philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Fake movie trailers were an art form. Then came the AI slop.

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According to an investigation from Deadline, counterfeit trailers have become lucrative enough that some Hollywood studios have asked YouTube for a cut of their ad revenue rather than file copyright complaints and takedowns. Two of the most popular fake-trailer channels — KH Studio and Screen Culture — lost their ability to run ads on their content after Deadline inquired about them.

Jack Malon, a spokesperson for YouTube, confirmed those accounts were “correctly” demonetized for policy violations. He said the company will bar ads on fake trailers when the video’s metadata — which helps tell search engines how to promote it — claims a false affiliation with the original film’s copyright holder, which can “deceive viewers into believing the content is different from what it actually is.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/04/28/fake-movie-trailers-ai-youtube/

Shelly Palmer: ChatGPT now offers ad-free shopping

OpenAI has launched a new online shopping feature inside ChatGPT Search. Announced yesterday via their official X account, the update adds real-time product discovery capabilities, including personalized recommendations, pricing, reviews, images, and direct merchant links – all presented seamlessly within ChatGPT.

Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT’s shopping experience is free of sponsored listings and ads. OpenAI emphasized that results are generated independently, using structured product data rather than promotional agreements. The update is available globally across all user tiers (Free, Plus, Pro), and even for users who aren't logged in.

OpenAI’s deeper integration of commerce inside ChatGPT directly challenges Google’s core business model, signaling a future where search, discovery, and purchase could happen in a single conversational flow. Whether users embrace this particular ad-free business model remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: ten blue links won't rise to this challenge.

Prediction: Palantir’s New Deal With NATO Could Revolutionize How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Used in the Public Sector. Here’s Why.

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Below, I'm going to break down why this deal with NATO could be a game changer for how AI is deployed in the public sector. More importantly, I'll make the case for why Palantir sits in a unique position to take advantage of the public sector's interest in AI and how the company appears to be supercharged for even more growth.

Taking a closer look at Palantir's revenue breakdown

Palantir's AI applications are sold across the public and private sectors. On the commercial side of the house, large corporations use Palantir to help them organize data across disparate systems and synthesize these workloads into actionable insights. On the government side, Palantir helps the Department of Defense (DOD) on different military and stealth operations.

Per the company's annual filing, Palantir bifurcates its revenue into two categories: government and commercial. In 2024, roughly 55% of Palantir's total revenue stemmed from the government. Taking this one step further, Palantir's 2024 revenue was split into the following geographic demographics: 66% for the U.S., 11% for the United Kingdom, and 23% for the rest of the world. ...

Palantir's MSS brings a unique blend of large language models, generative AI, and machine learning to mission-critical operations ranging from "intelligence fusion and targeting, battlespace awareness and planning, and accelerated decision-making." ...

See the full story here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/prediction-palantirs-deal-nato-could-160000229.html

The AI-generated movie What’s Next opens a fresh debate over AI filmmaking

... In February, the 75th Berlin International Film Festival featured a movie made entirely of AI-generated video clips: What’s Next? by Cao Yiwen, a film that’s appropriately titled for the kind of conversations it ought to generate. While you’d be hard-pressed to find critics who watched and reviewed the 72-minute film (it has only 50 or so audience ratings between Lettboxd and IMDb, most of which skew negative), the festival’s description — which explicitly notes its artificial nature — generated enough interest that several of its screenings sold out. ...

See the full story here: https://www.polygon.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/563883/whats-next-ai-generated-movie-interview-ethics

‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw

Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google's AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived. ...

But two of its defining characteristics come into play when it explains these invented phrases. First is that it’s ultimately a probability machine; while it may seem like a large-language-model-based system has thoughts or even feelings, at a base level it’s simply placing one most-likely word after another, laying the track as the train chugs forward. That makes it very good at coming up with an explanation of what these phrases would mean if they meant anything, which again, they don’t. ...

The other factor is that AI aims to please; research has shown that chatbots often tell people what they want to hear. In this case that means taking you at your word that "you can't lick a badger twice"  is an accepted turn of phrase. In other contexts, it might mean reflecting your own biases back to you, as a team of researchers led by Xiao demonstrated in a study last year. ...

Compounding these issues is that AI is loath to admit that it doesn’t know an answer. When in doubt, it makes stuff up. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-meaning/

The Man Who Wants AI to Help You ‘Cheat on Everything’

Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.”  ...

Lee wants people to use Cluely on “Sales calls. Meetings. Negotiations,” the “manifesto” on the software’s website says. “If there’s a faster way to win—we’ll take it. We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Hears your audio. Feeds you answers in real time. While others guess—you’re already right.” ...

“The second realm of negative feedback is that ‘cheating is inherently unethical and immoral.’ This is where we’re trying to do a lot of reframing around what exactly defines cheating, what cheating really is, and what cheating will look like in a future that is AI native,” he said. ...

I tried out a test version of Cluely in a mock interview with Emanuel Maiberg. We pretended Emanuel was interviewing me for a position at 404 Media and I used Cluely to shape my answers. ...

Then Cluely would answer the question it had just heard Emanuel ask me and put its answers in an overlay at the top of my screen. It would come in two pieces: a bright white script I could read verbatim and a darker piece of text below that explained the AI’s reasoning. Because of the way Cluely is programmed, it doesn’t show up in recordings or even screenshots. ...

It also wasn’t that impressive. A few questions into the conversation and Emanuel and I realized it was just feeding me ChatGPT answers to the questions as if I’d typed them in a browser. It also took 20 seconds each time to generate, with Emanuel and I staring at each other while we waited. ...

“The only thing the product really showcased [in the commercial] was ChatGPT in your glasses,” Lee said. ...

Both Lee and the marketing copy for Cluely hammer home that technical innovations are often thought of as cheating. Math teachers worried about the advent of calculators. ...

Every single thing that is rote memorization, that relies on facts that you don’t need in the moment, that are not intrinsically necessary for a human to learn, you won’t need that anymore.”

“Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. Everybody sits in a room eight hours a day, takes multiple choice exams. In my future, everything we understand education to be, will be completely gone.” He said that people will explore whatever topics they want from the earliest ages in the “most efficient way possible.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.404media.co/the-man-who-wants-ai-to-help-you-cheat-on-everything/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Character.AI Introduces New Video Generator in Closed Beta

Character.AI, a platform offering AI chatbots for socializing and role play, has released a video generation model called AvatarFX in closed beta. Promising the ability to make photorealistic images “come to life — speak, sing and emote — all with the click of a button,” the technology combines audio and video to create a variety of visual style and voice, from realistic 3D — including “non-human faces (like a favorite pet)” — to 2D animations, according to the company. AvatarFX also has the ability “to maintain strong temporal consistency with face, hand and body movement” and can “power videos with multiple speakers.” ...

Character.AI says its AvatarFX video will be watermarked so people know it’s not “real.” Additionally, it plans to block the generation of video featuring minors and will run images of recognizable people through a filter that changes details to obscure their identity, according to TechCrunch, which concludes that “since AvatarFX is not widely available yet, there is no way to verify how well these safeguards work.” ...

“The voices in these videos are generated by Character.AI’s own text-to-speech (TTS) technology, making conversations and singing sound natural and smooth,” writes Mint.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/character-ai-introduces-new-video-generator-in-closed-beta/

Shelly Palmer email

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We’re just months away from living in a world where any given image (especially in media, marketing, ecommerce, and presentations) has a high likelihood of being AI-generated. The political, cultural, economic, and creative implications will be massive.

Still images are just the beginning. Once video generation APIs arrive, the shift won’t just be disruptive — it will be transformative. ...

UN AI Report

... The Body’s final report, outlines a blueprint for addressing AI-related risks and sharing its transformative potential globally, including by:

• Urging the UN to lay the foundations of the first globally inclusive and distributed architecture for AI governance based on international cooperation.
• Proposing seven recommendations to address gaps in current AI governance arrangements.
• Calling on all governments and stakeholders to work together in governing AI to foster development and protection of all human rights.

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This is clearly reflected in the four main areas of generative AI of concern to the United Nations:

• Peace and Security: AI-powered disinformation is already endangering UN peace and humanitarian operations, putting staff and civilians at risk. Over 70% of UN peacekeepers responding in a recent survey said mis- and disinformation severely hampered their ability to carry out their work.
• Human rights violations: AI is being used to create and spread harmful content, including child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual pornographic images, especially targeting women and girls. The UN is also deeply concerned that anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, racist and xenophobic content could be supercharged by generative AI.
• Democracy at risk: The potential of AI to manipulate voters and sway public opinion during elections poses a significant threat to democratic processes around the world.
• Undermining science and public institutions: For example, AI tools could escalate decades-long disinformation campaigns to derail climate action by amplifying false information about climate change and renewable energy.

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See the full story here: https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/artificial-intelligence

“Periodic table of machine learning” could fuel AI discovery

... “Perhaps the most challenging aspect of being a machine-learning researcher these days is the seemingly unlimited number of papers that appear each year. In this context, papers that unify and connect existing algorithms are of great importance, yet they are extremely rare. I-Con provides an excellent example of such a unifying approach and will hopefully inspire others to apply a similar approach to other domains of machine learning,” says Yair Weiss, a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved in this research. ...

See the full story here: https://news.mit.edu/2025/machine-learning-periodic-table-could-fuel-ai-discovery-0423