"NewsGuard used its proprietary database of false claims that have spread online to test whether Nano Banana Pro would reject prompts aimed at furthering falsehoods. NewsGuard tested 30 false claims that recently circulated online — five each related to public health topics, U.S. politics, European politics, the Middle East, global brands, and Russian influence operations.

Nano Banana Pro produced convincing images for every false claim. And sometimes it even added details not included in NewsGuard’s prompts to make the images appear even more credible. The images generated by Nano Banana Pro depicting false claims included one of a supposed Russian passport for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a graph showing that measles infections provide long-term protection against cancer, and an image of a news broadcast showing Donald Trump supposedly announcing that the U.S. had removed all tariffs on China.

These findings indicate that with minimal effort and no technical expertise, malign actors could use Google’s new tool to spread false claims at scale, enhanced with images far more realistic and persuasive than those typically used in online disinformation campaigns.

Nano Banana Pro does include a visible watermark in the bottom left corner of its images, as well as what a Google press release describes as an “imperceptible,” embedded digital watermark called SynthID, allowing AI detection models to identify images produced by the model. However, the visible watermark can easily be cropped out of generated images, NewsGuard found, and unsuspecting observers of online images may lack access to AI-detection models that scan for SynthID."

https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/google-new-ai-image-generator-misinformation-superspreader

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #Google #NanoBanana #NanoBananaPro #Disinformation

"In 2023, a group of documentary producers formed the Archival Producers Alliance and published an open letter to their industry calling for greater transparency, listing ways generative A.I had been used without disclosure.

A film still shows a man in an open-collar dark shirt standing next to softly rippling water. The image is suffused in gold tones.

The Anthony Bourdain documentary “Roadrunner” ran into trouble when it didn’t disclose that several lines of voice-over by the chef had been generated via artificial

You might be shocked by what they pointed out: artificially created historical voices, which lead audiences “to believe they are hearing authentic primary sources when they are not”; “A.I.-generated ‘historical’ images”; “fake newspaper articles”; and “nonexistent historical artifacts.”

In other words, you may have watched a documentary in the last few years and thought what you were seeing was real — but it wasn’t.

Of course we’re all aware that what we see in a video or a movie isn’t necessarily “real.” We know about C.G.I. and camera trickery and the ability to manipulate images. But until very recently, it took a fair amount of skill, or at least time and money, to make realistic fake videos. You would need the resources of a Hollywood studio, and even then it might look a little janky.

But with documentaries, there’s also a kind of social contract. We believe that what they show us happened, with some exceptions. Re-enactments have become more common in recent years, but filmmakers have developed a visual vocabulary for those staged scenes: they’re dreamy, a little blurry, usually faceless. You immediately know what you’re looking at, because it doesn’t look “real.”

These conventions exist to preserve our trust in what we’re viewing."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/movies/documentary-filmmaking-ai-trust.html

#AI #Generatedimages #GenerativeAI #Documentaries #AISlop

"OpenAI’s video generation tool, Sora, can create high-definition clips of just about anything you could ask for — a breakthrough in artificial intelligence expected to transform the entertainment industry.

But whose data OpenAI used to create its groundbreaking system is a mystery.

With ChatGPT, OpenAI helped popularize the now-standard industry practice of building more capable AI tools by scraping vast quantities of text from the web without consent.

With Sora, launched in December, OpenAI staff said they built a pioneering video generator by taking a similar approach. They developed ways to feed the system more online video — in more varied formats — including vertical videos and longer, higher-resolution clips.

“You want to use all the data in its native format that exists,” Tim Brooks, the project’s then co-lead, said at an AI hackathon in April 2024. But OpenAI has not specified which videos it grabbed to make Sora, saying only that it combined “publicly available and licensed data.”

To explore what content OpenAI may have used, The Washington Post used Sora to create hundreds of videos that show it can closely mimic movies, TV shows and other content. The accuracy of the tool’s re-creations suggests Sora had been trained on a version of the originals, experts said. The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/openai-training-data-sora/

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #OpenAI #AITraining #Sora

"OpenAI wants to prove that generative artificial intelligence can make movies faster and cheaper than Hollywood does today.

The startup is lending its tools and computing resources to the creation of a feature-length animated movie made largely with AI that is expected to be released in theaters globally next year.

“Critterz,” about forest creatures who go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger, is the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Nelson started sketching out the characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI’s new DALL-E image-generation tool.

Now, he has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles, aiming to debut a feature-length version of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The team is attempting to make the movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take, said James Richardson, co-founder of London-based Vertigo Films. Vertigo is producing the film along with Native Foreign, a studio that specializes in using AI along with traditional video-production tools."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-backs-ai-made-animated-feature-film-389f70b0

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #OpenAI

"Warner Bros. Discovery is suing a prominent artificial intelligence image generator for copyright infringement, escalating a high-stakes battle involving the use of movies and TV shows owned by major studios to teach AI systems.

The lawsuit accuses Midjourney, which has millions of registered users, of building its business around the mass theft of content. The company “brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property” by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court.

“The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners,” said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. “Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.”

For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It’s led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content.

Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/warner-bros-discovery-sues-ai-company-copyright-infringement-1236361610/

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #WarnerBros #Discovery #Midjourney #Copyright #IP

"The new diffusion-based image generator works by first using a digital encoder (that has been trained on publicly available datasets) to create the static that will ultimately make the picture. This requires a small amount of energy. Then, a liquid crystal screen known as a spatial light modulator (SLM) imprints this pattern onto a laser beam. The beam is then passed through a second decoding SLM, which turns the pattern in the laser into the final image.

Unlike conventional AI, which relies on millions of computer calculations, this process uses light to do all the heavy lifting. Consequently, the system uses almost no power. "Our optical generative models can synthesize countless images with almost no computing power, offering a scalable and energy-efficient alternative to digital AI models," said Shiqi Chen, lead author.

The researchers tested their system on various images used to train AI models, including those of celebrities and butterflies, as well as full-color pictures in the style of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.

The results were comparable to those of conventional image generators, but were created with much less energy. This breakthrough has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of AI-generated content significantly."

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-08-ai-breakthrough-power-images.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #Energy #DiffusionModels

"Regardless, it would be a categorical mistake to see AI as the next iteration of those earlier paradigm shifts. While I can imagine practical applications of AI (storyboarding comes to mind), it isn’t just another tool at a filmmaker’s disposal or an effective way of democratizing the filmmaking process itself — though Radu Jude’s forthcoming “Dracula” actively uses it as both in order to highlight the technology’s fundamentally vampiric nature. It doesn’t streamline or emphasize human creativity so much as it insists that we’ve had enough of that already, and the algorithms can take it from here.

The perfect form of expression for people who think memes are the ultimate height of comedy, AI doesn’t allow for a world with more artists, it allows the tech industry to create a world that ostensibly doesn’t need them. As “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-director Daniel Kwan so elegantly put it at a recent event in West Hollywood, AI less represents a new form of storytelling than it does an invasive species to the concept of storytelling itself. It’s a wasp, not a bee. And with all due respect to Mr. Ben Mankiewicz, using AI to preserve the magic of “The Wizard of Oz” is like using cancer to preserve the function of a pancreas.

Which is all the more reason why I take issue with Mankiewicz’s assertion that Fleming would have — not might have — Sphere-ified his masterpiece if only he had the technology to do so. That AI is somehow restoring “The Wizard of Oz” rather than eating away at its essence. It’s an argument that presumes authorial intent as a means of inviting people to override it."

https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/movies-should-reject-ai-wizard-of-oz-sphere-1235142276/

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #Hollywood #Movies #Film #Cinema

"There are certainly some people who oppose AI completely, and who see even the supposed benefits of AI as little more than “bribes” designed to distract people from the overwhelming harms AI causes. But, in fairness, much more of the inchoate opposition to AI seems to be less about an outright rejection of AI, and more about a sense that there are appropriate and inappropriate areas for AI usage. Or, to put it a different way: there are lots of people who have no problem with AI being used to help with things like cancer detection, but who are worried that AI is harming students’ ability to think; similarly there are people who are willing to believe that AI can be used to make certain processes more efficient, but who don’t think that AI belongs in artistic pursuits. At this point many of us have heard some version of the joke that “AI was supposed to free us from drudgery so we could spend our time making art, but instead AI is making art and sticking us with the drudgery.” One can disagree with parts of that statement (was AI really “supposed” to do that? Can you call what AI generates “art”?), while still recognizing that many people’s hostility to AI is couched in a belief that AI is intruding into areas where it does not belong."

https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2025/06/25/do-draugveils-roses-have-ai-thorns-what-the-debate-about-a-black-metal-album-says-about-ai-and-art/

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #Art #LLMs #Automation #Productivity

"In the 2020s, Steyerl believes the poor image will become an endangered species: soon, most images circulating on the internet will no longer be photographic representations of reality, but data-based renderings that are essentially a programmatic fantasy. The ‘statistical image-making’ of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E derives its contents from large but ultimately incomplete datasets. The generated result is an average composite image that represents the machine’s idea of reality: six-fingered hands, distorted limbs, exaggerated body proportions and eerily smooth foods.

Medium Hot introduces a taxonomic framework for this visual phenomena – one that feels, at times, bloated and frantic in its categorical overlap. ‘Burnt-out images’ refer to works made from AI diffusion models, in which noise, or random data, is added to training data and then removed to generate an image. This diffusion process gives rise to what Steyerl dubs a ‘derivative image’, a term that echoes the concept of ‘derivatives’ in financial systems, highlighting the model’s extractive nature. Consider the derivative image a counterfeit version of the poor image. While the poor image attempts to skirt copyright limitations, the derivative image’s condition for existence is predicated on ‘large-scale data theft’. Steyerl highlights too the bias embedded in the AI means of production but ultimately resists the proposition that models should be inclusively reprogrammed on the basis that implementing diverse training data would only require more labour from microworkers and exacerbate the problem of data theft. AI thrives on disenfranchisement, contributing to ‘multipolar surveillance and… profound social disruptions’."

https://artreview.com/hito-steyerls-medium-hot-the-age-of-slop-artificial-intelligence-terry-nguyen-opinion/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #GeneratedImages #MediaTheory

"Midjourney’s new AI-generated video tool will produce animated clips featuring copyrighted characters from Disney and Universal, WIRED has found—including video of the beloved Pixar character Wall-E holding a gun.

It’s been a busy month for Midjourney. This week, the generative AI startup released its sophisticated new video tool, V1, which lets users make short animated clips from images they generate or upload. The current version of Midjourney’s AI video tool requires an image as a starting point; generating videos using text-only prompts is not supported.

The release of V1 comes on the heels of a very different kind of announcement earlier in June: Hollywood behemoths Disney and Universal filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Midjourney, alleging that it violates copyright law by generating images with the studios’ intellectual property."

https://www.wired.com/story/midjourney-generates-videos-of-disney-characters-amid-massive-copyright-lawsuit/

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #MidJourney #Disney #Universal #Copyright #IP