AI-generated Chinese short film goes viral by turning monsters into a story about people
... The 26-minute film follows a historian tasked with investigating and documenting yaoguai (monsters). As he delves deeper, he discovers that the so-called monsters are actually ordinary people suffering from famine, forced labor and hardship. Faced with a dilemma - recording the truth could put them in greater danger, while portraying them as monsters could save their lives but erase their real stories from history - he chooses to protect them turning them into "monsters." ...
The film first attracted attention for its AI-generated visuals, with its consistent character designs, ancient settings and cinematic scenes showcasing new possibilities for AI-assisted animation. According to creator "Qingguadan," the project was made with the help of several AI tools, including ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 video generation model, OpenAI's GPT Image tool and Jimeng AI, a Chinese AI creation platform that provides text-to-image and text-to-video generation services. ...
"Compared with works that simply showcase AI effects, content that truly attracts viewers needs to build an emotional connection through characters and storytelling," Li said. ...
See the full story here: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1369011.shtml
TIME100 AI 2026
Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.
See the full story here: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/
South Korea’s ‘AI for All’ Push Gives Free Access to Every Citizen
South Korea plans to give its entire population free access to generative AI services, the first major state-led offering treating the technology akin to a public utility.
The program seeks to connect more South Koreans to homegrown AI chatbots with the goal of advancing the country’s push for AI sovereignty. By giving premium-level AI services free to its citizens, South Korean officials hope to avoid an overreliance on models from the U.S. and China.
The AI tools will be linked directly to government systems and allow South Koreans to book doctor’s appointments, receive help with apartment hunting or get tax advice. Small businesses will be able to tabulate their taxes and check their eligibility for government-support programs, and parents will receive suggested educational content for their children. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/south-koreas-ai-for-all-push-gives-free-access-to-every-citizen-451f6b2c
‘I see the incredible promise’: on set of an AI film shoot as new studios embrace controversial tech
... But the excitement and energy about AI’s potential was palpable this week at Promise’s new base when a human actor, Tori Thomas, waited for her call amid rows of computers for early shooting on the studio’s newly announced AI-enabled horror film, Touch Grass, with a budget in the low millions of dollars.
The sound stage was little more than a corner of the office hung with white sheets. A small camera followed Thomas as she scrambled in a chase scene, then the AI did the rest. It superimposed her movement in real time on to a field of swaying grass generated by a Chinese AI model, Seedance 2.5, released this month, which looks set to dramatically slash production times.
Whole scenes – actor and backdrop – were instantly visible on the director’s handheld monitor, as if they were filming in real locations. Even the seedheads in the AI-generated meadow moved as Thomas appeared to brush past. In another take, the field was easily replaced by a nightmarish underground cavern. With a glance at the screen, Thomas could immediately see the backdrop she was acting with....
“When we went from optical to digital film, we thought we’d gone to heaven,” he told the Guardian. “It’s like that again. So many things are easy to do. I am an embracer of AI. Some people are wary of it, a little afraid of it, but I see the incredible promise.” ...
George Strompolos, a co-founder and the chief executive of Promise, estimated that hybrid AI films – human actors alongside AI technology – would prove 20% to 50% cheaper than conventional production. That could free film-makers from requiring major studio investment. ...
Joanna Popper, a producer and an adviser on AI to production companies, said the positive view on AI in film and TV was that it “empowers anybody with a talent and a discipline for storytelling to be able to go make what they want to make”. But she said: “The concern is … if five tech companies suck all of the financial gain out of the industry.” ...
Imagine, the 41-year-old studio run by Howard and Brian Grazer, now has an AI studio, Obsidian, operating from space in its Beverly Hills HQ. It has partnered with Obsidian to make The Code, an AI-enabled, Howard-directed animated feature based on drawings made in Vietnamese captivity by US prisoners of war. ...
But AI in Hollywood has drawn comparison to plastic surgery: everyone’s doing it but nobody wants to talk about it. “It’s 100% like that,” Reeb said. ...
Cardoza believes AI film-makers are attracting audiences because, ironically, their direct authorial voice has greater authenticity than in Hollywood where “they turn writing into algorithms”. ...
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/16/directors-embracing-ai-film-making
The Scandinavian Solution to A.I. in Schools
... a study of over 26,000 Chinese students from grades 7-12 that was published in June by the Center for Economic Policy Research.
The economists David Strömberg, Victor Lei and Yanhui Wu found that while A.I. use raised homework scores among students, it lowered “monthly exam scores by 20 percent within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24 percent,” with student performance worsening over time. The students with the greatest negative effects on their exam scores appeared to be rushing through their homework by outsourcing to A.I. ...
Natalia Kucirkova, a professor of early childhood and development at the University of Stavanger in Norway, outlines a sensible methodology for greenlighting screen-based activities in her new book, “The Great EdTech Pivot.” Kucirkova thinks that every piece of ed tech should be measured by a model she calls the five E’s: efficacy, effectiveness, ethics, equity and environment.
In the United States, we tend to assess ed tech only on efficacy — asking whether it raises test scores or other learning benchmarks. ...
But as Kucirkova points out, even good studies (some of which take place in lab settings) cannot account for how teachers will interact with a product, or how students use it in real life. That’s what effectiveness measures: classroom uptake and utility. Ethics is whether a product has been designed to protect a child’s data privacy and whether it has appropriate security features. Equity is whether tools have been created for a diverse student population; environment is whether an ed tech company has sustainability in mind. ...
That is why teachers, children and early childhood experts should be part of the creation of educational technology, because they are its user base, and their goals are not about scaling a start-up. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/opinion/ai-norway-schools.html
Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit
...
“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. “They’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones — like A.I.’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons — that it once said would warrant more caution.
“They’re just full speed ahead and hoping that the good outweighs the bad,” he said. ...
While Mr. Gates avoided criticizing Microsoft or other companies by name, he argued that he was uniquely positioned to work on the A.I. issue. He is a technologist and industry insider who is no longer driven by the profit incentives of running a company, and he has spent decades addressing inequality through his philanthropic foundation. ...
He said mass job losses, if not addressed, were inevitable because A.I. would spread across the economy and leave little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. ...
He proposed a new tax on A.I. use, known as a “token tax,” to make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. ...
Mr. Gates added that he was dumbfounded by the kind of voluntary measures that the White House and industry leaders were developing.
“Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented?” he said incredulously. “No, thanks!” ...
“I don’t like bringing bad news to people, and I don’t like saying that innovation may be a net negative,” he said. “But that’s where we are.”
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html
AI on the Lot the 4th Edition
...
This year the conference attracted 2,460 people to Culver City on May 27 and May 28. For those two days nowhere on the planet had a denser concentration of top talent working in the AI media space than a two-block radius of Culver City. ...
In 2026, something clearly shifted with AI video and Hollywood. And this May, AI on the Lot served as a kind of coming out party for this sizable vibe shift. ...
Micro-dramas, playable IP, character avatars are versions of what many people are calling neumorphic forms of media. These forms, while nascent, represent where cultural energy, consumer attention, and investor money are going. ...
... we made a small task force to give out free tickets to artists. We’ve done this every year, largely through our own networks. The conference size (2500 attendees) meant we needed to do this at scale. Simply reaching out to friends no longer worked. The solution we found was to identify interesting artists and give them bundle of free tickets to give their artist friends. We had two rules: the ticket must go to someone who is a working artist and the person must not normally go to conferences. This strategy worked well to bring interesting people to the conference and counteract any danger of it feeling too corporate. ...
See the full story here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-lot-4th-edition-mike-gioia-ixanc/
When AI art has no author: MIT study finds generated images often can’t be traced to any training data
PhilNote: we're back to "correlation versus causation"
... at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn't change.
And if removing something changes nothing, the researchers argue, it can't be said to be responsible for anything. "If you take away a piece of data and the output of the model doesn’t change, then that piece of data didn’t affect the output," says Zheng Dai SM ‘21, PhD ‘24, former MIT CSAIL researcher and lead author on the work. ...
"All previous methods were approximate," says MIT professor and MIT CSAIL principal investigator David Gifford. "They really could not absolutely show that deleting individual things did not change the output. This paper introduces the first method that is absolute. You're actually deleting the inputs and deleting all influences of the inputs. This is the first exact method for doing large-scale deletion efficiently and showing that the results don't change." ...
Exploring a counterfactual universe
With ablation working, the researchers could finally ask their question at scale. Take one generated image, then imagine every alternate version of it, each produced by removing a different piece of the training data. The team calls this the image's counterfactual universe. The distance between the original and its most different alternate, the counterfactual radius, captures the most any single piece of training data could have mattered. ...
The privacy paradox
The implications run in a direction that surprised the researchers themselves.
Gifford sees the finding as bearing directly on the legal question of whether model outputs are derivative works. “One way to think about this is that these models are creative. They are not simply copying what they are fed, but creating brand new outputs. If those outputs have nothing to do with any individual piece of training data, that raises questions about fair use, about whether the outputs are themselves copyrightable as novel works, and about how authors get compensated when what comes out of a model isn't attributable to anything on the internet.” ...
...this paper provides reason to think that attribution will fail for interesting models. Instead, technologists and courts will need to resort to other methods for assessing copying.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/when-ai-art-has-no-author-mit-study-finds-generated-images-often-cant-be-traced-any-training
Higher education is trying to stay relevant with AI. Some students don’t want it
...
This year, more than ever, Watson said universities and colleges are grappling with the unethical murkiness of AI — from environmental impacts to data centers to intellectual theft concerns and the potential effect on jobs — while also trying to stay relevant in the current marketplace.
Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI and its impacts, according to a recent Pew Research poll. At the same time, 91% of employers think it is very or somewhat important that college graduates gain skills in college to use AI, according to a recent AAC&U report.
Meanwhile, institutions are working to attract students amid a shrinking pool of traditionally college-aged Americans and widespread concerns about the cost and value of a college degree. ...
While he acknowledges student concerns about the co-major, he repeatedly emphasized that it is optional. ...
Bryan Alexander, senior scholar at Georgetown University, said AI is the most divisive technology in higher education. He said the backlash at Suffolk against a major, rather than AI in general, feels “groundbreaking” and like something to watch. ...
See the full story here; https://www.masslive.com/education/2026/08/higher-education-is-trying-to-stay-relevant-with-ai-some-students-dont-want-it.html
OpenAI wants California to strengthen its newly passed AI safety law
PhilNote: this sounds great until you think about how it would actually work. Will they actually hire experts to monitor and enforce independently from the companies driving the work, and will they fund the resources needed to do effective testing and verification?
...
In a post from OpenAI's Global Affairs team on LinkedIn, the company laid out its case for amending SB 53, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law back in Sept. 2025. OpenAI says the law needs new teeth, specifically, requirements that frontier AI models be monitored during training or evaluation for signs that they could bypass a third party's security controls or obtain confidential information they shouldn't have. ...
It also created CalCompute, a public computing consortium meant to give safety and equity research a boost, and it requires the state to revisit the law annually as the tech beneath it shifts. Newsom pitched it at the time as proof that California could protect the public without choking off the AI industry that has become such a huge part of the state's economy. It was also called a stopgap for Washington's inability to pass anything resembling a real federal AI policy. ...
See the full story here: https://mashable.com/tech/openai-urges-stregthening-of-california-ai-safety-bill
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