Today in Generative Media

Disney, Epic's AI Vader in Fortnite; Netflix's genAI ads; Meta users must opt out again

News and Opinion

• Disney, Epic Games Using AI to Bring James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader Voice to ‘Fortnite’ (Hollywood Reporter)

• Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 (Ars Technica)

• Meta is making users who opted out of AI training opt out again, watchdog says (Ars Technica)

• Musk’s xAI says Grok’s ‘white genocide’ posts resulted from change that violated ‘core values’ (cnbc.com)

• Top Priority for Pope Leo: Warn the World of the A.I. Threat (New York Times)

• A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12 (New York Times)

• Don’t be fooled. This is the calm before the AI storm. (Washington Post)

• Hedra, the app used to make talking baby podcasts, raises $32M from a16z (TechCrunch)

• Judge admits nearly being persuaded by AI hallucinations in court filing (Ars Technica)

Software

• PlayCanvas Adopts SOGS for 20x 3DGS Compression (playcanvas.com)

• Source code for the paper "Practical Inverse Rendering Of Textured And Translucent Appearance" (GitHub)

• Ollama's new engine for multimodal models

Research

• LightLab: Controlling Light Sources in Images with Diffusion Models (project page)

• Lossless data compression by large models (Nature Machine Intelligence)

  • Algorithm based on LLMs doubles lossless data compression rates (TechXplore)

• DeCLIP: Decoupled Learning for Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception (arXiv)

Misc

• Welcome to the 🤗 Model Context Protocol (MCP) Course (HuggingFace)

• Good debate on idea generation and AI: 1) Experimental paper finds that using the old GPT-3.5 helps people generate better ideas 2) Response paper finds that the AI's ideas are all quite similar to each other 3) Response to that argues that it may not matter as results are good (X)

• Using traditional 3D material spheres to apply the material to literally anything. (X)