The consulting firm CVL Economics estimated last year that AI would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026, but writer Nick Geisler argues in The Atlantic that the most consequential casualties may be the humble entry-level positions where aspiring artists have traditionally paid dues and learned their craft. Geisler, a screenwriter and WGA member who started out writing copy for a how-to website in the mid-2010s, notes that ChatGPT can now handle the kind of articles he once produced.

This pattern is visible today across creative industries: the AI software Eddie launched an update in September capable of producing first edits of films, and LinkedIn job listings increasingly seek people to train AI models rather than write original copy. The story adds: The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. The historical record suggests those early rungs matter. Hunter S. Thompson began as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; directors Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman before their breakthrough work. Geisler himself landed his first Netflix screenplay commission through a producer he met while making rough cuts for a YouTube channel. The story adds: Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not. Further reading: Hollow at the Base.

"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes."

What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...]

Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos.

The document, referred to as Hallmark's "bible" by writers and producers who have worked on these films, specifies everything from script length (105-110 pages across a rigid nine-act structure) to prohibited activities (no bowling, no karaoke). Christmas movies must include snow or its remnants and feature characters engaged in seasonal activities like baking cookies, ice skating, and drinking hot chocolate.

The target demographic is women aged 25-54, and the content must be watchable by an 80-year-old grandmother and a 5-year-old niece simultaneously. The economics differ sharply from theatrical filmmaking. Licensed titles from outside production companies carry budgets around $500,000 or less, while Hallmark's in-house productions can exceed $2 million. About three-quarters of the library comes from external producers. The formula appears to work. Hallmark TV movies have averaged a 6.3 IMDb user score over the past 14 years, compared to 5.9 for feature films worldwide.

Further reading: Using Data To Determine if 'Die Hard' is a Christmas Movie.

The video games industry in 2025 finds itself caught between the familiar forces of consolidation and job losses that have plagued creative industries, and a newer development: governments and the ultra-wealthy have begun treating games as tools of political influence. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund closed a $55 billion deal for EA this year and acquired Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go, in March.

Microsoft's 2023 acquisition of Activision already signaled the direction of travel. The workforce has borne the costs of this consolidation. More than 5,000 jobs have been lost in the industry this year, and several studios have shuttered, including Monolith Productions. The instability has pushed unions into greater prominence: United Videogame Workers formed in the US and Canada in March as part of the Communications Workers of America, and the firing of 30 staff from Rockstar Games in the UK brought the IWGB Game Workers Union into the spotlight.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has posted AI-generated images of the president as Halo's Master Chief and used Pokemon and Halo memes to recruit for ICE.

"Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers...." writes New York magazine's "Intelligencer" column: Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was "overwhelmed with negative responses" from the "concerned Postal community" after fans spotted AI-generated material in the game's trailer. The developers of Arc Raiders were accused of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts, while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across Black Ops 7.Games that weren't developed with generative AI are getting caught up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are going to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools. Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November to the Call of Duty backlash:"We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits," he posted on X....

AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy, and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where, notably, technologies referred to as "AI" have previously been embraced with open arms.
And now "the price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed" (per Tom's Hardware). "The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody's going to be happy about that."

Insider Gaming shares another example of anti-AI sentiment in the gaming industry: The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.

In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it's removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded. "The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself," the statement reads. "When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Polygon notes the award-stripping is "due to inclusion of generative AI assets at launch that were quickly patched out." Quotes from earlier in the year from Sandfall Interactive's FranÃois Meurisse made the rounds on social media last week amid a news cycle caught up in the use of generative AI in games... In June, the Spanish outlet El País published a story including an interview conducted around Clair Obscur's launch, in which Meurisse admitted that Sandfall used a minimal amount generative AI in some form during the game's development... Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.

What is the future of work? The Wall Street Journal asked five workplace experts and practitioners.

So while AI "is already doing tasks once relegated to newly minted college graduates in many professions," the Journal predicts that in the next 20 years AI "will have an impact on the role of managers, how organizations measure business outcomes and accelerate tasks that once took months."

A senior partner at the consulting firm Mercer predicts AI (plus advances in quantum computing) will enable entrepreneurs to reshape industries with a fraction of the resources traditionally required.

Some other predictions: Alan Guarino, vice chairman and CEO of board services at the global consulting firm Korn Ferry: In 25 years, the workplace will likely be unrecognizable, with employees and AI operating as one. Yes, there will be tasks and entire jobs taken over by AI, but we will all be elevated to a whole new superpower to make critical and creative decisions. The idea that work was once done strictly by people will seem quaint to some. Tasks that took entire teams, and months to complete, will be crunched down to a few minutes, with success measured on metrics we can't imagine today.

The middle layers of management — so central to today's corporate structure — could be a vestige of the past. The role of the leader too will change, as they directly oversee a collaboration of people and intelligent systems. The attitude toward in-person collaboration is growing and 25 years from now, counterintuitively, I believe face-to-face connection won't just be indispensable, but invaluable. Emotional intelligence will still set leaders apart. Those who blend empathy with tech savvy will be the ones shaping the future.

Peter Fasolo, a former executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Johnson & Johnson, and director of the Human Resource Policy Institute at Boston University's Questrom School of Business: There will be fewer available workers in Europe, Japan and the U.S. over this time frame and the demographic shift will be profound. In addition, there will be even fewer young adults available for colleges in the U.S., even if they decide the investment is worth it.

The implications of this shift will be the need for more investments in vocational and trade schools, and the need to invest in skill-based, not pedigree-based training. There will also be more on-the-job specific training. Companies will become classrooms. Companies that want a more sustainable relationship with employees will need an investment model versus a transactional one: We will invest in your skills so you can be a competitive professional in your domain.

"If I get to do another Avatar film, it'll be because the business model still works," James Cameron tells CNN in a video interview — adding "That I can't guarantee, as I sit here today. That'll play out over the next month, really." He says theatre is a "sacred space," and while it will never go away, "I think that it could fall below a threshhold where the kinds of movies that I like to make and that I like to see... won't be sustainable, they won't be economically viable. And that can happen. We're very close to that right now."

The Wrap notes he filmed his new movie at the same time as its predecessor, The Way of Water." "We did all the performance capture in an 18-month period for both films. Then we did a lot of the virtual camera work to figure out exactly how we were going to do the live-action," Cameron explained. "Then we did all live-action together for both films. Then we split it and said, All right, now we just got to finish [movie] two....." While Cameron has been iffy about whether the previously announced fourth and fifth films will actually happen, he has already shot some of the fourth movie. "We're in a fluid scenario. Theatrical's contracting, streaming is expanding. People's habit patterns are changing. The teen demo consumes media differently than what we grew up with. And how much is it changing? Does theatrical contract to a point where it just stops right and doesn't get any smaller because we still value that, or does it continue to wither away?" Cameron said.
It's a theme he continued in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter" "This can be the last one. There's only one [unanswered question] in the story. We may find that the release of Avatar 3 proves how diminished the cinematic experience is these days, or we may find it proves the case that it's as strong as it ever was — but only for certain types of films. It's a coin toss right now. We won't know until the middle of January."

I ask something that might sound odd: What do you want to happen? But Cameron gets the implication. "That's an interesting question," he says. "I feel I'm at a bit of a crossroads. Do I want it to be a wild success — which almost compels me to continue and make two more Avatar movies? Or do I want it to fail just enough that I can justify doing somethingelse...?"

"What won't happen is, I won't go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years. I'm going to figure out another way that involves more collaboration. I'm not saying I'm going to step away as a director, but I'm going to pull back from being as hands-on with every tiny aspect of the process..." Cameron won't reveal his next project — and he might even be unsure himself — but will give intriguing hints. In addition to co-directing Billie Eilish's upcoming 3D concert documentary, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Cameron has another globe-trotting documentary adventure in the works, the details of which are under wraps. His next narrative film probably won't be Ghosts of Hiroshima, which has generated considerable press after Cameron acquired the rights to Charles Pellegrino's book chronicling the true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who in 1945 survived the nuclear blasts at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cameron promised Yamaguchi on his deathbed in 2010 that he'd makethefilm. "The postapocalypse is not going to be the fun that it is in science fiction," he says. "It's not going to have mutants and monsters and all sorts of cool stuff. It's hell...."

Cameron first portrayed the apocalypse in his 1984 debut, The Terminator, a franchise he's quietly working on revisiting. "Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I'm going to really plunge into that," he says. "There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is how do I stay enough ahead of what's really happening to make it science fiction?" Asked whether he's cracked the premise, Cameron replies, "I'm working on it," but his sly smile suggests that he has.... There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence. I want to do new stuff that people aren't imagining."
Maybe Cameron's best response was what he told USA Today: "Let's do another interview in a year and then I'll tell you what my plans are," Cameron, 71, says with a grin. For now, he's still catching his breath.

One developer tells MIT Technology Review that AI tools weaken the coding instincts he used to have. And beyond that, "It's just not fun sitting there with my work being done for me."

But is AI making coders faster? "After speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might seem..." For some developers on the front lines, initial enthusiasm is waning as they bump up against the technology's limitations. And as a growing body of research suggests that the claimed productivity gains may be illusory, some are questioning whether the emperor is wearing any clothes.... Data from the developer analytics firm GitClear shows that most engineers are producing roughly 10% more durable code — code that isn't deleted or rewritten within weeks — since 2022, likely thanks to AI. But that gain has come with sharp declines in several measures of code quality. Stack Overflow's survey also found trust and positive sentiment toward AI tools falling significantly for the first time. And most provocatively, a July study by the nonprofit research organization Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) showed that while experienced developers believed AI made them 20% faster, objective tests showed they were actually 19% slower...

Developers interviewed by MIT Technology Review generally agree on where AI tools excel: producing "boilerplate code" (reusable chunks of code repeated in multiple places with little modification), writing tests, fixing bugs, and explaining unfamiliar code to new developers. Several noted that AI helps overcome the "blank page problem" by offering an imperfect first stab to get a developer's creative juices flowing. It can also let nontechnical colleagues quickly prototype software features, easing the load on already overworked engineers. These tasks can be tedious, and developers are typically glad to hand them off. But they represent only a small part of an experienced engineer's workload. For the more complex problems where engineers really earn their bread, many developers told MIT Technology Review, the tools face significant hurdles...

The models also just get things wrong. Like all LLMs, coding models are prone to "hallucinating" — it's an issue built into how they work. But because the code they output looks so polished, errors can be difficult to detect, says James Liu, director of software engineering at the advertising technology company Mediaocean. Put all these flaws together, and using these tools can feel a lot like pulling a lever on a one-armed bandit. "Some projects you get a 20x improvement in terms of speed or efficiency," says Liu. "On other things, it just falls flat on its face, and you spend all this time trying to coax it into granting you the wish that you wanted and it's just not going to..." There are also more specific security concerns, she says. Researchers have discovered a worrying class of hallucinations where models reference nonexistent software packages in their code. Attackers can exploit this by creating packages with those names that harbor vulnerabilities, which the model or developer may then unwittingly incorporate into software.
Other key points from the article:

• LLMs can only hold limited amounts of information in context windows, so "they struggle to parse large code bases and are prone to forgetting what they're doing on longer tasks."

• "While an LLM-generated response to a problem may work in isolation, software is made up of hundreds of interconnected modules. If these aren't built with consideration for other parts of the software, it can quickly lead to a tangled, inconsistent code base that's hard for humans to parse and, more important, to maintain."

• "Accumulating technical debt is inevitable in most projects, but AI tools make it much easier for time-pressured engineers to cut corners, says GitClear's Harding. And GitClear's data suggests this is happening at scale..."

• "As models improve, the code they produce is becoming increasingly verbose and complex, says Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar, which makes tools for checking code quality. This is driving down the number of obvious bugs and security vulnerabilities, he says, but at the cost of increasing the number of 'code smells' — harder-to-pinpoint flaws that lead to maintenance problems and technical debt."

Yet the article cites a recent Stanford University study that found employment among software developers aged 22 to 25 dropped nearly 20% between 2022 and 2025, "coinciding with the rise of AI-powered coding tools."

The story is part of MIT Technology Review's new Hype Correction series of articles about AI.

Adobe is integrating Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat directly into ChatGPT so users can edit photos, design graphics, and tweak PDFs through the chatbot. The Verge reports: The Adobe apps are free to use, and can be activated by typing the name of the app alongside an uploaded file and conversational instruction, such as "Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background of this image." ChatGPT users won't have to specify the name of the app again during the same conversation to make additional changes. Depending on the instructions, Adobe's apps may offer a selection of results to choose from, or provide a UI element that the user can manually control -- such as Photoshop sliders for adjusting contrast and brightness.

The ChatGPT apps don't provide the full functionality of Adobe's desktop software. Adobe says the Photoshop app can edit specific sections of images, apply creative effects, and adjust image settings like brightness, contrast and exposure. Acrobat in ChatGPT can edit existing PDFs, compress and convert other documents into a PDF format, extract text or tables, and merge multiple files together.

The Adobe Express app allows ChatGPT users to both generate and edit designs, such as posters, invitations, and social media graphics. Everything in the design can be edited without leaving ChatGPT, from replacing text or images, to altering colors and animating specific sections. If ChatGPT users do want more granular control over a project they started in the chatbot, those photos, PDFs, and designs can be opened directly in Adobe's native apps to pick up where they left off.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls himself "a highly creative hypochondriac" — who just paid for an expensive MRI scan to locate abnormal spots as tiny as 2 millimeters.

He discusses the pros and cons of its "diffusion-weighted imaging" technology combined with the pattern recognition of AI, which theoretically "has the potential to save our lives by revealing budding cancers, silent aneurysms and other hidden would-be killers before they become deadly. " But the scans cost $2,500 a pop and insurance won't pay. Worse, for every cancer these MRIs find, they produce a slightly greater number of false positives that require a biopsy, with the potential for infection and bleeding and emotional distress. Even when the scans don't produce a false positive, they almost always come up with some vague and disconcerting abnormality.... Will we feel better after viewing our insides? Or will we become anxious about things we hadn't even thought to worry about?

Part of living has always been in the mystery, in not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Now, because of sophisticated imaging, genome sequencing and other revolutionary screening tools, we can have predictability, or at least the illusion of it. But do we want that? The American College of Radiology says we do not. Its still-current 2023 statement says there is not "sufficient evidence" to recommend full-body screening, cautioning that the scan could lead to needless testing and expense. But David Larson, chair of ACR's Commission on Quality and Safety, told me that could change as more data comes in. "When people ask me, 'Would you recommend it?' I would say it depends on your tolerance for ambiguity," he said, giving the example of somebody found to have a borderline aortic aneurysm who is advised to wait and monitor it. If "that won't keep you up at night, then I wouldn't necessarily recommend against it...."

About 1 in 20 gets that dreaded call. A study Prenuvo presented earlier this year of 1,011 participants found that 4.9 percent of scans required a follow-up biopsy. Of those, 2.2 percent were actually cancer, and the other 2.7 percent were false positives. Of the 22 cancers the scans caught, 86 percent of patients had no specific symptoms. But if finding something truly awful is rare, finding something abnormal is almost guaranteed. [Vikash Modi, Prenuvo's senior medical director of preventative medicine] said only 1 in 20 scans come back completely clean. The vast majority of patients wind up in the ambiguous realm where something may look suspicious but doesn't require urgent follow-up.
He opted for the cheaper $1,000 torso scan, which the senior medical director calls "our bread-and-butter area," since 17 of the 22 cancers detected in one Prenuvo study were in that area and is where they often find cancers that wouldn't be discovered until they were incurable like "that scary pancreatic stuff...."

Milbank's scan found 12 "abnormalities" included "a 2.5 mm pulmonary nodule in the right lower lobe" and "a 4.6 mm intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm in the pancreatic tail" — but with 10 abnormalities labeled "minor" (and six being musculoskeletal wear-and-tear problems "I already knew about from the usual aches and pains".) Even the two "moderate" findings didn't sound that grim when I read on. The "indeterminant lesion" in my lung requires no follow-up, while the thing in my pancreas is "low-risk."... The "most interesting" finding was the pancreatic cyst, because, at this size and location, there's a 3 percent chance it will become cancerous in the next five years. But if annual follow-up scans of my pancreas (covered by insurance) show it's getting bigger, the cyst can be removed before it becomes cancer. For me, this made the MRI worthwhile. Sure, there was a 97 percent likelihood the cyst never would develop into a problem even if I hadn't learned about it. But now, with minimal inconvenience, I can eliminate that 3 percent risk of getting pancreatic cancer, the most lethal of major malignancies.

While Netflix hopes to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion, CNBC reports a senior official in America's federal government said the administration was viewing the deal with "heavy skepticism. And that's not the only hurdle: On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount, in a letter to lawyers for Warner Bros. Discovery [WBD], had warned that a sale to Netflix likely would "never close" because of regulatory challenges in the United States and overseas. "Acquiring Warner's streaming and studio assets 'will entrench and extend Netflix's global dominance in a matter not allowed by domestic or foreign competition laws,' Paramount's lawyers wrote," the Journal reported.
Paramount "is now weighing its options about whether to go straight to shareholders with one more improved bid," CNBC reported Friday, "perhaps even higher than the $30-per-share, all-cash offer it submitted to Warner Bros. Discovery this week."

And CNBC reported Friday that the review by America's Department of Justice "can take anywhere from months to more than a year." Netflix said Friday it expects the transaction to close in 12 to 18 months, after Warner Bros. Discovery spins out its portfolio of cable networks into Discovery Global... As part of the deal, Netflix has agreed to pay a $5.8 billion breakup fee to Warner Bros. Discovery if the deal were to get blocked by the government.
Netflix's planned move is already drawing high-powered criticism, reports CNN:

• "The world's largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent. The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers...." the Writers Guild of America union representing Hollywood writers.

• "Producers are rightfully concerned... Our legacy studios are more than content libraries — within their vaults are the character and culture of our nation." — The Producers Guild of America
• The deal raises "many serious questions" about the entertainment industry's future, "especially the human creative talent whose livelihoods and careers depend on it." — SAG-AFTRA, Hollywood's biggest actors union

• "This is not a win for consumers. Netflix has already aggressively raised prices, increased ad load, and stopped people from sharing passwords. Absorbing a competitor with strong content will only lead to its service becoming more expensive and give consumers less choice." — Ross Benes, a senior analyst at eMarketer, told CNN. [Benes also thinks this could mean fewer companies spending heavily on movies and TV shows. "This contracts the industry."

Netflix is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in an $82.7 billion deal that gives it HBO, iconic franchises, and major studio infrastructure. "Warner Bros. shareholders will receive $27.75 a share in cash and stock in Netflix," notes Bloomberg. "The total equity value of the deal is $72 billion, while the enterprise value of the deal is about $82.7 billion." From the report: Prior to the closing of the sale, Warner Bros. will complete the planned spinoff of its networks division, which includes cable channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT. That transaction is now expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2026, Netflix said in a statement. With the purchase, Netflix becomes owner of the HBO network, along with its library of hit shows like The Sopranos and The White Lotus. Warner Bros. assets also include its sprawling studios in Burbank, California, along with a vast film and TV archive that includes Harry Potter and Friends.

Netflix said it expects to maintain Warner Bros.' current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films, a point that had been a cause of concern in Hollywood. Netflix said the deal will allow it to "significantly expand" US production capacity and invest in original content, which will create jobs and strengthen the entertainment industry. Still, the combination is also expected to create "at least $2 billion to $3 billion" in cost savings per year by the third year, according to the statement. U.S. Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah who leads the Senate antitrust committee, said the acquisition "should send alarm to antitrust enforcers around the world."

"Netflix built a great service, but increasing Netflix's dominance this way would mean the end of the Golden Age of streaming for content creators and consumers," Lee wrote in a post on X.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it an antitrust "nightmare" that would harm workers and consumers. "A Netflix-Warner Bros would create one massive media giant with control of close to half of the streaming market -- threatening to force Americans into higher subscription prices and fewer choices over what and how they watch, while putting American workers at risk," Warren said on Friday. "It would mean more price hikes, ads, & cookie cutter content, less creative control for artists, and lower pay for workers," she said in a post on X. "The media industry is already controlled by a few corporations with too much power to censor free speech. The gov't must step in."

Apple's longtime human-interface chief Alan Dye is leaving to lead a new creative studio at Meta's Reality Labs, where he'll shape AI-driven design for devices like smart glasses and VR headsets. Dye will be replaced by Steve Lemay, who has had "a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999," according to a statement Apple CEO Tim Cook gave Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. TechCrunch reports: Shortly after the news broke of Dye's departure, Zuckerberg announced a new creative studio within Reality Labs that would be led by Dye. There, he'll be joined by Billy Sorrentino, another former Apple designer who led interface design across Reality Labs; Joshua To, who led interface design across Reality Labs; Meta's industrial design team, led by Pete Bristol; and its metaverse design and art teams led by Jason Rubin.

Zuckerberg said the studio would "bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences." "Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered," the Meta CEO wrote on Threads. "We plan to elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software."

The skills that future graduates will most need in an age of automation -- creative thinking, critical analysis, the capacity to learn new things -- are precisely those that a growing body of research suggests may be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process, yet universities across the United States are now racing to embed the technology into every dimension of their curricula.

Ohio State University announced this summer that it would integrate AI education into every undergraduate program, and the University of Florida and the University of Michigan are rolling out similar initiatives. An MIT study offers reason for caution: researchers divided subjects into three groups and had them write essays over several months using ChatGPT, Google Search, or no technology at all. The ChatGPT group produced vague, poorly reasoned work, showed the lowest levels of brain activity on EEG, and increasingly relied on cutting and pasting from other sources. The authors concluded that LLM users "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" over the four-month period.

Justin Reich, director of MIT's Teaching Systems Lab, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that rushed educational efforts to incorporate new technology have "failed regularly, and sometimes catastrophically."

As Stranger Things releases the first four episodes of its final season today, nearly a decade after its July 2016 premiere, the Netflix series has come to represent something broader than its own popularity -- the embodiment of streaming television's algorithmic philosophy. When the show first appeared, streaming was still finding its footing. Netflix had been producing original series for only a few years, and services like Disney+, Apple TV and HBO Max did not yet exist.

The question then was what form streaming originals would take: experimental fare like Sense8, nonlinear storytelling like the revived Arrested Development, or prestige dramas like House of Cards. The answer came from a popcorn horror thriller set in 1980s small-town Hawkins, Indiana. Matt and Ross Duffer built Stranger Things from vintage pop-culture parts -- Spielberg's coming-of-age sensibilities from E.T., Stephen King's horror and adolescent bonding, John Hughes' mean jocks and soulful goths, and references ranging from Kate Bush to The NeverEnding Story to casting Winona Ryder of Heathers and Beetlejuice fame.

New York Times critic James Poniewozik calls the series "a human-made equivalent of the algorithm" -- the software engine that drives streaming's "if you liked that, you'll like this" recommendation philosophy. Netflix did not invent the idea of copying television success, but the algorithm automated it and made it part of the creative operating system. The show's structure also fits streaming's mechanics: binge-watching encouragement, irregular release schedules, and episodes that assume audiences have time (the last season finale ran two hours and 22 minutes). The story adds: It's why you see a menu of similar thumbnail recommendations once you finish streaming a favorite series, encouraging you not to discover but to replicate. But the spirit behind it also explains why so much original streaming TV feels like the creative product of an algorithm. Consider the recent Netflix drama "The Beast in Me," which pairs familiar prestige-TV stars (Claire Danes of "Homeland" and Matthew Rhys of "The Americans") in a grim, upscale thriller that vaguely recalls something you might have seen on early 2010s Showtime or FX.

Creating the new by swallowing and regurgitating the old is also the signature move of generative A.I., which may be why that medium is so effective at creating works of burnished nostalgia. On Instagram and TikTok, accounts with names like "Maximal Nostalgia" serve up honeyed, uncanny images and videos that testify to how much better life was in a 1980s and 1990s that never existed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it's become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence. [...]

It's important to clarify what's meant by "online content," the phrase used in the Graphite study, which analyzed over 65,000 randomly selected articles of at least 100 words on the web. These can include anything from peer-reviewed research to promotional copy for miracle supplements. A closer reading of the Graphite study shows that the AI-generated articles consist largely of general-interest writing: news updates, how-to guides, lifestyle posts, reviews and product explainers.

The primary economic purpose of this content is to persuade or inform, not to express originality or creativity. Put differently, AI appears to be most useful when the writing in question is low-stakes and formulaic: the weekend-in-Rome listicle, the standard cover letter, the text produced to market a business. A whole industry of writers -- mostly freelance, including many translators -- has relied on precisely this kind of work, producing blog posts, how-to material, search engine optimization text and social media copy. The rapid adoption of large language models has already displaced many of the gigs that once sustained them.

The dramatic loss of this work points toward another issue raised by the Graphite study: the question of authenticity, not only in identifying who or what produced a text, but also in understanding the value that humans attach to creative activity. How can you distinguish a human-written article from a machine-generated one? And does that ability even matter? Over time, that distinction is likely to grow less significant, particularly as more writing emerges from interactions between humans and AI... "If you set aside the more apocalyptic scenarios and assume that AI will continue to advance -- perhaps at a slower pace than in the recent past -- it's quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable," writes author Francesco Agnellini, in closing.

"Put another way: The work of writers, journalists and intellectuals will not become superfluous simply because much of the web is no longer written by humans."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Solid-state drives sitting unpowered in drawers or storage can lose data over time because voltage gradually leaks from their NAND flash cells, and consumer-grade drives using QLC NAND retain data for about a year while TLC NAND lasts up to three years without power. More expensive MLC and SLC NAND can hold data for five and ten years respectively. The voltage loss can result in missing data or completely unusable drives.

Hard drives remain more resistant to power loss despite their susceptibility to bit rot. Most users relying on SSDs for primary storage in regularly powered computers face little risk since drives typically stay unpowered for only a few months at most. The concern mainly affects creative professionals and researchers who need long-term archival storage.

A promotional video for Amazon's Kiro software development system took a unique approach, writes GeekWire. "Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle's Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence..."

"Can the software development hero conquer the 'AI Slop Monster' to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?" Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon's effort to rethink how developers use AI. It's an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding... But rather than simply generating code from prompts [in "vibe mode"], Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists [in "spec mode"]. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable...

The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024... Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months...

Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies... During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company. Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro's spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they're seeing from adopting the tool... startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year's worth of Kiro credits.
Kiro offers property-based testing "to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified," according to the article — plus a checkpointing system that "lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent's steps when an idea goes sideways..."

"And yes, they've been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: They're cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship -- but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children's and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children's advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators.

"The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are well-documented, including fostering obsessive use, having explicit sexual conversations, and encouraging unsafe behaviors, violence against others, and self-harm," Fairplay said. AI toys, made by companies including Curio Interactive and Keyi Technologies, are often marketed as educational, but Fairplay says they can displace important creative and learning activities. They promise friendship but disrupt children's relationships and resilience, the group said. "What's different about young children is that their brains are being wired for the first time and developmentally it is natural for them to be trustful, for them to seek relationships with kind and friendly characters," said Rachel Franz, director of Fairplay's Young Children Thrive Offline Program. Because of this, she added, the trust young children are placing in these toys can exacerbate the types of harms older children are already experiencing with AI chatbots.

A separate report Thursday by Common Sense Media and psychiatrists at Stanford University's medical school warned teenagers against using popular AI chatbots as therapists. Fairplay, a 25-year-old organization formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, has been warning about AI toys for years. They just weren't as advanced as they are today. A decade ago, during an emerging fad of internet-connected toys and AI speech recognition, the group helped lead a backlash against Mattel's talking Hello Barbie doll that it said was recording and analyzing children's conversations. This time, though AI toys are mostly sold online and more popular in Asia than elsewhere, Franz said some have started to appear on store shelves in the U.S. and more could be on the way. "Everything has been released with no regulation and no research, so it gives us extra pause when all of a sudden we see more and more manufacturers, including Mattel, who recently partnered with OpenAI, potentially putting out these products," Franz said. Last week, consumer advocates at U.S. PIRG called out the trend of buying AI toys in its annual "Trouble in Toyland" report. This year, the organization tested four toys that use AI chatbots. "We found some of these toys will talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics, will offer advice on where a child can find matches or knives, act dismayed when you say you have to leave, and have limited or no parental controls," the report said.

Adobe is buying Semrush for $1.9 billion in a move to supercharge its AI-driven marketing stack. Reuters reports: Semrush designs and develops AI software that helps companies with search engine optimization, social media and digital advertising. The acquisition, expected to close in the first half of next year, would allow Adobe to help marketers better understand how their brands are viewed by online consumers through searches on websites and generative AI bots such as ChatGPT and Gemini. "The price is steep as Semrush isn't a massive revenue engine on its own, so Adobe is likely paying for strategic value. The payoff could be high too if Adobe can quickly turn Semrush's data into monetizable AI products," said Emarketer analyst Grace Harmon.

"While we are positive on Adobe restarting its M&A engine given the success that it has seen with this motion over the years... this deal likely does little to answer the questions revolving around the company's creative cloud business," added William Blair analysts.