On Thursday, The Walt Disney Company announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video generator to create short clips featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. It’s the first major content licensing partnership between a Hollywood studio related to the most recent version of OpenAI’s AI video platform, which drew criticism from some parts of the entertainment industry when it launched in late September.

“Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” said Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in the announcement. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”

The deal creates interesting bedfellows between a company that basically defined modern US copyright policy through congressional lobbying back in the 1990s and one that has argued in a submission to the UK House of Lords that useful AI models cannot be created without copyrighted material.

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In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor.

Miyazaki declared himself “utterly disgusted” by the technology demo, which he considered an “insult to life itself.”

“If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it,” Miyazaki said. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

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We'll debunk the myth created by Hollywood that a firearm can be completely silenced, reduced only to a "pew". I'll pull together some examples of silenced firearms and show what silencers/suppressors can and can't do, and compare the noises you'd get to some other types of sound. Then I'll go into the components which make up firearm noise: mechanical, sonic boom, and muzzle blast. Then I'll discuss the advantages that silencers bring, even though they're not as impressive as they seem in the movies. Finally, I'll sum up by discussing the limitations of silencers and why they are not universal. from Silencers: not very silent [Military Realism]