Two weeks ago, Netflix confirmed it would livestream the Love Is Blind season four reunion. But when the time came, first it was delayed, then, after an hour, Netflix pulled the plug. The streaming service soon tweeted an apology and aired the reunion yesterday.
This was only Netflix's second attempt at livestreaming. Its first, Chris Rock's comedy special Selective Outrage, aired live in March. But Netflix edited his material about being hit by Will Smith at the Oscars. Rock got a film name wrong in a punchline when performing live and corrected himself mid-delivery. The streaming service subsequently cut around the hiccup. Netflix also owns the rights to stream the Screen Actors Guild Awards live, next year, which should give it enough time to fix those technical difficulties.
– Mat Smith
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Google’s new project, a collaboration with marine biologist Steve Simpson and marine ecologist Mary Shodipo, is training AI to recognize aquatic wildlife sounds, hoping to replenish them and raise awareness of the ocean’s troubled habitats. The Earth’s coral reefs have been declining thanks to climate change, overfishing and pollution. The project has online volunteers listening to some reefs and flagging fish noises. Is it thrilling? No. But at least it works, unlike the Love Is Blind livestream.
But you won't know exactly what design you're paying for until later.
After launching its .Swoosh web3 platform in November, Nike is ready to unveil its first set of digital collectibles today. The company has announced the Our Force 1 (or OF1) series of "virtual creations" will be available to invitees on May 8th, while general access opens on May 10th. You can choose to buy one of two boxes – Classic Remix or New Wave – and each will cost $19.82.
That gets you a digital box – but you won't know which design you got. On an undisclosed date after May 10th, Nike will reveal all the OF1 boxes, but you can choose not to open the box, leaving it as a virtual Schrodinger's sneaker situation.
Adobe announced Monday it’s working on more AI upgrades, coming to Firefly's beta program later this year. Building on the company's long-running AI program, Sensei, Firefly is a suite of generative AI models that can both create and transform audio, video, illustrations and 3D models using text prompts in the same way that Dall-E and ChatGPT do. Firefly's features are already available across Adobe Premiere Pro, Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop, with these new features accessible through the closed beta program later this year. They’re to help professional editors cut down on their drudge work, boosting color levels, inserting placeholder images, adding effects, even autonomously recommending b-roll for video projects.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-netflix-struggles-with-its-livestreaming-tech-111517890.html?src=rss
Soon, when you go to stream Succession or The Last of Us, you'll no longer be looking for an app called HBO Max. As has been rumored, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is changing the name of the streaming service to simply "Max." The company is folding content from Discovery+ into the platform to make it more of a one-stop shop, though Discovery+ will remain as a standalone service in the US.
The big switch will take place on May 23rd — almost exactly three years after HBO Max debuted. WBD previously said it would combine the streaming services sometime this spring. WBD CEO David Zaslav suggested during a press event that, in the coming months, Max will fold in sports and other live content. The company plans to add an average of more than 40 new titles and TV show seasons each month.
There will be three pricing tiers. An ad supported plan will cost $10 per month or $100 per year. It will allow users to stream HD video on two devices simultaneously.
The ad-free plan won't have an immediate price hike as it will remain $16 per month (or $150 per year) for the time being. WBD raised the price of that plan for the first time back in January. That also supports HD streaming on two devices simultaneously with up to 30 offline downloads.
There will also be an "ultimate ad-free" plan that costs $20 per month or $200 per year. That's the option you'll need to plump for it you want to stream shows and movies in 4K. It supports 4K UHD streams on up to four devices at once with up to 100 downloads for offline viewing.
WBD's presentation highlighted some of the content that's coming to Max, including a first look at The Penguin, an eight-episode miniseries that ties into The Batman. An It prequel called Welcome to Derry is on the way, as is a show based on The Conjuring and a Big Bang Theory follow-up series.
Elsewhere, content that was in the works for Discovery+ will move over to Max, such as reality programming featuring Robert Downey Jr. and all-time great snowboarder and skateboarder Shaun White. A docuseries featuring Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes as they tour the US with a live version of their podcast, SmartLess, will drop on Max's launch day. Also coming to the platform on May 23rd is Shazam! Fury of the Gods.
There's some logical reasoning behind shortening the name to Max. It's now about more than HBO and nods toward a more expansive array of shows, movies and other content that's on offer. Executives were reportedly concerned that keeping HBO in the platform's name could weaken that brand if consumers associate it with all the content on the platform, such as the impending influx of reality shows from Discovery+.
However, the rebranding strips away the name value of HBO and the implied level of quality that has been associated with that brand for decades. Max is a bad, soulless name with zero identity of its own.
Since WBD was formed as a result of a merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery last year, the company's leadership has overhauled its streaming strategy in a bid to cut costs and improve the bottom line. Executives swung the ax on an array of HBO Max exclusives, reportedly in favor of tax breaks. WBD also removed several shows and many episodes of popular series from HBO Max. The company has started licensing out some of its programming to other platforms to add some extra revenue streams.
Developing...
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hbo-max-will-just-be-called-max-when-it-folds-in-discovery-171611258.html?src=rss
Super Mario Bros. is an almost perfect kids film. It's stunningly animated, it has enough momentum to keep youngins from being bored, and almost every character is unique and likable (even Bowser himself, thanks to the comedic stylings of Jack Black). It's clear that Nintendo didn't want to repeat the mistakes of that other Mario movie, the live-action 1993 film that's ironically beloved by some '90s kids (it's all we had!), but ultimately failed to capture the magic of the games. This film, meanwhile, is chock full of everything you'd remember from NIntendo's ouvre. It's a nostalgic romp for adults, and it's simply a fun time for children.
But boy is it safe. Maybe I'm a bit spoiled by the excellent non-Pixar animated films we've seen over the last decade, especially the ones that Phil Lord and Chris Miller have touched (The Lego Movie! Into the Spider-Verse!). But it's glaringly obvious Nintendo didn't want to take any major creative risks with this adaptation. The script from Matthew Fogel is filled with enough humor and references to keep us from feeling bored, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic deliver some inspired sequences. But it's almost like the film is trapped in a nostalgia castle thanks to the whims of an aging corporate dinosaur. (Bear with me.)
Nintendo/Illumination
That wasn't a problem for the kids in my matinee audience, but it's a bit disappointing if you've waited decades to see a truly great Mario adaptation. It's in line with the recent live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie — Super Mario Bros. is "fine." There's no attempt to achieve anything deeper than the basics: Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are two floundering Brooklyn plumbers who are inexplicably transported to the Mushroom Kingdom. Luigi, ever the scaredy-cat, is almost instantly captured by Bowser's minions, and it's up to Mario and Princess Peach (an effervescent Anya Taylor-Joy) to save him. Big bad Bowser, meanwhile, has plans to either marry Peach or, barring that, take over the kingdom.
The film bombards you with an endless series of references from the start – just look at all those Punch-Out! characters on the wall! – something that will either delight longtime Nintendo fans or make your eyes roll. Personally, though, I mostly enjoyed seeing how all of the nostalgia fodder was deployed (the adorably fatalistic Lumalee from Mario Galaxy practically steals the film). The filmmakers also show off plenty of visual flair, like an early scene in Brooklyn that rotates into a 2D chase sequence. If only some of the musical choices were more creative. (A Kill Bill reference? Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" during Mario's training montage? Come on.)
It's always nice to see kids movies reach far beyond our expectations — The Lego Movie wrestled with the prison of capitalism, the importance of pushing against restrictive social expectations and how fandom can ruin the thing you actually love, all in addition to being a fun adventure for kids and injecting a dose of smart humor for adults. In Super Marios Bros., Mario learns to eat mushrooms because they literally make him big and strong. What subtext!
At the same time, I can still respect a movie that simply accomplishes its goal of entertaining children. Over the years, I've been subjected to plenty of truly awful kid's films with ugly animation and production design, lazy writing, and zero creative vision. I wish I could reclaim the time I spent watching Space Jam: A New Legacy or the 2011 Smurfs movie. The Super Mario Bros. may be a bit basic and safe, but it's not a waste of time.
For one, we've never seen Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom look this good. Illumination may not have the stellar track record of Pixar, but this movie is filled with gorgeously detailed characters, vibrant worlds jam-packed with detail and some of the most fluid animation I've seen in years. It's a visual feast, and it makes me long for the day when a Mario game can look so lush (as much as I loved Super Mario Odyssey, it's visuals are held back by the Switch's aging hardware).
And for the most part, the voice acting kept me invested. Jack Black is inspired as Bowser, a hopeless romantic who can only express his feelings through song and world domination. Charlie Day basically plays his usual harried persona, but it fits Luigi, a character who mainly exists to support his little bigger brother. And Anya Taylor-Joy makes for a perfect Princess Peach, a leader who has to feign bravery to protect her adorable Mushroom Kingdom people.
Nintendo/Illumination
For all of Chris Pratt's hype about his Mario voice, though, it's merely serviceable. The movie jokes about Charles Martinet's original problematic accent (Martinet also voices two characters in the film), but Pratt's spin on it just feels like someone pretending to be a schlubby Brooklynite. That's particularly surprising since Pratt injected so much life into his Lego Movie lead.
What's most disappointing about The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it's so close to being genuinely great. If the film had more time to build up its characters, or if it made room for Jack Black unleash his full Tenacious D talents as Bowser, it would easily be stronger. Why not go a bit harder on that Mario Kart sequence? (Even Moana managed to fit in a Mad Max: Fury Road reference!) Why not spend a bit more time on the rivalry/budding bromance between Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and Mario?
With a projected opening weekend of $150 million or more, it's clear that Nintendo has a hit on its hands. A sequel is inevitable. I just hope that the company loosens up the next time around. After all, what fun is a Mario adventure without taking a few creative leaps over chasms of uncertainty?
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/super-mario-bros-movie-review-fun-safe-romp-135146207.html?src=rss
At the Star Wars Celebration in London, Lucasfilm has unveiled a raft of news, trailers and more on its numerous upcoming streaming series, Variety has reported. That starts with a first look at The Acolyte showed to the ExCel Center crowd (but not online yet) and a launch date window of sometime in 2024.
First revealed at Disney's Investor Day 2020, The Acolyte takes place in the High Republic era of the Star Wars universe (100 years before the franchise’s prequel trilogy) during a period called the Golden Age of the Jedi. The cast includes Jodie Turner-Smith, The Good Place star Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Rebecca Henderson and Carrie-Anne Moss.
The first look showed footage of a Jedi temple, fighting with Moss, a gold lightsaber, and a shots of the Jedis lighting up their sabers in unison. "This is about power and who is allowed to use it," a tagline read. The show is reportedly a "mystery thriller" seen from the perspective of the Siths, with the term "acolyte" describing soldiers of Sith Lords, according to Variety.
— Star Wars | #TheMandalorian is Now Streaming (@starwars) April 7, 2023
Lucasfilm also revealed that the Ahsoka series will debut in August of 2023, and stars Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead revealed a teaser trailer to the crowd (above), with Dawson intoning "Something is coming, something dark."
In other news, creator Tony Gilroy also showed off a trailer (also not online yet) and said that Andor's second and final season will debut in August 2024. Meanwhile, Jude Law and Jon Favreau showed off the first trailer for Skeleton Crew, a Spielberg-esque series focused on a group of rebellious kids. The footage showed Jude Law as a Jedi, kids on speeders and spaceships, and a baddie from The Mandalorian.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-acolyte-star-wars-series-will-hit-disney-in-2024-123506267.html?src=rss
Pop star Maggie Rogers isn’t going to let bots spoil her upcoming tour. The “Alaska” singer told fans in an email today that she’s getting a jump on automated scalpers by selling tickets the old-fashioned way: in-person sales.
Rogers says fans can physically walk up to box offices on Friday to get first dibs on pre-sale tickets for her US summer tour, running from July to August. “On Friday, for one day only, we’re running an in-person pre-sales, where you can go directly to your local box office to buy a ticket,” wrote the artist, who rose to fame after a video of Pharrell Williams reacting to her “Alaska” demo went viral in 2016. “There’s a two-ticket-per-person limit, but you can choose any ticket you want — all of the prices and tiers will be available, along with exclusive merch and a special playlist I cooked up just for box office day.”
Rogers says the in-person process will vary from city to city, and she advises fans to check her website for specifics. For fans in the NYC area, she adds that she will visit the Music Hall of Williamsburg box office in Brooklyn on Friday, greeting fans buying tickets for her Forest Hills show scheduled for July 27th.
If you can't make it to the box office on Friday, Rogers says her website will open registrations for traditional artist pre-sales on April 11th. In addition, Spotify will have its own pre-sales on April 12th with local promoters joining on the 12th and 13th. General availability opens on April 14th.
Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold, testifying before Congress in January
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ticketmaster has been in hot water lately over its inability to prevent bots from scooping up pre-sale tickets and reselling them for egregiously inflated prices. After 1.5 million presale codes went out to Taylor Swift fans in November, 14 million buyers (including “a staggering” amount of bots) tried to purchase tickets. The company said it was hit with 3.5 billion system requests, leading to the site crashing and fans left without access.
That caught the attention of the US Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called for the breakup of Ticketmaster. Joe Berchtold, President and CFO of Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, acknowledging the problem but punting a resolution to (the largely dysfunctional) Congress. Despite a reported DOJ investigation, Senate hearings and the usual political showboating, the government hasn’t yet produced any reforms.
A similar fiasco unfolded in December when thousands of Bad Bunny fans heading to see the reggaeton star in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca were denied entry at the door, with staff telling them their Ticketmaster-purchased tickets were fake. That incident led to Mexican antitrust scrutiny, but Ticketmaster avoided paying announced fines after it refunded buyers who were denied entry and provided additional compensation.
Although Rogers deserves credit for an analog solution to a modern-day problem, the story says more about our high-tech, modern-day ticket-purchasing catastrophe as it does the artist’s crafty workaround.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/maggie-rogers-thwarts-ticket-bots-with-in-person-sales-204546294.html?src=rss
Our reverence towards stars and celebrities was not borne of the 19th century’s cinematic revolution, but rather has been a resilient aspect of our culture for millennia. Ancient tales of immortal gods rising again and again after fatal injury, the veneration and deification of social and political leaders, Madame Tussauds’ wax museums and the Academy Awards’ annual In Memoriam segment, they’re are all facets of the human compulsion to put well-known thought leaders, tastemakers and trendsetters up on pedestals. And with a new, startlingly lifelike generation of generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) at our disposal, today’s celebrities could potentially remain with us long after their natural deaths. Like ghosts, but still on TV, touting Bitcoin and Metaverse apps. Probably.
Fame is the name of the game
American Historian Daniel Boorstin once quipped, “to be famous is to be well known for being well-known.” With the rise of social media, achieving celebrity is now easier than ever, for better or worse.
“Whereas stars are often associated with a kind of meritocracy,” Dr. Claire Sisco King, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Chair of the Cinema and Media Arts program at Vanderbilt. “Celebrity can be acquired through all kinds of means, and of course, the advent of digital media has, in many ways, changed the contours of celebrity because so-called ordinary people can achieve fame in ways that were not accessible to them prior to social media.”
What’s more, social media provides an unprecedented degree of access and intimacy between a celebrity and their fans, even at the peak of the paparazzi era. “We develop these imagined intimacies with celebrities and think about them as friends and loved ones,” King continued. “I think that those kinds of relationships illustrate the longing that people have for senses of connectedness and interrelatedness.”
For as vapid as the modern celebrity existence is portrayed in popular media, famous people have long served important roles in society as trend-setters and cultural guides. During the Victorian era, for example, British folks would wear miniature portraits of Queen Victoria to signal their fealty and her choice to wear a white wedding gown in 1840 is what started the modern tradition. In the US, that manifests with celebrities as personifications of the American Dream — each and every single one having pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and sworn off avocado toast to achieve greatness, despite their humble beginnings presumably in a suburban garage of some sort.
“The narratives that we return to, “ King said, “can become comforts for making sense of that inevitable part of the human experience: our finiteness.” But what if our cultural heroes didn’t die? At least not entirely? What if, even after Tom Hanks shuffles off this mortal coil, his likeness and personality were digitally preserved in perpetuity? We’re already sending long-dead recording artists like Roy Orbison, Tupac Shakur and Whitney Houston back out on tour as holographic performers. The Large Language Models (LLMs) that power popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard, are already capable of mimicking the writing styles of whichever authors they’ve been trained on. What’s to stop us from smashing these technologies together into an interactive Tucker-Dolcetto amalgamation of synthesized content? Turns out, not much beyond the threat of a bad news cycle.
How to build a 21st century puppet
Cheating death has been an aspirational goal of humanity since prehistory. The themes of resurrection, youthful preservation and outright immortality are common tropes throughout our collective imagination — notions that have founded religions, instigated wars, and launched billion dollar beauty and skin care empires. If a society’s elites weren’t mummifying themselves ahead of a glorious afterlife, bits and pieces of their bodies and possessions were collected and revered as holy relics, cultural artifacts to be cherished and treasured as a physical connection to the great figures and deeds of yore.
Technological advances since the Middle Ages have, thankfully, by and large eliminated the need to carry desiccated bits of your heroes in a coat pocket. Today, fans can connect with their favorite celebrities — whether still alive or long-since passed — through the star’s available catalog of work. For example, you can watch Robin Williams’ movies, stand up specials, Mork and Mindy, and read his books arguably more easily now than when he was alive. Nobody’s toting scraps of hallowed rainbow suspender when they can rent Jumanji from YouTube on their phone for $2.99. It’s equally true for William Shakespeare, whose collected works you can read on a Kindle as you wait in line at the DMV.
At this point, it doesn’t really matter how long a beloved celebrity has been gone — so long as sufficiently large archives of their work remain, digital avatars can be constructed in their stead using today’s projection technologies, generative AI systems, and deepfake audio/video. Take the recent fad of deceased singers and entertainers “going back out on tour” as holographic projections of themselves for example.
The projection systems developed by BASE Hologram and the now-defunct HologramUSA, which made headlines in the middle of the last decade for their spectral representations of famously deceased celebrities, used a well-known projection effect known as Pepper’s Ghost. Developed in the early 19th century by British inventor John Henry Pepper, the image of an off-stage performer is reflected onto a transparent sheet of glass interposed between the stage and audience to produce a translucent, ethereal effect ideal for depicting the untethered spirits that routinely haunted theatrical protagonists at the time.
Public Domain - Wikipedia
Turns out, the technique works just as well with high-definition video feeds and LED light sources as it did with people wiggling in bedsheets by candlelight. The modern equivalent is called the "Musion Eyeliner" and rather than a transparent sheet of glass, it uses a thin metalized film set at a 45 degree angle towards the audience. It’s how the Gorillaz played “live” at the 2006 Grammy Awards and how Tupac posthumously performed at Coachella in 2012, but the technology is limited by the size of the transparent sheet. If we’re ever going to get the Jaws 19 signage Back to the Future II promised us, we’re likely going to use arrays of fan projectors like those developed by London-based holographic startup, Hypervsn, to do so.
“Holographic fans are types of displays that produce a 3-dimensional image seemingly floating in the air using the principle of POV (Persistence of Vision), using strips of RGB LEDs attached to the blades of the fan and a control-unit lighting up the pixels,” Dr Priya C, Associate Professor at Sri Sairam Engineering College, and team wrote in a 2020 study on the technology. “As the fan rotates, the display produces a full picture.”
Dr Priya C goes on to say “Generally complex data can be interpreted more effectively when displayed in three dimensions. In the information display industry, three dimensional (3D) imaging, display, and visualization are therefore considered to be one of the key technology developments that will enter our daily life in the near future.”
“From a technical standpoint, the size [of a display] is just a matter of how many devices you are using and how you actually combine them,” Hypervsn Lead Product Manager, Anastasia Sheluto, told Engadget. “The biggest wall we have ever considered was around 400 devices, that was actually a facade of one building. A wall of 12 or 15 [projectors] will get you up to 4k resolution.” While the fan arrays need to be enclosed to protect them from the elements and the rest of us from getting whacked by a piece of plastic revolving at a few thousand RPMs, these displays are already finding use in museums and malls, trade shows and industry showcases.
What’s more, these projector systems are rapidly gaining streaming capabilities, allowing them to project live interactions rather than merely pre-recorded messages. Finally, Steven Van Zandt’s avatar in the ARHT Media Holographic Cube at Newark International will do more than stare like he’s not mad, just disappointed, and the digital TSA assistants of tomorrow may do more than repeat rote instructions for passing travelers as the human ones do today.
Getting Avatar Van Zandt to sound like the man it’s based on is no longer much of a difficult feat either. Advances in the field of deepfake audio, more formally known as speech synthesis, and text-to-speech AI, such as Amazon Polly or Speech Services by Google, have led to a commercialization of synthesized celebrity voice overs.
Where once a choice between Morgan Freeman and Darth Vader reading our TomTom directions was considered bleeding-edge cool, today, companies like Speechify offer voice models from Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and other celebs who (or whose estates) have licensed their voice models for use. Even recording artists who haven’t given express permission for their voices to be used are finding deep fakes of their work popping up across the internet.
In Speechify’s case at least, “our celebrity voices are strictly limited to personal consumption and exclusively part of our non-commercial text-to-speech (TTS) reader,” Tyler Weitzman, Speechify Co-Founder and Head of AI, told Engadget via email. “They're not part of our Voice Over Studio. If a customer wants to turn their own voice into a synthetic AI voice for their own use, we're open to conversations.”
“Text-to-speech is one of the most important technologies in the world to advance humanity,” Weitzman continued. “[It] has the potential to dramatically increase literacy rates, spread human knowledge, and break cultural barriers.”
ElevenLabs’ Prime Voice AI software similarly can recreate near perfect vocal clones from uploaded voice samples — the entry level Instant Voice Cloning service only requires around a minute of audio but doesn’t utilize actual AI model training (limiting its range of speech) and an enterprise version that can only be accessed after showing proof that the voice they’re cloning is licensed for that specific use. What’s more, “Cloning features are limited to paid accounts so if any content created using ElevenLabs is shared or used in a way that contravenes the law, we can help trace it back to the content creator,” ElevenLabs added.
The Enterprise-grade service also requires nearly 3 hours of input data to properly train the language model but company reps assure Engadget that, “the results are almost indistinguishable from the original person’s voice.” Surely Steve Van Zandt was onscreen for that long over the course of Lillyhammer’s four-season run.
Unfortunately, the current need for expansive, preferably high-quality, audio recordings on which to train an AI TTS model severely limits which celebrity personalities we’d be able to bring back. Stars and public figures from the second half of the 20th century would obviously have far more chance of having three hours of tape available for training than, say, Presidents Jefferson or Lincoln. Sure, a user could conceivably reverse engineer a voiceprint from historical records — ElevenLabs Voice Design allows users to generate unique voices with adjustable qualities like age, gender, or accent — and potentially recreate Theodore Roosevelt’s signature squeaky sound, but it’ll never be quite the same as hearing the 26th President himself.
Providing something for the synthesized voices to say is proving to be a significant challenge — at least providing something historically accurate, as the GPT-3-powered iOS app, Historical Figures Chat has shown. Riding the excitement around ChatGPT, the app was billed as able to impersonate any of 20,000 famous folks from the annals of history. Despite its viral popularity in January, the app has been criticized by historians for returning numerous factual and characteristic inaccuracies from its figure models. Genocidal Cambodian dictator, Pol Pot, at no point in his reign showed remorse for his nation’s Killing Fields, nor did Nazi general and Holocaust architect, Heinrich Himmler, but even gentle prodding was enough to have their digital recreations begin spouting mea culpas.
“It’s as if all of the ghosts of all of these people have hired the same PR consultants and are parroting the same PR nonsense,” Zane Cooper, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, remarked to the Washington Post.
We can, but should we?
Accuracy issues aren’t the only challenges generative AI “ghosts” currently face, as apparently, even death itself will not save us from copyright and trademark litigation. “There's already a lot of issues emerging,” Dan Schwartz, partner and IP trial lawyer at Nixon Peabody, told Engadget. “Especially for things like ChatGPT and generative AI tools, there will be questions regarding ownership of any intellectual property on the resulting output.
“Whether it's artwork, whether it's a journalistic piece, whether it's a literary piece, whether it is an academic piece, there will be issues over the ownership of what comes out of that,” he continued. “That issue has really yet to be defined and I think we're still a ways away from intellectual property laws fully having an opportunity to address it. I think these technologies have to percolate and develop a little bit and there will be some growing pains before we get to meaningful regulation on them.”
The US Copyright Office in March announced that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted by the user under US law, equating the act of prompting the computer to produce a desired output with asking a human artist the same. "When an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology — not the human user," the office stated.
This is the opposite of the stance taken by a Federal Appeals Court. “[Patent law regarding AI] for the most part, is pretty well settled here in the US,” Schwartz said, “that an AI system cannot be an inventor of a new, patentable invention. It's got to be a human, so that will impact how people apply for patents that come out of generative AI tools.”
Output-based infringement aside, the training methods used by firms like OpenAI and Stability AI, which rely on trawling the public web for data with which to teach their models, have proven problematic as well, having repeatedly caught lawsuits for getting handsy with other people’s licensed artwork. What’s more, generative AI has already shown tremendous capacity and capability in creating illegal content. Deepfake porn ads featuring the synthetic likenesses of Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson ran on Facebook for more than two days in March before being flagged and removed, for example.
Until the wheels of government can turn enough to catch up to these emerging technologies, we’ll have to rely on market forces to keep companies from disrupting the rest of us back into the stone age. So far, such forces have proved quick and efficient. When Google’s new Bard system immediately (but confidently) fumbled basic facts about the James Webb Space Telescope, that little whoopsie-doodle immediately wiped $100 billion off the company’s stock value. The Historical Figures Chat app, similarly, is no longer available for download on the App Store, despite reportedly receiving multiple investment offers in January. It has since been replaced with numerous, similarly-named clone apps.
“I think what is better for society is to have a system of liability in place so that people understand what the risks are,” Schwartz argued. “So that if you put something out there that creates racist, homophobic, anti-any protected class, inappropriate content, whoever’s responsible for making that tool available, will likely end up facing the potential of liability. And I think that's going to be pretty well played out over the course of the next year or two.”
Celebrity as an American industry
While the term “celebrity” has been around since being coined in 17th century France, during the days of John Jacques Rousseau, it was the Americans in the 20th century who first built the concept into a commercial enterprise.
By the late 1920s, with the advent of Talkies, the auxiliary industry of fandom was already in full swing. “You [had] fan magazines like Motion Picture, Story Magazine or Photoplay that would have pictures of celebrities on the cover, have stories about celebrities behind the scenes, stories about what happened on the film set,” King explained. “So, as the film industry develops alongside this, you start to get Hollywood Studios.” And with Hollywood Studios came the star system.
“Celebrity has always been about manufacturing images, creating stories,” King said. The star system existed in the 1930s and ‘40s and did to young actors and actrices what Crypton Future Media did to Hatsune Miku: it assembled them into products, constructing synthetic personalities for them from the ground up.
Actors, along with screenwriters, directors and studio executives of the era, would coordinate to craft specific personas for their stars. “You have the ingénue or the bombshell,” King said. “The studios worked really closely with fan magazines, with their own publicity arms and with gossip columnist to tell very calculated stories about who the actors were.” This diverted focus from the film itself and placed it squarely on the constructed, steerable, personas crafted by the studio — another mask for actors to wear, publicly and even after the cameras were turned off.
“Celebrity has existed for centuries and the way it exists now is not fundamentally different from how it used to be,” King added. “But it has been really amplified, intensified and made more ubiquitous because of changing industry and technological norms that have developed in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Even after Tom Hanks is dead, Tom Hanks Prime will live forever
Between the breakneck pace of technological advancement with generative AI (including deepfake audio and video), the promise of future “touchable” plasma displays offering hard light-style tactile feedback through femtosecond laser bursts, and Silicon Valley’s gleeful disregard towards the negative public costs borne from their “disruptive” ideas, the arrival of immortal digitized celebrities hawking eczema creams and comforting lies during commercial breaks is now far more likely a matter of when, rather than if.
But what does that mean for celebrities who are still alive? How will knowing that even after the ravages of time take Tom Hanks from us, that at least a lightly interactable likeness might continue to exist digitally? Does the visceral knowledge that we’ll never truly be rid of Jimmy Fallon empower us to loathe him even more?
“This notion of the simulacra of the celebrity, again, is not entirely new,” King explained. “We can point to something like the Madame Tussaud's wax museum, which is an attempt to give us a version of the celebrity, there are impersonators who dress and perform as them, so I think that people take a certain kind of pleasure in having access to an approximation of the celebrity. But that experience never fully lives up.”
“If you go and visit the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, there's a kind of aura [to the space],” she continued. “There's something intangible, almost magical about experiencing that work of art in person versus seeing a print of it on a poster or on a museum tote bag or, you know, coffee mug that it loses some of its kind of ineffable quality.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/immortal-hologram-celebrities-chatgpt-ai-deep-fake-back-catalogs-180030493.html?src=rss
Have you heard about the Scandoval? I asked a handful of friends this question over the past week, and a surprising number confirmed this strange new word had recently popped up in their news feeds, attached to stories from The New York Times, CNN and Vanity Fair. My friends didn’t quite know what it was, aside from the vague notion that it was related to the Real Housewives shows. More importantly, they didn’t know why it was being recommended to them, considering they didn’t follow Bravo shows or reality television.
That’s because this is the March Madness of reality TV. The Scandoval is an explosive cheating scandal involving the cast of Vanderpump Rules — and it’s unfolding in real time, with cameras on, allowing viewers to look for signs of deceit in every scene as it airs. There are clear villains and an obvious heroine, and it’s all leading up to the reunion, which was filmed at the end of March and has already provided a drip feed of drama and staged paparazzi encounters. The Scandoval is so monumental in the Bravo multiverse that it’s culturally important for people outside of this bubble to know what’s going on — just like folks who don’t follow sports are subjected to the NCAA’s media cycle every year.
The Real Housewives of Miami
Jeff Daly/Peacock
It’s not all about the Scandoval, either. This is a golden era for Bravo and its streaming home, Peacock. Nearly every Housewives franchise is popping off in its own special way, and many of them are making mainstream news headlines: Jen Shah of Salt Lake City was just sentenced to six and a half years in prison for running a telemarketing scam and her surprise arrest was caught on camera; Erika Jayne of Beverly Hills continues to display obscene greed as her estranged husband, disbarred lawyer Tom Girardi, is federally indicted on charges he stole millions of dollars from victims of corporate malfeasance. Miami, a streaming-only series exclusive to Peacock, just wrapped a beautiful fifth season and cemented itself as a blueprint for future Housewives shows; Ultimate Girls Trip, a crossover event that brings wives together like the third act of a Marvel film, is in its third season and already serving hype for its fourth. Married to Medicine continues to be a powerful, captivating and hilarious franchise centered on Black women and doctors in Georgia, and it’s bringing in a notorious wife from the Atlanta history books for its upcoming season.
That’s not even all of it, and the above list doesn’t address the biggest bit of Bravo drama happening right now: the Scandoval. Here’s a brief summary, for the culture: Vanderpump Rules is a spin-off of Beverly Hills starring the servers and bartenders of trendy Los Angeles restaurants. Its tenth season is currently airing, and as it kicked off, news broke that Tom Sandoval, a bar owner with Peter Pan syndrome, had been cheating on his partner of nine years, Ariana Madix, with a younger cast member named Raquel Leviss for the past six months. Details about the affair have been dripping out online — lightning bolt necklaces will never be the same — and viewers are scouring each new episode for signs of the pair’s lies. Meanwhile, Bravo picked cameras back up after the affair came to light, and the mid-season trailer promises intense, intimate reactions from everyone involved, plus plenty of vengeful edits for Ariana. The reunion is poised to be a spectacle like Bravo has never seen.
Vanderpump Rules
Nicole Weingart/Bravo
To put it back in sports terms: The Scandoval is like David Beckham cheating on Victoria with Emma Bunton. Or like Scottie Pippen’s ex-wife starting a relationship with Michael Jordan’s son — a storyline that literally happened on the latest season of Miami. See? As Quad said on season nine of Married to Medicine when asked whether she’d cheated on past boyfriends, our cup runneth over.
This all means Peacock is getting my money for the foreseeable future, no high-budget original series required. I mean, I loved Poker Face, but I haven’t thought about it much since watching the final episode of season one. Housewives and its related series live outside of the app, on message boards and social media and podcasts, filling the silence even between seasons. Meanwhile, the Scandoval is driving viewership for Peacock, where Vanderpump is available to stream next-day. Peacock is also the only place to watch Miami and Ultimate Girls Trip, two shows that already make it essential in my own app lineup. I never expected to get so much use out of an NBC streaming service, but here we are.
The next app to get my business will be whichever one picks up Married at First Sight Australia. If you’ve made it to this point in this article — a Real Housewives fever dream somehow published on a technology website — do yourself a favor and find a way to watch it (in between Vanderpump Rules episodes, of course).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/bravos-scandoval-has-made-peacock-my-number-one-streaming-app-163020121.html?src=rss
Drew Carey isn't afraid of AI. Instead, The Price is Right host and longtime improv comedian is embracing the technology. During a recent episode of his SiriusXM radio show, "Friday Night Freakout," Carey used an artificially generated version of his voice to handle most of his DJ work, reading a script written by ChatGPT. His AI voice kicked off the show, introduced upcoming songs and recapped what listeners were hearing. As an experiment to see just how far AI could go on the radio, the episode was mostly a success. But Carey's fans weren't happy about it.
"I violated a rule from Radio 101," Carey told me. His Twitter fans complained that the voice sounded soulless, and that they missed the "real Drew." "The reason FM stations and treasured radio stations still make money is because people like the personality of the DJs," he said. "You don't have to be like a big boss radio guy and be phony. You can just talk... that's what listeners like."
While his fans were ultimately forgiving of the experiment, Carey says he got the message: "Don't do it again."
For many entertainers, AI could be viewed as yet another threat in an increasingly precarious industry. Soon after ElevenLabs introduced a beta version of its AI voice tool — the same software Carey used for his radio show — online trolls used it to impersonate Emma Watson, Joe Rogan and other celebrities. Watsons' simulated voice read portions of the Mein Kampf aloud, while other deepfaked voices made openly racist and transphobic statements, according to Vice.
Carey's AI voice wasn't perfect: It sounded a tad robotic, it didn't have the inflections his fans have grown to love over the years, and the ChatGPT-written script was noticeably simplistic. But if you were driving down the highway late at night, and you just wanted a bit of company alongside some classic rock, it's possible you wouldn't notice the DJ wasn't human. In fact, ElevenLabs recently partnered with Super HI-Fi to create "fully customized and personalized" AI driven radio stations.
"I was just playing with it, and I wanted to show what it was capable of," he said. "Plus, I thought, oh, I don't want to show everybody how to make an exact copy of my voice right now. I thought it might screw me over somehow. So I had that little fear in the back of my head."
It took a weekend for Carey and a friend, who already had experience training ChatGPT and other AI tools, to create his AI voice. ChatGPT wrote 99 percent of his radio show's script, though Carey made a few tweaks of his own. Funny enough, when he asked the chatbot to write a joke about how easy it was to use, it wrote the line "even Drew Carey can use it." (Perhaps ChatGPT is just trying to snag a spot on the inevitable Whose Line Is It Anyway? revival.)
Carey envisions AI being used in the future for the grunt work of radio and other production. Perhaps it could read a script late at night, or churn out some ad copy. When I asked if that's a potential problem for newcomers, he noted, "There are no blacksmiths anymore... If you're a mechanic that works on internal combustion engine cars, if you don't make the switch to electric soon, you're out of a job."
According to a recent Goldman Sachs report, up to 300 million jobs around the world could be automated thanks to recent advancements in AI. But the bank's economists also point out that major innovations that replace some jobs typically lead to the creation of new roles. And for those who are only partially impacted by AI, they'll likely be able to complement their work with generative intelligence.
For celebrities like Carey, AI could also be a way for them to continue working indefinitely, long after they've retired or passed on. James Earl Jones's voice has already been reconstructed for the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he's approved future work to "keep Vader alive." Eventually, actors (and their estates) could sign off on AI clones that entertain us for generations to come.
Carey isn't afraid of such an outcome. "You know what, if the price is right, anything can happen," he said when I asked if he'd ever sell his digital likeness. "I'm not worried about CGI Drew Carey taking over, because people want to see me, they want some kind of host. They want that interaction."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/drew-carey-made-a-radio-show-with-ai-fans-werent-pleased-143014038.html?src=rss
Rumors of an animated Scott Pilgrim show have been swirling around for years, though Netflix officially confirmed those rumors last year by announcing it was working on something. More details just dropped, however, and not only is the Scott Pilgrim anime a real thing, but it is currently in production and features the entire cast of the original 2010 movie.
We mean the entire cast, including Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong and Mae Whitman. Some cast members have become major stars in the years since the film’s original release, but they are also returning. In other words, expect to hear the dulcet tones of Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Kieran Culkin and Aubrey Plaza as they reprise their original roles.
This is not a drill! This is happening!
After much musing over the years about there being potential for an anime adaptation of ‘Scott Pilgrim’, I’m thrilled to say one is IMMINENT, with the whole cast back together and… you are going to lose your minds. pic.twitter.com/LyB7EIlcUD
There’s also plenty of behind-the-scenes folks coming back for this animated follow-up. The big name here is original director Edgar Wright, who is returning as an executive producer and seems to be heavily involved if his tweets are any indication. Bryan Lee O’Malley, the original creator of the Scott Pilgrim comic, is one of the showrunners. Wright even tweeted to suggest that the film’s original composers, legendary chiptune band Anamanaguchi, would be back in some capacity.
Netflix has dropped a trailer, but it does not feature any actual footage, so the look and feel of the animation are still unknown. Additionally, no official release date has been announced, so it may be a while before we see what this new interpretation looks like. It’s time to play the waiting game again, but at least we know it’s actually coming this time. In the meantime, there is the original movie to watch, comics to read and a video game to play.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scott-pilgrim-is-coming-back-as-a-cartoon-with-the-films-entire-cast-174540102.html?src=rss
It turned into a five-hour showdown between TikTok CEO Shou Chew and US lawmakers, who have found suspicion of TikTok to be a rare source of bipartisan agreement. It comes as US officials told the company they could ban the app if it doesn’t separate itself from ByteDance.
As with previous hearings with social media executives, lawmakers pressed Chew for often impossible yes-no answers to complex questions and grew frustrated when he declined to give one. In one exchange, Representative Tony Cardenas asked Chew whether ByteDance was a Chinese company. He would only admit it was a “global” firm with a Chinese founder. The hearing was also notably different from previous hearings with other social media company CEOs because the vast majority of lawmakers are not active on TikTok. Not all of their questions were nuanced, either: Representative Richard Hudson demanded to know if TikTok can “access the home WiFi network.” TikTok’s future remains uncertain, Chinese officials said Thursday they opposed a sale of the social network.
– Mat Smith.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission has cracked down on the businesses of crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and has charged him for the unregistered offer and sale of the tokens Tronix and BitTorrent. If those tokens sound familiar even to non-hardcore crypto enthusiasts, it's because several celebrities had promoted them on social media – and now they're also being charged by the agency. According to the SEC, eight celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Ne-Yo and Akon, illegally promoted the tokens online without disclosing they were paid to do so. All celebrities charged, except for Soulja Boy and musician Austin Mahone, have agreed to pay a collective amount of $400,000 in penalties to settle the charges.
The tech preview requires the latest and most expensive NVIDIA graphics cards.
A new Cyberpunk 2077 technology preview (Overdrive Mode) supports path tracing, the next goalpost to make games look even prettier and keep you buying expensive new GPUs, courtesy of… GPU manufacturer NVIDIA. The two-year-old game joins Minecraft, Portal and Quake II — old… classics? – in supporting the technology. While ray tracing follows a single beam of light across a virtual scene, path tracing follows the light as it bounces around an environment, more realistically mimicking how it works in the physical world. But the heady calculations behind it mean you’ll need the most powerful NVIDIA RTX 40-series GPUs to enjoy Cyberpunk 2077’s path-tracing makeover – and you might still run into performance issues.
After multiple scrubbed attempts, Relativity Space has finally launched its 3D-printed rocket. But the results were mixed. Its Terran 1 vehicle successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral late Wednesday but failed to reach orbit after the second-stage engine ignited only momentarily. It's unclear what led to the failure, but Relativity is promising updates in the "coming days." Terran 1 endured Max-Q (maximum dynamic pressure), the moment expected to place the most stress on the 3D-printed design, so that’s being seen as an achievement. The 3D-printing process theoretically provides simpler, more reliable rockets that are cheaper to make and could be ready in weeks, lowering the costs of putting satellites into orbit.
The Framework Laptop 16 is the company’s second product after its upgradeable 13-inch notebook, but there’s not much information – or specs – to go on at the moment. Yesterday’s announcements essentially just prepared the ground for a fuller media blitz closer to pre-orders opening later this spring. But according to company founder Nirav Patel, the new laptop has “pretty much complete flexibility to support changes when it comes to GPUs.”
Archer Aviation and United Airlines announced a partnership today to launch a commercial air taxi route between downtown and O’Hare International Airport in 2025. As well as being United’s headquarters and largest hub, Chicago's airport makes it an ideal testbed for flying taxis. The drive to or from O’Hare, in the western suburb of Rosemont, can take anywhere from 35 minutes to over an hour, depending on traffic. Archer estimates a flight in one of its air taxis will only take 10 minutes to travel from O’Hare to its destination at a downtown helipad.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-what-tiktoks-ceo-told-congress-about-the-apps-ties-to-china-113834453.html?src=rss
