Roku has launched Howdy, a new ad-free streaming service that costs $2.99 a month. The streaming platform says it offers 10,000 hours of content from Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery and FilmRise, as well as its own, exclusive programming known as Roku Originals. CNBC reports: The service is available across the U.S. beginning Tuesday. [...] The new service runs alongside the Roku Channel, which will remain free. Howdy will initially be available on the Roku platform, and will later be rolled out on mobile and other platforms, the company said. "Priced at less than a cup of coffee, Howdy is ad-free and designed to complement, not compete with, premium services," said Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood in the release.

Disney scrapped plans to use a deepfake of Dwayne Johnson in Moana and an AI-generated character in Tron: Ares due to concerns over bad publicity and legal ownership. Ultimately, the studio decided the potential PR and copyright risks weren't worth the convenience. Deadline reports: Disney is working on a live-action remake of Moana, where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will reprise his role of Maui. In a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, the studio came up with the idea to digitally clone Johnson and use a body double for some shots. "Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage -- a 'digital double' that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once," WSJ said (paywalled). Although the Black Adam star approved the idea, the studio "worried" that they "ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it." The film studio and the AI company were seemingly unable to come to terms, and the footage was scrapped.

Disney's upcoming Tron: Ares revolves around AI and the real-world implications of it. According to WSJ sources, "executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters in the sequel to the 1980s hit movie Tron as a buzzy marketing strategy." The AI-generated character would be a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' character, but the idea was ultimately scrapped because "executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity."

Disney "cloned" Dwayne Johnson when filming a live-action Moana, reports the Wall Street Journal, using an AI process that they were ultimately afraid to use: Under the plan they devised, Johnson's similarly buff cousin Tanoai Reed — who is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds — would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage — a "digital double" that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once... Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said. Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer...

Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and partners present an entertainment giant torn between the inevitability of AI's advance and concerns about how to use it. Progress has at times been slowed by bureaucracy and hand-wringing over the company's social contract with its fans, not to mention its legal contract with unions representing actors, writers and other creative partners... For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key. "We have been around for 100 years and we intend to be around for the next 100 years," said the company's legal chief, Horacio Gutierrez, in an interview. "AI will be transformative, but it doesn't need to be lawless...." [As recently as June, a Disney/Comcast Universal lawsuit had argued that Midjourney "is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism."]

Concerns about bad publicity were a big reason that Disney scrapped a plan to use AI in Tron: Ares — a movie set for release in October about an AI-generated soldier entering the real world. Since the movie is about artificial intelligence, executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters... as a buzzy marketing strategy, according to people familiar with the matter. A writer would provide context on the animated character — a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' lead role named Bit — to a generative AI program. Then on screen, the AI program, voiced by an actor, would respond to questions as Bit as cameras rolled. But with negotiations with unions representing writers and actors over contracts happening at the same time, Disney dismissed the idea, and executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity, the people said...

Disney's own history speaks to how studios have navigated technological crossroads before. When Disney hired Pixar to produce a handful of graphic images for its 1989 hit The Little Mermaid, executives kept the incorporation a secret, fearing backlash from fans if they learned that not every frame of the animated film had been hand-drawn. Such knowledge, executives feared, might "take away the magic."
Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite creator Epic Games, acccording to the article, and is planning a world in Fortnite where gamers can interact with Marvel superheroes and creatures from Avatar. But "an experiment to allow gamers to interact with an AI-generated Darth Vader was fraught. Within minutes of launching the AI bot, gamers had figured out a way to make it curse in James Earl Jones's signature baritone." (Though Epic patched the workaround within 30 minutes.)

But the article spells out another concern for Disney executives. "If a Fortnite gamer creates a Darth Vader and Spider-Man dance that goes viral on YouTube, who owns that dance?

It's a cultural milestone. Fiverr just released an ad mocking vibe coding.

The video features what its description calls a "clueless entrepreneur" building an app to tell if an avocado is ripe — who soon ends up blissfully singing with an avocado to the tune of the cheesy 1987 song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." The avocado sings joyously of "a new app on the rise in a no-code world that's too good to be true" (rhyming that with "So close. Just not tested through...")

"Let them say we're crazy. I don't care about bugs!" the entrepreneur sings back. "Built you in a minute, now I'm so high off this buzz..."

But despite her singing to the overripe avocado that "I don't need a backend if I've got the spark!" and that they can "build this app together, vibe-coding forever. Nothing's going to stop us now!" — the build suddenly fails. (And it turns out that avocado really was overripe...) Fiverr then suggests viewers instead hire one of their experts for building their apps...

The art/design site Creative Bloq acknowledges Fiverr "flip-flopping between scepticism and pro-AI marketing." (They point out a Fiverr ad last November had ended with the tagline "Nobody cares that you use AI! They care about the results — for the best ones higher Fiverr experts who've mastered every digital skill including AI.") But the site calls this new ad "a step in the right direction towards mindful AI usage." Just like an avocado that looks perfect on the outside, once you inspect the insides, AI-generated code can be deceptively unripe.
Fiverr might be feeling the impact of vibecoding themselves. The freelancing web site saw the company's share price fall over 14% this week, with one Yahoo! Finance site saying this week's quarterly results revealed Fiverr's active buyers dropped 10.9% compared to last year — a decrease of 3.4 million buyers which "overshadowed a 9.8% increase in spending per buyer."

Even when issuing a buy recommendation, Seeking Alpha called it "a short-term rebound play, as the company faces longer-term risks from AI and active buyer churn."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Edward Saatchi isn't totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, which has invested in Fable, Saatchi's San Francisco-based start-up. The amount of Amazon's funding in Fable isn't being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the "Netflix of AI": a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes -- or entire episodes -- of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.

Fable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said. Viewing Showrunner-generated content will be free, and anyone can share the AI video on YouTube or other third-party platforms. [...] Fable's Showrunner public launch features two original "shows" -- story worlds with characters users can steer into various narrative arcs. The first is "Exit Valley," described as "a 'Family Guy'-style TV comedy set in 'Sim Francisco' satirizing the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, et al." The other is "Everything Is Fine," in which a husband and wife, going to Ikea, have a huge fight -- whereupon they're transported to a world where they're separated and have to find each other. [...]

Showrunner is powered by Fable's proprietary AI model, SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research paper on how it built the SHOW-1 model. As part of that, it released nine AI-generated episodes based on "South Park." The episodes, made without the permission of the "South Park" creators, received more than 80 million views. (Saatchi said he was in touch with the "South Park" team, who were reassured the IP wasn't being deployed commercially.) [...] Out of the gate, Showrunner is focused on animated content because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking live-action video scenes. Saatchi said Fable wants to stay out of the "knife fight" among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content. "If you're competing with Google, are you going to win?" Saatchi said. "Our goal is to have the most creative models," he said.

Star Wars creator George Lucas made his first Comic-Con appearance ever on Sunday. The Hollywood Reporter describes the scene: Thousands waited hours just to get inside, chanted "Lu-cas, Lu-cas!" while they waited, and then gave a wild standing ovation as the filmmaker took to the stage, introduced by rapper-actress Queen Latifah, and sat down next to filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Star Wars production designer Doug Chiang. If the 6,500-strong crowd was disappointed he didn't talk a whiff about Star Wars or Indiana Jones, it wasn't shown, as cries of "I love you, George!" and waving lightsabers punctuated the air several times.

Lucas even received a standing ovation when he left the presentation, which was devoted entirely to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. He, along with museum board member and fellow art collector del Toro and Chiang, were there to not only give a first look at the museum but also make a case for the importance and validity of narrative art, which includes comic book art, as a vital form of expression... A video presentation showed interior looks at the museum — there are no right angles anywhere, Latifah underscored — as well as images that will be in the collection.

A cover of DC comic Mystery in Space, featuring the first appearance of Adam Strange; the first ever Flash Gordon comic strip; a cover of 1950s EC comic Tales from the Crypt; strips of Peanuts and Garfield; art ranging from Brian Bolland and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola to underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, Windsor McKay and Moebius; art of Astro Boy and Scrooge McDuck. But there were also images of art by Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth and Frieda Kahlo. Also in the museum will be concept and storyboard art from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark by Ralph McQuarrie and Jim Steranko, as well as the props of starships and speeders from various Star Wars movies.

Chiang explained that comic art in particular had long been discounted. "It's not taken seriously," he said, and when he was younger was told, "You will outgrow it one day.... I'm so glad I didn't," he said, before driving home the point that one of the strengths of narrative art is that it's driven by story. "Story comes first. Art comes second...."

The museum, which has had its opening pushed back several times, is slated to open in 2026.
More Comic-Con highlights:

• Pennywise, the scary clown, returns in the upcoming HBO series "IT: Welcome to Derry"

• Comic-Con also saw a trailer for the new rock mockumentary Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. (Bassist Derek Smalls is now apparently into cryptocurrency...)

• Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has a new series called Pluribus coming to AppleTV+, a nine-episode sci-fi drama starring Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul. (Watch its bizarre trailer here.)

Satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer died Saturday at age 97. The Associated Press notes Lehrer had long ago "largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities." Lehrer had remained on the math faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.

A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math degree from the institution at age 18), Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to old traditions and current events... He'd gotten into performing accidentally when he began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse his friends. Soon he was performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he remained at Harvard to teach and obtain a master's degree in math. [Lehrer also "spent several years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate..."]

He cut his first record in 1953, "Songs by Tom Lehrer"... After a two-year stint in the Army, Lehrer began to perform concerts of his material in venues around the world. In 1959, he released another LP called "More of Tom Lehrer" and a live recording called "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer," nominated for a Grammy for best comedy performance (musical) in 1960. But around the same time, he largely quit touring and returned to teaching math, though he did some writing and performing on the side. Lehrer said he was never comfortable appearing in public...

He did produce a political satire song each week for the 1964 television show "That Was the Week That Was," a groundbreaking topical comedy show that anticipated "Saturday Night Live" a decade later. He released the songs the following year in an album titled "That Was the Year That Was"... [Lehrer's body of work "was actually quite small," the article notes, "amounting to about three dozen songs."] He also wrote songs for the 1970s educational children's show "The Electric Company." He told AP in 2000 that hearing from people who had benefited from them gave him far more satisfaction than praise for any of his satirical works...

He began to teach part-time at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, mainly to escape the harsh New England winters. From time to time, he acknowledged, a student would enroll in one of his classes based on knowledge of his songs. "But it's a real math class," he said at the time. "I don't do any funny theorems. So those people go away pretty quickly."

Marvel's Fantastic Four: First Steps "raked in about $57 million at the domestic box office for its opening day, according to multiple outlets," reports Forbes.

That haul makes it "the year's second-largest opening day so far and a win for Marvel and Disney about a year after they announced a reduction in film and TV show quantity to focus on quality." The roughly $57 million "Fantastic Four: First Steps" generated at the domestic box office Friday fell narrowly short of the opening day for "A Minecraft Movie" ($57.11 million) and just topped opening day for DC Comics rival "Superman" ($56.1 million), according to Variety. The film has netted about $106 million globally after securing $49.2 million overseas, setting itself up for an opening weekend of around $125 million, the same figure achieved by "Superman" earlier this month.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is receiving praise from critics and fans alike, boasting an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.6/10 on IMDb... With its opening weekend alone, "Fantastic Four: First Steps" out-earned the entire domestic run of "Fantastic Four" (2015), an adaptation of the heroes that flopped hard at the domestic box office ($56.1 million) and received poor ratings...

Marvel's next movie is slated to release almost a full year from now, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day hitting theaters next summer before Avengers: Doomsday in December.

At this weekend's Comic-Con, "Excitement has been high over the sneak peeks at Tron: Ares and Predator: Badlands," reports CNET. (Nine Inch Nails has even recorded a new song for Tron: Ares .)

A few highlights from CNET's coverage:

• The Coyote vs. Acme movie will hit theaters next year "after being rescued from the pile of scrapped ashes left by Warner Bros. Discovery," with footage screened during a Comic-Con panel.

• The first episode of Alien: Earth was screened before its premiere August 12th on FX.

• A panel reunited creators of the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender for its 20th anniversary — and discussed the upcoming sequel series Avatar: Seven Havens.

• A trailer dropped for the new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series on Paramount+ ("Star Trek Goes Full Gen Z..." quips one headline.)

To capture some of the ambience, the Guardian has a collection of cosplayer photos. CNET notes there's even booths for Lego and Hot Wheels (which released toys commemorating the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future and the 50th anniversary of Jaws).

But while many buildings are "wrapped" with slick advertisements, SFGate notes the ads are technically illegal, "with penalties for each infraction running up to $1,000 per day," (according to the San Diego Union-Tribune). "Last year's total ended up at $22,500."

The Union-Tribune notes that "The fines are small enough that advertisers clearly think it is worth it, with about 30 buildings in the process of being wrapped Monday morning."

An Argentine captured naked in his yard by a Google Street View camera has been awarded compensation by a court after his bare behind was splashed over the internet for all to see. From a report: The policeman had sought payment from the internet giant for harm to his dignity, arguing he was behind a 6 1/2-foot wall when a Google camera captured him in the buff, from behind, in small-town Argentina in 2017. His house number and street name were also laid bare, broadcast on Argentine TV covering the story, and shared widely on social media.

The man claimed the invasion exposed him to ridicule at work and among his neighbors. Another court last year dismissed the man's claim for damages, ruling he only had himself to blame for "walking around in inappropriate conditions in the garden of his home." Google, for its part, claimed the perimeter wall was not high enough.

Indian studio Eros International plans to re-release the 2013 Bollywood romantic drama "Raanjhanaa" on August 1 with an AI-generated alternate ending that transforms the film's tragic conclusion into a happier one. The original Hindi film, which starred Dhanush and Sonam Kapoor and became a commercial hit, ended with the protagonist's death. The AI-altered Tamil version titled "Ambikapathy" will allow the character to survive.

Director Aanand L. Rai condemned the decision as "a deeply troubling precedent" made without his knowledge or consent. Eros CEO Pradeep Dwivedi defended the move as legally permitted under Indian copyright law, which grants producers full authorship rights over films. The controversy represents what appears to be the first instance of AI being used to fundamentally alter a completed film's narrative without director involvement.

Spotify was found publishing AI-generated songs on the official pages of deceased artists like Blaze Foley and Guy Clark -- without permission from their estates or labels. The tracks, flagged for deceptive content and now removed, were uploaded via TikTok's SoundOn distribution platform. "We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," a Spotify spokesperson told 404 Media. From the report: McDonald, who decided to originally upload Foley's music to Spotify in order to share it with more people, told me he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley's page without his permission. "It's harmful to Blaze's standing that this happened," he said. "It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly."

McDonald's suggested fix is not allowing any track to appear on an artist's official Spotify page without allowing the page owner to sign off on it first. "Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording," he said. "Then the harm is that the people who don't know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it's not. So again, I think Spotify could easily change some practices. I'm not an engineer, but I think it's pretty easy to stop this from happening in the future."

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige "isn't interested in your theories of superhero fatigue, which he doesn't buy as real," writes The Hollywood Reporter. Feige points to the $400 million worldwide box office for Superman (which another article notes in only its second weekend "has already passed up the entire lifetime run of Marvel's Thunderbolts*.")

So how is Marvel moving forward? Yes, Feige knows Marvel made too many movies and shows (and the other things they did wrong). From the first Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers: Endgame in 2019, Marvel produced around 50 hours of screen storytelling. In the six years since Endgame, the number jumps to an astounding 102 hours of movies and television. 127 hours if you include animation. "That's too much," Feige said.

He characterized the time period after Endgame as an era of experimentation, evolution and, unfortunately, expansion. And while he's proud of the experimentation — he points to WandaVision and Loki as some of the best stories they've made — he admits "It's the expansion that is certainly what devalued" that output. Being high on success also may have pushed them to readily agree to try to deliver more programming at a time when Disney and the rest of Hollywood were engaged in the streaming wars. "It was a big company push... [T]here was a mandate that we were put in the middle of, but we also thought it'd be fun to bring these to life."

Marvel has already pulled back the amount of movies and shows it will make. Some years may even only have one movie. Certainly there will be years with only one show released. Also, Marvel has started "grinding down" on budgets, with movies costing up to a third cheaper than the films from 2022 or 2023.
Feige also explains why Thunderbolts* struggled at the box office (even though he's called it a "very, very good movie"). The massive expansion into television and focus on Disney+ led to the feeling that watching Marvel was becoming a type of homework. "It's that expansion that I think led people to say, 'Do I have to see all of these? It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?' And I think The Marvels hit it hardest where people are like, 'Okay, I recognize her from a billion dollar movie. But who are those other two? I guess they were in some TV show. I'll skip it.'" Which had an effect on Thunderbolts*, which featured characters that were seen on various platforms, including some only on shows.
The article notes Friday's release of Fantastic Four: First Steps is Marvel Studios' first crack at the characters after "a trio of movies of various quality and box office made by Twentieth Century Fox before its 2019 acquisition by Disney." And the article also acknowledges "the never-released, 1994 feature produced low-budget king Roger Corman. (Fun fact: the four stars of that movie cameo in Fantastic Four: First Steps.)"

"I vibe coded a little game called Coldplay Canoodlers," reads the X.com post by gaming enthusiast/songwriter Jonathan Mann. "You're the camera operator and you have to find the CEO and HR lady canoodling. 10 points every time you find them."

Mann's post includes a 30-second clip from the game, which is playable here.

Forbes notes that the TikTok video of the couple's reaction has drawn more than 100 million views — and that the married-to-someone-else CEO has now tendered his resignation from his dataops company Astronomer (which was accepted). The company is now searching for a new chief executive, according to a statement posted on LinkedIn. ("Comments have been turned off on this post...")

"Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met."

But songwriter Mann saw a chance to have some fun, writes Forbes: Mann used ChatGPT to make the "Coldplay Canoodlers" game, inputting such prompts as: "Can you generate an 8-bit pixel image of a stadium concert viewed from the stage" and "there should be a large jumbotron somewhere up in the stadium seats." He also entered rough drawings of the visual style he envisioned... The response to the game, Mann said in an interview, has been unexpected. "I have gone viral many times with my songs," he said. It's "very strange to have it happen with a game I made in four hours."
Songwriter Mann has been sharing an original song online every day for over 17 years. Last summer Slashdot also covered Mann's attempts to sell NFTs of his songs, and his concerns about SEC regulations. (This led him to file a real-world legal challenge — and to write a song titled "I'm Suing the SEC".) So with all the attention this weekend to his instant game, there was nothing to do but... write a new song about it.

And minutes ago on X.com, Mann also posted a new update about his game.

"I turned it into an NFT."

"Took some time," Mann explained later. "But I vibe coded my own ERC-721 contract and minted the game as a playable NFT. (Plays great on OpenSea)."

Microsoft has shut down its Movies & TV storefront on the Microsoft Store, ending the ability to purchase new entertainment content on Windows PCs and Xbox consoles. The company announced that as of July 18, users can no longer buy or rent movies and TV shows through Microsoft.com, the Microsoft Store on Windows, or the Microsoft Store on Xbox.

Customers who previously purchased content from the Microsoft Store can continue accessing their libraries through the Movies & TV app, which remains available for download. Microsoft will not offer refunds for recent purchases. US customers can use the Movies Anywhere service to sync their purchased content to other compatible platforms.

Major US theater chains including Cinemark, Regal and Marcus have held preliminary talks about jointly marketing their big-screen theaters to compete with Imax, according to Bloomberg. The discussions have focused on setting shared standards for the chains' "premium large-format" theaters, with options including uniting around a new brand name or adding an industrywide designation that would serve as a stamp of approval for their locations.

The chains are motivated by Imax's growing influence in the industry, as the company consistently generates more than 10% of the box office for blockbusters despite operating only 372 US locations. AMC Entertainment, the largest chain and biggest operator of Imax screens in the US, is not participating in the deliberations, the report added.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: They went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated -- right down to their music, promotional images and backstory. The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged to tag music created by AI-generated acts so consumers can make informed decisions about what they are listening to. [...]

Several figures told the Guardian that the present situation, where streaming sites, including Spotify, are under no legal obligation to identify AI-generated music, left consumers unaware of the origins of the songs they're listening to. Roberto Neri, the chief executive of the Ivors Academy, said: "AI-generated bands like Velvet Sundown that are reaching big audiences without involving human creators raise serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent." Neri added that if "used ethically," AI has the potential to enhance songwriting, but said at present his organization was concerned with what he called "deeply troubling issues" with the use of AI in music.

Sophie Jones, the chief strategy officer at the music trade body the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), backed calls for clear labelling. "We believe that AI should be used to serve human creativity, not supplant it," said Jones. "That's why we're calling on the UK government to protect copyright and introduce new transparency obligations for AI companies so that music rights can be licensed and enforced, as well as calling for the clear labelling of content solely generated by AI."

Liz Pelly, the author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, said independent artists could be exploited by people behind AI bands who might create tracks that are trained using their music. She referred to the 2023 case of a song that was uploaded to TikTok, Spotify and YouTube, which used AI-generated vocals claiming to be the Weeknd and Drake. Universal Music Group said the song was "infringing content created with generative AI" and it was removed shortly after it was uploaded.

Aurelien Herault, the chief innovation officer at the music streaming service Deezer, said the company uses detection software that identifies AI-generated tracks and tags them. He said: "For the moment, I think platforms need to be transparent and try to inform users. For a period of time, what I call the "naturalization of AI', we need to inform users when it's used or not." Herault did not rule out removing tagging in future if AI-generated music becomes more popular and musicians begin to use it like an "instrument." At present, Spotify does not label music as AI-generated and has previously been criticized for populating some playlists with music by "ghost artists" -- fake acts that create stock music. Bruce66423 comments: "Artists demand 'a warning' on such material. Why? If it is what the people want..."

James Gunn's Superman "appears to be succeeding in rebooting DC Studios and its most iconic comic book franchise," writes The Hollywood Reporter, noting the film is "headed for a possible record domestic box office debut of $115 million to $120 million." Gunn is in a unique position, being both the film's writer-director and the co-head of the Warner Bros.-owned DC, which he co-runs with Peter Safran. Overseas, Superman is launching to $100 million-plus from 78 markets after earning $40 million midweek from its first raft of international markets for an early global total of $96.5 million through Friday. Superman will be the first superhero film to cross $100 million in its North American bow since Marvel Studios and Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool & Wolverine launched to $211 million in summer 2024 ("superhero fatigue" has become part of the Hollywood lexicon). And it's the first DC title to cross $100 million in eight long years since Wonder Woman debuted to $103.3 million in 2017.

And if the $225 million tentpole comes in north of $116.6 million, it will beat Zack Snyder's 2013 film Man of Steel ($116.7 million) to rank as the biggest domestic launch ever for a solo Superman pic, not adjusted for inflation. Snyder's mash-up Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice scored the biggest DC opening of all time when earning $166.6 million over Easter weekend in 2016... Gunn's movie is only the third Hollywood title of 2025 to launch north of $100 million after fellow Warners tentpole A Minecraft Movie, which opened to $162.8 million, and Disney's live-action Lilo & Stitch, which sewed up $146 million in its debut. Crossing the century mark is no small feat for any movie in the post-pandemic era, and particularly for the troubled superhero genre.

The pic should enjoy a long run thanks to strong word-of-mouth. Critics and audiences alike are embracing the film. The pic earned an A- CinemaScore from moviegoers, the same grade given to Man of Steel and ahead of Superman Returns' B+. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a stellar 94 percent, while the critics' score is a pleasing 82 percent...

Other upcoming DC Studios projects include HBO's Green Lantern series, Lanterns, and a Supergirl movie due out in 2026.
Superman's weekend debut at nearly $130 million domestically smashes early estimates of around $90 million (according to a senior media analyst at Comscore).

And the film also got a positive reaction from the author of the cultural history Superman: The Unauthorized Biography (writing for NPR): Recent attempts to tell live-action Superman stories have shied away from his bright, hopeful, altruistic nature in favor of making him more cool and relatable (read: dark and brooding). That's not who he is; it never has been. Superman is an ideal. He represents the best we can aspire to be. He's not the hero you relate to, à la Peter Parker/Spider-Man's ongoing struggle to pay his rent and buy Aunt May her damn medicine. He's the hero who inspires you, who shows you the way...

It doesn't have to be about slogging through trauma and shame and shadow-selves and endlessly tedious redemption arcs. Sometimes, it's simpler, cleaner, brighter. And also? Not for nothing? More fun.

Warner Bros. releases a $225 million Superman reboot this week that executives consider the studio's final chance to build a successful cinematic universe rivaling Marvel's dominance. The film, written and directed by James Gunn, serves as the foundation for DC Studios' planned expansion into multiple films and television shows.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav appointed Gunn and producer Peter Safran to lead the newly unified DC Studios in 2022, ending decades of corporate infighting that prevented the company's superheroes from matching Marvel's success. The Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe has generated $32 billion across 36 films since 2008. Warner executives want the movie to gross over $500 million globally, according to WSJ. If successful, this would mark the first year since 2008 that DC outperforms Marvel at the box office.

After discovering that ChatGPT was falsely telling users that Soundslice could convert ASCII tablature into playable music, founder Adrian Holovaty decided to actually build the feature -- even though the app was never designed to support that format. TechCrunch reports: Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It's known for its video player synchronized to the music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played. It also offers a feature called "sheet music scanner" that allows users to upload an image of paper sheet music and, using AI, will automatically turn that into an interactive sheet, complete with notations. [Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice] carefully watches this feature's error logs to see what problems occur, where to add improvements, he said. That's where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.

They were creating a bunch of error logs. Instead of images of sheet music, these were images of words and a box of symbols known as ASCII tablature. That's a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There's no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.) The volume of these ChatGPT session images was not so onerous that it was costing his company money to store them and crushing his app's bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote in a blog post about the situation.

"Our scanning system wasn't intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks -- until I messed around with ChatGPT myself." That's how he saw ChatGPT telling people they could hear this music by opening a Soundslice account and uploading the image of the chat session. Only, they couldn't. Uploading those images wouldn't translate the ASCII tab into audio notes. He was struck with a new problem. "The main cost was reputational: New Soundslice users were going in with a false expectation. They'd been confidently told we would do something that we don't actually do," he described to TechCrunch.

He and his team discussed their options: Slap disclaimers all over the site about it -- "No, we can't turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music" -- or build that feature into the scanner, even though he had never before considered supporting that offbeat musical notation system. He opted to build the feature. "My feelings on this are conflicted. I'm happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?" he wrote.