Today in Generative Media

WB sues Midjourney; AI to recover lost Orson Welles film; Synthesia's AI clones

News and Opinion

• Warner Bros. Joins Studios’ AI Copyright Battle Against Midjourney (Variety)

• Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes (Hollywood Reporter)

• Synthesia’s AI clones are more expressive than ever. Soon they’ll be able to talk back. (MIT Technology Review)

• Gaussian Splatting in Superman (Radiance Fields)

• Confessions: How an indie agency’s over-reliance on AI drove it out of business (DigiDay)

• Nano Banana responsible for 10+ million first-time Gemini app users (9to5Google)

Software and Hardware

• Introducing Oasis 2.0: Our most advanced AI model. Transform game worlds & styles in real time. 1080p, 30fps (X)

• Google Photos now lets you animate your camera roll with Veo 3 for free (The Verge)

• Google’s NotebookLM now lets you customize the tone of its AI podcasts (TechCrunch)

• Gboard now integrates powerful AI Writing Tools for better messaging (Android Police)

• Introducing EmbeddingGemma: The Best-in-Class Open Model for On-Device Embeddings (Google Developers Blog)

  • You can now easily build AI applications leveraging SQLite-vec and the new Embedding Gemma directly on-device, no internet required. (X)

• FunASR is a fundamental speech recognition toolkit that offers a variety of features, including speech recognition (ASR), Voice Activity Detection (VAD), Punctuation Restoration, Language Models, Speaker Verification, Speaker Diarization and multi-talker ASR. (GitHub)

• new stealth model Carrot now available as default model in anycoder for vibe coding (X)

• Acer Unveils the Veriton GN100 AI Mini Workstation Built on the NVIDIA GB10 Superchip (Acer)

Research

• Mixture of Contexts for Long Video Generation (project page) “Minute-long context memory with short-video cost”

• ⚡️ FastVGGT: Training-Free Acceleration of Visual Geometry Transformer (project page)

• Lost in latent space: The pros and cons of latent physics emulation (project page)

Misc

• Breaking Google up was one of the last best hopes for preventing the free press from getting squeezed into oblivion and harvested into AI slop, and saving the open web. The ruling that lets Google continue operating as a monopoly isn't just disappointing, it's a disaster. (X)

• Huge congrats Refik Anadol — breaking attendance records at two major institutions (X)

• Animation acting meets AI (X)