Technologies

OpenAI Wants This Film to Prove AI Animation Is Ready for the Big Screen

Critterz is a planned feature-length adaptation of a 2023 short film that used OpenAI’s image generator.

Can generative AI animate a decent movie? That question’s getting an early test. OpenAI and production studio Vertigo Films have announced a plan to create a feature-length adaptation of a 2023 short film made as a demonstration for OpenAI’s Dall-E image generator.

The film, called Critterz, has a budget of less than $30 million, and producers hope to make the movie in about nine months — in time for the Cannes Film Festival next May, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The short film, also called Critterz, was a play on the nature documentary genre, with the strange creatures in the forest suddenly showing they could understand and talk with the narrator. It was written and directed by Chad Nelson, now a creative specialist at OpenAI. Nelson used Dall-E to generate the images of the environment and the characters, tapping into traditional animation technique to bring the film to life.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Vertigo Films said the full movie will be a family adventure that will «expand the world of the so-called Critterz characters.» James Lamont and Jon Foster, two of the writers behind the movie Paddington in Peru, will write the script. The Wall Street Journal reported that the film’s production team plans to feed sketches from human artists hired for the project into AI tools to animate them. Nelson said on LinkedIn that the film would use the latest research models from OpenAI «to innovate new production workflows.»

Read more: AI Essentials: 29 Ways You Can Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts

Image and video generators have come a long way just in the two years since the short film was made. Dall-E was impressive, but early image generators had notorious quirks, like giving people irregular numbers of fingers. Today’s tools can render much more realistic-looking images and video. While they aren’t perfect, tools like Google’s Veo 3 are good enough that AI-created slop is overrunning social media feeds, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell what video is real and what’s fake.

The bigger question isn’t whether these tools can generate a film but rather whether they should — and whether audiences will want to see it. The use of generative AI is controversial in the film industry and in creative fields more generally. There’s also the issue of copyright, with OpenAI and other AI companies facing lawsuits from entertainment and media companies over the materials used to train their tools and the ability of some tools to generate things that look an awful lot like copyrighted characters.

Technologies

Microsoft and LG Team Up to Help You Play Xbox in Your Car (Not While Driving, Please)

Long road trips soon might be a lot more fun for back-seat passengers.

If you just can’t get enough Xbox, take heart. Soon, you may be able to play even in your car. (Not while driving, duh, this is a passenger-aimed perk.) Thanks to a partnership between Microsoft and LG, you can access Xbox Cloud Gaming on internet-connected vehicles.

The vehicles must have LG’s Automotive Content Platform, and a new app will soon appear there to play cloud versions of Xbox games on in-car screens. Access will be available for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, and some of the more popular titles include Gears of War: Reloaded, Forza Horizon 5 and upcoming releases like Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds 2.

ACP is currently available in Europe on the Kia EV3 and will soon be available on the EV4, EV5 and Sportage models. The tech behind it is LG’s WebOS platform, which also powers its smart TVs and enables streaming platforms such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus and others.

«Our work with LG is the latest example of Xbox expanding to new places, building on partnerships that already bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to mobile devices, PCs and TVs,» Xbox Marketing Vice President Christopher Lee said in a press release. «By adding vehicles to the mix, we’re giving players more choice than ever in how they enjoy their games.»

A representative for LG did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.

Xbox specifies that «all services operate in compliance with driving safety regulations» — naturally, you can’t play while driving. Only passengers in back seats can use their infotainment system screens to play.

First, connect to a compatible Bluetooth controller, then launch the Xbox app from your internet-connected in-vehicle infotainment system. Finally, log in to your Xbox Game Pass subscription and play.

Technologies

The iPhone 17 Is Here! Watch the Announcement at the Apple iPhone 17 Event.

Technologies

Claude Can Now Spin Up Spreadsheets, Reports and Slide Decks Directly in Chat

The latest feature is currently in preview for Claude Max, Team and Enterprise customers.

Anthropic is pushing Claude further beyond text-based answers. The AI chatbot can now generate and edit files, including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slide decks and PDFs, directly inside Claude.ai and its desktop app. This update will allow Claude to deliver finished, professional files instead of just copy-pasted text.

The feature is currently in preview for Claude Max, Team and Enterprise customers. Pro users will get access in the coming weeks.

Read also: Claude AI Can Now End Conversations It Deems Harmful or Abusive

What this update brings to Claude

Users can now drop in raw data and get back a spreadsheet with formulas, charts and a written summary. Meeting notes can become a polished report or slide presentation. Claude can transform data into slides or a stack of invoices into a spreadsheet. Claude can reportedly build complex assets like financial models or project trackers from scratch, too.

The new functionality is powered by a secure computing environment that lets Claude write code and run programs in the background to assemble files. Anthropic positions the update as a way to shorten the distance between ideas and deliverables. Instead of spending hours cleaning data or formatting documents, customers would use Claude to handle the execution while they focus on strategy and decision-making.

Don’t use sensitive data

There’s an important caveat. Claude connects to the internet while creating and analyzing files, so companies and employees should be cautious about feeding the AI platform sensitive data.

How to get started with Claude’s new file creation feature

Turn on «Upgraded file creation and analysis» in Settings > Features > Experimental.
Upload the files you want Claude to work with or describe your request in the chat.
Collaborate with Claude by giving instructions and refining the output step-by-step.

You can download the results from there or push them straight into Google Drive.

Read also: Claude for Chrome Extension Bakes AI Right Into the Browser