I think the vagueness of statements like this is why a lot of people (myself included) are just so very skeptical. Surely some company wants to brag about their use. I don’t doubt it’s found its way into certain spaces, but by and large a lot of the “big” claims have been demonstrated to be borderline fraudulent. That Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise AI fight is fake. It is misleading. Taking existing green screen choreography and using AI to impose Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise’s faces is not what it is being sold as. Darren Aronofsky’s AI works are not good either. They can’t seem to hold a shot for more than a few seconds, why is that?
If the argument is that AI is being used in the background or for some VFX, sure, I’ll buy that. It’s just another tool, then. If it is being used to generate entire scenes, there’s no evidence of this, unless something like that atrocious holiday Coca-Cola commercial is a herald of our future.
As written, your claim is just handwavy. I get you might not be able to cite anything concrete due to NDAs or whatnot but, you also have to understand why a lot of people find this kinda unpersuasive.
I can respond directly to this, I’m a former VFX industry person and still fairly well connected.
The the former you suggested. Background plates and the like. The lack of actual creative direction tools, trite visual style, lack of consistency/repeatability and complete inability to be edited or adjusted easily make it a non-starter for most tasks. Compositors are fast, LLMs are slow at that scale. There are tools like ComfyUI that sit in the “we’re running experiments/useful sometimes” category.
Loads of ML tools are in use and incredibly handy, but fit into that tool category, but actual wholesale video/image generation is not that prevalent, no.
I gotta admit I laughed heartily at the quote. I expected the slippery slope argument, I did not expect it to be made so clumsy :)
btw. what followed is worse: <<He accused the government of blindsiding a sector that supports 30,000 jobs and "provides critical funding to sport, racing and broadcast industries".>>
Gambling business is not a positive force. It's not even zero sum. It's a negative sum game. I hope no one is nodding along to these kind of arguments, they are nonsensical.
“provides critical funding to sport, racing and broadcast industries”
I foresee that the amped-up sports gambling will destroy professional sports as all results will be tainted with the probable interference from the gambling industry and those trying to “game the system” (irony noted).
It’s too late. Professional sports is already ruined by gambling. You don’t always see it in the results but in the weird side bets (how many tackles, home many metres).
It should be more heavily regulated and the advertisements are so blatant and intrusive they ruin any pleasure you might take from watching sport in Australia.
here's hoping that someday headphones without pressure (e.g. active/passive noise cancelling) will make a comeback, too. But then again I think there still exist cheap wired ones without such "advanced" technology. As one woman in the article said best: "'I don't like how this feels' and we're all kind of returning to the last place we were comfortable."
For wireless headphones I've gone to bone conduction and open-ear. Started with some cheap models from Ali-Express to see how I liked it. I did.
Shokz had a black friday deal on Open-Run Pros and those are my goto. Admittedly, they are not as convenient as my Airpods were, but my ears appreciate not being bombarded with noise canceling.
Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 at least just allows varying levels of passthrough. You can have noise cancelling or noise cancelling + sound from the outside mike. You cannot have noise-cancelling off for better battery life or to cope with windy conditions
They're awful in several other ways too, which is sad for what should be their flagship model
I avoid noise cancelling as well; I find that it very rapidly gives me a headache. I prefer a nice set of headphones that physically block outside sound.
I have an anecdata where it was true: Angela Merkel. She studied physics not because it was her favorite but because in the system that she lived (GDR) it made more sense than social studies or politics.
But she wasn’t oppressed. She made a choice freely and was able to decide what would allow her to pursue a career and get ahead and actually end up becoming the de facto leader of the EU.
The OP is suggesting women are becoming highly educated in technically difficult fields due to oppression. It makes literally no sense. Either they are oppressed and cannot get ahead, or maybe they are able to freely pursue education contradicting the original assertion.
I got the same or similar but let's not kid ourselves that this is in any way small. It would have been giant by 2015 standards. That's how much the overton window has shifted.
1) 2015 saw the iPhone 6s, which was only 15 mm shorter than the Xperia 5 or 10 V, while being about the same width and thickness. It had a tiny screen in comparison. The 6s Plus was larger, and heavier, than the Xperia 10 V, in all dimensions (OK, not thickness, this was the time of "paperthin" phones) while still having a smaller screen.
2) I don't want a tiny 2008 smartphone, I want a phone I can use with one hand. A width of 70 mm or less lets me do that. Today, that is small, in 2015 it was about normal.
3) My perfect phone was the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge from 2015, which has about the same dimensions like the Xperia 10 V but the rounded screen edges made it easier to use with one hand.
I once read a study during the height of covid about this[1], which is why I loaded up on Metform. Was lucky enough not to get covid in the meanwhile (or didn't notice), but better safe than sorry.[2]
I've been thinking: Trump won't settle for less than Greenland unless it's the Nobel Peace Price. So... why not give it to him but with caveats? E.g. It will be presented to him in an extraordinary pompous celebration (to tickle his ego) but will remain in Norway until the day of the end of Trump's presidency. He will receive it again on that day, and can keep it!, in another majestic ceremony.
It'd be interesting to see what trump would do if the Nobel committee promised to give him a peace prize if he stopped all tariffs and gave up on greenland (or better yet, if he resigned).
Because every other agreement we have made with him on tariffs or Ukraine, every other appeasement, has done nothing to sway him from his actual course.
Contrary to popular thinking (and it is a nicer fantasy), he is not an inconsistent, emotionally manipulated short-termist with no attention-span.
He is actually smarter than we thought (or wanted to think) OR someone actually is a bona-fide Trump whisperer.
His main foreign policy aims and beliefs seem remarkably fixed.
All of this to say, no further appeasement. No need to completely undermine the Nobel peace price also for 5 minutes of respite, he will literally be back to this within a fortnight.
Humans are not rational. Even if you are 99% of the time, with a smartphone in your pocket there's a good chance you will use it for your emotional 1% within 2hours (and unravel). Read Rutger Bregman's goal for 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jan/04/lifes-t...
Yes. It's propaganda, not speech. Also the algorithms favor this sh*t. Also this massive generation of content floods the zone[1]. There is nothing "freedom of choice" about it if it resurfaces all the time. Upvotes/Views count disproportionally in most social media against downvotes/"not interested" (tiktok is better but even there you can't downvote enough AI-videos for them to not resurface. Probably because the algorithm isn't good enough to understand what is AI and what not, so these downvotes often don't count against AI).
reply