An anonymous reader shares a report: As Hollywood executives insist it is "just not realistic" to pay actors -- 87 percent of whom earn less than $26,000 -- more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs. While entertainment firms like Disney have declined to go into specifics about the nature of their investments in artificial intelligence, job postings and financial disclosures reviewed by The Intercept reveal new details about the extent of these companies' embrace of the technology. In one case, Netflix is offering as much as $900,000 for a single AI product manager.

[...] Netflix's posting for a $900,000-a-year AI product manager job makes clear that the AI goes beyond just the algorithms that determine what shows are recommended to users. The listing points to AI's uses for content creation: "Artificial Intelligence is powering innovation in all areas of the business," including by helping them to "create great content." Netflix's AI product manager posting alludes to a sprawling effort by the business to embrace AI, referring to its "Machine Learning Platform" involving AI specialists "across Netflix."

A research section on Netflix's website describes its machine learning platform, noting that while it was historically used for things like recommendations, it is now being applied to content creation. "Historically, personalization has been the most well-known area, where machine learning powers our recommendation algorithms. We're also using machine learning to help shape our catalog of movies and TV shows by learning characteristics that make content successful. We use it to optimize the production of original movies and TV shows in Netflix's rapidly growing studio."

In its latest attempt to boost revenue and cut losses, Spotify unveiled a widely telegraphed move to raise prices for its premium paying subscriber base. From a report: The new monthly cost for U.S. users will be $10.99, the company said. The hike brings Spotify in line with rivals Apple Music ($10.99 a month) and Amazon Music ($10.99, though cheaper for Prime members), which both raised prices last year. Slightly cheaper: YouTube Music ($9.99 a month), which has steadily built a major presence in the space with more than 80 million-plus combined music and premium subscribers. The price of the Premium Duo plan will go up by $2 to $14.99 per month, while the Family plan and Student plans rise by $1 to $16.99 and $5.99, respectively.

"The market landscape has continued to evolve since we launched. So that we can keep innovating, we are changing our Premium prices across a number of markets around the world," the company said in a statement. "These updates will help us continue to deliver value to fans and artists on our platform." Spotify had 210 million global paying subscribers (a 15 percent increase year-over-year) and 515 million monthly active users as of March 31. Yet the audio giant has been operating at a loss and has been looking for ways to cut costs amid what CFO Paul Vogel called in late April a "very modest underperformance in advertising" revenue in its first quarter of 2023.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The number one movie in North America is Warner Bros. Discovery's Barbie, which Deadline reports has teamed up with Oppenheimer to fuel a mind-blowing $300M+ box office weekend. ["Oppenheimer Shatters Expectations with $80 Million Debut," read the headline at Variety.]

Now it seems everybody is trying to tap into Barbie buzz, including Microsoft's Xbox [which added Barbie and Ken's cars to Forza Horizon 5] and even Microsoft-backed education nonprofit Code.org. ("Are your students excited about Barbie The Movie? Have them try an HourOfCode [programming game] with Barbie herself!").
The idea is to inspire young students to become coders. But as Code.org shares Instagram images of a software developer Barbie, Slashdot reader theodp remembers when, nine years ago, Code.org's CEO "took to Twitter to blast Barbie and urge for her replacement." They'd joined a viral 2014 Computer Engineer Barbie protest that arose in response to the publication of Barbie F***s It Up Again, a scathing and widely reported-on blog post that prompted Mattel to pull the book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer immediately from Amazon. This may have helped lead to Barbie's loss of her crown as the most popular girls' toy in the ensuing 2014 holiday season to Disney's Frozen princesses Elsa and Anna, and got the Mattel exec who had to apologize for Computer Engineer Barbie called to the White House for a sit down a few months later. (Barbie got a brainy makeover soon thereafter)...

The following year, Disney-owned Lucasfilm and Code.org teamed up on Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code, a signature tutorial for the 2015 Hour of Code. Returning to a Disney princess theme in 2016, Disney and Code.org revealed a new Hour of Code tutorial featuring characters from the animated film Moana just a day ahead of its theatrical release. It was later noted that Moana's screenwriters included Pamela Ribon, who penned the 2014 Barbie-blasting blog post that ended Barbie's short reign as the Hour of Code role model of choice for girls.

Interestingly, Ribon seems to bear no Barbie grudges either, tweeting on the day of the Barbie movie release, "I was like holy s*** can't wait to see it."
To be fair, the movie's trailer promises "If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you," in a deconstruction where Barbie is played by D.C. movies' "Harley Quinn" actress Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey), whose other roles include Tonya Harding and the home-wrecking second wife in The Wolf of Wall Street.

For a taste of Comic-Con, one San Diego newspaper is sharing photos of the 30 buildings in San Diego that had their exteriors covered this week with promotional "building wraps" for "the latest TV shows, movies and even a National Geographic special."

Some of the stranger announcements this year:

• Jamie Lee Curtis has co-authored a horror graphic novel with an environmentalist theme called Mother Nature.

• It was also announced that season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would include a musical episode.

• Star Trek: the Next Generation star Jonathan Frakes has directed a Star Trek: Lower Decks episode in which the animated characters crossover into the live-action world of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

And the A.V. Club offers a slideshow with its choices for this year's hottest trailers. Some of the highlights:

• The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
• Wheel of Time (Season 2)
• The Marvels (a new movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe)
• Agatha Christie's A Haunting In Venice (starring Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot)
• Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire (Season 2)
• Harley Quinn (Season 4)

Something unexpected happened at this year's Comic-Con, reports Entertainment Weekly: As film and TV actors skipped San Diego Comic-Con in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike, a number of voice actors gathered to show their support — and raise awareness about the threat of artificial intelligence on their industry.

The National Association of Voice Actors hosted a panel Saturday morning, where multiple actors and SAG officials spoke to a packed room about how rapidly changing AI technology can threaten both fans and creators... The panelists took a deep dive into the many different forms of AI, particularly in its use in voice work — from original voices like Apple's Siri to synthetic voices copying live actors. All cautioned that AI inherently is not a bad tool and can in some ways enhance voice performances, but fans and actors should push back against exploitative methods.

"Voice acting is the tip of the spear of how AI can either be used to lift people up and enhance the opportunities that actors have — or be used in a negative way to steal their voices and crush human creativity," SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told the crowd. "We need to be very vigilant about that. AI isn't implementing itself. People are choosing to implement AI. So, we've got to reject the idea that this is something that is going to happen to us, and there's nothing to be done about that. That is an absolute myth that is being foisted upon us by the people who want us to think we have no power."

Ultimately, the panelists explained, it all comes down to consent. Currently, there are no federal or international laws protecting a person's likeness, and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity." NAVA and SAG-AFTRA are calling upon voice actors and fans alike to push back, both by establishing protective contract language and by pushing for global laws.
In addition, the site also reports that "Actors, cosplayers, and a congressman hit the streets of San Diego during Comic-Con 2023 on Friday to show their support for the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike."

Ahead of the Oppenheimer release, IMAX's TikTok showed the massive 70mm film print and special IMAX extensions. The video interestingly featured an emulated Palm m130, commonly known as a Palm Pilot, a 2002 device running on a Motorola 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor and Palm OS 4.1. From a report: In an IMAX theater, the m130's job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU's job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film's many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. The IMAX 1570 projector moves film at a little under six feet per second, so it's all happening really fast.

The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming -- "PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME," reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet -- but doesn't often need to be used. "I've never had to interact with the Palm Pilot," says one person familiar with the technology. "It's really just a status screen." Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film's video in sync with its audio.

Netflix is bringing password-sharing crackdown to consumers in India and every other market starting today, the global streaming giant said after a limited rollout of the restriction helped the firm sign up nearly 6 million subscribers in the quarter ending June. From a report: The streaming giant said it will start to address account sharing between households in almost all of its remaining countries starting Thursday. Netflix, which once supported the practice of account password-sharing, now finds it posing complex challenges to its business prospects.

It began testing the restriction last year, much to many subscribers' chagrin, and expanded it to a number of other countries including Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and the U.S. in 2023. In some aforementioned markets, Netflix allowed those sharing the password to pay extra to accommodate their friends.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science: This week, the much anticipated movie Oppenheimer hits theaters, giving famed filmmaker Christopher Nolan's take on the theoretical physicist who during World War II led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, is known as a charismatic leader, eloquent public intellectual, and Red Scare victim who in 1954 lost his security clearance in part because of his earlier associations with suspected Communists. To learn about Oppenheimer the scientist, Science spoke with David C. Cassidy, a physicist and historian emeritus at Hofstra University. Cassidy has authored or edited 10 books, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. How did Oppenheimer compare to Einstein? Did he actually make any substantiative contributions to THE Bomb? And why did he eventually lose his security clearance?

A year after its largest quarterly loss and a significant drop in subscribers, Netflix has made a remarkable recovery by adding 5.9 million global subscribers in the second quarter of 2023, surpassing analyst expectations. TechCrunch reports: The subscriber addition far exceeds industry guidance; analysts forecasted an increase of 1.7 million subs. Netflix ended Q1 with 232.5 million users. Netflix's quarterly earnings results arrive a few hours after news broke out that the streamer dropped its basic plan in the U.S. and the U.K.

Netflix's significant subscriber gain this quarter reflects the impact of its paid sharing rules. Netflix wrote in its letter to shareholders, "In May, we successfully launched paid sharing in 100+ countries, representing more than 80% of our revenue base." The company added that today it's rolling out paid sharing to "almost all the remaining countries," including Croatia, Kenya, Indonesia and India. Netflix reported $8.2 billion in revenue and a net income of $1.5 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a ArsTechnica report: On Wednesday, two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. In particular, they discovered that ChatGPT's knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes, leading them to conclude that the responses were likely learned and memorized during the AI model's training rather than being newly generated. The two researchers, associated with the Institute for Software Technology, German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Technical University Darmstadt, explored the nuances of humor found within ChatGPT's 3.5 version (not the newer GPT-4 version) through a series of experiments focusing on joke generation, explanation, and detection. They conducted these experiments by prompting ChatGPT without having access to the model's inner workings or data set.

"To test how rich the variety of ChatGPT's jokes is, we asked it to tell a joke a thousand times," they write. "All responses were grammatically correct. Almost all outputs contained exactly one joke. Only the prompt, 'Do you know any good jokes?' provoked multiple jokes, leading to 1,008 responded jokes in total. Besides that, the variation of prompts did not have any noticeable effect." [...] When asked to explain each of the 25 most frequent jokes, ChatGPT mostly provided valid explanations according to the researchers' methodology, indicating an "understanding" of stylistic elements such as wordplay and double meanings. However, it struggled with sequences that didn't fit into learned patterns and couldn't tell when a joke wasn't funny. Instead, it would make up fictional yet plausible-sounding explanations.

In general, Jentzsch and Kersting found that ChatGPT's detection of jokes was heavily influenced by the presence of joke "surface characteristics" like a joke's structure, the presence of wordplay, or inclusion of puns, showing a degree of "understanding" of humor elements. Despite ChatGPT's limitations in joke generation and explanation, the researchers pointed out that its focus on content and meaning in humor indicates progress toward a more comprehensive research understanding of humor in language models: "The observations of this study illustrate how ChatGPT rather learned a specific joke pattern instead of being able to be actually funny," the researchers write. "Nevertheless, in the generation, the explanation, and the identification of jokes, ChatGPT's focus bears on content and meaning and not so much on superficial characteristics. These qualities can be exploited to boost computational humor applications. In comparison to previous LLMs, this can be considered a huge leap toward a general understanding of humor."

With no formal announcement, Netflix removed its $9.99 "Basic" subscription tier for anybody trying to sign up for a new account or resubscribe in the U.S. and UK. From a report: Now your two options are to pay $5.50 more per month for the "Standard" plan, or otherwise suffer through constant ad interruptions with what's now been dubbed "Standard with ads."

All the changes are listed on the service's help center page. The company noted that the Basic plan "is no longer available for new or rejoining members. If you are currently on the Basic plan, you can remain on this plan until you change plans or cancel your account." Netflix pulled the same move in Canada last month, again without any official announcement. The company has been extra cagey about its latest subscription plan shakeup, which could lead to some rather nasty surprises for anybody who leaves Netflix but comes back later hoping to sign up for the $10 ad-free option.

Plexamp, the music player originally incubated by the Labs division of media company Plex, is now free, the company announced today. From a report: The project was first launched in 2017 as Plex's own spin on the classic Winamp media player app, offering visualizations to accompany your tunes, tools for programming mixes, and more recently, a ChatGPT-powered "Sonic Sage" feature that builds unique playlists from users' music libraries. However, after its expansion from desktop to mobile, Plexamp was only available to subscribers.

Now, Plex says the Plexamp app will become free, allowing users to play tracks from their own library or the TIDAL music streaming service with high-quality audio and support for lossless audio. The app also includes gapless playback, loudness leveling, and smooth transitions between tracks, among other things. In addition to Library Radio, a feature used to rediscover your music, users can create playlists with Plexamp to match their current mood: like "brooding, cathartic, confident, intense, playful, poignant, swaggering, and wistful," the company says.

Daniel Belquer, the "Chief Vibrational Officer" of Music: Not Impossible, developed a haptic suit with vibrating plates to enhance the live music experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. The suit, showcased at an event called "Silent Disco: An Evening of Access Magic" at Lincoln Center, provided unique textures and sensations corresponding to the music, creating an inclusive environment for all attendees, regardless of hearing ability. NPR reports: His team started by strapping vibrating cell phone motors to bodies, but that didn't quite work. The vibrations were all the same. Eventually, they worked with engineers at the electronic components company Avnet to develop a light haptic suit with a total of 24 actuators, or vibrating plates. There's 20 of them studded on a vest that fits tightly around the body like a hiking backpack, plus an actuator that straps onto each wrist and ankle. When you wear the suit, it's surprising how much texture the sensations have. It can feel like raindrops on your shoulders, a tickle across the ribs, a thump against the lower back. It doesn't replicate the music -- it's not as simple as regular taps to the beat. It plays waves of sensation on your skin in a way that's complementary to the music.

A recent event at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts called "Silent Disco: An Evening of Access Magic" showcased the suit's potential. Seventy-five of them were lined up on racks at a party meant to be accessible to all. Anyone could borrow one, whether they were hearing, hard of hearing or deaf, and the line to try them out snaked around the giant disco ball that had been hung over Lincoln Center's iconic fountain. The vibrations are mixed by a haptic DJ who controls the location, frequency and intensity of feeling across the suits, just as a music DJ mixes sounds in an artful way.

Disney CEO Bob Iger is citing the studio's output increase for Disney+ as one reason for "some disappointments" as of late. From a report: Speaking to CNBC's David Faber at the Sun Valley Conference, Iger admitted the studio screwed with audience expectations by offering up so much streaming content. The negative impact of that has been commercial disappointments in theaters, be it "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" not even reaching $500 million worldwide or disappointing openings for summer tentpoles "Elemental" and "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny."

"There have been some disappointments. We would have liked some of our more recent releases to perform better," Iger said. "It's reflective not as a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond -- in terms of their time and their focus -- way beyond where they had been. Marvel's a great example of that. They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention. That is, I think, more of the cause than anything."

Slashdot reader quonset shared this report from CNN: Forty years ago this summer, a new movie floated the prospect of the world being destroyed by artificial intelligence run amok — anticipating current anxieties about where the technology could potential lead — a year before the "Terminator" introduced the futuristic threat known as Skynet. At the time, "WarGames" spoke to another issue very much on the minds of movie-goers: The danger of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, years before the Berlin Wall and Soviet regime fell...

Yet a recent re-viewing of the movie... makes its spin on AI seem even more pointed and timely — the idea that in seeking an emotionally detached, people-free solution to a problem, we might sow the seeds for our own destruction... The AI, in this case, is more sensible than its creators, as opposed to the more malevolent force featured in the new "Mission: Impossible" sequel. Yet the apprehension that has entered the chat — as underscored by recent congressional hearings regarding the perils associated with the technology — is that future iterations of AI won't be so benevolent, and might actually be smarter than the resourceful teenagers that we can deploy to thwart them...

As Ryan Britt wrote recently at Inverse.com, what really makes "WarGames" scary isn't that the computer is evil, but rather its potentially dire inability to recognize nuance the way a human can. "In 'WarGames,' the computer doesn't understand the difference between a game and real life," Britt noted.
CNN says the movie deals with questions that have "simply continued to evolve" as "reality has caught up with science fiction."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is proposing legislation to create a commission with the power to declassify government documents related to UFOs and extraterrestrial matters. The New York Times reports: The measure offers the possibility of pushing back against the conspiracy theories that surround discussions of U.F.O.s and fears that the government is hiding critical information from the public. The legislation, which Mr. Schumer will introduce as an amendment to the annual defense policy bill, has bipartisan support, including that of Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who has championed legislation that has forced the government to release a series of reports on unidentified phenomena. Support in the House is also likely. On Wednesday, the chamber included a narrower measure (PDF) in its version of the annual defense bill that would push the Pentagon to release documents about unidentified aerial phenomena.

The Senate measure sets a 300-day deadline for government agencies to organize their records on unidentified phenomena and provide them to the review board. President Biden would appoint the nine-person review board, subject to Senate approval. Senate staff members say the intent is to select a group of people who would push for disclosure while protecting sensitive intelligence collection methods. [...] Under Mr. Schumer's legislation, the president could decide to delay material the commission has chosen to release based on national security concerns. But the measure would establish a timetable to release documents and codify the presumption that the material should be public. "You now will have a process through which we will declassify this material," said Allison Biasotti, a spokeswoman for Mr. Schumer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: During today's press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode. In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included "a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members."

When asked about the proposal during the press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said that "This 'groundbreaking' AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day's pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that's a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again."

The use of generative AI has been one of the major sticking points in negotiations between the two sides (it's also a major issue behind the writers strike), and in her opening statement of the press conference, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said that "If we don't stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines." The SAG-AFTRA strike will officially commence at midnight tonight.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When top anime streaming platform Crunchyroll was first gaining popularity as a pirated-video site in the mid-2000s, Japanese animation was considered a niche form of entertainment, appealing mainly to enthusiasts known as otaku. Today, it's a $20 billion industry spanning streaming, games and merchandise, and the company's hit series, such as One Piece and Demon Slayer, have drawn millions of US and European subscribers. Crunchyroll, now owned by Sony Group, is setting its sights on India as a major growth market -- one that could help the industry further expand from a made-in-Japan subculture into a mainstream and global phenomenon.

The company, founded in 2006 by graduates of the University of California at Berkeley, started off as an anime-sharing site. It eventually began streaming only legitimate content, helped by investment from venture capitalists including former News Corp. President Peter Chernin and ownership by AT&T's WarnerMedia. Now the largest anime-dedicated streaming platform in the world, it was bought by Sony in a $1.2 billion deal announced in 2020. Crunchyroll has more than 100 million registered members, including 11 million paid users, after rapid subscriber growth during the pandemic when people binge-watched exotic content. With growth in Western markets moderating, the anime giant is looking to India for its next breakthrough, according to President Rahul Purini.

Telly's free 55-inch 4K dual-screen TV sets are set to arrive at users' homes this week -- but of course, there's a catch. From a report: The start-up, which plans to ship some 500,000 free, ad-supported TVs in 2023 in the U.S., is calling the initial wave a "public beta program." The company says the new Telly households represent a diverse cross-section of the U.S. population, although the initial user base overindexes on education level and household income -- and also skews toward Gen Zers and millennials. According to Telly, more than 250,000 people have signed up to receive a free TV set, which displays an always-on, rotating ad unit on a 9-inch-high second screen situated below the main 55-inch one. Each unit also includes a free Chromecast with Google TV adapter. The bulk of the half-million TVs will go out in the fourth quarter of 2023, Telly chief strategy officer Dallas Lawrence said: "We think there's no better Black Friday deal than free."

To receive the free TV, Telly users must submit detailed demographic info (such as age, gender and address), as well as purchasing behaviors, brand preferences and viewing habits, and they must agree to let their data be used for serving targeted ads. Telly's TVs include a sensor that detects how many people are in front of the screen at any given moment. So what's the catch? Telly users must agree to several conditions under the company's terms of service. If someone doesn't abide by the TOS, Telly reserves the right to demand the TV be shipped back -- otherwise, it will charge up to $1,000 to the credit card associated with a given account. Also read: Telly, the 'Free' Smart TV With Ads, Has Privacy Policy Red Flags.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, the parent company of Redbox, has partnered with TikTok to stream the platform's short-form videos on screens atop approximately 3,000 Redbox kiosks across the United States. Deadline reports: Third-party brands will also have their ads run alongside the TikTok videos via Chicken Soup's ad platform Crackle Connex. The agreement covers roughly 10% of the total network of Redbox kiosks, which are generally located outside of grocery, convenience and big box retail stores. The out-of-home ad deal is part of a growing effort across the industry to identify alternatives to linear TV and place brand messages in venues like gas stations, elevators and other locations. "TikTok is the go-to destination for short-form video consumption by over a billion people globally," said Philippe Guelton, chief revenue officer of Crackle Connex. "This new partnership provides advertisers a unique opportunity to reach new audiences and drive engagement. Our Redbox kiosks are in high-traffic locations where millions of people frequently shop, such as grocery stores or value retailers. We look forward to working with TikTok on expanding this partnership as our DOOH network expands."