philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

19Jun/25Off

Elon Says He’s Working to ‘Fix’ Grok After AI Disagrees With Him on Right-Wing Violence

PhilNote: this is why we need to scrap the click license for AI and create QC-checked contract requirements between AI developers and their customers/users. There is a market for AIs that would agree to and comply with this.

Billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk really doesn’t like it when Grok says anything that contradicts his far-right worldview. And that’s exactly what his AI chatbot did late Tuesday when an X user asked whether people on the political right or the political left have been more violent since President Donald Trump was first elected in 2016. Grok said it was people on the right. Musk responded that he was working to fix Grok so it wouldn’t do that again. ...

See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/elon-says-hes-working-to-fix-grok-after-ai-disagrees-with-him-on-right-wing-violence-2000617420

19Jun/25Off

Moonvalley Hires VFX Trailblazer Ed Ulbrich to Lead Strategic Growth in AI-Powered Entertainment

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In this role, Ulbrich will help shape the company’s broader growth strategy while deepening Moonvalley’s relationships across studios, brands, agencies, and creative communities. He will also collaborate closely with Moonvalley’s studio arm, Asteria Film Co., to accelerate adoption and integration of its technology within professional filmmaking communities and workflows. ...

Ulbrich brings over 30 years of experience driving innovation at the intersection of storytelling, production, and technology. ...

The announcement reflects Hollywood’s evolving relationship with AI technology. Following industry strikes partly centered on AI concerns, studios are seeking partners who can deliver professional tools while respecting creators’ rights. Moonvalley’s approach of building models exclusively from licensed content directly addresses these concerns. ...

See the full story here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250618829097/en/Moonvalley-Hires-VFX-Trailblazer-Ed-Ulbrich-to-Lead-Strategic-Growth-in-AI-Powered-Entertainment

17Jun/25Off

A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.

... Even if the A.I.-written version of this piece was entirely factual, submitting it to my editors would have represented a fundamental misunderstanding of why they hired me. In freelance journalism, as in many fields where the work product is written text, you aren’t just being paid for the words you submit. You’re being paid to be responsible for them: the facts, the concepts, the fairness, the phrasing. ...

It’s not just a question of where humans want A.I., but also: Where does A.I. want humans? To my mind, there are three major areas where humans either are, or will soon be, more necessary than ever: trust, integration and taste. ...

Trust

A.I. auditors — people who dig down into the A.I. to understand what it is doing and why and can then document it for technical, explanatory or liability purposes. ...

A.I. translator: someone who understands A.I. well enough to explain its mechanics to others in the business, particularly to leaders and managers. ...

... a whole new breed of fact checkers and compliance officers ...trust authenticatoror trust director. ... A.I. ethicist. It will be these ethicists’ jobs to build chains of defensible logic that can be used to support decisions made by A.I. (or by hybrid A.I.-and-human teams) to a wide variety of interested parties...

At its core, trust is about accountability ... “There should be a human who ultimately takes responsibility,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the digital economy lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and also a founder of the A.I. consulting company Workhelix. ...

 legal guarantor: someone who provides the culpability that the A.I. cannot. ...

 consistency coordinator. ... when A.I. isn’t consistent, it can’t be trusted. ...

 escalation officer. ... But our preferences will almost certainly also require someone to step in when the A.I. just feels … inhuman. ...

Integration

A.I. integrators: experts who figure out how to best use A.I. in a company, then implement it. ...

...  people who fix the A.I. when it breaks, which will look a little different than traditional I.T. specialists ... A.I. Plumber ...

Deciding which tools to use, and when, is a complex problem. ... A.I. assessor ...

Integration jobs are already on the rise, ... In the future, they might carry more specific titles, like integration specialist. ...

A.I. trainer: the person whose job it is to help the A.I. find and digest the best, most useful data a company has and then teach it to respond in accurate and helpful ways. ...

A.I. personality director ... an organization’s A.I. personality could become as core to its brand as its logo. ...

Healthcare... drug-compliance optimizer — a person who develops A.I.-driven systems to make sure patients take the right medications at the correct time. ...  A.I./human evaluation specialist: someone who determines where A.I. performs best, where humans are either better or simply needed and where a hybrid team might be optimal. ...

Taste

... music producer Rick Rubin ... “The confidence I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists.” ...

In that future, provided my editor and I can trust the A.I., the job of writing this article may very well come down to selecting the inputs, then picking and choosing phrases, paragraphs and lines of reasoning offered by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and others. I will still be the “author” of the article, but perhaps not the writer. ...

Rather than go away, in the future, the term “designer” might actually grow to cover a whole range of jobs in which a person’s main function is to steer A.I. to create something compelling — a product, a service, a process — based largely on their taste. ...

product designers will have a much greater ability to own products, from top to bottom... not be a writer but an article designerStory designer might become a more popular title in film and TV. We could see a lot more world designers in everything from marketing — where a person fabricates an entire universe, complete with fictional characters and locations, which then feeds all the images and videos of a campaign — to video games. ...

human resources designer who can more thoroughly control everything from training materials to detailed benefits-and-leave policies, giving them a more pronounced ability to personally shape the entire culture of an organization. We might see civil designers, who are more focused on the creative part of the job than the math and physics, favored over civil engineers. ...

This means that rather than have rookie employees compile reports or write memos — things the A.I. is good at — you might have them start, say, creating new ideas for products right away. ...

differentiation designer, whose remit combines branding, philosophy, product, risk tolerance and creative execution. ...

 “I will have it do research in advance, but I will never let it write before I write,” Mollick said of A.I. “I have to write messily to think something through. Otherwise, the A.I. will dominate my thoughts.” ...

Brynjolfsson said. “We have to think, OK: What is it we really want to accomplish? What are the goals here? And we have to think a little bit more deeply about that than we have in the past.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/magazine/ai-new-jobs.html

17Jun/25Off

Nvidia’s pitch for sovereign AI resonates with EU leaders

  • Nvidia's AI projects highlight Europe's lack of AI infrastructure
  • EU leaders emphasize AI infrastructure for digital sovereignty
  • High electricity costs challenge Europe's AI data center expansion

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidias-pitch-sovereign-ai-resonates-with-eu-leaders-2025-06-16/

17Jun/25Off

Social media now main source of news in US, research suggests

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More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube - overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute.

"The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries," a report found.

Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. ...

It said populist politicians around the world are "increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, 'personalities', and 'influencers' who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse". ...

  • The use of AI chatbots to get the news is on the rise, and is twice as popular among under-25s than the population as a whole.
  • But most people think AI will make news less transparent, accurate and trustworthy.
  • All generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don't use them as often as they once did

See the full story here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93lzyxkklpo

17Jun/25Off

Its time for sovereign AI

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been crisscrossing the continent making a compelling case for “sovereign AI,” which has been defined as localized AI models that reflect each country's unique language, culture, and values. ...

Behind the policy speeches and funding pledges is a very clear business case: Nvidia wants to ensure that when Europe builds its own AI capabilities, it does so using Nvidia GPUs. It’s also a direct response to Europe’s growing discomfort with being dependent on a small number of U.S. tech giants.

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See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/06/its-time-for-sovereign-ai/

15Jun/25Off

Apple’s Liquid Glass design is paving the way for AR glasses

... Liquid Glass is named with the idea that each window on a phone is like a pane of glass, see-through and somewhat reflective. It gives the screen a sleeker look, though in its developer beta, Apple hasn’t quite wored out the kinks of playing with opacity. ...

If that’s the case, then Apple will need to master the style of these somewhat transparent design elements. If you’re wearing AR glasses and get some form of notification, you’d probably rather see that as something that blends into your surroundings, and not some giant colorful box that suddenly obscures your vision while you’re walking around. ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/apples-liquid-glass-design-is-paving-the-way-for-ar-glasses/

12Jun/25Off

How Disney’s AI lawsuit could shift the future of entertainment

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“It’s sort of a ‘finally’ moment,” said Chad Hummel, principal at the Los Angeles office of the law firm McKool Smith. Previously, entertainment giants had stayed on the sidelines even as researchers documented how AI tools could be used to generate apparently infringing content. Now they’ve entered the fray in a big way.

...

See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/11/disney-universal-sue-midjourney-ai-copyright/

10Jun/25Off

Meta Is Creating a New A.I. Lab to Pursue ‘Superintelligence’

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Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence,” a hypothetical A.I. system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s plans.

Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and chief executive of the A.I. start-up Scale AI, to join the new lab, the people said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars in his company as part of a deal that would also bring other Scale AI employees to the company. Meta has offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading A.I. companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, according to the people. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/technology/meta-new-ai-lab-superintelligence.html

ChatGPT: Scale AI is a company that provides data-centric infrastructure to accelerate the development of AI applications. They focus on creating high-quality data for machine learning models, offering services like data annotation, synthetic data generation, and model validation. Their platform helps organizations build and deploy AI models efficiently, with a focus on both speed and accuracy. 

7Jun/25Off

Is it live or is it AI? A ‘pop-up’ radio station takes over LA’s airwaves

  • A new type of radio station bubbled up in Los Angeles this week, with songs, bands and even the DJ generated by artificial intelligence
  • The Fizz, as it’s called, is broadcasting on 106.3 FM for the month of June as part of an elaborate relaunch campaign for the ‘80s soda brand, Slice
  • Driving through mid city, where the signal is strongest, people who tune in either by choice or by accident will hear soda-themed songs with titles like “Pop the Top,” “Fizzical Attraction” and “Lipstick Stain on my Slice” as part of a “pop 40 countdown"
  • Billed as LA’s home for pop hits that didn’t exist until now, the station airs jingles, back announcements from a DJ named Bev and back stories for nonexistent bands — all of it created with Google’s AI programs

See the full story here: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triad/entertainment/2025/06/06/fizz-fm-ai-radio-slice-soda