Today in Generative Media

X sues Minnesota over deepfakes; NSF axes disinfo grants; Hollywood spurns OpenAI

News and Opinion

• Musk’s X sues to block Minnesota ‘deepfake’ law over free speech concerns (CNBC)

• NSF cancels over 400 grants covering disinformation, deepfakes and STEM education (NextGov)

• Why can’t OpenAI win over Hollywood? (MovieGuide)

• WhatsApp defends 'optional' AI tool that cannot be turned off (BBC)

• Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry (MIT Technology Review)

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

• Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth (The White House)

Software

• OpenAI makes its upgraded image generator available to developers (TechCrunch)

• How much energy do your chatbot conversations consume? The first AI chat interface with real-time energy estimates! ... Even small energy savings can scale up across millions of queries — model choice or output length can lead to major environmental impact. (HuggingFace)

• This is the official code repository for our SIG'25 paper: Text-based Animatable 3D Avatars with Morphable Model Alignment (GitHub)

Research

• SEGA: Drivable 3D Gaussian Head Avatar from a Single Image (project page)

• Vidi: Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding and Editing (project page)

• Emergence and Evolution of Interpretable Concepts in Diffusion Models (arXiv)

• TAPIP3D: Tracking Any Point in Persistent 3D Geometry (arXiv)

Misc

• Massive gap in the market: AI Bible story films. (X)

• This startup from China has 150M+ users and the weirdest take on entertainment: micro dramas. It's Netflix with 60-90s vertical video episodes. First few free and then you pay per episode. Cheap actors with AI-gen scenes. $200M+ in revenue! (X)