It's been rumored for years, but Nintendo still managed to surprise us with a late-day announcement: a live-action film based on The Legend of Zelda is in the works, directed by Wes Ball. Ball's most recent films are the Maze Runner series, the latest of which was released in 2018. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto is producing the film along with Avi Arad, who has produced or executive produced loads of Marvel movies over the last decade-plus.
Surprisingly, the film is being co-financed by Nintendo and none other than Sony Pictures Entertainment. You know, part of the same company that owns PlayStation. Nintendo was quick to point out that it is financing more than 50 percent of the film, but that Sony Pictures Entertainment will be the the theatrical distributor.
Aside from that, there's no other detail besides this tweet from Miyamoto:
This is Miyamoto. I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films. [1]
Miyamoto goes on to say that they have officially started development on the film with Nintendo "heavily involved" in the production. He also notes that it'll "take time" before its completion but that he hopes fans look forward to seeing it.
Way back in 2015, we heard rumors from the Wall Street Journal that Nintendo and Netflix were making a live-action Zelda show, but that never came together (and there's a pretty weird story around why). But the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie was perhaps the last thing Nintendo needed to make this project a reality. And while there's plenty of time for things to go wrong between now and the movie hitting theaters, this Zelda fan is cautiously excited about the prospect of another classic Nintendo franchise making its way to the big screen.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nintendo-is-making-a-live-action-legend-of-zelda-movie-221618064.html?src=rss
Xbox has teamed up with a startup called Inworld AI to create a generative AI toolset that developers can use to create games. It's a multi-year collaboration, which the Microsoft-owned brand says can "assist and empower creators in dialogue, story and quest design." Specifically, the partners are looking to develop an "AI design copilot" that can turn prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and other game elements in the same way people can type ideas into generative AI chatbots and get detailed scripts in return. They're also going to work on an "AI character runtime engine" that developers can plug into their actual games, allowing players to generate new stories, quests and dialogues as they go.
On Inworld's website, it says its technology can "craft characters with distinct personalities and contextual awareness that stay in-world." Apparently, it can provide developers with a "fully integrated character engine for AI NPCs that goes beyond large language models (LLMs)." The image above was from the Droid Maker tool it developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm's storytelling studio ILM Immersive when it was accepted into the Disney Accelerator program. As Kotaku notes, though, the company's tech has yet to ship with a major game release, and it has mostly been used for mods.
Developers are understandably wary about these upcoming tools. There are growing concerns among creatives about companies using their work to train generative AI without permission — a group of authors, including John Grisham and George R.R. Martin, even sued OpenAI, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright. And then, of course, there's the ever-present worry that developers could decide to lay off writers and designers to cut costs.
Xbox believes, however, that these tools can "help make it easier for developers to realize their visions, try new things, push the boundaries of gaming today and experiment to improve gameplay, player connection and more." In the brand's announcement, Haiyan Zhang, General Manager of Gaming AI, said: "We will collaborate and innovate with game creators inside Xbox studios as well as third-party studios as we develop the tools that meet their needs and inspire new possibilities for future games."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-will-let-xbox-game-makers-use-ai-tools-for-story-design-and-npcs-083027899.html?src=rss
Facebook is no stranger to moderating and mitigating misinformation on its platform, having long employed machine learning and artificial intelligence systems to help supplement its human-led moderation efforts. At the start of October, the company extended its machine learning expertise to its advertising efforts with an experimental set of generative AI tools that can perform tasks like generating backgrounds, adjusting image and creating captions for an advertiser's video content. Reuters reports Monday that Meta will specifically not make those tools available to political marketers ahead of what is expected to be a brutal and divisive national election cycle.
Meta's decision to bar the use of generative AI is in line with much of the social media ecosystem, though, as Reuters is quick to point out, the company, "has not yet publicly disclosed the decision in any updates to its advertising standards." TikTok and Snap both ban political ads on their networks, Google employs a "keyword blacklist" to prevent its generative AI advertising tools from straying into political speech and X (formerly Twitter) is, well, you've seen it.
Meta does allow for a wide latitude of exceptions to this rule. The tool ban only extends to "misleading AI-generated video in all content, including organic non-paid posts, with an exception for parody or satire," per Reuters. Those exceptions are currently under review by the company's independent Oversight Board as part of a case in which Meta left up an "altered" video of President Biden because, the company argued, it was not generated by an AI.
Facebook, along with other leading Silicon Valley AI companies, agreed in July to voluntary commitments set out by the White House enacting technical and policy safeguards in the development of their future generative AI systems. Those include expanding adversarial machine learning (aka red-teaming) efforts to root out bad model behavior, sharing trust and safety information both within the industry and with the government, as well as development of a digital watermarking scheme to authenticate official content and make clear that it is not AI-generated.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-reportedly-wont-make-its-ai-advertising-tools-available-to-political-marketers-010659679.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
Blizzard is planning an MCU-style future for the World of Warcraft. Chris Metzen, who only recently returned to the company as the executive creative director of Warcraft, has announced that the game's next three expansions will make up a three-part interconnected saga. Since Blizzard typically releases expansions within two years of each other, "The Worldsoul Saga's" story will take years to unfold. The first installment called World of Warcraft: The War Within is slated for release sometime in 2024, followed by World of Warcraft: Midnight and World of Warcraft: The Last Titan in the years after that.
Warcraft general manager John Hight said the trilogy encompasses "one of the most ambitious creative endeavors ever attempted for World of Warcraft." Each one is a standalone narrative, but they're connected by an overall story arc, he explained. "Alongside these epic adventures, the ongoing quality-of-life feature updates players have come to expect from us since Dragonflight will continue in The War Within, further setting us up for the next 20 years and beyond," Hight added.
While Blizzard has yet to released an in-depth summary for The War Within, it did share a few pertinent details about the expansion. It will feature an ancient civilization underneath the surface of the planet as it rises in power, while Alliance and Horde heroes experience visions of possible futures, both good and bad. Players can grind until they reach the expansion's level cap of 80, and they can explore a new continent called Khaz Algar. There's also a new unlockable and playable Titan-forged race called the Earthen, new bite-size adventures that can support one to five players called Delves, as well as a new feature dubbed Warbands, which allows players to share banks, reputations and transmogs across characters.
Fans can already pre-purchase The War Within for $50, and it will also give them instant access to the Dragonflight expansion. The War Within: Heroic Edition, which comes with extras, is available for $70, while the The War Within: Epic Edition that includes beta access to the expansion, along with even more extras, will set them back $90.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/blizzards-next-world-of-warcraft-expansions-make-up-a-three-part-saga-154521763.html?src=rss
Not too long ago, Marvel Studios seemed indestructible. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe has faced some significant setbacks over the last few years. As laid out in a Variety report this week, Marvel has been contending with a number of issues such as box office disappointments, while Jonathan Majors (who portrays the MCU's latest centerpiece villain) is awaiting trial for assault and harassment charges. Marvel also seemed to be stretching itself thin between its many movies and TV shows amid reports that visual effects staffers were overworked.
Perhaps with all of that in mind, Marvel is trying something a bit different with its next streaming series in a bid to get fans back on board. Echo will be the first Marvel show to arrive on Disney+ and Hulu simultaneously. On top of that, for the first time since its former Netflix shows, Marvel will return to TV-MA-rated fare and drop all five episodes of the series simultaneously on January 10. However, Echo will only be available on Hulu until April 9.
Echo will be the first superhero series to have both a deaf and a Native American character in the central role, as Varietynotes. Maya Lopez/Echo (Alaqua Cox) first appeared in Disney+ series Hawkeye in 2021, though she's more of an anti-hero.
The show's first trailer shows Echo squaring off against a returning Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). Based on this evidence, the series looks to have a darker, more adult-oriented tone that's more aligned with the likes of Daredevil (that show's titular character appears briefly in this trailer) and Jessica Jones than Ms. Marvel or Loki.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/echo-will-be-the-first-marvel-show-to-hit-disney-and-hulu-simultaneously-172206411.html?src=rss
It's become cliche to say that we live in a golden age of board games, but to paraphrase the great stoic philosopher Andy Bernard, it's great to know you're in the good old days before you've left them. Great titles are still coming out by the thousands every year, from crowd-pleasing party games to genre-bending, theme-heavy Euros. Whether the gamer in your life is looking for a mind-warping challenge, a fun evening with friends or something in-between, we've got new releases or old favorites they'll love.
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
It looks like Meta may be pumping the brakes on one of its more aggressive, and unpopular, growth-hacking tactics for Threads. The company appears to be working on a new privacy setting so Threads users can opt-out of having their posts cross-posted to Facebook and Instagram feeds.
The unreleased feature was spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who often uncovers early versions of social media features before they officially launch. Paluzzi shared screenshots of a new “suggesting posts on other apps” toggle in Threads’ privacy settings.
The feature comes barely a week after the company acknowledged that it was promoting users’ Threads posts in Facebook feeds in an effort to boost Threads. While Meta has used similar tactics to promote its other apps in the past, the move has been widely unpopular among Threads users, many of whom are not active on Facebook and see the promotions as an intrusive overreach. Meta said last week it was “listening to feedback” in response to user complaints about not being able to opt out.
Notably, it appears as if Meta still intends to automatically enable cross-posting as a default setting. “If your profile is public, your posts may be suggested on other apps so people can discover and follow you,” the opt-out screen states.
The back and forth over the feature comes as Meta has steadily ramped up its efforts to boost Threads growth. The Twitter clone has been growing again in recent weeks, and currently has about 100 million monthly users. Mark Zuckerberg recently said he sees a path for the app to become Meta’s next billion-user service. But in order to reach that many people, the company will need to lean hard on its other apps to attract new sign-ups.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-will-stop-forcing-your-threads-posts-onto-facebook-and-it-cant-come-soon-enough-174835068.html?src=rss
Meta just released an experimental new A/B testing feature for Reels on Facebook, allowing creators to experiment with different captions and thumbnail images to create the perfect clips. The tools are part of the pre-existing Professional Dashboard, which already provides plenty of useful metrics, like view count insights and more.
Here’s how it works. When creating a Facebook Reel on your mobile device, you can insert up to four different caption and thumbnail combinations. This starts a testing phase for the content. Whichever one gets the most views will automatically be displayed on your page as the “winning variant.” It seems fairly simple.
The company’s also working on incorporating generative AI to help create unique caption and thumbnail options, though that feature is still being worked out. The ultimate goal here is to ensure user-generated content gets as many eyeballs as possible. This increases Facebook’s traffic and potentially gives creators some money in the process, thanks to Meta’s bonus program.
To that end, there’s a new system in place that awards achievement badges for leaping past certain metrics. A digital badge isn’t as good as money, but it’s something (I guess.) Meta does say that these badges could help creators achieve increased visibility of their content, via an awarded Rising Creator label.
That’s not the only tool that rolled out today. There’s also a new feature that lets you quickly whip up Reels from pre-existing video posts and livestreams. The Professional Dashboard has new content management tools to help users keep track of all of this stuff. Previously, creators could only access content performance on a post-by-post basis, but now the dashboard gives you a more holistic view of things.
It’s interesting that this feature dropped on Facebook and not Instagram, as Reels are more integral to the latter than the former. We’ll update you if and when the company debuts these tools for Instagram users.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-made-an-ab-testing-tool-to-help-users-optimize-their-reels-on-facebook-171323994.html?src=rss