that? Well, though entertainment giants said all they wanted was an internet free from copyright infringement, their actions — and the candid memos released in the Viacom case — make it clear that blocking infringement is a pretext for an internet where the entertainment companies get to decide who can make a new technology and how it will function.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-internet-con-cory-doctorow-verso-153018432.html?src=rss
The Beatles have released another song, the first since 1995. “Now and Then” is being advertised as the final Beatles track, given that two of the members have passed and the other two are well over 80 years old. But then again, millionaires do love money.
The song grew from a John Lennon demo track dating back to the 1970s and a 1995 guitar track from George Harrison. The surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, then finished the tune using machine learning technology. The song was meant to come out back in 1995, along with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” two other tracks culled from old Lennon demos. However, the technology just wasn’t there to pull the vocals without degrading audio quality.
With the same software director Peter Jackson used for the Get Back documentary for Apple, the team split Lennon’s vocal from the piano without any audio bleed, allowing the remaining Beatles to turn it into a fleshed-out ballad. The guitar solo is in the Harrison style, but it’s not actually played by him — he does play some of the rhythm guitar in the background.
— Mat Smith
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Not another one! At least this streaming service is free. NASA has announced a new streaming service called NASA+, which will hit most major platforms next week. It’ll be completely free, with no subscription needed, and you won’t be forced to sit through ads, either. There aren’t too many details out just yet about the content, but NASA says its family-friendly programming “embeds you into our missions” with live coverage and original video series.
HTC is sending its Vive VR headsets to the International Space Station, apparently to give lonely astronauts something to do. The HTC Vive Focus 3 headsets will be part of an ongoing effort to improve the mental health of astronauts during long assignments on the station. The headsets are optimized to stabilize alignment and reduce the chances of motion sickness — which is a bigger problem when it happens in space.
Netflix is celebrating one year of its ad-supported plan by giving users on that tier every fourth episode of a consecutive binge ad-free. That’s certainly not a bad way to entice you into staying on, especially if it’s, ugh, Ozark. (Don’t ‘at’ me.) Netflix is also rolling out downloads on its ad-supported tier, claiming to be the first streamer to make the option available for users who have ads included. Netflix’s ad-supported plan is by far the cheapest after the streamer cut its Basic tier in mid-2023. It’s $6.99 monthly, while the Standard plan is now $15.49.
It sounds like an action movie, but it’s not. It’s just legal action. Scarlett Johansson’s lawyers have approached an AI app developer for using her likeness in an ad without permission.
An ad spotted on X promoted an AI image editor called Lisa AI used an AI-generated version of Johansson’s voice and image, alongside actual footage of the actor in a Black Widow behind-the-scenes clip. Multiple Lisa AI apps remain on the App Store and Google Play, but the ad no longer appears on X. Yet, when Johansson gets to play a robot voice, that’s OK? Yes. Of course it is.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-final-beatles-song-was-made-with-a-little-help-from-ai-111541406.html?src=rss
Oscar-nominated actor Scarlett Johansson has taken legal action against an AI app developer for using her voice and image in an ad without permission, Variety has reported. The 22-second ad promoted an AI image editor called Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar, and reportedly used an AI-generated version of Johansson's voice and image.
The ad showed a real clip of Johansson in a Black Widow behind-the-scenes clip, saying "What's up guys? It's Scarlett and I want you to come with me...". It then transitions to AI-generated photos and a cloned version of her voice promoting the AI app. Under the ad is fine print that states: "Images produced by Lisa AI. It has nothing to do with this person." Multiple Lisa AI apps created by Convert Software remain on the App Store and Google Play, according to Variety, but the ad no longer appears on X.
Johansson is "handling the situation in a legal capacity," said her lawyer Kevin Yorn. "We do not take these things lightly. Per our usual course of action in these circumstances, we will deal with it with all legal remedies that we will have," he added.
Johansson has one of the best known faces (and voices) in Hollywood and is the spokesperson for high-end companies including Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton. Given that, it's hard to believe that someone would even attempt to rip off her likeness, if the claim is accurate (and it's not exactly a ringing endorsement for the quality of advertisers on X).
The idea of using AI to rip off celebrity likenesses is a relatively new phenomenon, so the legal ramifications are still being worked out. In one notable incident, actor Tom Hanks warned his fans on social media that videos using AI versions of his likeness were being used to fraudulently hawk products.
Though it's still a legal grey area, some states have related laws around privacy rights, with California for one allowing civil lawsuits for the unauthorized use in advertising or promotion of someone’s "name, voice, signature, photograph or likeness."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scarlett-johannson-takes-legal-action-against-ai-app-that-cloned-her-likeness-065505106.html?src=rss
Amazon Prime Video announced Monday that the Fallout television series will premiere on April 12, 2024. The news came from a short teaser video the streaming service posted on its social channels, including Instagram, styled like a Pip-Boy interface. The series, initially announced in 2020, will adopt a “serious and harsh” tone while adding “ironic humor” and “B-movie nuclear fantasies.”
The live-action series, from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, will have an original (canonical) story set in the Fallout gaming universe. It will take place in 2077, beginning in Vault 33 in Los Angeles. As fans of the game know, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland following the events of “The Great War” on October 23, 2077. That date has become known as “Fallout Day” among the game’s fans — an ideal day for Amazon to reveal the series’ premiere date.
Fallout will star Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (Justified), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Xelia Mendes-Jones (The Wheel of Time), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island) and Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks). Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are the series’ executive producers, writers and showrunners. Additional executive producers include Athena Wickham of Kilter Films, along with Bethesda’s Todd Howard and James Altman.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-fallout-series-finally-has-a-release-date-163430938.html?src=rss
Netflix just dropped the official trailer for its upcoming Scott Pilgrim anime, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The highly anticipated eight-episode series brings back the original cast from the 2010 movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and counts Bryan Lee O’Malley — creator of the comics it’s all based on — as one of its executive producers. Edgar Wright, who directed the movie, is also on board as an executive producer. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will be released on November 17.
The show will return to the story of 23-year-old Sex Bob-Omb bass player, Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), and his plight to defeat the seven evil exes of his new love interest, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). While Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will build on what we’ve seen in the comics and movie, it won’t be a straight adaptation, according to the show’s creators. In an interview with the Netflix companion site Tudum, Wright said O’Malley’s idea for the show “was way more adventurous” than that.
Alongside Cera and Winstead, actors including Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Brie Larson, Chris Evans, and Aubrey Plaza will be reprising their roles. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will also feature music by Anamanaguchi, the band that did the soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game. The action-packed trailer set to the Mortal Kombat theme is doing everything to drum up the hype, and honestly, it's working.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-full-trailer-for-scott-pilgrim-takes-off-is-here-and-it-brings-the-heat-161223113.html?src=rss
Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has confirmed it used AI voice cloning software to reconstruct the voice of a deceased actor for its Phantom Liberty DLC. Actor Miłogost Reczek voiced the character Viktor Vektor in the Polish version of the game and would have been tapped to reprise the role for the DLC, which came out last month, but he died in 2021 before its production. The developer told Bloomberg it decided to go this route as a way to “pay tribute to his wonderful performance,” and was given permission to do so by his family.
Instead of replacing Reczek outright, CD Projekt Red worked with Respeecher, the Ukraine-based voice tech company known for deaging Mark Hamill’s voice in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett to create a young Luke Skywalker. Another actor was hired to speak the new lines, and Respeecher’s software reworked them into Reczek’s voice, CD Projekt localization director Mikołaj Szwed told Bloomberg. Reczek, who Szwed described as “one of the best Polish voice talents,” had also voiced major roles in The Witcher series.
AI has become a contentious topic in the entertainment industry, and striking Hollywood actors are currently fighting for more protections around the use of their likenesses, among other things. In September, SAG-AFTRA voted in favor of a strike authorization for video game actors, too, whose jobs could be threatened by studios’ increasing reliance on AI. Zelda Williams — Robin Williams’ daughter — recently slammed the practice of emulating deceased actors using AI, saying that they cannot consent. In this case, CD Projekt Red says Reczek’s family was “very supportive.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cd-projekt-red-used-ai-to-include-a-deceased-actors-voice-in-cyberpunk-2077-dlc-161521634.html?src=rss
Apple has acknowledged its new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro can get uncomfortably hot. The company said background activity, an iOS 17 bug and third-party apps were the cause, with some apps, like Instagram, already updated not to make the newest iPhones sweat.
Everyone loves to have opinions on why the newest iPhones aren’t working like they should, with some people blaming the new titanium body. Apple told MacRumors that the design actually provides better heat dissipation than previous stainless steel models. Similarly, the company says the issue isn’t connected to its new A1 Pro chop, nor high-power chargers and the new USB-C connector.
My iPhone 15 Pro ran pretty hot the first few days, pulling down all my apps, games and music library, but it’s evened out more recently. Others are still waiting on a fix.
Humane is a startup founded by ex-Apple executives. It’s working on a device called the Ai Pin, which uses projectors, cameras and AI tech as a sort of wearable AI assistant. The company unveiled the Ai Pin at a Paris fashion show (Humane x Coperni), attached to Naomi Campbell, who is the first person outside of the company to wear the device in public. The company describes the device as a “screenless, standalone device and software platform built from the ground up for AI.” Other information is less clear, like how the device connects to the internet, as it doesn’t pair with a smartphone. We’ll learn more when it’s fully unveiled on November 9.
Hanks called out the ad for using an AI likeness of him.
An ad reportedly used a deepfake of Tom Hanks to promote dental plans without the actor’s permission. Hanks shared a warning on Instagram on Sunday about the AI-generated video, which he wrote he had “nothing to do with.” Hanks has been outspoken about the challenges AI poses for the industry, and the use of actors’ digital likenesses is one of the major points of concern voiced by striking SAG-AFTRA workers. The use of AI to capitalize on celebrities’ legacies has already become an ethical issue. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain sparked widespread debate after it was revealed the documentary contained AI-generated voiceovers of Bourdain.
Leave the World Behind is a dual-release Netflix film that hits theaters on November 22 and the streaming service on December 8. It stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Kevin Bacon, which is a whole lot of star power. The movie continues Netflix’s recent dual-release strategy as seen with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Marriage Story, The Irishman and other high-profile features. It also ensures these movies are eligible for award season.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-apple-addresses-iphone-15-overheating-issues-111539143.html?src=rss
