This Week in AI: Moving into the Movie Business
It's almost Halloween, so of course there's something going on in AI. This time, it has to do with scary movies.
Variety reports that Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind thrillers such as "The Purge" and of course the modern-day "Halloween," has announced a partnership with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta to use AI technology to help make movies.
The entertainment publication says it's more Meta's effort to "build goodwill with the industry and gather feedback on how to improve the tool." Still, it plans to expand its partnerships with movie makers into 2025.
Meta's Movie Gen is a suite of AI tools similar to tools by OpenAI and Google, each designed to use generative AI to create video. The technology is still in its nascent phases, struggling to expand past that "AI-look" of dramatic colors, futuristic imagery and uncanny valley. Ironically, AI has a habit of creating disturbing images even when it's not meant to. But that's a whole other problem.
Still, AI pioneers believe generative video can eventually help to simplify production, while also potentially giving new life to industries such as stock imagery.
FTC outlaws AI-generated reviews
A federal rule banning fake reviews went into effect, after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in August that it was planning to fight the practice. The rule bans buying and selling of reviews, as well as any reviews or testimonials that "attributed to people who don't exist or are generated by artificial intelligence," as ABC News reported.
"Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement when announcing the rule. Khan added at the time that the FTC's efforts will "protect Americans from getting cheated, put businesses that unlawfully game the system on notice, and promote markets that are fair, honest, and competitive."
Talk, not bark
A new smart dog collar is hoping to help dogs speak with their owners, "or at least fake it," as Wired reports.
It's not exactly the talking dogs from Disney Pixar's "Up," but startup Personify AI says it wants to "personify everything," starting with its pet collar called Shazam.
"The company’s collar has a speaker on it; talk to your pet (or, really, talk to the collar) and you’ll hear a prerecorded human voice responding to you, creating the illusion that your pet has a humanlike personality and the ability to speak English," Wired reported. It's only for dogs and cats for now, starting at $495.
Copyright vs AI heats up
The messy world of copyright is getting a little murkier this week, with a new lawsuit from media giant (and my former employer) Dow Jones, as well as new moves by Penguin Random House.
Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp, accused AI startup unicorn Perplexity AI of training its popular news aggregation tool on copyrighted material.
“What Perplexity does not tout is that its core business model involves engaging in massive freeriding on Plaintiffs’ protected content to compete against Plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience, and in turn to deprive Plaintiffs of critical revenue sources,” the complaint alleges, according to CNN's reporting.
Perplexity did not comment to CNN, but the company has previously fought accusations from other media companies, including Forbes and Wired, who have also accused the AI startup of misappropriating their published work.
Penguin Random House meanwhile changed its copyright rules to protect authors from AI. The book publisher changed wording on its copyright pages to "help protect authors’ intellectual property from being used to train large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools," according to a report by trade publication The Bookseller.
The new wording, which will be included in all new titles and reprints, says, “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”
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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.
