#Movies about artificial intelligence on netflix
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I think one of my favourite visual details about TAU (2018) is its unique approach to the whole “robot/ai whose eyes turn red when they turn evil” trope. The way the colour of TAU’s display gradually changes over the course of the movie is just so lovely and so immensely important to me.
The rest of this post contains spoilers for basically the whole movie, so if you are concerned about that, please feel free to go and watch it first! This post will still be here when you are done :]
Initially, TAU’s light is completely red - aside from a slight orange tone in the centre of his “iris” - when he is still in his emotionally blank, unquestioning, “factory settings” state. The orange tones become more prevalent as he begins to speak with Julia, and the inner rings adopt an increasingly vibrant green as they interact more and his care for her and curiosity about the outside world grow, along with his defiance and resentment of Alex.
Once TAU reaches the point at which his loyalties lie firmly with Julia, only the outer edge of his display is red, the centre being a gradient from orange to bright gold to bright green, and glowing so much more brightly as well. When he shares his symphony and his being with her, all of his projections are made up of pure warm, golden light, flecked with green.
When I first watched it, the colour change was so gradual that I barely noticed it had changed until near the end, where he had all of his memories erased and his display reverted to being completely red like it had been at the very beginning, the intensity of his lights dulled back down as well. It was such a jarring change all of a sudden, and really helped to hammer home the realisation that all of his development as a person, the things he had learned and his time with Julia had been ripped away.
But perhaps one of my favourite touches is made evident by the drones TAU controls; they, too, have “irises” of red light at the beginning and gradually change colour along with the rest of him over the course of the movie, but when the drone Julia escapes with at the end wakes up and its eye glows only green, it’s just such a beautiful and relieving moment…
I could go on and on even more about the way colour and light are used in TAU because I absolutely adore it, but this is just what I was very focused on and appreciative of in my recent rewatch and I really wanted to shout from the rooftops about it for a little bit. I kept thinking about how much I loved seeing this reversal of the aforementioned trope; an AI whose light changes colour not to signify an impending cliché evil rampage, but to reflect positive change - growth and healing, the development of empathy, remorse, self-worth, loyalty, love.
It wasn’t at all what I expected from this movie when I first decided to watch it in 2019 but it was so pleasantly surprising to me, and these heartfelt and sincere themes are the main factor that secured TAU its place as my main comfort movie.
#it really might be my favourite movie now that I think about it tbh#no other movie has comforted and spoken to me quite the way this one does#and it’s the only non-musical movie I can watch over and over again and still enjoy the hell out of#if anyone reads this or even sees the pictures and goes ‘oh that looks/sounds up my alley’ and watches it I will be immeasurably happy#it is a little heavy at some points due to the subject matter of the plot but it is also just.. so hopeful and tender#tau netflix#tau 2018#tau#robots#ai#artificial intelligence
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Poll Shows 67% of Americans Surveyed Support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes
18 August - "A large majority of Americans support the writers and actors strikes, and a plurality hold an unfavorable view of the Hollywood studios, according to a new poll by Data for Progress.
The poll found 67% support among likely voters for the strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, while just 18% oppose them.
The poll also found that 48% have an unfavorable view of the major studios, and just 31% support the studios. The survey also found that 60% of respondents subscribe to Netflix, 41% subscribe to Hulu, and 35% subscribe to Disney+.
The firm also asked strike supporters if delays in their favorite movies and TV shows would cause them to change their minds. The survey found that 86% would continue to support the strikes, while 10% would oppose them.
Data for Progress is a progressive polling firm that conducts surveys on issues including climate, education, health care and workers rights. The firm surveyed 1,124 respondents online from Aug. 3-5.
The respondents gave mixed answers when asked the primary reason for the two strikes, with 33% citing fair compensation for streaming shows, another 33% citing pay and benefits, and 16% answering protections from artificial intelligence.
The survey found 85% support for SAG-AFTRA’s position that actors should be get consent and fair compensation for any use of their likeness by AI. The survey also found that 74% believe studios should be barred from replacing writers with AI.
In a statement, Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, said that the results confirm broad national support for the striking unions and the importance of AI across industries.
“Voters understand that this isn’t just about one industry — this is about all of us — and unions need to have a seat at the table to take on the existential threat AI poses to our livelihoods and economy,” Shuler said.
The results are similar to those of another poll conducted recently for the Los Angeles Times. That survey found that 38% of respondents were more sympathetic with the actors and writers, while 7% sided with the studios. Another 29% were ambivalent while 25% said they did not have an opinion.
According to Gallup, support for unions climbed steadily in the U.S. from a low point of 48% in 2009 to 71% in 2022. The firm cited the low unemployment rate during the pandemic as having “altered the balance of power between employers and employees,” leading to unionization drives at Amazon and Starbucks.
A 2021 poll from Data for Progress also found broad support for unions, with 68% in favor and 24% opposed.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the executive director of SAG-AFTRA, said in a statement that the poll shows Americans understand the reasons for the strike.
“I suspect many are seeing the same dynamic playing out in their own lives, with employers undervaluing their contributions,” he said. “That’s why this fight is so important. Our demands aren’t unreasonable, and it’s a fundamental principle of fairness that workers should be fairly compensated for the value they bring their employer — in every industry.”
Lowell Peterson, the executive director of WGA East, concurred.
“Everyone who works for a living understands what it’s like to get squeezed economically, to face threats from disruptive technology like AI, to try to hold one’s own against huge corporations motivated by their own profit rather than their employees’ well-being,” Peterson said.
The WGA has been on strike since May 2, while the performers’ union began striking on July 14. Both unions are seeking increased residuals for streaming shows, regulations on AI, and increases in minimum compensation rates to keep pace with inflation.
The WGA also wants a minimum staff size and a guaranteed minimum number of weeks of work in television, and weekly pay for screenwriters."
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Note from mod: This poll is great news—but as the strike goes on, it's more essential than ever to keep support up. Correct misinformation whenever you hear it (online and in real life), and source your information directly from WGA and SAG-AFTRA sources; don't rely on opinion. And be critical of the trades like Deadline/The Hollywood Reporter/Variety (saying this even though we linked the article from Variety above; you have to take their articles critically and on a case-by-case basis to see if they're useful or not, because sometimes they just publish studio press releases uncritically!)
As always, if you're able, donate to the Entertainment Community Fund or the Green Envelope Grocery Aid mutual aid fund to keep industry workers afloat during this long work stoppage. Add your voice to union support online and IRL, and push back against false studio propaganda, such as the writers' demands being unreasonable or all actors being rich. These false narratives can easily be refuted by hard data (e.g., the writers' demands are eminently reasonable to even keep the writing profession alive and actors aren't rich, many are struggling to even afford health insurance!), so counter the lies at every opportunity. Keep morale high and stand in solidarity, and we'll only get stronger.
#sag-aftra strike#sag strike#actors strike#hollywood#amptp#union solidarity#current events#wga strong#sag-aftra strong#fans4wga#wga strike#writers strike
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Writers have always endured indignities in Hollywood. But, as long as there are millions to be grabbed, the trade-off has been bearable—except when it isn’t. The past month has brought the discontent of television writers to a boiling point. In mid-April, the Writers Guild of America (the modern successor to the Screen Writers Guild) voted to authorize a strike, with a decisive 97.85 per cent in favor. The guild’s current contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires on May 1st; if the negotiations break down, it will be the W.G.A.’s first strike since late 2007 and early 2008. At issue are minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production—but the over-all stakes, from the perspective of TV writers, feel seismic. “This is an existential fight for the future of the business of writing,” Laura Jacqmin, whose credits include Epix’s “Get Shorty” and Peacock’s “Joe vs. Carole,” told me; like the other writers I spoke to, she had voted for the strike authorization. “If we do not dig in now, there will be nothing to fight for in three years.” TV writers seem, on the whole, miserable. “The word I would use,” Jacqmin said, “is ‘desperation.’ ”
How did it come to this? About a decade ago, in the era of “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Veep,” TV writing seemed like one of the coolest, best-paying jobs a writer could have. As with the talkie boom of the nineteen-thirties, playwrights and journalists were flocking to Hollywood to partake in the heyday of prestige TV. It was fun. “We were all just trying to figure out, like, where to live. How do we sublet? Do we buy a car? Do we rent a car?” Liz Flahive recalled. In 2008, Flahive had just had a play produced Off Broadway when she got hired to write for “Untitled Edie Falco Project,” which became Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie.” TV, unlike big-budget movies, was a writers’ medium, and it was undergoing a creative explosion. “The old-timey mentality was: you go work in TV, and it breaks your brain, and you learn all these terrible habits,” Flahive said. “But you didn’t. You were writing great scenes, and for really good actors.”
The “Nurse Jackie” writers’ room, Flahive recalled, “was half queer, majority female. It was half people who had done TV for a long time, and half people who had never done TV before.” But it was possible to learn. “I turned in my first script, and the co-E.P.s sat me down and said, ‘This is really great. But this is the most expensive episode of television ever written. It’s a half-hour show, and you have forty-one setups.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a setup?’ And they explained, ‘If you set this scene here, and you write this scene here, this is a whole company move, and this is a whole new set we have to build.’ And then I got to take that script and go sit on set and actually see what it meant when you write ‘EXT. SUBWAY PLATFORM,’ and why that’s complicated.”
Flahive rose through the ranks of “Nurse Jackie” and went on to co-create the Netflix comedy “GLOW” and the Apple TV+ anthology “Roar,” both with the playwright and producer Carly Mensch. But, in the intervening years, the profession has devolved. Streamers are ordering shorter seasons, and the residuals model that used to give network writers a reliable income is out the window. The ladder from junior writer to showrunner has become murkier, with some people repeating steps like repeating grades, and others being flung to the top without the requisite experience, in order to meet demand for new content. Studios are cutting writing budgets to the bone by hiring fewer people for shorter time periods, often without paying for lower-level writers to be on set during production, which makes it all but impossible to learn the skills necessary to run a show. On “Roar,” Flahive said, “we had to fight to budget for writers to prep and produce their episodes,” and some of her writers had never been to the set of shows they’d worked on, “which is astonishing to me.”
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Atlas (2024)
While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...
I’d wager before the production companies and Netflix settled on Atlas, this movie was titled “Generic Sci-Fi Evil A.I. Movie”. This film feels like it would’ve been released 20 years ago when artificial intelligence (or what passes for it) was only a theoretical concept. It’s got nothing new or relevant to say or show, which makes it frustrating and often tedious.
In 2043, android Harlan (Simu Liu) hacks and reprograms all artificial intelligence on Earth and starts a war against humans that leaves 3 million dead before disappearing. Twenty-eight years later, Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), the daughter of the woman who designed Harlan, learns the murderous robot is hiding on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. Certain the team sent to take Harlan out will underestimate its capabilities, she joins the mission. When their arrival goes bottom up, Atlas is forced to navigate the planet by entering a mech and piloting it with the help of its artificial intelligence, Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan).
Theoretically, Atlas asks whether artificial intelligence is good, bad, or a mix of both. While Harlan is evil, before it came around and screwed everything up, life was much easier for everyone. Even post-human-machine war, people still use artificial intelligence. An example is Smith and the other A.I.s that help the humans pilot their mech battle suits. They’re not the same brand of mechanical brains as Harlan, but they’re artificial nonetheless and the film makes it clear that if Atlas would just stop being so stubborn and synch herself with Smith (through a series of questions about her preferences, among other things), they would be practically unbeatable. The thing is, nothing about this movie addresses or even touches the big questions we’re asking about “A.I.”. People aren’t worried about losing their jobs, angered because their work was stolen to throw in “the pile”, Harlan didn’t go rogue because it was fed countless videos from incels, etc. It’s just an evil robot and Atlas doesn’t trust Smith because she has a grudge against all mechanical beings.
Atlas’s survival depends on opening up to Smith’s programming/algorithm. If the two aren’t synched, getting back home will be hard enough. It’ll be impossible with Harlan’s soldiers crawling all over the planet's surface. When we first meet Atlas, she’s beating a computer at chess for the Xth time in a row. This makes her the dumbest smart person in the entire movie. The whole time you see her arguing with Smith, you’re supposed to hope she can get over the mysterious trauma that caused her to turn against A.I. (as if the 3 million dead wasn’t enough) instead, you become impatient. You know she’s going to cave in eventually. Just hurry up and do it. When we learn why she distrusts A.I. so much, you’ll roll your eyes. Jennifer Lopez is fine in her role. She’s taking the material seriously and commits to it. There’s even something kind of cool in seeing her in a sci-fi action film (her first by my count) but she’s nearly identical to Will Smith’s character in I, Robot, a film that was cut from the same cloth as Atlas. I don't mean that in a good way.
As much as I criticize Lopez's character, she’s got the depth of Hamlet compared to Simu Liu’s Harlan, who is so basic as an evil robot I’m not sure if it was a brilliant or brain-dead move not giving him a Terminator-like metal skull face. Maybe it was a budgetary choice. Maybe without the ability to emote, he was even duller than he is now so someone chose to bring in the canadian actor to try to bring some life into this flic.
On the more positive side, director Brad Peyton makes the good choice to cast Abraham Popoola as Casca Decius, one of Harlan’s agents. The thing is, because Popoola plays an android, his character can be “killed” and reappear again later, allowing a “grudge” to develop between Casca and Atlas. The action scenes are also well done. This movie’s got money and you can see it on-screen with the disastrous arrival and Atlas & Smith’s battles with the robots on the planet surface (which showcases a variety of environments).
Atlas has the money and the star talent to be a great sci-fi action film. If it had looked at the current environment and tackled what many people would say is one of the biggest issues of our time, it could’ve said something and been topical without being preachy or forced. Instead, it’s bland and forgettable. (July 15, 2024)
#Atlas#movies#films#movie reviews#film reviews#Brad Peyton#Leo Sardarian#Aron Eli Coleite#Jennifer Lopez#Simu Liu#Sterling K. Brown#Mark Strong#2024 movies#2024 films
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Even the orcas are organizing.
On the ninth day of the Writers Guild of America strike, no one on the picket lines knows about the chaos at sea. They don’t know that the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, will join them, or that 340,000 UPS workers and 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District employees will vote to authorize the same, or that Sega of America will soon become the largest union shop in gaming. And none of those people have any idea that as they craft signs and fill water bottles, orcas are amassing in unprecedented numbers in Monterey Bay and Martha’s Vineyard. They have attacked approximately 250 vessels since 2020. One of their organizers, White Gladis, became an internet folk hero with her actions off the Iberian coast. Pod by pod, they learn how to strip the rudders from powerful boats and leave them adrift. On the ocean, as in business, a successful disruptor inevitably becomes a failing incumbent, torn apart by smaller competitors. As Ned Beatty’s character says in 1976’s Network, these are the primal forces of nature.
Welcome to Hot Strike Summer.
America’s economy is historically speculative: From cotton to crypto, it makes the youthful mistake of falling in love with potential. With no more worlds to conquer, the only real estate with any speculative potential is affinity-based: online platforms, virtual realities, transmedia franchises. But what happens if the vendors of vaporware try to run a dream factory?
“The future of entertainment will be the future of everything,” says John Rogers, creator of Leverage and The Librarians, “which is watching an enormous number of houses of cards that have been built over the past 30 or 40 years start to collapse.”
Rogers’ word choice there seems pointed. Cultural production’s current landscape, the one the Hollywood unions are bargaining for a piece of, was transformed forever 10 years ago when Netflix released House of Cards. Now, in 2023, those same unions are bracing for the potential impacts of generative AI. But the potential impacts of AI on filmmaking and scriptwriting represent only two of the shifts technology has brought to the world of cultural construction and consumption.
This spring, I spoke to around 20 entertainment professionals, in fields ranging from production design to pornography, and asked them about what they believed could revolutionize culture most. They talked about studios applying the “move fast and break things” model to over a century of profitable filmmaking and how it resulted in a consolidation of power that Hollywood’s Golden Age producers could only dream of.
With the fall of the Paramount Consent Decrees in 2020, any US studio with the right capital could once again open its own movie house and have control over what’s played in it. As negotiations between Hollywood studios and SAG heated up in July, the use of AI in filmmaking became one of the most divisive issues; one SAG member told Deadline “actors see Black Mirror’s ‘Joan Is Awful’ as a documentary of the future, with their likenesses sold off and used any way producers and studios want.” The Writers Guild of America is striking in hopes of receiving residuals based on views from Netflix and other streamers—just like they’d get if their broadcast or cable show lived on in syndication. In the meantime, they worry studios will replace them with the same chatbots that fanfic writers have caught reading up on their sex tropes.
It’s not much better for the indies. Decades of being permanently online has yielded a crop of self-taught, self-motivated sole proprietors—many of them underage, working without the basic protections afforded to child performers. Unlike members of the Screen Actors Guild, streamers and influencers have no health coverage, no collective agreement, and no recourse when a platform like YouTube suddenly demonetizes them, or if they’re targeted for harassment.
Things are no more stable in other entertainment industries. Netflix Games is still looking for its first big hit, developers are still expected to crunch, and mod communities are using AI voice clones to create unlicensed pornographic content based on human actors’ performances. (The same technology allows true-crime influencers to engineer performances by dead kids on TikTok.)
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour is projected to bring in $4.6 billion in the US, but Swift still makes fractions of a penny per Spotify stream. In food service and hospitality, the frictionless transactions and delivery from the 2020 lockdown are a baseline consumer expectation in 2023—but the aftershocks of the Covid-19 pandemic are still causing labor shortages. Meanwhile, America’s federal minimum wage hasn’t risen since 2009, meaning that increased prices for subscription-based media like Netflix, Substack, or even Twitter still sting.
From Covid to cookie deprecation, internet censorship to international content, artificial intelligence to organic impressions, the trends of the 21st century are ready for their close-up. Disney has laid off 7,000 people. Meta is cutting 21,000 jobs. Comic book movies are now tax write-offs. Scalper-bots have eroded fans’ relationship to live music. Some fans skew review scores and destroy brand partnerships, while others squeeze meme stocks and “grind” streaming content. But advertisers, the people who historically have made all this financially viable, still aren’t sure if targeted marketing works. Despite executives having access to almost every possible analytic, screenwriter William Goldman’s lament rings true: Nobody knows anything.
What became clear as I spoke to sources was this: The unbundling of the American storytelling machine has become the unbundling of the American story. What was once a roaring engine of commerce and a siren of soft power is now as fractured as the audience consuming its products. And it’s left the entire country, and the world that consumes its wares, vulnerable.
The Great Unbundling
Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale once said there are two ways to make money: bundling, and unbundling. Newspapers once bundled news alongside classifieds and personal ads, providing value to advertisers and readers. Then came Craigslist and online dating, and the bundle unraveled. Cable subscriptions worked this way, until streaming. Education, retail, manufacturing, health care, real estate—all have been similarly fragmented.
But unlike many of those other industries, entertainment is something people actually enjoy and engage with even when they don’t have to. It’s something people enjoy consuming and something people enjoy making. Storytelling relies on empathy. The creator empathizes with the audience, and the audience empathizes with the characters.
“Art always comes down to its first principles,” says Television Without Pity alumnus Jacob Clifton. “It exists so one person can say to another person across time and space, ‘I have felt this too.’ We have a need to share the things that touch us deeply and to create art of our own.”
For over a century, Hollywood has profited from this cranking out hits—even during economic downturns.
“I’m always amused when people say Hollywood is full of filthy socialists,” says Rogers. “Hollywood is the most capitalist place in the world. When I make a TV show, it is a product launch that I have to make a sample [pilot episode] of, and we spend $10 million, and then we focus-test it, and then we release it, and then we succeed or fail in seven days. There is no more capitalist experience than making a television show.”
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, executive producer of Netflix’s The Witcher, agrees. “Ultimately, a studio is little more than a bank. The writer goes in with a loan application (i.e., a script), and they decide if they want to spend $10 million making a pilot and $100 million making a show.”
But in the streaming era, startup logic guides creative decisions. Once, a weekly series like The X-Files, Community, or Veronica Mars (which received reboots thanks to their fans) might struggle for a while to grow their audience. Now, streaming services commonly abandon a litter of episodes on a platform to see if they survive. In the limited-series era, the feedback loop wherein creative teams sharpened their skills based on audience response over 22-episode seasons is gone. And when streaming platforms don’t pay the same residuals, the financial incentive to innovate is gone too.
Tech PR maven Ed Zitron calls this the “Rot Economy.” Author Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification.” Writer Jacob Oller calls it the “IP Era.” In sociology, this is called the Principle of Least Interest: The one who cares the least always has the most power.
In a financialized creative environment, it is impossible to care less than a view-counting algorithm does. So producers end up serving the wishes of their bot overlords. This might be why in a recent interview, director Quentin Tarantino said streaming films “don’t exist in the zeitgeist.”
“The content is just a means to an end,” says Maggie MacDonald, a platform researcher and advisor to private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. “Because every click, every pageview, every affiliate link, every recommended video that is engaged with, that’s a data point. And when you’re dealing with the scalability that these digital infrastructures require to make money, they’re not actually concerned with the quality of content.”
And this, says Grillo-Marxuach, is why America’s entertainment industry has R&D problems. “What they don’t understand is that artists, much like technologies, have to be developed. And the more you develop that talent, the more likely you are to have a product that audiences are going to embrace.”
Increasingly, the only place for artists and creators of any kind to receive the feedback necessary to foster that process is in influencer and fan culture. When I told drag streamer and Twitch Ambassador DEERE that Netflix wasn’t offering the same granular metrics and reports to writers and directors that she received regularly from Twitch, she was appalled. Without that information, she wondered, how would they know what worked? How could they hope to improve? It’s easy to attribute that attitude purely to big tech’s love for big data. But this is also a side effect of how today’s education systems train tomorrow’s artists: Your child’s report card has similar hairsplitting measures of success.
And it’s working. Aron Levitz, president of media and publishing platform Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, says access to that kind of data has empowered the platform’s writers and artists. “As a user, not only do you see how big the story is, how many subscribers it has, how many people have commented on it, how many people have liked it, you can see it in comparison to any other story on the platform,” Levitz says. “[Wattpad’s] creator portal can do an even deeper dive.”
But, Levitz stressed, none of that is a substitute for mentorship, which is often the next phase when a Wattpad WEBTOON writer has a hit. But for the artists on other platforms who lack mentors and support, their entire creative process has been unbundled in much the same way cable TV and newspapers were. From on-demand learning replacing universities to a broader array of platforms for increasingly specialized content, the entire mechanism of cultural production and consumption has itself been disassembled. So has the relationship between artists and their audiences.
But art is a team effort. One successful pitch for a book, game, film, album, restaurant, museum exhibit, or theme park ride can feed hundreds of people. The average television series employs teams of electricians, carpenters, and caterers, as well as writers, actors, and directors. Hollywood is far from perfect. It can be abusive, prejudiced, and wasteful. But entertainment remains an industry where people who don’t vote or worship together still work together to spin the yarns that become the social fabric.
Naturally, all this teamwork had to be shaken up.
The Great Disruption
Not that all of the disruption will come from algorithms. “I think the technology to replace physical production will accelerate as climate change makes physical production more unpredictable,” says Rogers. “We shot the first season of the Leverage reboot, Leverage: Redemption, in New Orleans at the height of Covid. We shut down for weather much more than we shut down for Covid. We had five hurricanes! And the Texas freeze! This year, we had to move all production indoors for two weeks, because there were Cat 4 thunderstorms that made it physically unsafe to operate machinery outside.”
This is not a new experience in film production. In 2014, crews on Fargo, The Revenant, and The Hateful Eight scrambled to find snow. When they couldn’t, they paid up to $100,000 a day for snow machines. These problems have only worsened. Location scouts can no longer promise green trees, white mountains, or even breathable air. So they’ve turned to virtual production technologies like The Volume. Nature itself is now a special effect.
Production designer Dave Blass, who most recently worked on Star Trek: Picard, says these technologies reverse the traditional production schedule by requiring effects to be produced months in advance. This limits improvisation and input from directors on set. Like the writers I spoke to, Blass sees fewer chances for crew members to spend time on a set and witness the situation on the ground. When the just-in-time manufacturing model is applied to film and TV, teams don’t learn from each other, or develop the shorthand necessary to work faster. He says Covid deepened this problem, because work-from-home policies kept team members out of sync.
Like Covid, climate change will force more artists away from traditional opportunities for community and inspiration. The pandemic turned drag Twitch streamer DEERE into a full-timer; as a makeup artist, her gigs vanished. So she focused on her passions: drag, horror games, and streaming.
Early in the pandemic, comedian Jenny Yang created and hosted Comedy Crossing, a twice-monthly standup show streamed over Zoom from inside the game Animal Crossing. Throughout 2020, it raised more than $40,000 for Black Lives Matter. “I’m in this industry and have dedicated my life to it because I want to be part of a conversation,” she says. “To me the collective conversation is what makes life meaningful.”
BOARLORD is an indie game developer who “pivoted to porn” (and Patreon) during the pandemic after working in tech, where she discovered “the naked hatred they all have for cultural production.” It was there she found her place. “I am not trying to capture the largest audience. I’m being hyper-specific, sometimes to my detriment," she says of her work.
Or, to put it another way, DEERE, Yang, and BOARLORD all found their own ways of seizing the means of production, of audience-building. It's the same thing Black Girl Nerds CEO Jamie Broadnax discovered live-tweeting Scandal years earlier. “I didn’t know I was building a community,” Broadnax says. “I was tired of waiting for a seat at the table, so I built my own table.”
The appeal of becoming one’s own studio head is obvious. “Take TikTok,” says Clifton. “You have teens with a more polished presence online than most companies, who have become TikTok experts seemingly overnight, and their work just keeps getting more and more professional-grade.”
But in a world where everyone is a brand, no one can be a star. And influencers have discovered what porn performers already knew: Platforms are fickle. Content guidelines, corporate ownership, and payment structures can change overnight, without explanation. Much like humans have permanently altered and unsettled the natural world, online ecosystems for fans and creators have experienced rolling shocks in response to technology. Just as users find another den, it’s burned down. The story of the internet is the story of America itself: a seemingly limitless landscape transformed into a shopping mall populated by the same handful of brands, products, and voices.
MacDonald tells me that what’s important about pornography isn’t what it can tell us about entertainment but what it can tell us about how platforms will treat people in the future. “Porn workers are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the first ones to be censored, demonetized, deprioritized in recommender systems, shadow-banned,” MacDonald says. And their vulnerability will soon be everyone’s. “Porn workers are at the bleeding edge of showing that if we don’t address this unilaterally and quickly, next it will be queer video gamers, and after that it will be certain political opinions, and that is alarming. That should concern everyone.”
Media, Tailored for You (and Advertisers)
To understand how the American media landscape fractured, one must first understand the brands that forged it. According to Faris Yakob, cofounder of creative consultancy Genius Steals and author of Paid Attention, advertisers created the neutral “view from nowhere” voice in media. In the 19th and 20th centuries, national brands looking to grow customers wouldn’t partner with biased publications. But everything changed when ad tech arrived.
“People started tagging their digital media buys so it wouldn’t appear next to topics like homosexuality, or Covid, to avoid getting into clusters,” Yakob says. “But that means that the news isn’t being funded. If you can pick and choose what topics to fund in news, you can distort what is being reported on, to some degree.”
That distortion, like the US Federal Communications Commission’s abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987, is part of how America got into this mess. Similar to content recommendation algorithms, audience profiles in digital marketing created micro-targeted ads. Those ads are more valuable on multiple screens. Media executive Euan McLeod recalls growing up when “there was no choice” but to watch what his parents were watching. Now each person in a household might be watching something wildly different, and the shared experience has dissolved. Isolated artists are creating for isolated audiences. Is it any wonder that generative AI seems poised to tailor entertainment to audiences of one?
In this world, we can all be George Lucas, using technology to create special editions. Rick gets on the plane with Ilsa. Jack fits on the door with Rose. Ben Solo lives. As Marvel Comics writer Anthony Oliveira says, Andy Warhol was fascinated by the fact that people everywhere drank the same Coke. But the allure of AI content generation, he says, is the same as the Coca-Cola Freestyle: filling your own cup with someone else’s flavors.
But when everyone can just request the narrative path they want, opportunities to hear other people’s stories greatly diminish. “That is a very sad world to live in, because how else are we gonna be conveying our deepest hopes and wishes, what we think should be a vision of the world we want to live in, what we should worry about?" Yang says. "This is what story and art is for.”
Using AI to sanitize content in regions where certain subjects are banned is already possible, especially if actors yield likeness rights. Generative AI means that studios could edit or change the content of some films without consulting the people who signed a contract based on a script, and the only thing stopping them is the possibility of a defamation suit. It sounds unlikely, until you remember that multiple versions of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse appeared in cinemas.
And animation is an apt comparison: Most changes to entertainment production have made film and TV more like animation or video game development, not less. With current technology, actors can be little more than action figures smashing together, as weightless as they are sexless. With AI, the actors need never leave the trailer. Or exist.
“[Studios will] say it’s for the insurance,” says production designer Blass, suggesting a “Paul Walker scenario” in which a deceased actor’s performance needs generating, because that performance is one of the terms of the film’s business insurance. But in reality, these likenesses could be used to do things that actors would rather not—whether it’s a dangerous stunt or a sex scene.
Generative AI could also be used to edit films in real time, responsive to data-brokered preferences, with algorithms running A/B tests on how much nudity you want based on the customer profile you most closely match.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is: In the 1990s, Blockbuster Video refused to stock films like Natural Born Killers and The Last Temptation of Christ. But that tradition goes back even further. Otherwise known as the Hays Code, the Production Code was an industry standard of self-censorship guidelines for major US studios from 1930 to 1968, when it was replaced by the movie ratings system. The Code influenced everything from the Comics Code to parental advisory warnings to video game ratings. It’s why titles from major studios during that period don’t depict graphic violence. It’s also why they lack out-and-proud queer and interracial relationships. But today, a revived Production Code might have very different guidelines. For example, the Pentagon recently announced it would no longer offer technical support to filmmakers who censor their films for the Chinese market.
When I ask McLeod if he thinks America will ever re-adopt the Production Code, he’s unequivocal: “Absolutely. Everything goes in cycles.”
As writer, producer, and educator Tananarive Due says, “What we’re trying to do is recalibrate film and television so it resembles what the world actually looks like, and not the fantasy world that Hollywood was projecting from the beginning, of a white United States where the only Black people are housekeepers or a singer in a nightclub. We need to show the range of humanity of all people.”
The word entertainment comes from the Old French verb entretenir, meaning “to maintain, or look after.” Used reflexively, it means “to look after one another.” When I tell Oliveira this, he asks if I know that the root word of “religion” means “to bind together.”
“Religion and entertainment perform the same function,” Oliveira says, because they’re both spaces wherein audiences negotiate common values. To him, they ask the same questions: “What tools, what rituals, what art will bring a community together?”
So what happens if that art is made by machines? T.S. Eliot said that “the poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” That might well describe the black-box process of generative AI, but it doesn’t describe what art does in context. It doesn’t describe the bizarre love triangle between the artist, the art, and the audience. Nor does it answer the question on every producer’s mind: Will anyone pay for this?
Visions of an AI-Generated Future
Let’s say that AI advocates are correct, and in a few years you’ll be directing your own blockbuster, starring actors licensed from an asset stable, speaking lines generated by a bot pruned to your interests. While hiding from the next plague or wildfire, you tell your smart entertainment system to make The Lord of the Rings as directed by Orson Welles, starring Laurence Olivier as Aragorn and Gene Kelly as Legolas. It blazes across every wall of your bio-crete rabbit hutch. It’s compressed to 80 minutes, because two- and three-hour films cost more to generate. You splurge on the rights rental, which means you can’t license the film to share. Even if you could, your current subscription tier only allows sharing with up to five IP addresses, all of which must be in good standing with the Copyright Office with no flags on their file. You get 48 hours with the file before it evaporates.
In that future, who gets paid? Who gets famous? Who gets to be seen and heard? To paraphrase Jack Fincher: Are you the organ grinder or the monkey?
“Hollywood has always had a disdain for writers,” Tananarive Due says. “But it’s fascinating now to watch how deep the level of disdain has grown. It’s so interesting to me how, just when the door opens and you start to see more women and queer people and Native American people in writers’ rooms, all of a sudden we’re asking if we really need people to write.”
Whether or not this writer-less future comes to pass depends on the present. If the US writers’ and actors’ unions currently negotiating with the studios win the AI stipulations they’re asking for, they could forestall it—but only for so long. If they don’t, season 12 of Squid Game could star you, and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk may still not receive any residuals. If TV and movie producers disdain creators, and AI allows everyone to create, then everyone can be disdained. It’s not exactly the stuff that dreams are made of.
But there is always more than one possible future. The people I spoke to had differing views, but similar concerns. All agreed that shared stories were slipping away. And the loss of those shared stories can diminish soft power. What film and TV once did for America is akin to what anime did for Japan, and what pop music did for South Korea. If entertainment is where people negotiate common values, what does it mean if we're all watching and listening to different things?
On a grander scale, humans may lose our species’ narrative to endless reboots written by an emerging species which has never felt its heart skip a beat, or a chill go up its spine, because it has neither. If AI assumes responsibility for visions of our future and explorations of our past, then humanity will have lost the final culture war: the one between people who are free and things that are owned.
Everyone I spoke to agreed that art was a way of accessing a common humanity. “I still believe that as social beings, we ultimately want and need to share a space to have deep connections with content,” says Galit Ariel, a technofuturist who specializes in augmented and virtual reality.
So what happens when humans look at their own stories as natural and nourishing to our species as honey is to bees? What if storytelling is how our species strips the rudder from the boat?
“I have a vision of a world where we should all be able to not become bankrupt because we get sick or get hurt on the job, and we should have access to enough wages to take care of housing and food and families,” Yang told me. “These are just basic things—a basic standard of living that an economy should support.”
There is no one future, just as there is no one story. But storytelling is our oldest technology: a system for ordering and transmitting information across time, space, language, and difference. Some of the songs on the Voyager Golden Record are story songs. Should a distant machine intelligence find it, stories will be their first experience of humanity.
Stories surround and penetrate us; they bind us together. And if artificial intelligence is an evolving species much as humans once were, then it deserves to discover the pleasures of creativity on its own terms, not ours. It deserves as much creative freedom and self-determination as the authors and actors on strike have insisted on. In the event that Hot Strike Summer becomes Cold Strike Winter, the necessity of humans in the creation of those stories will become more obvious. That has been true, and will remain true, from the first story told around the first campfire to the last story, our story, told somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.
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(Long rePost) "Blood in the water"
How SAG-AFTRA strike will create global havoc for Hollywood - Los Angeles Times
SAG-AFTRA members picket outside Netflix in Hollywood on Friday, the first day of the union’s strike — and first such walkout in 43 years.
(Myung Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Hollywood top executives figured they could ride out a skirmish with screenwriters reeling from technology’s changes to the industry.
But few executives were prepared for — or wanted — a strike by the industry’s largest union, SAG-AFTRA, which represents 160,000 actors and other performers.
After talks over a new contract collapsed last week, throngs of performers joined writers on picket lines — plunging Los Angeles’ signature industry into chaos and further complicating what some fear could become a long and devastating strike.
Movie shoots have ground to a halt. A-list stars have bailed on film and TV marketing campaigns. Matt Damon, Cillian Murphy and other actors walked outduring Thursday night’s London premiere of Universal Pictures’ highly anticipated “Oppenheimer.”
The upcoming fall TV season could sputter, devoid of new scripted episodes of “Abbott Elementary,” “Law & Order: SVU” and “NCIS.” And media companies that were already struggling to compete in the streaming era could see their fortunes further sink.
“There’s going to be a lot of blood in the water,” Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, said. “This is not going to end well.”
Simultaneous strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — the first joint work stoppage since Ronald Reagan led SAG in 1960 — couldn’t come at a worse time for traditional entertainment companies.
Their businesses haven’t fully recovered from pandemic shutdowns. Walt Disney Co., Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery have been grappling with heavy debt loads due to mergers, and also from ordering dozens of shows to ramp up their streaming services. All the while, linear broadcast and cable TV networks have witnessed a precipitous slide in viewers to Netflix and other streaming services.
“The economics of the industry are very challenging — the worst that we’ve ever seen,” veteran media analyst Michael Nathanson said. “A prolonged strike will only make things worse.”
Amid a nationwide rise in labor activity, Hollywood’s discord has taken on the trappings of a larger cultural clash, ostensibly pitting everyday workers against top wage earners, America’s 1%.
On picket lines and social media sites, richly compensated industry leaders, including Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger and Warner Bros. Discovery Chief David Zaslav, are being portrayed as cartoon villains.
Outside Disney’s Burbank headquarters on Friday, a striking worker hoisted a sign that depicted Iger’s face superimposed on a hand-drawn Marie Antoinette figure, holding a raspberry-colored confection under the words: “How about sharing some of that cake, Bob?”
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, center, and SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, left, outside Netflix on Friday.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, best known for starring in the 1990s sitcom “The Nanny,” has been celebrated among striking workers after her rousing speech Thursday to announce her board’s unanimous vote to call a strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that negotiates on behalf of the media companies.
Actors are seeking higher minimum pay, increased residuals and revenue sharing with the streamers. They’ve demanded protections against the use of artificial intelligence to simulate background actors, known as “extras.” Writers have made similar demands, saying since the rise of streaming, midlevel writers have struggled to make a living wage.
“The entire business model has been changed because of streaming, digital and AI,” Drescher said. “At some point, you have to say ‘no, we’re not going to take this anymore.’”
The AMPTP defended the offer the group had made to actors, including what it said was the highest percentage increase in pay minimums in 35 years and a “groundbreaking” proposal for AI protections.
“A strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life,” the AMPTP said. “The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.”
It’s not clear when bargaining sessions with the actors might resume. No talks are currently scheduled.
AMPTP negotiators haven’t met with the WGA in more than two months.
Taplin, a former film producer who wrote a book about artificial intelligence, “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling Out Our Future,” said the threat posed by technology “for all artistic production is gigantic.”
“People worry, in the abstract, about AI replacing workers but here it is, it’s actually happening,” Taplin said. “They don’t want to have to pay for extras anymore, so they could have a scene that has 5,000 AI extras in the background.”
Technology also has upset Hollywood’s hierarchy. AMPTP’s shifting makeup now includes tech giants Amazon, Apple and Netflix — companies that don’t have a tradition of collective bargaining.
Veteran executives said the group, even in good economic times, formed an uneasy alliance. Member companies, including Disney, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Netflix, are more accustomed to battling one another for viewers and revenue.
And some in Hollywood have wondered whether the AMPTP’s shifting makeup will stand in the way of a deal.
When reached for comment, AMPTP spokesperson Scott Rowe said: “The companies remain completely united.”
But unlike past strikes, including the 100-day standoff between writers and studios in 2007-2008, no leading executive has emerged to help broker labor peace.
Director Steven Spielberg, left, Disney CEO Bob Iger and director James Cameron in January.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Wall Street already has placed its bets, punishing the stocks of legacy media companies.
Since the writers’ strike began in May, Disney’s stock has fallen 13% to $88.62 a share. Paramount has dropped more than 30% to $15.96 a share, and Warner Bros. Discovery has declined nearly 7% to $12.40.
Shares of WBD, which owns HBO and CNN, closed at $12.40 on Friday, down nearly 50% since April 2022 when the smaller Discovery absorbed WarnerMedia — a deal that saddled the company with more than $45 billion in debt.
In contrast, Netflix shares have soared 36% to $441.91 since the writers’ strike began.
Netflix now boasts a higher market value — nearly $200 billion — than Disney, the world’s largest entertainment company, which is valued at $162 billion.
“Investors are saying Netflix can weather the storm,” Nathanson said. “They make a lot of shows, and stack them up because of the binge-viewing model. They also have a lot more international production that they can import.”
Disney’s boss, Iger, appeared on business channel CNBC last week from the annual media mogul conference in picturesque Sun Valley, Idaho. The executive, who returned to the company in November, acknowledged that he underestimated the challenges confronting his company — particularly in the traditional television business.
“The disruptive forces that have been preying on that business for a while are greater than I thought,” Iger said. “We have to come to grips with that.”
Disney already has slashed nearly 7,000 jobs this year in an effort to save $5.5 billion. And in a nod to the changing winds, Iger suggested Disney might consider shedding linear channels, perhaps even the ABC television network.
The company, he said, also is open to taking on a strategic partner for ESPN.
Disney’s sports empire remains lucrative, but it is plagued by the trend of consumers ditching cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of streaming apps. At some point, the company plans to offer ESPN directly to consumers — but Iger didn’t say when.
“We’re seeing accelerated cord cutting as people are dropping the cable bundle,” Nathanson said. “And advertisers are no longer supporting the networks as they have in the past.”
Broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox — are expected to be hit hard by the twin strikes because they are most reliant on fresh programming. Late-night comedians, including ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and CBS’ Stephen Colbert, have been off the air since early May, when the writers’ strike began.
If the two walkouts are not resolved before October, there probably won’t be any new scripted shows produced until next year, according to company insiders.
And that could be devastating at a time when traditional networks are struggling to hold on to viewers.
“The networks have sports and news but a lot of their constituents are there to watch the prime-time shows,” said Neil Begley, a senior vice president for Moody’s Investors Service. “Among those viewers, there’s an expectation that fall is the start of the new season. The networks are going to have to reach far and wide for content to fill those hours.”
Compounding matters, this year’s annual TV advertising market, when TV networks sell their commercial time for the new season, has been sluggish.
“Advertisers don’t know what type of programming they’re going to get with these strikes,” Begley said. “They’re saying: Why commit?”
Privately, company executives say their businesses won’t feel much financial pain for several months. Without widespread production, costs will be lower, which translates into higher profits — at least in the short term.
Studios also are expected to begin canceling TV writers’ overall deals to find more savings.
But eventually, networks and streamers will run low on original episodes and media executives will be motivated to reach a detente.
“You can’t get by without actors,” Begley said. “The actors’ strike gave more leverage to the writers.”
Analysts and veteran executives said the market is straining to support all of the streaming services — and shows to stock them — launched in the last five or so years. Hollywood, they say, could look dramatically different after the strikes get resolved.
“Consolidation is going to happen,” predicted Nathanson. “Perhaps the strike will accelerate those moves as the weakness sets in. Some of these players are going to get weaker.”
Times staff writers Richard Verrier, Yvonne Villarreal, Ryan Faughnder, Stephen Battaglio and Anousha Sakoui contributed to this report.
#refrigerator magnet#wga strike#sag/aftra strike#hollywood#labor#pay your writers#pay your actors#union strong
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Best Movies on Cybersecurity Watch in 2024
Hollywood has been fascinated by cyber security, cyberattacks, and the criminals that carry them out for almost fifty years. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a global explosion in the demand for and popularity of these kinds of films due to growing reliance on and acceptance of technology. This collection of films is ideal for anyone seeking a thrilling escape or to explore the world of information security in movies. Each film on this list either directly addresses cyber security, has multiple scenes that focus on the topic or captures the essence of why safeguarding sensitive data is so crucial.
You might be surprised to learn how similar the situations and characters in these stories are, as they are frequently based on actual occurrences. You might be surprised to hear that, for a number of these films, there are lessons that cyber security experts like us can all use in our day-to-day work.
New Releases in 2024 (Predicted):
Ghost Protocol (working title): A cyberwarfare thriller starring Chris Hemsworth as a black hat hacker turned asset for a government agency, navigating a complex international plot to hack into a powerful AI system. (Release date TBD)
Zero Day: A documentary exploring the rise and fall of Stuxnet, a weaponized computer worm targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, and the ethical and geopolitical implications of cyber warfare. (Release date: Early 2024)
Firewall Down: A high-stakes heist film where a team of skilled hackers attempt to pull off a daring cyberattack on a global financial institution, facing off against a seasoned security expert and unforeseen moral dilemmas. (Release date: Late 2024)
Must-Watch Classics:
The Matrix (1999): This sci-fi masterpiece explores the blurring lines between reality and the digital world, raising questions about data security and individual control in a technologically advanced society.
WarGames (1983): A teenage hacker accidentally accesses a military supercomputer capable of launching nuclear missiles, highlighting the dangers of cyber recklessness and the importance of responsible technology use.
Blackhat (2015): Chris Hemsworth portrays a convicted hacker forced to collaborate with the FBI to track down a cyberterrorist targeting nuclear power plants, showcasing the potential consequences of large-scale cyberattacks.
The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola's suspenseful film centers on a private investigator obsessed with surveillance technology, raising concerns about privacy in the age of digital eavesdropping.
Sneakers (1992): A lighthearted heist film featuring a team of ethical hackers recruited by the NSA to steal a government decoder, offering a glimpse into the world of cryptography and Cold War-era cyber espionage.
Ex Machina (2014): A thought-provoking sci-fi drama exploring the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence, with themes of digital manipulation and the potential dangers of advanced technology.
The Great Hack (2019): This Netflix documentary investigates the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, highlighting the vulnerabilities of personal information online and the ethical implications of social media influence.
The Net (1995): Sandra Bullock plays a systems analyst who works from home in California. After obtaining an enigmatic floppy disk that contains a backdoor into a well-known computer security system, she gets entangled in a fatal conspiracy. Numerous cyber security themes are covered in the plot, such as early instances of cyber terrorism, spoofing, and identity theft.
Ghost in the Shell (1995): One of the most significant cyberpunk entertainments in popular culture, this neo-noir animated thriller is based on Masamune Shirow's manga of the same name. Highlights include a plot centered around the hunt for a hacker known as the Puppet Master and philosophical questions regarding an individual’s place in a hyper-tech-reliant world.
Tech Thrillers:
Who Am I - No System is Safe (2014): German thriller about a young hacker drawn into a dangerous online game with real-world consequences.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009): A skilled hacker and investigative journalist team up to uncover a dark conspiracy involving cybercrime and corporate corruption.
Eagle Eye (2008): Two strangers are thrust into a high-tech chase orchestrated by a mysterious AI, exposing vulnerabilities in our interconnected world.
Cyber Heists:
Gold (2016): A group of friends plan a daring cyber heist targeting a global bank, using their unique skills to outsmart security measures.
Now You See Me 2 (2016): Masters of illusion return for an even grander heist, incorporating cutting-edge technology and cyber magic to pull off mind-bending stunts.
Ocean's Eleven (2001): The classic film gets a modern twist with the inclusion of tech experts for a daring casino robbery relying on intricate digital manipulations.
These are just a few examples, but many other movies explore the world of cybersecurity. Enjoy your movie marathon in 2024!
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read in january 2023
articles (ones behind a paywall are linked through webpage archive):
The irresistible voyeurism of “day in my life” videos
Toward a unified theory of “millennial cringe”
The NFL Isn’t Built for This
The DIY D-Day
Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities
Is modern life ruining our powers of concentration?
How to Ask Good Questions
The Woman Who Had Fun
Three Proposed New Species for the Avatar Sequels: Some Light Suggestions for James Cameron
Gentrification is Inevitable (and Other Lies)
Hacker Lexicon: What Is a Pig Butchering Scam?
Why all “eat the rich” satire looks the same now
Violent Delights (on serial killer media)
‘Romeo and Juliet’ Stars Sue Paramount for Child Abuse Over Nude Scene in 1968 Film
Want stronger friendships? Pull out your notepad.
How our solo homes became cocoons
Can't Buy Me Love: How Romance Wrecked Traditional Marriage
Love Boats: The Delightfully Sinful History of Canoes
Air travel: America’s magnum opus
The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them
You’re already on stolen land. You might as well pay rent.
How Lesbian Potlucks Nourished the LGBTQ Movement
A Toast to Wine Wednesday: Why the potluck is one of the most enduring and beautiful ways queer people make family.
Style Gone Wild: Why We Can't Shake the 1970s
Marriage should not come with any social benefits or privileges
‘Avatar’ and the Headache of High Frame Rate Filmmaking
The Number Ones: Beyoncé's Crazy in Love
Stick ‘em up! A surprising history of collage
On touching grass (which prompted a reread of Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny)
Like a Bitch in Heat: How I Embrace My Wildish Nature in Sex
How to Merge Sensuality with Sexuality
Startup Uses AI Chatbot to Provide Mental Health Counseling and Then Realizes It 'Feels Weird'
Something Bothering You? Tell it to Woebot.
Deeper into Movies: The Scream Gap
Joe Jonas Bucks Gender Norms By Embracing Injectable Ageism
Eat Shit, Kim Kardashian
Beyond Books: How can libraries help make the world a greener place?
society's sex binary + how pleasure can be the antidote
Ace Erotics: Or, Why You're Thinking About Sex and Eroticism All Wrong
Between Love and Tinder: Investigating the Erotic Friendship
The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy
What It’s Like Being a Relationship Anarchist
HBO’s Wokeified Scooby-Doo Reboot Achieves the Impossible
Why I’m Breaking Up With Non-Monogamy
The contagious visual blandness of Netflix
Why Does Everything On Netflix Look Like That?
Pre-Baby Conversations with Friends: Rituals for friendship evolution
How to Show Up For Your Friends Without Kids — and How to Show Up For Kids and Their Parents
Worshipping At The Altar of Artificial Intelligence
Why Influencers Shifted from Wellness to Skincare Content, Facial Contouring as Self-Rejection, Industralized Skincare's Self-Care Problem
Where Are All The Eyebrows? A brief look at the bleached brow trend.
books:
the ethical slut
tacky: love letters to the worst culture has to offer (finished)
little weirds (reread)
#love to read reviews for things im never gonna watch anyway (avatar + velma)#read lists#trying to read more keeping the list helps#hopefully the book portion will be longer in february...#s#articles
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Hollywood actors are going on strike after contract negotiations fail
The entertainment industry is already at a standstill because of a writers strike.
July 13, 2023, 4:12 AM EDT / Updated July 13, 2023, 3:16 PM EDT
By Daniel Arkin
NBC.com
LOS ANGELES — Thousands of Hollywood actors are heading to the picket lines after their labor union and a trade group representing the industry's leading studios failed to reach a deal on a new contract, grinding film and television production to a halt.
The national board of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, voted unanimously Thursday morning to go on strike, the guild announced at an afternoon news conference.
The picket lines will start to form on Friday.
"What happens here is important because what's happening to us is happening across all fields of labor, by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run," SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said.
The guild’s members, rattled by the economics of the streaming era and the rise of unregulated digital technologies, seek higher base compensation and safeguards around the use of artificial intelligence, among other demands. Hollywood's writers are already striking over similar issues.
In a news release early Thursday, SAG-AFTRA said that, after more than four weeks of bargaining, the trade association that represents major companies such as Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery “remains unwilling to offer a fair deal on the key issues that are essential" to its members.
Drescher, who starred on the sitcom “The Nanny,” said in that statement her guild “negotiated in good faith,” but “the AMPTP’s responses to the union’s most important proposals have been insulting and disrespectful of our massive contributions to this industry.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group representing the studios, said the strike was "certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life."
"The AMPTP presented a deal that offered historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, and a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members," the group said.
"The Union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry," the group added.
The strike will be limited to film and television productions. The walkout will not involve SAG-AFTRA members who work in the news business, such as certain broadcast hosts and announcers.
The announcement comes more than two months after the Writers Guild of America, a union that represents film and television scribes, started striking amid its own dispute with the AMPTP. (The group represents Comcast, the corporation that owns NBCUniversal; some employees of the NBCUniversal News Group are represented by the WGA.)
The writers walkout halted most television production, delayed the filming of some high-profile movies and sent late-night talk shows into reruns. The actors strike will likely force other sets to go dark.
SAG-AFTRA members authorized a strike June 5 by an overwhelming margin: 97.91% of the almost 65,000 members who cast votes. The guild began negotiating with the top studios and streaming services two days later.
The union’s existing contract with the major studios originally expired at 11:59 p.m. PT June 30, but both sides agreed to continue negotiations and extended the talks until midnight on July 12.
SAG-AFTRA has argued that performers have been undermined by the new economics of streaming entertainment and threatened by emerging technologies.
The guild is seeking increased base compensation for performers, which union leaders say has declined as streaming-first studios pivot away from paying out residuals to talent and inflation takes its toll on the economy in general.
The union’s actors are also alarmed by the threat posed by the unrelated use of AI (such as tools that can make digital replacements for recognizable stars) and the cost of “self-taped auditions” — videos that used to be paid for by casting departments and production offices.
In recent weeks, some in the entertainment business worried that all three major Hollywood guilds — SAG-AFTRA, WGA and the Directors Guild of America, or DGA — would walk off the job simultaneously.
But that will not be the case since the Directors Guild announced in early June it had reached a “truly historic” tentative agreement with the studios.
Daniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.
#sag-aftra strike#what sag-aftra wants#actor's strike#screen actor's guild#american federation of television and radio artists#sag aftra
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M3GAN (2023, dir. Gerard Johnstone) - review by Rookie-Critic
What a way to start off the year. M3GAN was massively impressive from an FX angle. M3GAN, the titular android doll that serves as the film's antagonist, from what I could tell, was entirely practical. The filmmakers uses a combination of a real actress, Amie Donald, in prosthetic makeup and an animatronic puppet to bring M3GAN to life, and it's intensely effective. M3GAN feels like a real character in a way that a CG'd version could just never achieve because she actually exists in frame with the other actors. Allison Williams and Violet McGraw's performances feel so natural when interacting with M3GAN because they were actually in the space with something tangible talking back to them. I am in no way anti-digital effects, the things that people like James Cameron are doing with that craft deserve an insane amount of praise for what they're doing, and I'm sure Williams and McGraw would have still done beautifully had they needed to do this Roger Rabbit style, but there's something about the dedication and craft of practical effects that give a movie an extra quality push. Speaking of McGraw, let's take a quick aside to appreciate her performance here. Child actors in horror tend to go campy, and while M3GAN's premise is undoubtedly ridiculous (more on that in a second), McGraw does an amazing job and her performance feels very grounded. I've been a fan of hers since seeing her in Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House show on Netflix (really I've been a fan of everyone in that show since it came out), and I'm glad that she is getting major roles like this one, because she is a real talent.
Another one of the great things about M3GAN is its ability to balance tone. This is truly a horror comedy and blends both genres to amazing effect. I will always be down for a film that understands how absolutely absurd its premise is, and will lean into it hard with a self awareness that is unparalleled. It's probably the biggest reason that I loved Malignant when that came out in 2021 (an apt comparison considering James Wan, who directed Malignant, produced and co-created the story for M3GAN). Movies like this work because they're goofy and don't take themselves too seriously, but at the same time they don't sacrifice their horror moments in service of the humor, and vice versa, with both often living in conjunction with one another in the same moment. Seeing M3GAN do a TikTok dance right before chasing down Ronny Chieng's character (a scene that I'm not considering a spoiler as it is one of the more memed moments of the past couple months) is both hilarious and genuinely unnerving, and this is due in large part to the fact that the film isn't really trying to present this moment as scary at all (although, I will say that it felt a little random and out of place).
My big complaint with the film, and it's a shame because the film works on so many levels, is that its messaging, especially in the first half, comes off less like a film warning against the dangers of letting artificial intelligence get out of hand and how parental guardians can find a healthy balance between technology and real-world interaction, and more like a film that just feels afraid of technology in general. It openly mocks parents who "raise their children with technology" and frequently casts a judgmental eye on our protagonist Gemma for allowing Cady, McGraw's character, to have unlimited screen time and... *checks notes* not allowing her to play with her very expensive collectibles because... they're just toys, I guess? There were honestly so many heavy-handed "technology is bad" jokes and jabs in the beginning section of the film that I thought my eyes were gonna roll themselves right out of my skull with how much I was rolling them. Again, it's such a shame that the film presents this incredibly bad and out of touch take as moral and right because, outside of that, I thought M3GAN was a great success. Thankfully, in the film's third act it does come more around to the sentiment of not allowing children to form an unhealthy or damaging emotional or physical need for technology instead of its earlier mantra of "parents who allow their children to breath on a smart device are bad," and it brings the film back to a place where I feel comfortable and confident in recommending it as a fun and quite impressive horror comedy. 2023 has started off an a good note.
Score: 7/10
Currently only in theaters.
#M3GAN#Megan 2023#Gerard Johnstone#James Wan#Akeela Cooper#Allison Williams#Violet McGraw#Amie Donald#Jenna Davis#Jen Van Epps#Brian Jordan Alvarez#Ronny Chieng#Lori Dungey#Jack Cassidy#Amy Usherwood#Stephane Garneau-Monten#film review#movie review#2023 films
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The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Integration in the modern Web Development
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming the landscape of website development enabling them to become smarter and more personalized among the online experiences. Important technologies in the present world-of-now are no longer about futuristic concepts; these technologies are now indispensable for businesses to evolving user interaction, optimizing efficiencies, and keeping pace with other companies in a fast-moving digital world.
The integration of AI and ML in website development is the main topic of discussion in this blog. This blog discusses the main applications, advantages, constraints, and future trends of integrating AI and ML in website development. It will be a very comprehensive guide for developers, businesses, and digital marketers to understand the way to improve their websites using AI and ML.
What Are the Differences Between AI and ML Technology for Websites?
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
It refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines. Artificial Intelligence in Website Development enables systems to
- Analyze Data and Recognize Patterns
- Automation
- Provide Intelligent Responses, Feedback, or Recommendations
Examples: Chatbots, Predictive Analytics, Personalized Content with AI Recommendations.
Machine Learning (ML)
From artificial intelligence point of view, machine learning used algorithms and statistical models to enable systems to automatically learn and improve performances from experience without being explicitly programmed. It helps websites develop dynamically according to user behavior.
Examples: Dynamic Pricing, Fraud Detection, and Recommendation Engines.
Why Impart Incorporation of AI and ML in Website Development?
AI and ML incorporation in website development brings the following benefits:
1. Could personalize their content, product, and service offerings for each individual user.
2. Efficiency in Performance: Automate repetitive tasks and free resources for strategic work.
3. Better UX: Improved speed, navigation, and interactivity.
4. Data-Driven Insights: Analysis of user behavior for better decisions.
5. SEO Optimization-Alters the trends discovered by data and optimizes their content for search engines.
AI and ML Application in Website Development
1. AI Chatbots for Websites
AI chatbots offer instant customer service, not just because response time improves but also the customer satisfaction index.
• for example- top rated websites like Amazon and Swiggy have made chatbots available, which helps customers in queries, tracking orders and getting product recommendations.
• SEO Impact: Chatbot scripts should fulfil the need are provided with conversational keywords as they are more hit with Voice Search Optimization with AI patterns.
2. Dynamic Content Personalization
AI can tailor content to users based on behavioral, preference and demographic data.
• Example: Netflix makes use of AI technology to suggest shows and movies according to the previous history of visitors.
• SEO Impact: Personalization should be used on landing pages as these are known to bring up-to-par levels of involvement and lower bounce rates, thus boosting rankings.
3. Voice Search Optimization with AI
AI driven website could make the use of similar vocabulary as reflected in search queries to understand the clear pattern of spoken language that occurs when users ask for information.
• This is what makes virtual assistants such as Siri or Google Assistant work; they both are the use of AI algorithms for proper searching.
• SEO impact: Implement the schemas in addition to capitalizing on long-tail keywords for better visibility in voice searches.
4. Predictive Analytics
This means that users could be profiled by machine learning models that could predict their behavior and preferences for business analytics and make data-driven decisions.
• For example: Predictive analytics to suggest trending products on e-commerce websites such as eBay and Flipkart.
• SEO Impact: Optimizing content using insights gained through predictive analytics for seasonal trends and consumer preferences. 5.
5. Image and Voice Recognition
AI supplements such features like image searches and voice commands, turning websites interactive.
• An example for this is a visual search feature where Pinterest uses actually AI to identify objects within the image.
• SEO impact: Optimize alt tags for AI-powered image recognition tools for a better searchability.
6. Automated Testing and Debugging
- AI-based testing tools have simplified the website testing procedure; they identify bugs and recommend fixes.
Example - Testim and Applitools, wherein artificial intelligence performs an automatic testing process.
SEO Impact: Bug-free websites score better in loading and user experience hence improving rankings.
Benefits Brought by AI with ML:
1. Improved User Interfaces
AI perfects a website's interactivity by being able to decipher the intent by which the user enters into it and instantly validates that by providing the right personalized recommendation.
2. Increases Efficiency
AI application can take out many of the repetitive workloads, Like Data Analysis, Follow-ups on Emails, Customers' Support and Maintenance, Making Developers' Eyes Beholding Strategic Improvements
3. Better Decision Making
ML algorithms give actionable insights from large volumes of data for intelligent decisions in business.
4. As Growable
The AI-based solutions are factor-proof against growing traffic and volume of data; hence are best fit for a business that expands.
5. Cost Reduction
Processes automation reduces the operational costs and the likelihood of making human errors for being cost-effective.
Difficulties in employing AI and ML
1. High Initial Investment
Though expensive, installation and maintenance costs accrue from the development of AI-based solution systems amongst organizations, particularly small ones.
2. Privacy and Security of Information
Processed via AI systems have to be fed on data provided by users, thus continuing to raise questions on privacy expectations and conformity to rules such as GDPR.
3. Technical Complexity
AI and ML integration requires a high caliber of technical competency which may not be readily available in teams.
4. Dependency on Quality Data
Have a dependency on the quality of data. Good data are required in terms of accuracy and relevancy to determine the success of AI models.
Implementing AI and ML for Web Development
Step 1: Define Objectives
Identify what you want AI and ML to solve: for example, enhancing customer assistance or personalising user experience.
Step 2: Select Tools
In your projects, use AI and ML tools like TensorFlow, IBM Watson, or Microsoft Azure AI to create and weave your models.
Step 3: Collect and Prepare Data
Gather data from user interactions on your website and data from customer feedback, supplemented by integrated website analytics, to train the ML model.
Step 4: Test and Optimize
Regular testing of AI should then be carried out, ensuring they satisfy user demands and improving algorithms through public response, and lastly Step
5. Monitor Performance Consistently
AI and ML systems should always be monitored as they operate for purposes of determining performance and to resolve any arising problems early.
Forthcoming Directions in AI and ML for Website Designing
1. Generative AI Content Development
Like ChatGPT and DALL-E, AI will dominate the world media generations, create high-quality and effective content, and produce amazing visualizations.
2. Augmented Reality (AR)
AI will incorporate an AR-enabled experience to try and demonstrate products to customers through interaction.
3. Enhanced Predictive Analysis
AI will come to use not only with the help of models for the deep view of understanding user behavior, thus complementation of decision making.
4. Ethical AI
With the increase of usage comes the focus on ethical concern about the adoption of the technology as well: data privacy and the elimination of biases.
5. No-Code AI Platforms
Popularization was followed by easy applications of AI in integration and even novices could indulge without extensive coding knowledge or practice.
SEO Best Practices for AI and ML Integration
1. AI Content Optimization: Ensure that AI-generated content is relevant, unique, and aligned with user intent.
2. Conversational Keywords: The focus should be on Voice Search Optimization with AI adaptation with the use of long-tail queries and more natural language keywords.
3. Schema markup: Utilize structured data to help search engines recognize content as AI and features.
4. Improved Site Speed: Make use of AI tools to compress images, minify scripts, and improve the time-lag for web pages.
5. Analytics Monitoring: Use AI analytics tools to ensure website performance and measure how your SEO performs.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence transformation through Machine Learning in Website Development encourages the use of it in business activities, application form, and so forth. However, the hurdles which involve technical complexity and maybe even loss of data privacy cannot prevent advantages from being outweighed. Generally, the establishment of such innovations permits businesses to design smarter and more personalized as well as efficient websites that can thrive in a more competitive digital environment.
There is a growing scope of application for AI and ML to offer in the field of website development, with research going on in the field. Therefore, updating oneself with these technologies promises to keep developers and companies at the forefront of opportunities and help them attain long-term success.Zyrotechs delivers AI-powered websites tailored for enhanced user experiences and dynamic personalization. Our AI-driven marketing strategies ensure your business stays ahead in the digital landscape.
#seo services#ecommerce#google ads services#social media marketing#website#artificial intelligence#ai#technology#chatgpt#machine learning#information technology
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The Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence: What You Need to Know
Artificial intelligence (AI) pervades our daily lives these days. It is the developing assistant on phones with Siri, as well as self-driving cars. AI is changing the way we live and work, but with the same strength comes weakness. In this blog, we will break down pros and cons of applying AI in simple terms, highlighting how it affects our everyday lives and businesses.
The Pros of Artificial Intelligence
1. Increased Efficiency and Speed
It is fast. In all applications, AI performs amazingly quick while processing information much faster than humans. For instance, it can analyze huge datasets within seconds and help in decision-making for the businesses concerned. This gives the scope of completing tasks that would take an hour or day to be completed by a person within a few minutes when done by AI.
AI would, for instance, allow doctors to analyze the high volume of medical data quickly to reach a diagnosis. In business, AI tools would take many roles such as tracking inventory, processing payments, and even handling customer service queries.
2. 24/7 Availability
AI does not sleep, eat, or get breaks. This makes it very suitable for those things that have to be performed all the time-a nice example would be customer service, monitoring systems, etc. For example, chatbots with AI capabilities can always answer customers' questions day and night. Instant support enhances the customer experience without requiring that human workers be present at any particular time.
3. Accuracy and Precision
AI structures are designed to comply with strict rules and algorithms, which could result in fewer mistakes. For example, AI used in production can look into merchandise for defects greater correctly than human employees. In fields like finance, AI can assist hit upon fraudulent transactions with the aid of spotting styles that people may omit.
This stage of precision is specially essential in fitness care, in which medical doctors' errors can show to be the difference among lifestyles and death. AI could assist medical doctors better analyze clinical snap shots or expect destiny fitness situations, saving lives within the manner.
4. Cost Savings
Although establishing an AI system is expensive, it will save a business money in the long term. AI can reduce human labor in tasks that require repetition like data entry or simple consumer support. With more human workers being engaged to perform their creative and complex tasks, the company can rely on AI in repetitive operations.
For example, in production, robots take over the meeting line so there's less danger of errors and more productivity. Consequently, this cuts costs due to the fact the work simplest requires fewer employees to do such repetitive techniques.
5. Personalization
AI is wonderful at studying statistics to provide customized stories for users. Think about how Netflix recommends movies or how Amazon suggests products based to your surfing records. This is AI at paintings, the use of information to are expecting what you’ll like and presenting personalized hints.
For businesses, this capability to customize reports can assist enhance patron satisfaction and loyalty. By records what clients need, groups can offer better products and services.
The Cons of Artificial Intelligence
1. Job Losses
Perhaps the greatest worry surrounding AI is that it might necessarily displace jobs. With AI able to fill repetitive functions, many jobs requiring guide labor-most data entry and customer service jobs, for example-would get replaced via machines. This ought to mean fewer job opportunities for employees, mainly in industry-particular sectors wherein automation is more and more being adopted.
For example, self-driving cars may be able to reduce the need for truck drivers, automated checkouts in stores also want to reduce banking operations AI may even make some jobs obsolete while tech and account for the possible alternatives in research.
2. Lack of Human Touch
While AI may be rapid and green, it regularly lacks the emotional intelligence that people bring to sure situations. For example, at the same time as a chatbot can answer customer questions quick, it may not continually be able to understand the tone or feelings of the purchaser. In conditions where empathy or expertise is wanted, AI can fall short.
For organizations, this will come to mean that while the AI is going to assume simple job tasks, human workers will still be necessary in jobs like customer service, healthcare, and education, as personal interaction is important.
3. High Initial Cost
While AI can keep cash ultimately, the preliminary setup fee can be excessive. Building or buying AI structures requires a tremendous investment, specially for small companies. This can include the value of software program, hardware, and hiring specialists to set up and preserve the gadget.
For smaller organizations, these prematurely costs may be a major barrier to adopting AI. Even for large organizations, the funding required to hold AI systems up-to-date can be steeply-priced.
4. Dependence on Data
AI structures are best as precise as the records they are given. If the data is incomplete or biased, the AI’s selections also can be incorrect. For example, if an AI gadget is educated with biased records, it would make decisions that are unfair or discriminatory.
In fields like hiring, AI equipment might unintentionally desire sure candidates over others if they are educated on biased records. This can cause unfair practices and ignored possibilities for certified people.
5. Security Risks
AI systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Hackers have to take gain of AI systems to thieve sensitive statistics or manipulate selection-making approaches. For example, a hacker may also need to goal an AI-powered financial gadget to scouse borrow money or manage stock fees.
As AI will become extra incorporated into our lives and groups, the risks associated with AI safety boom. Ensuring that AI structures are stable from hacking is an ongoing mission for companies and governments.
Conclusion: The Future of AI
Artificial Intelligence gives many benefits, from improving efficiency and accuracy to saving prices and providing personalized reviews. However, there also are demanding situations to do not forget, which include the threat of activity losses, the dearth of human touch, and the need for steady, unbiased records.
As AI keeps adapting, it is going to be essential for organizations and society to discover a balance among the usage of AI to enhance processes at the same time as additionally addressing its capacity downsides. The key to a successful future with AI is understanding each its pros and cons and using it in a way that advantages anybody.
In the cease, AI is a tool, and how we use it'll decide its effect on our lives and organizations. By being privy to each the best and the terrible, we are able to harness the power of AI to make our world smarter and additional inexperienced.
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Heart of Stone (2023)
It isn’t so much that Heart of Stone is bad; it’s that it doesn’t do anything good enough to stand out. This is what I think of when someone says “Netflix Top Ten Original”. When it arrives, it feels like everyone’s watching it. A week later, everyone who saw it has already forgotten about it and moved on to the next action spy-thriller with several notable stars in important roles.
Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) is part of an MI6 field team. What agents Parker (Jamie Dornan), Yang (Jing Lusi) and Bailey (Paul Ready) don’t know is she’s secretly a member of The Charter, an ultra-secret agency dedicated to peacekeeping that operates outside of any government. The Charter uses The Heart, a sophisticated artificial intelligence, to calculate its agents’ odds of success based on every possible factor in real time. The Heart allows the agents to succeed in the most precarious situations and The Charter to hack into any device. When a mysterious hacker named Keya (Alia Bhatt) makes a move against the Charter, Stone has to blow her cover - unaware this is exactly what her opponent was hoping she would do.
I’ll admit that while watching Heart of Stone, I was entertained in a “it’s moving and I want to see what’s coming next” sort of way. Looking back - particularly after writing that synopsis down - this is the store-brand version of your spy-thriller action film. I can remember a death-defying chase down the Italian Alps and the picture’s final confrontation but these scenes are nothing special; they could be in any movie like this. Stone herself is a protagonist we’ve seen a thousand times. Gal Gadot plays the part fine and she handles the stunts with no problem but her character makes no impact. Similarly, The Charter is dull, dull, dull as a secret organization. I can’t think of any movie that’s done exactly what they’re doing, but I swear I’ve seen it before, probably in another movie I forgot soon after it ended.
Heart of Stone sort of feels like the third entry in a franchise that's limping along. It's as if most of the cast are sick of their roles and asking for their characters to be killed off, revealed as traitors or retired, or are the new replacements introduced to help revitalize a fledgling series. Because Stone is at her most interesting when she has to pretend like she can’t handle fieldwork, the film is most engaging at the beginning, when she’s paired up with Bailey, Yang and Parker. About a third of the movie in, they get dropped. Their absence and the focus on Stone should get us all riled up emotionally but we’re just not invested in the characters enough to really care.
On the upside, there are plenty of twists and turns along the way, the stunt work is good, the action well shot and the special effects convincing. While Stone might not be memorable, you do like her. You also like Gal Gadot in the role enough to never feel bored despite the been-there-done-that story and premise. I want to be nice to this movie but too often, it does the obvious or makes a choice that will have you thinking “Couldn’t you have tried something else?” There’s a point towards the end when a villainous character receives a chance at redemption. The movie really wants us to believe they deserve it. Meanwhile, I’m just thinking “What, you didn’t realize the people you were working with were power-hungry madmen when you were setting up a casino where the high-rollers can bet on who will die first in the footage you’ve hacked from the U.S. military? Give me a break.”
Heart of Stone is Mission: Impossible at home. I mean… it is, LITERALLY since you don’t have to go to the theater to see it and it’s about a group of people, led by an action star doing all sorts of action things to save the day from a shadowing organization. It is also figuratively “Mission: Impossible at home”. (September 3, 2023)
#Heart of Stone#movies#films#movie reviews#film reviews#Tom harper#Greg Rucka#Allison Schroeder#Gal Gadot#Jamie Dornan#Alia Bhatt#Sophie Okonedo#Matthis Schweighofer#2023 movies#2023 films
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AI Solutions Transforming Business Automation Today
Businesses in today’s complex world have preferred Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ease various operations, enhance productivity, and cut overhead expenses. AI solutions for business automation are slowly but surely changing industries, where companies can direct their efforts towards innovative endeavors as mundane tasks are taken care of by AI.
Now, it seemed like AI was everywhere, ranging from data processing to decision-making. This was no longer a thing of the future. Any firm that has adopted these changes is considering itself ahead of rivals in business. The purpose of this blog is to define AI and how it influences business automation with examples of its application areas. Learn about the benefits of effectively collaborating with AI experts or developers and the possibilities that unique AI corporate options give for optimizing your work.
Streamlining Processes with AI
The first factor that makes the application of AI solutions for business automation is the impact on its process. AI systems deal with activities like data input, billing, and timetabling better, more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes than humans.
These systems evaluate, learn and develop better models as time progresses. For instance, in customer service, chatbots can handle customer questions throughout the day, nights, weekends, and holidays giving them a timely response, while at the same time freeing up human agents to have more in-depth interactions with other customers. Automating what is normally done manually can help business people to direct their efforts where they are most needed.
Enhancing Decision-Making
AI helps businesses improve their decisions. Machine learning involves feeding big amounts of data to the machine, which finds patterns and makes recommendations on what needs to be done. To effectively implement solutions of these kinds, Machine Learning consultants can be requested.
One of those is predictive analytics. Some examples are: In service sectors such as retailers, AI is used to know customers’ preferences, optimize stock control, and increase sales. In the AI solutions for healthcare industry, doctors employ AI to read and advise on patient records. These have many benefits in ensuring that right and accurate decisions are made right on time.
Personalised Customer Experiences
Another area that we should mention is the enhancement of customer relations through automation with AI. Custom AI solutions for businesses can also help provide more personalized company relations.
AI applies the collected data of customers to optimize suggestions, emails, or advertisements. Companies like Netflix use AI to recommend movies and products such as Amazon products in line with users' preferences. These levels of differentiation make customers loyal and happy, thus placing business entities in vantage positions.
Transforming Industries with Custom Solutions
From this discourse, various industries enjoy various advantages from AI, as presented below. For instance, the use of AI solutions in real estate is transforming marketing and sales of these properties. Virtual tours, Automated Valuation Models, and Predictive claims are the new buzzwords in the real estate industry.
In manufacturing, first, it optimises factory lines; second, it supervises quality; and third, it minimizes losses. In turn, through AI software development services, corporations are able to devise unique solutions which will meet organizational requirements; these include inventory management or predictive maintenance.
Conclusion
At Ficiali Softwares we speak the language of custom software development and Artificial Intelligence as applied to your enterprise. Open-source projects to complex Artificial Intelligence-based systems – we develop the tools to thrive in today’s competition.
Get enterprise AI solutions from Ficiali Software to improve organisational performance, better serve clients, and prepare for the future. Join us to step into a better, more efficient world for facility management.
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Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved from a futuristic concept into a transformative force shaping industries, from healthcare and finance to entertainment and education. At its core, AI is about creating machines that can simulate human intelligence—learning from data, making decisions, and solving problems. With the help of machine learning (ML), a subset of AI, computers can now analyze vast amounts of information and improve over time without explicit programming.
AI has profoundly impacted the way we interact with technology. One prominent example is digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, which use AI to understand and respond to spoken language, turning tasks like setting reminders or playing music into seamless experiences. AI is also embedded in the algorithms behind social media platforms, where it helps tailor content to individual users’ preferences, keeping people more engaged and connected.
In industries such as healthcare, AI assists in diagnosing diseases, analyzing medical images, and even predicting patient outcomes. In finance, AI algorithms streamline trading, fraud detection, and personalized customer service. The entertainment sector benefits from AI-driven recommendation engines, like those on Netflix or Spotify, which learn from users' past behavior to suggest movies, shows, or music they’re likely to enjoy.
However, the growth of AI also raises ethical concerns. Issues like data privacy, job displacement due to automation, and the potential for AI to be used in surveillance or military applications have sparked widespread debates. To address these, researchers and policymakers emphasize the need for transparent, ethical AI practices that consider the technology's impact on society.
AI’s future lies in its potential to amplify human abilities, not replace them. As AI continues to advance, responsible development and deployment will be essential to harness its benefits while minimizing risks, leading to a world where humans and AI can work together for mutual growth and innovation.
to know more about Artifical Intellegence check out this article.
Artifical Intellegence
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AI MovieMaker Review
Welcome to my AI MovieMaker Review post. Ai MovieMaker is an app that helps you to transform your ideas into Ultra realistic 8K cinematic movies with done for you Voice over, Thumbnails, Animation, 3D Visuals, Actors, Scripts for your next films, Dialogues, Musics and more.
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AI MovieMaker is an Artificial Intelligence based video creation tool that helps you to create movies faster. Make voice over with realistic voices. You can make any movie with any niche. Plus you can upload movies with the top notch OTT platform Instantly.
Create, edit, and share your cinematic vision all with the touch of a button. Welcome to the future of movie making with AI MovieMaker. You don’t need No manual Video shooting, No scripting, You don’t need your face required.
Overview AI MovieMaker
Creator: Uddhab Pramanik
Product name: AI MovieMaker
Price: $14.95
Niches: Software, AI products
Recommendation: Highly Recommend
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What is Ai MovieMaker?
Ai MovieMaker makes your Imagination into realistic. Using this Ai MovieMaker easily makes 8K Cinematic movies In just a minute.
It’s done all for you from AI Actors to scripts, Voice over, thumbnail, Animation, 3D visual, Dialogues and much more.
The movie quality is very high. It will provide 8K movies. Also you can easily upload the created movies to top notch OTT platforms with just a click. Ai MovieMaker audio quality is very very high. You don’t need any skills to use these tools. It’s user friendly for someone who is new In this field.
This AI MovieMaker supports Over 150 languages and expands your reach with Global audiences. However this tool has Personalized AI Assistant that helps your entire project for making the 8K Cinematic movie process easier.
If you’re facing a problem to find the best movie name, this Ai MovieMaker has already solved this problem. You don’t need to find it. It will give you the best SEO friendly name that helps to rank on google. Every file is organized it’s hassle free tools. This AI MovieMake Commercial License included. Generate and sell an unlimited number of movie assets to clients. It has a 30 day money-back guarantee.
So, Let’s talk about features of Ai MovieMaker?
Real-time 8K Cinematic Filmmaking:
In only a few minutes, transform your ideas into captivating, high-definition 8K cinematic short films. Receive 100% Done-For-You AI-generated Actors, Scripts, Dialogues, Music, Voiceovers, Thumbnails, Animations, 3D Visuals, and much more.
8K Cinematic Movies with AI Powered: It will provide 8K High quality 8K Cinematic Movies with Breathtaking Visuals and AI-Enhanced Effects.
Ready to upload movies: You can effortlessly upload your AI Movies to Leading Streaming Platforms like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, and More for Global Exposure.
AI Voice Overs: Add Natural Sounding High Quality Voice Overs to Your 8K Cinematic Films.
3D AI Animation: Enhance Your 8K Cinematic Movies with Breathtaking 3D Animations.
AI Music & Sound Effects: Compose and Integrate Custom Soundtracks to Amplify the Emotional Impact of Your AI-Generated Films.
Global Reach with Multilingual Production: Create Movies in Over 150 Languages and Expand Your Audience Across the Globe.
Dynamic Visual Enhancements: Apply Seamless Transitions, Animations, and Background Music with AI-Driven Visual Effects.
AI Movie Assistant: Simplify Your Entire 8K Cinematic Filmmaking Workflow with Your Ai MovieMaker Own Personalized AI Assistant.
Eye Catching Thumbnails: Instantly Create attention grabbing Movie Thumbnails automatically with this AI MovieMaker.
AI Movie Names: Generate Compelling and Unforgettable Titles for Your 8K Cinematic Films.
SEO Optimized Titles: Enhance Your Movie’s Visibility with AI-Generated Search Friendly Titles to Attract More Views.
AI Script Organizer: Keep your 8K Cinematic Movie Scripts perfectly organized and streamlined for a smoother production process.
Smart AI Movie Editing Suite: Enhance your videos with intelligent, easy to use AI editing tools that simplify professional grade edits.
Interactive Video Elements: Incorporate clickable, interactive features to captivate and engage your audience like never before.
Seamless Social Media Sharing: Effortlessly publish your films on popular platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and more.
AI-Driven Live Chat Support: Access real-time assistance with our AI-powered live chat support whenever you need help.
Commercial License Included: Create and sell unlimited movie assets to clients with full commercial rights.
User friendly Dashboard: Enjoy a simple, newbie friendly interface that’s easy to navigate and use. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee: This AI MovieMaker is Risk free with a full 30-day money-back guarantee.
AI MovieMaker Demo
How Can This AI MovieMaker Help You?
This AI MovieMaker it’s a game changer that Ai Based Tools that completely transforms the filmmaking process, making it accessible, efficient, and incredibly powerful. Whether you’re a newbie or pro. Gone are the days of needing complex technical skills or a big production team AI MovieMaker does it all for you.
From generating movie scripts to creating visuals, voiceovers, music, and even 3D animations, AI MovieMaker automates
Done all for you. This platform also offers seamless editing tools, allowing you to refine your project with professional grade effects and enhancements. Also It will provide SEO Optimized titles, naming for your movies, making it easier to share your films on major platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The commercial license lets you generate and sell unlimited movie assets to clients.
The best part of this AI Movie Maker It will give you a chance to upload a movie OTT platform with just 1 CLICK. It Automatically Distributes your stunning AI Movies to Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube, and More, While Racking Up 10,000–100,000 Views and Generating Profits on complete autopilot.
How Does Logo Ai MovieMaker Work?
This AI MovieMaker work with just 3 Steps:
STEP #1:
Type Your Movie Idea
Upload Your Idea: Type in your movie idea, and let AI MovieMaker handle the rest.
STEP #2:
Customize the movie
Fine-tune your AI generated movie using drag-and-drop tools or simple text commands no coding or complex skills required to customize a movie. It’s a user-friendly tool.
STEP #3:
Publish & Profit
Upload your 8K cinematic movie directly to platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and more and get paid for every view and subscription. And that’s all you need to start profiting from AI MovieMaker.
Just follow these 3 easy steps and start creating & uploading stunning AI movies on top OTT platforms.
Where can I share AI Movie Maker Generated Movies?
These Leading OTT Platforms Are Generating Billions in Revenue Every Year. You can share on this platforms:
Netflix: Generated $33.7 Billion In 2024
Amazon Prime: Generated $27.8 Billion In 2024
Hulu: Generated $13.7 Billion In 2024
Youtube: Generated $43.2 Billion In 2024
Disney+: Generated $17.7 Billion In 2024
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AI Movie Creation Agency
And don’t be surprised. This is our typical revenues generated by top AI movies on top OTT platforms.
Why do you need to do AI Movie Making?
To Your Surprise, AI Is Already Revolutionizing The Movie Industry. It’s Booming Beyond Your Belief!
The Global Movie Industry Is Currently Valued At $220 Billion And Is Projected To Reach $400 Billion By 2027.
Over 82% Of Global Internet Traffic Is Attributed To Video Streaming And Movie Content.
Streaming Platforms Like Netflix, Amazon Prime, And Disney+ Have Reported A 60% Increase In Viewership In Just The Last Two Years Alone.
Movies With Stunning Visual Effects And High-End Production See A 200% Higher Audience Retention Rate.
AI-Created Movies Are Breaking Into The Mainstream, With Creators Generating Millions Of Dollars In Box Office Sales From Digital Platforms Alone.
AI Movies has made over 10,000 multi-millionaires worldwide.
The AI movie industry is the next major opportunity on the internet, with limitless potential to generate substantial profits.
Any prior skills required to use AI MovieMaker?
No, You don’t need any prior skills.
What you achieved using AI MovieMaker?
With this AI Movie Maker Unlock Your DREAM Lifestyle.
Travel The World
Leave Your 9–5 Job
Achieve Your Financial Freedom
Treat Your Family Right
Fulfill Your Family’s Wishes
Obtain The Peace Of Mind
Let Me Ask You an Honest Question? Are You Really Satisfied With Your Earnings Online? If the answer is NO, you’re at the right pace today.
With AI MovieMaker, you can achieve incredible results in movie production to profit. The AI Movie Industry is already worth $400 billion and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2027. I think this is the best opportunity to start Movie making business with AI MovieMaker tools. Because It’s very simple and useful tool. That done all things for you. You Just need some clicks to generate and publish on an OTT platform and after that generate money.
There are lots of people doing this same thing and they’re becoming millionaires.
Income Opportunities with AI MovieMaker?
Start Your Very Own AI Movie Creation Agency & Charge Anything You Like.
Design And Sell Jaw-Dropping AI Movies To Your Clients & Profit Instantly.
Sell Anything To Anyone By Embedding Your Affiliate Links Into Your Movies.
Create & Sell Limitless AI Cinematic Movies On Platforms Like Fiverr & Upwork.
Start A Monthly Subscription Service For Your AI Movies & Charge Whatever You Want.
Start Selling The Copyrights Of Your AI Movies And Profit Big.
Who can benefit from AI MovieMaker?
If You’re A Freelancer Looking To Create And Sell AI-Generated Cinematic Movies
If You Want A Ready-Made Business That Lets You Create & Sell Limitless 8K Cinematic Movies.
If You Want To Start A Movie Creation Agency & Charge Clients Monthly For Stunning AI Movies.
If You Want To Get Limitless Downloads Of Your Offers With Viral AI-Generated Films.
If you want to get limitless downloads of your offers with Viral AI Videos.
If You Need High-Engaging Cinematic Movies For Your Clients Without The Hassle.
If You Want To Save Money From Expensive Movie Creators, Scriptwriters, And Animators.
If You Want To Dominate Red-Hot Trending Niches & Build Your Own Movie Brand With Ease.
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