philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

From Prince Harry to Steve Bannon, hundreds call for ban on AI superintelligence

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Organized by AI researchers concerned about the fast pace of technological advances, the statement had more than 800 signatures from a diverse group of people. The signers include Nobel laureate and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, rapper Will.i.am, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon and U.K. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle. ...

“It’s been quite surprising to me that there has been less outright discussion of ‘Do we want these things? Do we want human-replacing AI systems?’” he said. “It’s kind of taken as: Well, this is where it’s going, so buckle up, and we’ll just have to deal with the consequences. But I don’t think that’s how it actually is. We have many choices as to how we develop technologies, including this one.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/ai-superintelligence-ban-from-prince-harry-to-steve-bannon-unlikely-c-rcna238747

Hollywood pushes OpenAI for consent

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Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of the union SAG-AFTRA told NPR last week that it wasn't feasible for rightsholders to find every possible use of their material.

"It's a moment of real concern and danger for everyone in the entertainment industry. And it should be for all Americans, all of us, really," says Crabtree-Ireland. ...

Last week, OpenAI agreed to take down phony videos of Martin Luther King, Jr., after his estate complained about the "disrespectful depictions" of the late civil rights leader.

See the full story here: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/20/nx-s1-5567119/sora-2-openai-hollywood

When AI replaces our dead loved ones, what’s next?

• Contemporary plays use AI as a lens to explore eternal questions about humanity, examining what happens when deceased loved ones are re-created digitally.
• “anthropology” and “Marjorie Prime” feature AI replicas that force characters to confront whether humans are just compilations of memories or emails and internet history.
• Theater proves an ideal medium for these explorations, using living performers to examine how technology is deconstructing our understanding of personhood.

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-10-20/theater-what-makes-us-human-playwrights-ai-anthropology-marjorie-prime

Adobe Launches AI Foundry for Enterprise-Grade Custom Models

... Now, a company can have its own (private) version of Adobe Firefly that understands its products, colors, logos, and tone of voice. Every image, video, or design the model generates is brand-safe, legally clear, and ready for commercial use. Adobe says the models stay private to each client and include built-in content-tracking metadata for IP protection.

AI Foundry solves the “we’re not allowed to use public AI tools” problem.  ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/10/adobe-launches-ai-foundry-for-enterprise-grade-custom-models/

Innovation at the Speed of AI

Governor Christopher J. Waller, Federal Reserve System Board of Governors

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I will focus on three aspects of major technological change that "repeat" through history. First, technological change is a constant in our lives, and it is almost always disruptive. It upends the way we work and socialize. Second, it alters existing power relationships in unsettling ways. Finally, technological change reliably raises productivity and our standard of living while improving the quality of our lives. My intent is to describe how AI is likely to affect our lives along these lines and how it differs from past technological changes. ...

Those who collected economic rents, or excess payments, from the control of power will lose those rents. But this will improve our lives in the process.

Whenever a new technology emerges, the first question economists get is about jobs: Will this replace people or make them more productive? The challenge is that, with innovation, there is often a time inconsistency between the costs and the benefits. The disruptions come first; the benefits take time. ...

History shows that adaptation, not avoidance, is what sustains progress. Each wave of technology has disrupted industries and employment, but over time it has also lifted productivity, raised real incomes, and improved living standards. ...

See the full speech here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/waller20251015a.htm

Hollywood turns to K Street as AI threatens their livelihoods

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The latest sign of the seriousness came when famed talent agency Creative Artists Agency retained Washington lobbying shop Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

CAA, which represents some of the biggest stars in music, movies, TV, sports, social media and fashion, in addition to the world’s most iconic brands, tapped the heavyweight firm in mid-September to lobby on artificial intelligence and other issues related to the entertainment industry, according to disclosures this month.

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There’s “no question that the risks and rewards created by AI are prompting more engagement in D.C. than I’ve seen in over a decade,” ...

Trump’s pressure campaign on major media companies is another cause for Hollywood concern.  ...

This month, OpenAI unveiled a new AI video tool that generates content using copyrighted characters from film and TV, eliciting swift blowback from studios and talent managers.

Charles Rivkin, the chief executive of the Motion Picture Association, which represents leading studios in Washington, demanded that OpenAI “take immediate and decisive action to address this issue.” ...

In a statement, the agency mused whether OpenAI believes it can “just steal” artists’ work, “disregarding global copyright principles and blatantly dismissing creators’ rights, as well as the many people and companies who fund the production, creation, and publication of these humans’ work.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/15/hollywood-lobbying-firms-ai-threat-00608521

Nano Banana AI Image Tool Is Added to Search, NotebookLM

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“The buzz about Google’s Nano Banana hasn’t stopped since its release,” per Tom’s Guide, conceding that “the popularity of Sora 2,” which OpenAI released September 30, may have stolen some of its thunder. (And Microsoft’s MAI-Image-1, now in pre-release, is teed-up to get in on that action.)

Nano Banana is “currently rolling out in English for users in the U.S. and India (with broader language support planned),” says Tom’s, calling it “yet another step toward bridging generative AI with everyday visual tools.”

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/nano-banana-ai-image-tool-is-added-to-search-notebooklm/

I’ve Seen How AI ‘Thinks.’ I Wish Everyone Could.

... In my experience, AI works best when I can touch the guts of the model I’m using, when I can feel around for the training data, visualize the math that gives it its structure and tweak the code that generates its outputs.

Most users of large language models don’t get this opportunity, since AI companies don’t make it easy—or even possible....

Plotting words in a “vector space” makes it possible for an LLM to detect the connections among them: Distance is an easily computable property in a vector space, and closeness encapsulates relationships. ...

A (very simplified) language model would “read” these lines by running through them again and again, each time “hiding” one word from itself and trying to guess how it should fill in the blank. After each pass, the model would assess how far off its guess was from the correct word, tweak its calculations and try again. ...

When we find that, to a model, an angry fruit is really a vegetable, ... . We learn, in short, how the model thinks. ...

For every dollar that AI companies pump into computing power to make their models bigger, why not spend a penny on explaining how those models work? Open up the training data. Make programming “playgrounds” where model parameters can be tweaked. Let us traverse vector space hand-in-hand with our machines.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ive-seen-how-ai-thinks-i-wish-everyone-could-41c81370

Numerous Billionaires Preparing for End of Society

... “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever reportedly once told the OpenAI team, according to the journalist Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI. ...
See the full story here: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/billionaires-preparing-for-end

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ask families to join fight against predatory social media policies

 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle urged parents to stand against social media companies that they said prey upon children with exploitative algorithms as the “explosion of unregulated artificial intelligence” adds to their concerns that technologies' benefits are inseparable from its dangers.

To underscore that point, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex cited research from advocacy group ParentsTogether that found researchers posing as children experienced harmful interactions every five minutes they spent with an artificial intelligence chatbot.

“This wasn’t content created by a third party. These were the companies’ own chatbots working to advance their own depraved internal policies," said Prince Harry at Spring Studios in Manhattan Thursday night as he and Markle were named Humanitarians of the Year by the nonprofit Project Healthy Minds. "But here’s what gives us hope: these families aren’t facing this alone.” ...

See the full story here: https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/prince-harry-meghan-markle-families-join-fight-predatory-126387673