SpaceX has moved the next launch attempt of its Starship rocket to Thursday, 23 July, the latest delay for a flight that has now been scrubbed once and rescheduled twice. The company had been targeting Monday evening from its Starbase site at Boca Chica in Texas, and said it needed more time to finish work […]
The folks at TryAI put Fable to the test in directing a music video.
The AI glitches show up from the start and continue. But it’s even more unsettling than this.
When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding. The stiff awkwardness jumps out at us… and yet, if aliens were to compare this to footage of actual humans dancing, it probably seems very similar.
Throughout the video, each activity portrayed is directly related to the lyrics, awkward and, to be honest, stupid. Again, those aliens are wondering if celebrating this sort of time-wasting is the best we could do.
As I (re)watched it, I wondered what would happen if actual humans reshot this, frame by frame, move by move, with real people in it. It would probably come across as ironic, insightful and wickedly funny.
I expect two cultural shifts to come out of this era of awkward banality:
a hip new clunkiness. The same way that beautiful type was elbowed out by grunge lettering on social media, there’s a sort of lowbrow hipness to doing this so poorly.
a new appreciation for work that embraces and celebrates what humans are capable of. It’s not enough to stuff fast food in a cardboard box and announce you’re done. We can get a robot to do that now. If it’s worth our effort, it’s worth raising our standards.
ZTE showcased the NaviX Ultra at the World AI Conference in Shanghai this week, calling it the world’s first agentic AI smartphone. The device, built under ZTE’s Nubia brand, runs ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent and can be activated by voice or a dedicated button. It comes in four colours and was prototyped in December at […]
France and Germany pledged on Friday to develop a European alternative to Palantir’s military AI software. A joint declaration signed after talks between Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz committed the two countries to examine “a European sovereign digital backbone” covering data-centric security, AI, and cloud solutions. France’s Arcadia, an AI-powered command-and-control platform, was named as […]
The Trump administration is now dictating which companies and entities get access to frontier AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, CNBC reported on Friday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Until now, the labs made that decision themselves. Anthropic controlled access to its Mythos cybersecurity model through an initiative called Project Glasswing. OpenAI ran […]
Brits bought 384 Chinese-made vehicles in 2015. Last year, they bought 285,000, according to automotive consulting firm Mobility Global. The growth is accelerating. BYD nearly doubled its UK sales in the first half of 2026 to over 37,000 units, and Chinese brands collectively hold roughly 13% of new car registrations in Britain, double their share […]
Face AI, a Los Angeles-based face swap platform, announced a major update to its video face swap feature on Friday. The update improves facial tracking, expression preservation, and scene stability across changing lighting, camera angles, and partial face occlusions like glasses and hats. Queued videos now process in under a minute. The tool targets social […]
The nearest lightning was 1,200 miles away. At least that’s what the weather site reported.
When lightning is that unlikely, we don’t worry about it much.
It turns out that this is the best time to install a lightning arrestor on your home, though.
The urgency of the moment might be the push we need to take action, but if we rely on that, we’ve given up our agency to external events.
The media is hooked on selling us breaking news in whatever form they can discover–they need to break our rhythm and cajole us into clicking. But what they want and what we need might not be the same.
One of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s signature black Tom Ford leather jackets sold at Sotheby’s on Friday for $960,000 after 65 bids from 45 collectors. The pre-sale estimate was $40,000 to $60,000. The jacket retails for just under $10,000. Huang wore it in 2023 at a Foxconn event in Taipei and signed it for the […]
On August 2, 1959, Pelé scored what he called the greatest goal of his career: three consecutive sombreros over defenders, a knee flick past the goalkeeper, and a header into the net, all without the ball ever touching the ground. It was never filmed. For 67 years, the “Gol da Rua Javari” existed only in […]