AI-generated avatars are flooding social media feeds, promoting products and building loyal audiences, often without disclosing that they are not real people. Charlie Warzel reports for The Atlantic, drawing on an interview with New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu, who has investigated the rise of synthetic influencers selling supplements and other consumer products. One …
Trip Venturella, a writer and MFA graduate, has built a small language model called Mr. Chatterbox, trained entirely on Victorian-era literature from the British Library. The model draws on 28,035 books published between 1837 and 1899, totaling roughly 2.93 billion tokens of training data. Venturella used Andrej Karpathy’s nanochat framework and Claude Code, an AI …
As artificial intelligence becomes a standard workplace tool, companies are beginning to monitor how much it actually costs to use. Katherine Bindley reports for the Wall Street Journal that businesses are tracking employee AI consumption through a metric called tokens, the basic unit that measures computing effort behind every AI interaction. For text-based tasks, roughly …
Amazon is developing artificial intelligence tools designed to speed up film and television production while reducing costs, even as concerns grow in Hollywood about job losses and industry transformation. Greg Bensinger reports for Reuters that Albert Cheng, a veteran entertainment executive at Amazon MGM Studio, leads a small team building AI applications for the entertainment …
Romance novelist Coral Hart produces over 200 books annually using artificial intelligence, earning six figures from sales on Amazon. What once took her months now takes 45 minutes per novel. Alexandra Alter reports for The New York Times that the romance industry is rapidly adopting AI writing tools, despite significant controversy within the community. Hart, …
Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has launched a series about the American Revolution that combines artificial intelligence tools with human voice talent. The project, titled “On This Day… 1776,” recreates key moments from America’s founding year. Todd Spangler reports for Variety that the series is produced by Primordial Soup, the AI studio Aronofsky established in 2024. The …
ElevenLabs has launched “The Eleven Album,” featuring original music from established artists including Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel, created in collaboration with the company’s AI music generation system. The project marks one of the first large scale partnerships between artificial intelligence technology and professional musicians, Todd Spangler reports for Variety. The album features tracks across …
Disney is partnering with AI startup Animaj to dramatically accelerate its animation production process, reducing the time needed to create a five-minute episode from five months to less than five weeks. Corinne Reichert reports for CNet that Disney selected Animaj as part of its 2025 accelerator program after reviewing thousands of AI companies. The technology …
The leadership behind WordPress is planning a fundamental shift in how the world’s most popular content management system operates. A new proposal suggests treating artificial intelligence not as an optional add-on, but as a core component of the software. This change would place AI on the same level as the database, which is the essential …
The second season of the Amazon Prime series “House of David” used between 350 and 400 shots created with generative artificial intelligence. Kat Tenbarge reports for WIRED that this is more than four times the amount used in the show’s first season. Showrunner Jon Erwin said his production company, The Wonder Project, used AI to …