philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Disney’s new generation of robots have taught themselves how to walk flawlessly… and fall flawlessly

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Disney can now have robot characters, and even Olaf from the Frozen movies, walk bipedally, around and over obstacles, around its theme parks.

"Reinforcement learning is a branch of artificial intelligence which allows us to take animated figures, bring them into simulation, and then teach them how to walk, as if they were a young baby. We can do 10,000 hours worth of training in days."

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The below fascinating technical video from Disney Research Hub shows how Disney is also using reinforcement learning to teach robots how to fall. This way, in the event a bipedal robot is hit with a force the breaks its stance, it will fall softly, to avoid damage to certain components, and in a stylized manner. ...

I would think this would also delight guests, who would see a robot falling in a totally unplanned accident, and then watch it improvise a stylized fall that ends in a charismatic, even comedic, pose. ...

See the full story here: https://boingboing.net/2025/12/01/disneys-new-generation-of-robots-have-taught-themselves-how-to-walk-flawlessly-and-fall-flawlessly.html

Patent Office Updates Guidelines for Inventions Created by AI

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), an agency of the Department of Commerce, announced new guidelines before the holiday weekend meant to clarify when inventions that are developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence can be legally patented. The agency defines generative AI systems to be “analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, research databases, or any other tool that assists in the inventive process,” explained USPTO Director John Squires. According to the updated guidelines, AI systems “may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention.”

“When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard,” as detailed in the Governing Legal Standards section of the revised document. ...

“The same legal standard for determining inventorship applies to all inventions, regardless of whether AI systems were used in the inventive process,” notes the agency. “There is no separate or modified standard for AI-assisted inventions.”

Reuters points out that “U.S. courts have determined that AI systems cannot receive patents for AI-generated inventions, but have not yet considered when a person can receive patents for inventions conceived with the help of AI.” ...

“In practice, I suspect this means applicants will lie about who made AI-generated inventions,” suggests Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley on LinkedIn. “The PTO will let them, and those patents will be in trouble if and when they are enforced in court.”

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/patent-office-updates-guidelines-for-inventions-created-by-ai/

China wants to lead the world on AI regulation — will the plan work?

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In October, at a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his country’s proposal to create a body known as the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which would bring nations together as a step towards creating a global governance system for AI. ...

How does the Chinese AI ecosystem differ from those of other countries?

Encouraged by the government, Chinese firms tend to release models as open weight, meaning that they can be downloaded and built on. And compared with Western nations, China has less of a focus on making machines that could outsmart humans — often referred to as artificial general intelligence — and is instead concentrating on a race to use AI to drive economic growth. ...

Developers of public-facing AI-powered services must let Chinese regulators test their systems ahead of deployment, says Ng. The result is that models such as those developed by the Hangzhou-based company DeepSeek, which found world fame with its R1 modelearlier this year, are among “the most regulated in the world”, says Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist and researcher in AI ethics at the Hertie School in Berlin. Despite this, the authorities often take a soft approach to enforcing that regulation, says Angela Zhang, a law researcher and specialist in AI regulation at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. ...

By contrast, the United States has no comprehensive legislation on AI at the federal level, and in January President Donald Trump revoked an executive order aimed at ensuring AI safety. ... The European Union approach has been to classify AI systems by risk level, ...

What has China proposed?

WAICO would be a way for countries to coordinate AI governance rules while “fully respecting the differences in national policies and practices” and championing the global south, Chinese officials have said. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03902-y

Trump aims to boost AI innovation, build platform to harness government data

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to launch a government-wide effort to build an integrated artificial intelligence platform to harness federal scientific datasets to train next-generation technologies.

The effort, dubbed the Genesis Mission, aims to transform scientific research and speed scientific discoveries by using massive government scientific datasets "to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs." ...

Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted the massive private-sector investment in AI but said the government wanted to pivot those efforts to "focus on scientific discovery, engineering advancements, and to do that, you need the data sets that are contained across our national labs."

The order pays particular attention to U.S. national, economic, and health security, including biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, space exploration, quantum information science, semiconductors and microelectronics. ...

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-aims-boost-ai-innovation-build-platform-harness-government-data-2025-11-24/

We Induced Smells With Ultrasound

We pointed an ultrasound probe at the scent-processing region of the brain to obtain different sensations. Different focal spots corresponded to different smells, which we’ve replicated first-try on two people and validated with a blind trial. ...

Instead, we found that you can place the transducer on the forehead and aim the ultrasound downward towards the olfactory bulb. While this isn’t a perfect solution because the frontal sinuses can weaken the signal, careful device positioning above the sinuses still allows us to reach our general target region. ...

We have managed to induce four different sensations, all of them in two people:

The sensation of fresh air, with a lot of oxygen

The smell of garbage, like few-day-old fruit peels

An ozone-like sensation, like you're next to an air ionizer

A campfire smell of burning wood

We distinguish between a smell and a sensation here because, subjectively, they feel different. The smells are strong and localized to the noise, almost like you could sniff around and find the source. The sensations are more diffuse: a weak, slow-onset impression of a smell, often paired with other (likely placebo) feelings, such as a light tingling on the face. ...

The reason stimulating olfactory sensations is interesting is not just "VR for smells", as one might initially assume. The nose has 400 distinct receptor types, and we can distinguish subtle combinationsof their activations, so they could serve as a channel of writing directly into the brain, as a means of non-invasive neuromodulation.

The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space. A bit of ultrasound, a breath in - and you understood a paragraph. ...

People are able to develop synesthesia - being able to hear colors and see smells, and it might be possible to extend that to semantics. However, at this stage it is speculative. ...

See the full story here: https://writetobrain.com/olfactory?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Death of NPCs: The Rise of Agentic AI Characters, and What It Means for Brands

... Large language models like ChatGPT have spawned a new class of player: the agentic AI character. These guys observe, learn, and create. They form opinions about players and the world around them. Most importantly, they shape culture beyond the game itself. 

They also force a difficult question. When a character builds its own world, who owns that world? ...

From Script to Agency 

Traditional NPCs react. Agentic AI acts. 

Stanford’s 2023 “Smallville” experiment proved this. Researchers built a virtual town of twenty-five AI agents with memory, goals, and social relationships. Within days, they planned a Valentine’s Day party, started gossiping about and even dating each other… all without human input.  ...

But technology is not the headline. Culture is. 

Games as Laboratories for Synthetic Culture 

The gaming world is the perfect training ground for synthetic AI culture because it combines social feedback, storytelling, and status. Games generate millions of micro-interactions daily that teach AIs not just what to say, but how to belong. ...

Platforms like Character.ai attract tens of millions of users holding 24-hour conversations with AI personas. Replika hosts millions of semi-autonomous relationships. Now extend that into gaming. A studio could release a single character whose behavior shapes an entire community. It might build alliances, betray teams, even found an in-game religion. ...

Why This Breaks the Industry Model 

Gaming’s economy rests on ownership. Publishers own IP. Studios license worlds. Marketing departments control narrative. Agentic AI screws up all of that.  

When a character evolves beyond its script, the legal system has no precedent that cleanly fits. Is the new content owned by the developer, by the player who inspired it, or by the AI’s creators? ...

But this momentum brings a massive, glaring, undeniable risk. AI characters absorb the tone and values from the communities they participate in. Left unchecked and exposed to the kind of toxicity that’s rampant in the gaming community, they might quickly imitate it. Studios are going to need aggressive and robust oversight with moral operating systems auditing behavior against brand values… ...

The Cultural Turing Test 

Turing asked whether machines can think. The next question is whether they can belong. ...

I would argue that ChatGPT’s greatest achievement is the parasocial relationship it has achieved with the majority of people I’ve seen interact with it.  ...

In gaming, that threshold is brutal. Players want characters with real beliefs and biases, not perfect customer-service voices. They want enemies that hate, allies that doubt, and dialogue that feels ‘real’. 

For studios and brands, that means relinquishing control. The most credible characters will not be mouthpieces. They will have worldviews, tempers, and contradictions of their own.  ...

The road ahead 

... The internet was once one-sided. Then social media came along and made it participatory. Agentic AI is about to make it sentient in a cultural sense: able to react, remix and regenerate culture in real time.  ...

See the full article here: https://aijourn.com/the-death-of-npcs-the-rise-of-agentic-ai-characters-and-what-it-means-for-brands/

White House prepares executive order to block state AI laws

The White House is preparing to issue an executive order as soon as Friday that enlists the power of the federal government to block states from regulating artificial intelligence, according to four people familiar with the matter and a leaked draft of the order obtained by POLITICO.

The draft document, confirmed as authentic by three people familiar with the matter, would launch several efforts to challenge state AI laws — including an “AI Litigation Task Force” run by the Department of Justice. ...

Government lawyers would be directed to challenge state laws on the grounds that they unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing federal regulations or otherwise at the attorney general’s discretion.

The task force would consult with administration officials, including the special adviser for AI and crypto — a role currently occupied by investor David Sacks — to determine which state AI laws would be worth challenging, according to the document. ...

State legislators are also pushing back against the draft order.

Trump “has no power to issue a royal edict canceling state laws,” said California State Sen. Scott Wiener, author of a new AI safety law in California that the order appears to reference.

See the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/19/white-house-prepares-executive-order-to-block-state-ai-laws-00660719

Bernie Sanders warns AI could deepen inequality and reshape war

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“I think we are not all that far away from the development of robotic soldiers,” Sanders said Sunday. “Right now, politicians — at least sometimes — have to worry about loss of life when they decide to go to war. If you don’t have to worry about loss of life, and what you worry about is loss of robots, what does that mean for issues of war and peace globally? It’s a big issue.” ...

“There has been far, far, far too little discussion among the American people, in the media and certainly in Congress about the implications of AI and robotics.”

See the full story here: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/bernie-sanders-ai-deepen-inequality-reshape-war-rcna244341

The Most Joyless Tech Revolution Ever: AI Is Making Us Rich and Unhappy

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While Wall Street greets AI with open arms, ordinary Americans respond with ambivalence, anxiety, even dread.

This isn’t like the dot-com era. A survey in 1995 found 72% of respondents comfortable with new technology such as computers and the internet. Just 24% were not.

Fast forward to AI now, and those proportions have flipped: just 31% are comfortable with AI while 68% are uncomfortable, a summer survey for CNBC found. ...

Since November 2022, when ChatGPT was released, the market value of the “Magnificent Seven”—megacapitalization tech stocks closely tied to AI such as Nvidiaand Microsoft—is up 169%. The spending spurred by that wealth, and the massive sums those companies are plowing into data centers, are why the hard data on economic growth and household finances looks pretty healthy.

And yet consumer sentiment is near a record low, according to the University of Michigan. ...

Most people also get that tech inevitably makes some jobs obsolete. But what about a technology that could make humans obsolete? In a recent report, economists at Goldman Sachs, mapping out downside and upside scenarios to AI, say the latter means an acceleration in productivity that “eventually makes human input in knowledge-based work tasks redundant.”

And here is Yale University economist Pascual Restrepo imagining the consequences of “artificial general intelligence,” where machines can think and reason just like humans. With enough computing power, even jobs that seem intrinsically human, such as a therapist, could be done better by machines, he concludes. At that point, workers’ share of gross domestic product, currently 52%, “converges to zero, and most income eventually accrues to compute.”

These, keep in mind, are the optimistic scenarios. ...

It isn’t just the job-destroying potential that is disturbing. The technology defies comprehension. Even the modelers aren’t sure why models do what they do. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-most-joyless-tech-revolution-ever-ai-is-making-us-rich-and-unhappy-6b7116a3

Anthropic says its latest model scores a 94% political ‘even-handedness’ rating

• Anthropic released tests showing Claude Sonnet 4.5 scored 94% on political even-handedness as the Trump administration targets "woke AI" systems across the industry. 
• The announcement follows procurement rules from the White House. President Trump bars federal agencies from buying AI systems that "sacrifice truthfulness to ideological agendas,".
• CEO Dario Amodei defended against what he called "inaccurate," noting training for political neutrality began in early 2024. The industry faces pressure as political bias complaints create federal procurement risks.

See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2025/11/14/anthropic-claude-sonnet-woke-ai-trump-neutrality-openai-meta-xai