A person sits on a leopard in a sculpture found inside a small stone building. What did this unusual pairing mean to the people of Karahantepe?
The post Karahantepe’s 11,000-Year-Old Figure Shows a Person Seated on a Leopard appeared first on Curiosmos.
Exposure to light at night may be linked to potentially harmful changes in the heart’s structure and performance, according to a study involving more than 11,000 people. The findings were published in the European Heart Journal on September 9. The research was led by Professor Lu Qi of Tulane University, New Orleans, USA. He said: [...]Helm no Snap Store facilita instalar e atualizar o gerenciador de charts do Kubernetes em Linux.
O post Helm chega ao Snap Store com foco em Kubernetes apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.
A popular heart scan may be unnecessary for many patients but valuable for those whose risk is difficult to judge. Coronary artery calcium scanning has become an increasingly accessible way to refine estimates of heart attack and stroke risk. Yet a Northwestern Medicine study involving more than 6,000 adults suggests the quick, relatively inexpensive test [...]Remember how Elon Musk vowed that his AI Grok would make an anti-woke, “historically accurate” version of the Odyssey?
Well, he ended up throwing together a whole contest around it — and the winner of the first place prize of $100,000 is, as you probably expected, laughable nonsense.
The problems run deep. The Cyclops Polyphemus is depicted with three eyes, which feels disqualifying. And just a few cuts later, the famously monocular giant is at least four times as large as he was before. The other creatures and gods look like something out of a mobile game; Poseidon emerges from the sea appearing conspicuously cartoonish and impossibly muscled, before smashing Odysseus’s ship and his crew of photorealistic, ripped men.
Half the dialog is delivered in dramatic whispers with the same cadence. The fight scenes are cut to disguise the actual moments of impact, in the same way real B-movies do with aging action stars.
There are some shots here and there that look convincing enough, if you can overlook their bland aesthetic. But this AI “film” suffers the same tragic flaw that all AI films do: their component clips fail to coalesce into a coherent whole. It doesn’t do much on the “historically accurate” front, either; some of the Greek soldiers are clearly wearing the armor donned by Roman legionnaires.
Nonetheless, its creator Nem Perez declared that “this is ‘The Odyssey’ as Homer intended,” before calling it his “most intricate work to date.” He also labeled the video, in oxymoronic fashion, a “5-minute epic.”
This is "The Odyssey" as Homer intended. My longest, most intricate work to date. I pushed @grok @imagine to its absolute limits to create this 5-minute epic.
— Nem Perez (@NemPerez) August 31, 2026
What bothered me most about the recent adaptation was the omission of the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa, whom… https://t.co/awYW6Hu4W8 pic.twitter.com/hJHOgdkEec
It’s unclear if Musk actually watched the winner; as far as we can tell, he hasn’t replied or retweeted it, something he’s done for other AI Odyssey adaptations.
For those blissfully out of the loop, the centibillionaire and culture war crusader spent this summer raging against Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Greek epic, attacking it for its diverse cast, which included several Black women and a trans actor.
Nolan, Musk accused, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” As such, he vowed that his AI “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
We’re still waiting for that full-length adaptation. But the short films that the contest has produced already make it painfully clear that AI video generators, and the “filmmakers” that embrace them, simply aren’t up to snuff. In all of the top three entries, Odysseus looks more or less like the same guy — some weird, looksmaxxer’s fantasy of a buff Antonio Banderas. Is this a fault of Grok or Grok users? At this point, the distinction may be moot.
More on AI: Amazon Deploying AI Tech That Forces Actors’ Mouths to Match Dubbed Dialogue
The post The Winner of Elon Musk’s AI “Odyssey” Contest Will Make You Laugh Out Loud appeared first on Futurism.
Pauline Hanson’s gas policy and the party’s relationship with Rinehart is examined in a new Guardian podcast series, The Populist
Listen: The Populist: Aeroplanes and bulldozers | Episode 1 – podcast
Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast
One Nation has come under fire for quietly shelving support for a new domestic gas reservation policy in preference for a policy that favours the party’s billionaire patron, Gina Rinehart.
The Albanese government has announced it will establish a new reservation policy for Australia’s east coast, requiring gas exporters to supply a portion of the gas they produce to the domestic market. The policy is aimed at “modestly” supplying the domestic market to put downward pressure on prices for consumers.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s Politics, really newsletter here
Continue reading...
© Composite: Getty/AAP
© Composite: Getty/AAP
© Composite: Getty/AAP
Amazon is catapulting us into the final boss of sub vs dub debates.
On Thursday, its Prime Video streaming service announced the launch of a new AI-powered feature that matches actors’ mouth movements to dubbed audio tracks — which we’re sure won’t result in nightmarish hallucinations of facial disfigurement.
For now, the company says that the AI-powered lip syncing will exclusively be available on the English dub of the German Series “Maxton Hall,” though there are plans to expand it to other titles in the future.
“At Prime Video, we’re constantly innovating with new tools that enhance the viewing experience for our customers,” Raf Soltanovich, vice president of technology at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement, per the New York Times. “With lip-syncing, we’re creating a more seamless and immersive way for customers to enjoy global content.”
Right now, it’s unclear how much of the feature is automated by AI, and there’re plenty of questions to be asked about how it’ll be deployed. Such as: in the future, will it be available on all titles, and will the rightsholders get a say in it? And isn’t this an overreach on Amazon’s part in how much it’s determining how a work of art is being presented? Will an actor’s unique facial movements be smoothed down into something generic? And lest we forget the most obvious question mark: how convincing will it be? (It feels telling that Amazon hasn’t posted any clips of its tech in action.)
It’s not the first time Amazon Prime Video has tried something like this. Last year, it rolled out an experimental “AI-aided” dubbing feature for a dozen movies and shows in English and Spanish. It also experimented with showing AI-generated recaps of TV shows, and an AI tool that picked movie and show recommendations based on similar character arcs and plot points. Amazon, in other words, is trying to make consuming the content it provides as frictionless as possible.
There are plenty of valid reasons for preferring dubs, especially for those with accessibility issues. But the fact that actors in a movie might be speaking a different language from your own is being treated as something that needs to be erased and covered up is a bit worrying — at least in our humble opinion.
More on art: Gal Godot Starring in Heavily AI-Generated Movie About the Glories of Bitcoin
The post Amazon Deploying AI Tech That Forces Actors’ Mouths to Match Dubbed Dialogue appeared first on Futurism.
The legendary German director Werner Herzog had a few choice words about other so-called “filmmakers” who use AI to imitate their inspirations — one of those inspirations being himself.
In an interview with IndieWire, the 84-year-old — whose wide-ranging filmography includes 1982’s “Fitzcarraldo,” 2009’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” and 1979’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre“ — was asked about a 2025 movie called “About a Hero,” which made heavy use of AI to evoke the style of his films. It gets even more on the nose than that: on top of using an AI-generated script trained on his movies, it also featured AI-deepfaked Herzog as the narrator.
The flesh and blood director didn’t sound impressed.
“The intention of this young filmmaker was never to remake any [of my films], but making something in the spirit. And I immediately said, ‘You will fail. It is such a stupid idea,'” he said, in what we can imagine was his trademark husky voice.
“‘It’s phenomenally, abysmally stupid,'” Herzog drove home. “‘I will not take part in it.'”
Herzog seemed to venture that if AI is useful for anything, it’s replacing the talentless hacks.
“It’s so standardized that AI can step in because there’s not real storytelling,” Herzog sneered. “It’s mimicry of something that has happened before.”
“And I welcome AI to replace all the idiots who are into nothing but repeating, repeating, repeating until it’s ad nauseam,” he told IndieWire. “When it’s ad nauseam, please, please, please let AI step in and do the job.”
When it comes to artists, the irony of a technology like AI, which promises to let users create virtually anything they want, is that rather than realizing their creativity, it instead often ends up exposing how little of it they actually possess. Truly interesting uses of AI in art are few and far between; by and large it simply automates the process of churning out something unoriginal, only without the human spark or rawness unique to all of us that can elevate a work.
This isn’t the first time Herzog — who provocatively proclaimed that a “computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years,” — has unloaded on AI.
In a conversation with the comedian Conan O’Brien last year, he praised the tech’s “magnificent abilities” in applications like science, but sounded grave about how AI is being used in warfare.
He was no less despondent about its intrusion in the arts.
“I’ve seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence. Story, acting, everything. They look completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul,” he told O’Brien, as quoted by Gizmodo.
“You know it is the most common, lowest denominator of what is filling billions and billions of informations on the internet,” he continued. “The common denominator and nothing beyond this common denominator can be found in these fabrications.”
More on AI: Gal Godot Starring in Heavily AI-Generated Movie About the Glories of Bitcoin
The post Werner Herzog Demolishes Talentless Hacks Who Use AI to Imitate Other Filmmakers appeared first on Futurism.
Login