Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s big government adventure appears to be at an end. As promised in April, Musk has returned his attention to his car company, which is facing serious headwinds. In the first quarter of the year, Tesla sold tens of thousands fewer electric vehicles than it did the year before, despite a rise in worldwide EV sales. Data from April looked even worse, with substantial sales declines in Europe and China. May’s numbers don’t look much better.

Although Tesla only publishes its global production and sales numbers—and only at the end of each quarter—some countries provide monthly new car registration information, making it possible to track sales on a national level. And according to Germany’s KBA, in May, Tesla sales fell by just over 36 percent year over year, even as overall EV registrations increased by 45 percent. At least that’s a few hundred more cars than it managed in April.

Similar trends were seen in the UK and Italy. In the UK, Tesla sales decreased by 45 percent, even as overall EV sales increased by 28 percent. In Italy, EV sales increased by almost 41 percent, but Tesla’s deliveries dropped by 20 percent.

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AI video generation is a rapidly developing field, with the likes of Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora constantly out-doing each other. We are approaching the time when it might be difficult to discern some AI generated video content from reality. But all those gains are limited to the top-tier paid services. To get access to Google’s flagship Veo 3 model (which can now generate dialogue), you need to fork over $250 a month. Until now, no one has really tried to make free AI video generation a thing, given just how resource intensive it is. But now, Microsoft’s stepping up to the plate.

Of all things, the Bing app is integrating a free video creator, that while limited, generates short videos for free using OpenAI’s Sora model. But is it worth your time? And how does it compare to Gemini’s Veo 2, which requires Google’s $20/month AI Pro subscription?

How Bing’s free AI videos work

Microsoft is rolling out its Video Creator feature first on the Bing iPhone and Android apps, with web and desktop versions to follow soon. It’s completely free to use, but is quite limited.

The feature is built on OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video platform that’s still in public beta, and is normally part of the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription. In Sora, you are able to edit and adjust videos after creation, but there’s no such option in Bing Video Creator.

Bing Video Creator also limits you to 5 second videos at 480p resolution, and only in a portrait 9:16 aspect ratio (landscape aspect ratios are coming soon).

Because the platform is free, it revolves around Fast Generation credits. When you first start using Video Creator, you’re handed 10 such credits, which you can spend to generate videos in just a couple of seconds. After you run out, you’ll have to wait a couple of hours for each video you generate (the app will send you a notification when a video is ready). Unfortunately, there’s no direct way to buy more credits, but you can redeem 100 Microsoft Rewards Points for future quick generations.

How to generate free short AI videos using Bing Video Creator

To get started with Bing Video Creator, first download the Bing app on your smartphone, then tap the Menu button from the right edge of the toolbar. Here, choose the Video Creator feature.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

You’ll see a text box where you can enter your prompt, alongside a Settings icon for changing your aspect ratio, the duration of the video, and generation speed. Microsoft will flesh out those first two options in the future, but for now, you can set your generation speed to Standard to avoid spending a fast generation credit. When you’re ready, click create to start generating your video.

Once it’s done, your video will be saved in a gallery, and you’ll have 90 days to share or download it.

How does Bing’s free AI video generator compare to the paid options?

As I mentioned above, completely free AI video tools are mostly unheard of, or are supremely limited. Canva offers 5 video generations for free, but then requires an upgrade to Canva Pro. Runway does have a free plan that offers 125 credits, but in my testing, I found that I couldn’t use it to generate videos—only images.

I generated three videos using Bing’s free video generator and was happy with the output of one of them. My prompt of a bride in a wedding dress resulted in a video of a bride twirling her body in front of a mirror, but not her head. Eerie.

Next, I asked it to generate a video of someone removing a carrot cake from an oven (not at all related to my sugar fast), and it just couldn’t nail the motion of the person moving a physical object with their hand.

It did well in one task though: a video of a freshly brewed cup of coffee, with people in the background.

Canva’s output was equally jarring. There’s a nice moment with a camera flash, but the hands are like putty, and the facial expressions are really far off.

Google’s Veo 2 did much better. It showed a bride smiling away in her new white dress. The view was too cropped in for my liking, but at least there’s no dislocated elbows or necks.

As it stands, the video quality of paid AI video generators is still quite a bit better, and free options are akin to the early days of DALL-E, where AI couldn’t really nail down fingers and hands.

If you want to generate a short video to share on your company’s page, or just as a gag, sure, go ahead, try it out. For anything else, it might be best to try Google’s Veo, which is currently the best AI video generator out there, at least based on the testing conducted by my colleague, David Nield.

On an average day, you might unlock or look at your phone dozens of times, which makes the lock screen a hot property for advertising. Ad tech company Glance has been taking advantage of that for years with its ad-laden lock screen experiences, but it’s going further in the age of AI. Samsung and Glance have teamed up to deliver a new “AI shopping” experience that uses a selfie to create custom fashion ads. This feature is rolling out to numerous Samsung phones in the next month.

Glance has been around for a while—its non-AI lock screen experience has been bundled on various phones from Samsung, Motorola, and others. Before the AI era, Glance lured people in with promises of pretty pictures and news alerts, which came with a side of ads and tracking. The new Glance AI feature has all that, but it adds an unsettling face-stealing layer to the experience.

The AI-infused Glance will arrive on Samsung phones as both a standalone app and a fully integrated lock screen. Thankfully, this is a fully opt-in experience. If you never open or set up Glance, you can keep using the normal lock screen on your phone.

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Being a fan of Apple TV+’s Severance requires patience. Hopefully the wait until season three is released won’t be as interminable as the three-year drought between seasons one and two, but you never know, so we gotta just hang in there.

There’s nothing quite like Severance. The series uses the head-spinning sci-fi premise of people having brain surgery to deal with their damn jobs to explore identity, corporate control, and the nature of humanity itself, while maintaining an unsettling vibe and managing to be darkly hilarious. That said, these five shows blend mind-bending concepts, workplace satire, and existential dread, and may just help you scratch that Severance itch while you wait for season 3 to drop.

Mr. Robot (2015-2019)

Mr. Robot follows the story of Elliot Alderson, a young cyber security expert with mental health problems who goes rogue to try to take down the mega corporation he works for. Like the re-integrated characters in Severance, Elliot isn’t always sure where reality ends and his delusions begin. Viewers aren’t, either. The two shows share thematic ground—a bleak view of late capitalism, the last embers of humanity being ground out by forces beyond anyone’s control—but Mr. Robot lacks the coldly removed vibe of Severance. It’s all told from the point-of-view of the main character, so it’s more intense and personal. You can stream Mr. Robot on Tubi.

Dark (2017 to 2020)

On the surface, German sci-fi drama Dark resembles Netflix’s Stranger Things more than Apple TV’s Severance—it’s partly about a group of teenagers who discover a weird lab on the outskirts of their town where something supernatural seems to be going on. But Dark is smart and interesting throughout its three seasons instead of falling off after season one. Like Severance, Dark features complex characters and an intricate plot where the fantastic element at its center is really a way to explore themes of loss, time, memory, and identity. And I really appreciate any show that doesn’t insult its viewers’ intelligence by over-explaining everything. You can stream Dark on Netflix.

The Prisoner (1967-1968)

If you’re the type who likes to explore the source of the thing you love, you have to watch The Prisoner. The title character is a British secret agent being held in a surreal prison for reasons he doesn’t understand. It’s hard to overstate how innovative and ahead of its time this show was when it aired in the late 1960s: It’s basically the blueprint for every mind-fuck TV show that followed, from Lost to the X-Files to Severance. While The Prisoner is obviously dated, there’s a charm to the old-school cheesiness. It’s a low-budget James Bond with sci-fi elements and serious ambitions—how could you not love it? You can stream The Prisoner on Prime, Tubi, Sling, and Plex.

Silo (2023-present)

Apple TV+’s other ambitious, original science fiction show tells the story of a civilization that has lived in a huge underground silo for so many generations, they’re not even sure why they’re down there anymore; they only know that returning to the surface means death. Or does it? The way Silo’s corrupt government tightly controls information has definite similarities to Lumon Industries’ petty authoritarianism. While Silo is, overall, a less nuanced show than Severance (it’s closer to exciting, YA fiction storytelling than Severance’s carefully plotted puzzle of a plot), if you need a sci-fi series fix, check out Silo. You can find Silo on Apple TV.

The Kingdom (1994)

Filmmaker/provocateur Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom is the only TV series I know of that balances comedy and surrealism as well as Severance. While The Kingdom‘s characters work in a Danish hospital built on a cursed burial ground instead of an evil cult’s corporate office, both shows feature a powerful institution corrupting its employees, and both are, on some level, absurdist, darkly hilarious workplace comedies. Severance has a weird cult, a brain operation, and a goat room; The Kingdom has patient-led seances, a ghostly ambulance, and a monster baby. You can stream The Kingdom on Mubi.

Paranormal horror game Phasmophobia is being adapted into a movie by Blumhouse Productions and Atomic Monster, in partnership with the games developer Kinetic Games. Blumhouse is a major player in the horror genre, having produced the Purge and Paranormal Activity franchises as well as Get Out, The Invisible Man and many more. Atomic Monster produced all the films in The Conjuring universe since 2016’s The Conjuring Two.

First released on PCs in 2020, Phasmophobia quickly became a pandemic-era hit, with YouTubers and streamers racking up millions of views playing the multiplayer survival game. The game follows one to four players as they work to complete a contract requiring them to identify the type of ghost haunting a specific site.

The horror genre has risen in popularity over recent years in both video games and the film business. In 2023 Blumhouse adapted the video game horror series Five Nights at Freddy’s into a film, which went on to be the highest grossing film in its history. Blumhouse has also begun making video games in-house, and released its first game, Fear the Spotlight, last year.

Blumhouse Productions announced the Phasmophobia adaptation at its first-ever “Business of Fear” event in Hollywood, where founder and CEO Jason Blum and Atomic Monster founder and CEO James Wan spoke about the business of horror movies. No distributor or release date has been announced yet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/phasmophobia-is-getting-the-hollywood-treatment-155654171.html?src=rss

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s enterprise capabilities with new integrations that connect the chatbot directly to business cloud services and productivity tools. The Microsoft-backed startup announced connectors for Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, OneDrive and Google Drive that allow ChatGPT to search across users’ organizational documents and files to answer questions, such as helping analysts build investment theses from company slide decks.

The update includes meeting recording and transcription features that generate timestamped notes and suggest action items, competing directly with similar offerings from ClickUp, Zoom, and Notion. OpenAI also introduced beta connectors for HubSpot, Linear, and select Microsoft and Google tools for deep research reports, plus Model Context Protocol support for Pro, Team, and Enterprise users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s another game to play on that shiny, new Switch 2 console. Hello Games just announced that it’s releasing a free update for No Man’s Sky to launch alongside Nintendo’s new device. It includes many features that the original Switch version lacked, like 4K texture support.

The update also finally brings full multiplayer to this version of the game, along with cross-play and cross-save. In other words, players can save the game on the Switch 2 and pick it up on another device. Spoiler alert: No Man’s Sky is on just about every platform imaginable.

The developer promises DLSS and DLR support, a better UI, touch controls and a resolution boost for both handheld and TV modes. Hello Games says this update took a full year to make, after receiving development kits around 12 months ago.

The Switch 2 version will also include the latest big update for the game, called Beacons. This brings a town management mechanic to the title, with plenty of new homesteads to discover. Players can design their own hangout locations within these towns, like bars or fishing ponds. Beacons is available on all platforms.

This is just the latest refresh for No Man’s Sky. Recent updates have added archeology, freighter combat and black holes. The game has come a long way in nine years.

No Man’s Sky isn’t the only game getting a software refresh for the Switch 2. The console launches alongside several Switch 2 editions that feature graphical overhauls, like both recent mainline Zelda titles.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/no-mans-skys-free-switch-2-update-adds-full-multiplayer-and-4k-support-153124323.html?src=rss

Major Hollywood studios are extensively using AI tools while avoiding public disclosure, according to industry sources interviewed by New York Magazine. Nearly 100 AI studios now operate in Hollywood with every major studio reportedly experimenting with generative AI despite legal uncertainties surrounding copyright training data, the report said.

Lionsgate has partnered with AI company Runway to create a customized model trained on the studio’s film archive, with executives planning to generate entire movie trailers from scripts before shooting begins. The collaboration allows the studio to potentially reduce production costs from $100 million to $50 million for certain projects.

Widespread usage of the new technology is often happening through unofficial channels. Workers are reporting pressure to use AI tools without formal studio approval, then “launder” the AI-generated content through human artists to obscure its origins.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector.

Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a “free, easy, and trustworthy” piece of software that made tax filing “more efficient.” About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network.

But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS’s Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump’s massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that “ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As scam detection features for calls and texts get more sophisticated, so too do the threats designed to evade such measures. Right now, Android users are being targeted with malware that can create fake contacts on your device, so calls and texts from threat actors appear under a trustworthy name rather than an unfamiliar number, making you more likely to fall for them.

How the Crocodilus malware works

The Crocodilus malware, first identified by fraud prevention firm Threat Fabric earlier this year, is a device takeover Trojan initially deployed to trick users into giving up crypto wallet seed phrases under the guise of needing to back up their keys. Once downloaded—such as via a malicious ad, smishing campaign, or third-party app—the malware was able to evade Play Protect on Android 13 (and later) and gain access to Accessibility Service, ultimately logging and harvesting typed account credentials. As a result, threat actors could gain control of and empty victims’ crypto wallets.

The latest iteration of the program has evolved to deploy a command that adds contacts to a device locally. If an attacker calls, they’ll appear in caller ID under a seemingly legitimate name, such as “Bank Support,” making targets more likely to answer and trust the contact. As Bleeping Computer reports, the fake contact isn’t connected to your Google account, so it’ll show up only on the compromised device, not any others you’ve logged into.

What Android users need to do

At first, Crocodilus campaigns were limited to a few countries, but the malware has now spread around the world, including to the U.S. To avoid infecting your Android device, stick to Google Play for downloading trusted apps and software, and keep Play Protect active to catch as many threats as possible.

Of course, you should also be vigilant for signs of social engineering tactics, which threat actors use to trick you into installing malware or providing sensitive personal information. These phishing campaigns and other cyber attacks exploit human psychology using tricks like impersonation of authority, and they usually play on emotions like fear or greed.

Never download attachments or click links in unsolicited emails or texts, navigate to websites directly instead. Call a company via their public contact number rather that trusting a number that calls you if you’re not sure about the legitimacy of a message. Don’t react to anything that seems urgent or provokes strong emotions. Also avoid clicking ads, downloading software, or following instructions from social media, which can also be vectors for malware.

Marketing teams and pre-visualization artists working with AMC Networks might need to be on their toes. The company has reached an agreement to generate marketing images and pre-visualize projects before they enter production using Runway’s AI tech.

Some other Hollywood companies — such as Lionsgate and Harmony Korine’s unfortunately named EDGELRD — have agreed deals with Runway. Other studios are said to be testing models from various gen AI companies. According to The Hollywood Reporter, however, AMC is the first cable company to agree a deal with Runway.

The publication notes that AMC’s profits dropped by nearly half to $63 million in its most recent earnings report. It’s been suggested that the company is looking to reduce the costs of producing and marketing projects without letting quality drop.

At least for the time being, AMC is not planning to include AI-generated imagery in its shows. However, the company that brought the likes of Mad Men and Breaking Bad to the world thinks it’ll be able to sell viewers on shows and films using AI-generated images. This is seen as a way for the company’s networks to “trot out a range of promotional material without the need to spend added time and money trying to capture images with a physical shoot,” per THR. AI imagery will also be used in pre-production, ostensibly to help showrunners determine what may or may not work in their projects before filming starts.

In both use cases, AMC will be looking to lower costs by reducing the level of human labor that’s traditionally needed in those arenas. To do so, it will be relying on tech from a company that reportedly trained its AI models on thousands of YouTube videos — as well as pirated versions of copyrighted movies — without first obtaining permission. It is not clear whether AMC has given Runway the green light to use its shows and films for AI training purposes, as Lionsgate has.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amc-networks-is-teaming-up-with-ai-company-runway-141959898.html?src=rss

A top expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was overseeing the process to update COVID-19 vaccine recommendations resigned on Tuesday.

The resignation, first reported by The Associated Press and confirmed by CBS News, comes just a week after health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally revoked and altered some of the CDC’s recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, restricting access to children and pregnant people. The resignation also comes three weeks before CDC’s experts and advisors are scheduled to meet to publicly evaluate data and discuss the recommendations for this season—a long-established process that was disrupted by Kennedy’s announcement.

The departing CDC official, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a pediatric infectious disease expert, was a co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who advised experts on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). She informed her ACIP colleagues of her resignation in an email on Tuesday.

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