“It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.” That quote was first delivered by mob boss Michael Corleone in The Godfather, but last Monday, it became the title of a speech by the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief Omeed Assefi. At a George Washington University event co-hosted with the publication MLex, Assefi described an agency firing […]
Things aren’t going so well in the video game industry. Consoles are getting more expensive, games are shutting down, layoffs are prevalent, the live-service space is a mess, major platforms are entering eras of uncertainty, and AI is infiltrating the medium in frustrating ways. Finding a bright spot is rare. But amid all of that, […]
“I was hoping we were going to have a bigger crowd than this, especially with the nice weather and everything,” Michael Maria told me. “I’m a little disappointed because the last march, I think there were about 10 times as many people at this time of day.” At 11AM, the crowd at Portland’s downtown waterfront […]
When my baby brother, a 3D modelling and animation student, talks to me about his projects and studies, the pride I usually feel is becoming increasingly tainted by a growing sense of dread. As a creative professional and former design student myself, I understand all too well how fierce the competition for postgraduate jobs will […]
In the coming years, HBO wants its new Harry Potter series to become “the streaming event of the decade” as it adapts each of the franchise’s seven original books. The show could very well become a hit that captures the imaginations of a new generation of fans who weren’t there for the first wave of […]
Is social media not just bad, but illegally bad? Should tech companies pay for making it that way? According to two US juries – and no shortage of outside commentary – the answer to both questions is “yes.” Earlier this week, two juries – one in New Mexico, one in Los Angeles – held Meta […]
I’ve been struggling to tell whether the ads appearing in my TikTok feeds have been made with generative AI tools. As someone who spends a great deal of time scrutinizing images and videos for the usual “tells” that something was synthetically generated, some of the promotions I’ve seen have definitely sparked suspicion. For several weeks, […]
On Tuesday morning, everything was business as usual at OpenAI. By the end of the day, the company had announced that it would scrap its video-generation app, Sora, and reverse plans for video generation inside ChatGPT; it would wind down a $1 billion Disney deal; it would shuffle the role of a high-level executive; and […]
Members of a convoy that delivered humanitarian aid to Cuba were detained and interrogated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) upon returning to the United States on a charter flight from Havana. Of the 20 US citizens who were pulled for secondary inspection at Miami International Airport on Wednesday morning, 18 had their phones and […]
Three children stare at the dilapidated remains of a battlefield, with trees and man-made structures mostly razed to the ground, save for the sturdy frame of a lone trebuchet. It’s a pensive snapshot of the bloodshed in A Plague Tale: Innocence by virtual photographer Ludovic “Shinobi” Helme – but it’s no mere screenshot. It’s a […]