1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance’s new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.
But while ByteDance gushes their tool “delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards,” the cinema industry isn’t happy, reports the Los Angeles Times reports:

Charles Rivkin, chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn., wrote in a statement that the company “should immediately cease its infringing activity.”

“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” wrote Rivkin. “By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs.”
The video was posted on X by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson. His post said the 15-second video came from a two-line prompt he put into Seedance 2.0. Rhett Reese, writer-producer of movies such as the “Deadpool” trilogy and “Zombieland,” responded to Robinson’s post, writing, “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.” He goes on to say that soon people will be able to sit at a computer and create a movie “indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases.” Reese says he’s fearful of losing his job as increasingly powerful AI tools advance into creative fields. “I was blown away by the Pitt v Cruise video because it is so professional. That’s exactly why I’m scared,” wrote Reese on X. “My glass half empty view is that Hollywood is about to be revolutionized/decimated….”

In a statement to The Times, [screen/TV actors union] SAG-AFTRA confirmed that the union stands with the studios in “condemning the blatant infringement” from Seedance 2.0, as video includes “unauthorized use of our members’ voices and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood. Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent,” wrote a spokesperson from SAG-AFTRA. “Responsible A.I. development demands responsibility, and that is nonexistent here.”

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Disney is going after another generative AI tool, accusing ByteDance and its recently released Seedance 2.0 of using its copyrighted material without permission. As first reported on by Axios, the Walt Disney Company sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming the Chinese company developed its Seedance tool “with a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.”

The letter, which was obtained by Axios, included examples of Seedance videos featuring copyrighted Disney characters, including Spider-Man, Darth Vader, Peter Griffin and more. Even though ByteDance just released Seedance 2.0 on Thursday, it’s already earned praise, but also indignation from Hollywood studios, when it comes to its AI-generating capabilities.

With the strong early momentum, Seedance has already found itself in hot water with one of the largest media companies in the world. However, it’s not the first time that Disney has threatened legal action against an AI company, since Character.AI received a cease-and-desist letter for the same offense in September. A few months later, Disney even accused Google of copyright infringement when training its AI models. On the other hand, Disney partnered with OpenAI in a three-year licensing agreement that allows the AI giant to generate images and videos using that highly sought-after intellectual property.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/disney-accuses-bytedance-of-virtual-smash-and-grab-when-using-copyrighted-works-to-train-its-ai-191116136.html?src=rss

Need something new for your reading list? Here are two titles we think are worth checking out. This week, we read Aoife Josie Clements’ deeply unsettling Persona, and the first issue of Bleeding Hearts, from the relaunch of the DC imprint, Vertigo.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-the-unsettling-new-horror-novel-persona-185152256.html?src=rss

“Global temperatures have been rising for decades,” reports the Washington Post. “But many scientists say it’s now happening faster than ever before.”

According to a Washington Post analysis, the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years. The Post used a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025. “We’re not continuing on the same path we had before,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. “Something has changed….” Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase…

For decades, a portion of the warming unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions was “masked” by sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles cause heart and lung disease when people inhale polluted air, but they also deflect the sun’s rays. Over the entire planet, those aerosols can create a significant cooling effect — scientists estimate that they have canceled out about half a degree Celsius of warming so far. But beginning about two decades ago, countries began cracking down on aerosol pollution, particularly sulfate aerosols. Countries also began shifting from coal and oil to wind and solar power. As a result, global sulfur dioxide emissions have fallen about 40 percent since the mid-2000s; China’s emissions have fallen even more. That effect has been compounded in recent years by a new international regulation that slashed sulfur emissions from ships by about 85 percent.

That explains part of why warming has kicked up a bit. But some researchers say that the last few years of record heat can’t be explained by aerosols and natural variability alone. In a paper published in the journal Science in late 2024, researchers argued that about 0.2 degrees C of 2023’s record heat — or about 13 percent — couldn’t be explained by aerosols and other factors. Instead, they found that the planet’s low-lying cloud cover had decreased — and because low-lying clouds tend to reflect the sun’s rays, that decrease warmed the planet… That shift in cloud cover could also be partly related to aerosols, since clouds tend to form around particles in the atmosphere. But some researchers also say it could be a feedback loop from warming temperatures. If temperatures warm, it can be harder for low-lying clouds to form.

If most of the current record warmth is due to changing amounts of aerosol pollution, the acceleration would stop once aerosol pollutants reach zero — and the planet would return to its previous, slower rate of warming. But if it’s due to a cloud feedback loop, the acceleration is likely to continue — and bring with it worsening heat waves, storms and droughts.

“Scientists thought they understood global warming,” reads the Post’s original headline. “Then the past three years happened.”

Just last month Nuuk, Greenland saw temperatures over 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average, their article points out. And “Parts of Australia, meanwhile, have seen temperatures push past 120 degrees Fahrenheit amid a record heat wave…”

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It’s Valentine’s Day, and while there are plenty of classic and current rom-coms out there for those wishing to immerse themselves in warm and fuzzy feelings, we’re opting to celebrate in a different way: honoring Ang Lee’s 2000 masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a wuxia tragic fairy tale featuring one of the most beautifully heartbreaking love stories in film at its center. It’s also got stunning cinematography and tons of awe-inspiring martial arts sequences, which makes it my personal perfect date night movie.

(Spoilers below, but we will give you a heads up before the major reveals.)

The film is adapted from a 1940s novel by Wang Dulu and is set sometime during the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 through 1912. (No specific date is given.) The title is a direct translation of a line from a 6th century Chinese poem: “behind the rock in the dark probably hides a tiger, and the coiling giant root resembles a crouching dragon.” It’s generally interpreted as a description of legendary martial arts masters living un-noticed and/or hiding in plain sight—until someone picks a fight, that is. And some of those hidden masters are women.

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OpenAI’s GPT-4o may have survived its first brush with going offline, but it won’t be as lucky this time. OpenAI has officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was seen as more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. The news of GPT-4o’s end was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the discontinuation also included GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT.

It’s not the first time that OpenAI has delisted GPT-4o as an option for ChatGPT. In August, the AI giant sunsetted the GPT-4o model in favor of rolling out and prioritizing the latest GPT-5 model at the time. However, a wave of user complaints led OpenAI to restore access to GPT-4o but with no guarantee that it’ll be around forever.

This time around, OpenAI doesn’t seem very open to preserving access to GPT-4o, especially since it’ll serve only a small portion of the user base. The company wrote on its website that “the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT‑5.2, with only 0.1 percent of users still choosing GPT‑4o each day.” On top of that, OpenAI is facing several wrongful death lawsuits that specifically mention the GPT-4o model. Despite the two weeks of notice before GPT-4o’s last day online, there is still a vocal group of users mourning the loss of their AI boyfriends and even calling for OpenAI to open-source their preferred model.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-has-officially-retired-the-controversial-gpt-4o-model-181553067.html?src=rss

The Crew-12 mission, SpaceX’s 20th human spaceflight, launched at 5:15 AM Eastern on February 13 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It’s expected to dock with the International Space Station today, February 14, at 3:15 PM, and you can watch the event below as it happens. By the time the mission’s Dragon capsule docks with the ISS, it will have traveled approximately 34 hours since lift off. Inside are NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency’s Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

The four spacefarers are joining the three remaining passengers onboard the ISS after Crew-11 flew back to Earth a month earlier than planned. If you’ll recall, NASA made the decision to cut their mission short after one of the crew members had a medical issue that instruments on the ISS aren’t capable of diagnosing. While the crew member was stable, the agency decided to bring the whole mission home out of an abundance of caution.

Crew-12 will be staying on the ISS for eight months and will conduct a number of scientific experiments, including ones related to human health and ones meant to advance technologies for future missions to the moon and Mars. They will study how pneumonia-causing bacteria can lead to long-term heart damage, for instance, and will also look into how a person’s physical characteristics can affect blood flow during spaceflight. NASA’s live coverage for the docking starts at 1:15 PM.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/watch-the-nasa-spacex-crew-12-mission-dock-with-the-iss-180000450.html?src=rss

Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world’s most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems. The demand follows the Commission’s declaration that TikTok’s design is addictive to users — especially children.

The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the basic design of its service is “ground-breaking for the business model fueled by surveillance and advertising,” said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil society group. That doesn’t bode well for other platforms, particularly Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. The two social media giants are also under investigation over the addictiveness of their design.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:

Telcos likely received advance warning about January’s critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise. Global Telnet traffic “fell off a cliff” on January 14, six days before security advisories for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. The flaw, a decade-old bug in GNU InetUtils telnetd with a 9.8 CVSS score, allows trivial root access exploitation. GreyNoise data shows Telnet sessions dropped 65 percent within one hour on January 14, then 83 percent within two hours. Daily sessions fell from an average 914,000 (December 1 to January 14) to around 373,000, equating to a 59 percent decrease that persists today.
“That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations,” said GreyNoise’s Bob Rudis and “Orbie,” in a recent blog [post]. The researchers unverified theory is that infrastructure operators may have received information about the make-me-root flaw before advisories went to the masses…

18 operators, including BT, Cox Communications, and Vultr went from hundreds of thousands of Telnet sessions to zero by January 15… All of this points to one or more Tier 1 transit providers in North America implementing port 23 filtering. US residential ISP Telnet traffic dropped within the US maintenance window hours, and the same occurred at those relying on transatlantic or transpacific backbone routes, all while European peering was relatively unaffected, they added.

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Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after Sunday’s Super Bowl ad mocking ChatGPT’s advertising, reports CNBC (citing data analyzed by French financial services company BNP Paribas).

The Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and AI competitors OpenAI, Google Gemini and Meta. Daily active users also saw an 11% jump post-game, the most significant within the firm’s AI coverage. [Just in the U.S., 125 million people were watching Sunday’s Super Bowl.]

OpenAI’s ChatGPT had a 2.7% bump in daily active users after the Super Bowl and Gemini added 1.4%. Claude’s user base is still much smaller than ChatGPT and Gemini…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attacked Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad campaign. In a post to social media platform X, Altman called the commercials “deceptive” and “clearly dishonest.”

OpenAI’s Altman admitted in his social media post (February 4) that Anthropic’s ads “are funny, and I laughed.” But in several paragraphs he made his own OpenAI-Anthropic comparisons:

“We believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the U.S… Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.

“If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don’t show you ads.”

“Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI — they block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.