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

Australians Flock to VPNs in the Wake of Online Age-Restriction Laws

App downloads for VPN services increase sharply as websites in Australia go behind age-restriction walls.

A new set of laws in Australia requiring adult websites and app stores to age-restrict content for those under 18, and requiring AI companies to restrict chatbot offerings from displaying certain types of sensitive or adult content to minors, is apparently driving many to download Virtual Private Network apps there.

Major adult sites have closed their virtual doors to those who aren’t age-confirmed in Australia, and these changes follow a nationwide ban on social media use by teenagers and young children that went into effect in December.

According to reports from Reuters, The Guardian and others, in response to the bans, downloads of VPN-related apps, which people can use to circumvent location-based restrictions, are sharply on the rise. According to Reuters, three of the 15 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the country were VPN-related as the new laws went into effect on Monday.

Lawmakers in some regions, including the US, are well aware that people use VPNs in this way. In states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, laws are being proposed to limit or outright ban VPN use. Wisconsin’s proposed law would require adult sites to block VPN traffic, while Michigan’s proposal would ban VPN use entirely in the state.

There is also a proposal in England under consideration to ban VPN use by minors. That proposal is currently under review.

Technologies

Here’s How to Track the Artemis II Mission in Real Time With NASA’s New Tool

The tool will let you track NASA’s modern lunar program during its 10-day flight around the moon and back again.

More than half a century after astronauts last left footprints on the lunar surface, humanity is preparing to return to the moon. The excitement surrounding NASA’s Apollo program once captivated the world, and now NASA hopes to rekindle that same sense of wonder with its modern lunar effort, the Artemis program.

NASA’s Artemis II launch is scheduled for the first week of April. It’ll be the first human mission to the moon since 1972, and it should be quite the achievement for the Artemis program. Now, NASA has released a new tool that lets the public track Artemis II in real time.

The Artemis program is NASA’s long-term effort to return humans to the moon and establish a sustained presence there for the first time since the Apollo program. The program aims to land astronauts near the lunar south pole, develop new technologies for long-term exploration and use the moon as a stepping stone for future missions to Mars.

The Artemis Real-time Orbit Website, dubbed AROW, is already available to the public, although there isn’t much to see since the launch is still a few weeks away. It’s also available directly from the NASA app if you’re using a mobile device. The site lets the public visualize data collected by sensors on Orion and sent to the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The website is simple to navigate. You’ll see a visual representation of Artemis II’s progress, including its speed, distance from Earth and distance to the moon. Mobile app users get all of the above, along with an extra augmented reality tracker that lets you point your phone at the sky and see where Artemis II is relative to your position on Earth. It works much like Google Star Map and other stargazing apps that use similar technology.

According to NASA, tracking will be available once the Orion capsule separates from the rocket’s upper stage, which is expected about 3 hours after the upcoming April launch. The site will then update its information in real time for the entire 10-day mission.

NASA is also making flight data available for download so that people interested in creating their own content, such as visualizations or tracking apps, can do so. The data will include all sorts of things, including state vectors, which are data that «describe precisely where Orion is located and how it moves.» That same data will be used by NASA to study Orion and make improvements for future Artemis missions.

An exact launch date for Artemis II hasn’t been set, but the agency plans on launching the mission no earlier than April 1. The launch was originally scheduled for February, but it was delayed multiple times due to a hydrogen leak and a helium flow issue. NASA says it has since fixed both issues.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for March 10, #1003

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 10, No. 1,003

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is a fun and diverse mix. If you know your US states, you’ll surely solve the blue category early. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Think Julia Child.

Green group hint: Also, Bro and Sis.

Blue group hint: Minn. and Ore. are two others.

Purple group hint: Hit with your fist.