If you were on social media over the holiday weekend--and really, what better use of a holiday weekend is there--you might have noticed a controversy brewing around the use of artificial intelligence in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's sprawling saga about a Jewish architect who escapes the Holocaust and immigrates to the U.S. to ply his trade. If you didn't happen to catch the initial backlash, good news: By Monday, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline had all picked up the story, and by this morning the internet was awash in aggregations and explainers, all blossoming two days before the Oscar nominations are announced. The flap traced back to an article published by RedShark News on Jan. 11--an eternity ago in internet time--that actually praised the film's "subtle and sensitive" use of artificial intelligence. Editor Dávid Jancsó detailed how the production used a tool called Respeecher to enhance "certain sounds" in Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian dialogue. Jancsó, a native speaker, explained that Hungarian is "one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," and even after working with a dialogue coach, there were still lingering inaccuracies.

The filmmakers behind The Brutalist, a likely Oscar contender currently being distributed by A24, used AI to alter actor's dialogue and create images used in the film's epilogue, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó shared in an interview with RedShark News. The epic drama follows a fictional Hungarian architect (as played by Adrien Brody) who struggles to make art under the fickle system of American capitalism (and the weirdos that run it). To make Brody and his costar Felicity Jones' Hungarian pronunciation as accurate as possible, Jancsó says the production used AI from a company called Respeecher to alter the actor's speech. Respeecher was able to adjust the actor's vocals to make them match a native Hungarian speaker's pronunciation, though Jancsó says the process didn't do anything you couldn't achieve with traditional dialogue editing. "You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process, otherwise we'd still be in post."

Is the intersection of technology and psychology possible through the use of AI in human relationships?

As artificial intelligence transforms news production, it offers both innovation and ethical challenges. While AI can streamline content and analyse data, it also raises concerns about misinformation, deepfakes, and accountability. How can the news industry maintain integrity and public trust? This episode explores the potential risks of AI in journalism and the need for robust ethical frameworks to ensure accuracy and transparency in the digital age.

From a daily skincare routine to Botox and face lifts, some people will do almost anything to turn back the hands of time. Now, some actors are going one step further and using a controversial technology to digitally'de-age' their appearance. In his latest film, Tom Hanks, 68, and his Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, 58, use AI to play the same couple at different stages in their lives. Hanks says: 'It's a great tool, because the super computing means you do not have to wait for post-production to do the purely technical visual view of it.' There has been growing concern over the use of AI in cinema, with many actors worrying that the technology will force humans out of the film industry.

Healthcare systems worldwide face persistent challenges in efficiency, accessibility, and personalization. Powered by modern AI technologies such as multimodal large language models and world models, Embodied AI (EmAI) represents a transformative frontier, offering enhanced autonomy and the ability to interact with the physical world to address these challenges. As an interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving research domain, "EmAI in healthcare" spans diverse fields such as algorithms, robotics, and biomedicine. This complexity underscores the importance of timely reviews and analyses to track advancements, address challenges, and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the "brain" of EmAI for healthcare, wherein we introduce foundational AI algorithms for perception, actuation, planning, and memory, and focus on presenting the healthcare applications spanning clinical interventions, daily care & companionship, infrastructure support, and biomedical research. Despite its promise, the development of EmAI for healthcare is hindered by critical challenges such as safety concerns, gaps between simulation platforms and real-world applications, the absence of standardized benchmarks, and uneven progress across interdisciplinary domains. We discuss the technical barriers and explore ethical considerations, offering a forward-looking perspective on the future of EmAI in healthcare. A hierarchical framework of intelligent levels for EmAI systems is also introduced to guide further development. By providing systematic insights, this work aims to inspire innovation and practical applications, paving the way for a new era of intelligent, patient-centered healthcare.

Rens Dimmendaal & Banjong Raksaphakdee / Better Images of AI / Medicines (flipped) / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 The potential of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development has sparked both excitement and skepticism among scientists, investors and the general public. "Artificial intelligence is taking over drug development," claim some companies and researchers. Over the past few years, interest in using AI to design drugs and optimize clinical trials has driven a surge in research and investment. AI-driven platforms like AlphaFold, which won the 2024 Nobel Prize for its ability to predict the structure of proteins and design new ones, showcase AI's potential to accelerate drug development. AI in drug discovery is "nonsense," warn some industry veterans. They urge that "AI's potential to accelerate drug discovery needs a reality check," as AI-generated drugs have yet to demonstrate an ability to address the 90% failure rate of new drugs in clinical trials.

A day after launching the most hotly anticipated product in the PC world, the Nvidia GeForce 50-series family of graphics cards, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang appeared on stage at CES to answer reporters' questions. A key one: In a world where AI is increasingly used to generate or interpolate frames, is the end result a world in which PC graphics is entirely AI generated? There's a reason we asked Huang the question. Nvidia says that while DLSS 3 could inject AI-generated frames between every GPU-rendered frame, DLSS 4 can infer three full frames off of a single traditional frame, as Brad Chacos noted in our earlier report on the GeForce 50-series reveal. A day earlier, rival AMD was essentially asked the same question.

Artificial intelligence models really can help spot cancer and reduce doctors' workload, according to the largest study of its kind. Radiologists who chose to use AI were able to identify an extra 1 in 1000 cases of breast cancer. Alexander Katalinic at the University of Lübeck, Germany, and his colleagues worked with almost 200 certified radiologists to test an AI trained to identify signs of breast cancer from mammograms. The radiologists examined 461,818 women across 12 breast cancer screening sites in Germany between July 2021 and February 2023, and for each person could choose whether or not to use AI. This resulted in 260,739 being checked by AI plus a radiologist, with the remaining 201,079 patients checked by a radiologist alone. Those who elected to use AI successfully detected breast cancer at a rate of 6.7 instances in every 1000 scans – 17.6 per cent higher than the 5.7 per 1000 scans among those who chose not to use AI.

Enterprise use of AI agents is on the rise, with 25% of enterprises using generative AI forecast to deploy AI agents in 2025, growing to 50% by 2027, according to Deloitte. The rise of agents means we need to adopt a new mindset. Being prepared for reinvention is crucial in an AI-first future led by agents. Business leaders must operate like chefs, not cooks in a world of hyper-automation, connections, and real-time knowledge sharing. A cook uses recipes to create -- learning by analogy.