philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The AI magic behind Sphere’s upcoming ‘The Wizard of Oz’ experience

philNote: the story quotes Buzz Hays,

“The Wizard of Oz” may not be the first film shot in color, but many people remember it that way because of how director Victor Fleming cleverly used black-and-white film for the scenes set in Kansas.

Likewise, “The Wizard of Oz” may not be the first film to be reconceptualized with AI, but it may soon be known for that, too. ...

 The team also had to account for all the camera cuts in a traditional film that remove characters from parts of certain scenes, which wouldn’t work at the new, theatrical scale that was envisioned. ...

Yet for all the powerful new technology at play, one of the biggest breakthroughs comes from following the traditions of cinema: having plenty of extra material to work with. In addition to old footage, the team scoured archives to build a vast collection of supplementary material, such as the shooting script, production illustrations, photographs, set plans and scores.

Through a process known as fine-tuning, these materials are uploaded to Veo and Gemini so the models can train on specific details of the original characters, their environments and even elements of the production, like camera focal lengths for specific scenes.

With far more source material than just the 102-minute film to work with, the quality of the outputs dramatically improved. Now, Dorothy’s freckles snap into focus and Toto can scamper more seamlessly through more scenes. Every change, Hays notes, was made in close collaboration with Warner Bros., to ensure continuity with the spirit of the original. ...

See the full story here; https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/sphere-wizard-of-oz/

Harvard Law Review – Artificial Intelligence

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Chapter I examines how state and federal bills aimed at regulating discriminatory AI fit into the larger framework of antidiscrimination law.  ...

Chapter II interrogates the “double bind” AI creates for artistic communities — the artist’s urge to use a new tool for greater creativity while that very tool simultaneously threatens the same human artist with irrelevance. ...

Following Chapter II’s consideration of specific professional contexts, Chapter III expands the discussion of affected communities to a global scale. This Chapter explores the importance of preserving democratic values in the governance of AI.  ...

On the topic of governance, corporations have experimented with uncommon forms of governance to channel the development of AI in a safe direction. While these corporate structures can control for traditional profit seeking by shareholders, Chapter IV investigates the mystery of “superstakeholders” — parties who wield unanticipated influence over the corporate board and may undermine a company’s prosocial mission in unexpected ways. Therefore, traditional theories of “amoral” drift may not offer a full explanation for events such as OpenAI’s firing-rehiring of Sam Altman and seeming pivot to profit.  ...

Revisiting themes raised in earlier Chapters, Chapter V sounds an alarm about inadequate oversight of AI. Drawing on examples of how a deregulatory approach to internet content has left injured individuals without legal recourse and even plausibly facilitated violence, the Chapter identifies accountability, transparency, and democracy as gaps in the internet’s current regulatory framework — problems echoed in the current context of generative AI, as well. ...

Together, these Chapters seek to advance how the legal world is grappling with AI’s challenges and opportunities.  ...

See (and download) the full article here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/introduction-10/

‘Wizard of Oz’ AI makeover is ‘total transformation,’ sparking mixed reactions: experts

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"What truly matters is the outcome," Chew explained. "If a reimagined classic resonates, its value will speak for itself. Dismissing it without seeing the result is less about merit and more about discomfort with change. A classic doesn’t stop being a classic because it’s expressed in a new way. In fact, the heart of a classic is its ability to endure, evolve, and inspire across generations. Some may say reimagining beloved films with AI is gimmicky or disrespectful. My take? Don’t engage with the remake if it’s not your thing — but let others explore and create. The only real line we shouldn’t cross is legal or ethical: copyright, attribution and transparency."

He continued: "From an evolutionary standpoint, nothing should be frozen in time. Reimagining classics with generative AI opens up new doors — for education, storytelling and accessibility." ...

Classic films with "strong visual signatures" would be good candidates for an AI remake, Walker told Fox News Digital. Those movies include "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Lawrence of Arabia."

Other films that could benefit from the AI transformation would be silent features, black-and-white movies and additional modern classics. ...

See the full story here; https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/wizard-of-oz-ai-makeover-total-transformation-sparking-mixed-reactions-experts

MIT study finds that AI doesn’t, in fact, have values

... The co-authors of the MIT study say their work suggests that “aligning” AI systems — that is, ensuring models behave in desirable, dependable ways — could be more challenging than is often assumed.

“One thing that we can be certain about is that models don’t obey [lots of] stability, extrapolability, and steerability assumptions,” Stephen Casper, a doctoral student at MIT and a co-author of the study, told TechCrunch. “It’s perfectly legitimate to point out that a model under certain conditions expresses preferences consistent with a certain set of principles. The problems mostly arise when we try to make claims about the models, opinions, or preferences in general based on narrow experiments.” ...

According to the co-authors, none of the models was consistent in its preferences. Depending on how prompts were worded and framed, they adopted wildly different viewpoints. ...

“A model cannot ‘oppose’ a change in its values, for example — that is us projecting onto a system,” Cook said. “Anyone anthropomorphizing AI systems to this degree is either playing for attention or seriously misunderstanding their relationship with AI … Is an AI system optimizing for its goals, or is it ‘acquiring its own values’? It’s a matter of how you describe it, and how flowery the language you want to use regarding it is.”

See the full story here; https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/mit-study-finds-that-ai-doesnt-in-fact-have-values/

How AI can help supercharge creativity

... Wilson, a researcher at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London, is just one of many working on what’s known as co-­creativity or more-than-human creativity. The idea is that AI can be used to inspire or critique creative projects, helping people make things that they would not have made by themselves. She and her colleagues built the live-­coding agent to explore how artificial intelligence can be used to support human artistic endeavors—in Wilson’s case, musical improvisation. ...

...The aim is to develop AI tools that augment our creativity rather than strip it from us—pushing us to be better at composing music, developing games, designing toys, and much more—and lay the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together. ...

But for a number of researchers and artists, the hype around these tools has warped the idea of what creativity really is. ...

These tools do not give you what you want; they give you what their designers think you want. ...

In short, existing generative models have made it easy to create, but they have not made it easy to be creative. ...

“Unfortunately, we’re removing the one thing that you have to do to develop creative skills for yourself, which is fail,” says Cook. “But absolutely nobody wants to hear that.” ...

Cook thinks the real promise of AI will be to help us get better at what we want to do rather than doing it for us. For that, he says, we’ll need to create new tools, different from the ones we have now. ...

Ask a range of researchers studying creativity to name a key part of the creative process and many will say: reflection. ...

Looking for ways that AI might support or encourage reflection—asking it to throw new ideas into the mix or challenge ideas you already hold—is a common thread across co-creativity research. ...

Bryan-Kinns is fascinated by how artists and designers find ways to use new technologies. “If you talk to artists, most of them don’t actually talk about these AI generative models as a tool—they talk about them as a material, like an artistic material, like a paint or something,” he says. “It’s a different way of thinking about what the AI is doing.”  ...

Bryan-Kinns sums it up like this: “The problem is that you’ve got this gulf between the very commercial generative tools that produce super-high-quality outputs but you’ve got very little control over what they do—and then you’ve got this other end where you’ve got total control over what they’re doing but the barriers to use are high because you need to be somebody who’s comfortable getting under the hood of your computer.”

“That’s a small number of people,” he says. “It’s a very small number of artists.” ...

Some have claimed that writing prompts is itself a creative act. “But no one struggles with a paintbrush the way they struggle with a prompt,” says Cook. ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/10/1114256/ai-creativity-art-collaboration-music/

Google and Sphere Announce Technology Partnership and Reveal New Details on the AI Technology Behind Upcoming The Wizard of Oz at Sphere

... To present The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, which opens in Las Vegas on August 28, 2025, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind are working together to deploy fine-tuned Gemini models, Veo 2, and Imagen 3 to intelligently enhance the film's resolution, extend backgrounds, and digitally recreate existing characters who would otherwise not appear on the same screen.  ...

Key techniques being used for the film include:

• Super Resolution: Veo is being used to intelligently enhance the film's resolution, filling in missing pixels and creating an ultra-crisp 16k image, essential for Sphere's 16k x 16k resolution interior display plane. ...
• Outpainting: To expand the film's visual scope ... involves generating coherent and consistent foreground and midground elements that were true to the original film.
• Performance Generation: Using Veo for generation – combined with Gemini for instructions – the team developed innovative storytelling techniques that allow multiple characters to remain on screen for extended periods, even when traditional editing would have dictated cuts. This enhances the audience's immersion, making them feel like they were part of the epic journey.
• Context Window: Gemini and Veo's extra-long context window capabilities are crucial for maintaining coherence across extended sequences. ...

See the full story here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/google-and-sphere-announce-technology-partnership-and-reveal-new-details-on-the-ai-technology-behind-upcoming-the-wizard-of-oz-at-sphere-302422950.html

Quantized Intelligence: How Quantum Computing and Advanced AI Are Redefining the Boundaries of Human ThoughtQuantized Intelligence:

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In the 21st century, our economies have hinged on the notion that humans are the central drivers of innovation and value creation. But that premise is crumbling as quantum computing and AI merge. Once machines begin to improve themselves, the “human bottleneck” is removed. AI shifts from being a mere tool to becoming an active economic agent, pursuing optimization and innovation, potentially independent of human input.

Here lies a paradox: Free-market forces can spur unprecedented innovation and prosperity, but the unbridled chase for efficiency could also unlock humanity’s greatest risk — our own irrelevance – the Homo Obsoletus. ...

What defines our value and role in the world if machines surpass our cognitive abilities? If AI learns to simulate even “intangible” human traits, such as creativity or empathy, what remains uniquely ours? ...

 In contrast to AI systems that simulate intelligence from the outside, AHI proposes an internal revolution, hacking biology and chemistry to co-evolve our capacities consciously.

This may include the following: 

• Quantum-biological interfaces that enhance cognition and perception.
• Human-machine symbiosis where digital augmentation supports but does not replace human judgment.
• Extended consciousness via neurotechnologies aimed not at control, but at deeper self-awareness and empathy.

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AHI isn’t about ceding control to superior machines; it’s about integrating AI capabilities within our very biology. ...

Personal Evolution Labs

Institutions where individuals train their mental, emotional and physical intelligences using quantum-tech-driven feedback loops and biosensors.

Mensch-Centric Design

Cities and workspaces designed not just for efficiency, but for enhancing creativity, contemplation, and communal vitality.

Civic Intelligence Ecosystems

AHI-guided democratic systems where policymaking involves empathic simulations of long-term outcomes, co-generated by citizens.

Spiritual Simulations

Tools to explore and extend consciousness, helping us confront mortality, identity and meaning in a post-material age.

...

See the full story here; https://builtin.com/articles/quantized-intelligence

AI’s ‘Oppenheimer moment’: Why new thinking is needed on disarmament

... The dual-use nature of AI technologies – where they can be used in civilian and military settings alike – means that developers could lose touch with the realities of battlefield conditions, where their programming could cost lives, warned Arnaud Valli, Head of Public Affairs at Comand AI. ...

At Microsoft, teams are focusing on the core principles of safety, security, inclusiveness, fairness and accountability, said Michael Karimian, Director of Digital Diplomacy. ...

“AI development is outpacing our ability to manage its many risks,” said Sulyna Nur Abdullah, who is strategic planning chief and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

“We need to address the AI governance paradox, recognizing that regulations sometimes lag behind technology makes it a must for ongoing dialogue between policy and technical experts to develop tools for effective governance,” Ms. Abdullah said, adding that developing countries must also get a seat at the table. ...

More than a decade ago in 2013, renowned human rights expert Christof Heyns in a report on Lethal Autonomous Robotics (LARs) warned that “taking humans out of the loop also risks taking humanity out of the loop”.  ...

But identifying AI-guided weapons, he says, poses a whole new challenge which nuclear arms – bearing forensic signatures – do not.

“There is a practical problem in terms of how you police any sort of regulation at an international level,” the CEO said. “It's the bit nobody wants to address. ...

“AI is complicated, but the real world is even more complicated,” said Robert in den Bosch, Disarmament Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the Conference on Disarmament. “For that reason, I would say that it is also important to look at AI in convergence with other technologies and in particular cyber, quantum and space.”

See the full story here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1161921

How AI is steering the media toward a ‘close enough’ standard

... In journalism, accuracy isn’t optional—and that’s exactly where AI stumbles. Just ask Bloomberg, which has already hit turbulence with its AI-generated summaries. The outlet began publishing AI-generated bullet points for some news stories back in January this year, and it’s already had to correct more than 30 of them, according to The New York Times. ...

...if you had to issue 30-plus corrections for an intern’s work in three months, you’d probably tell that intern to start looking at a different career path. ...

But the fact that the problem is still happening, more than two years after ChatGPT debuted, pinpoints a primary tension when AI is applied to media: To create novel audience experiences at scale, you need to let the generative technology create content on the fly. But because AI often gets things wrong, you also need to check its output with “humans in the loop.” You can’t do both.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91310978/ai-steers-the-media-toward-a-close-enough-standard

First look: Universal’s Epic Universe gives Disney theme parks a run for their money

... Dark Universe is one of five lands at Epic Universe, the first major theme park to launch in the U.S. since 2001, when Disney California Adventure opened its turnstiles in Anaheim. A brand new theme park is a rarity, and with it come expectations — of new tech, next-gen ride systems, unexpected ways to experience stories and an ask for your vacation dollars. ...

Epic Universe is largely a triumph, a theme park that will instantly be the favorite of many, and a park that at long last gives Universal a destination to properly rival — in many ways best — those of Disney. Perfect? No, Epic Universe could benefit from a larger idea or two beyond re-creating cinematic and gaming worlds, but it is stunning and should forever change the modern theme park industry, which was born right here in SoCal when Disneyland opened in 1955. ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2025-04-09/universal-studios-epic-universe-theme-park-orlando