A collection of stories set in George R. R. Martin's universe and a novel from author James S. A. Corey are among the science-fiction books we're looking forward to this month I am currently reading the science-fiction classic by Kim Stanley Robinson with the New Scientist Book Club (it's our April read). It's fantastic, so any other trips to the Red Planet are very welcome from my perspective, and I'm looking forward to Charlotte Robinson's thriller . Elsewhere in this month's science fiction, there's horror in space from S. A. Barnes, some resurrected Neanderthals from Douglas Preston and his daughter Aletheia Preston, and ghosts in AI-generated videos from Max Lury. Something for all tastes, I'd say. This near-future space-thriller follows a one-way mission to Mars, as well as the disappearance of a programmer in Hong Kong, who leaves nothing behind but a cryptic warning. As the Argo spaceship heads towards Mars, the crew realise they are being sabotaged.

The company believes AI-generated content is the future of social platforms. Meta is developing a standalone app for Vibes, its feed of AI-generated videos, according to reports from and . Vibes was introduced as a feature in the Meta AI app in September 2025. Similar to OpenAI's Sora app, Vibes lets users prompt Meta AI to create TikTok-style vertical videos. Following the strong early traction of Vibes within Meta AI, we are testing a standalone app to build on that momentum, Meta said in a statement.

Thousands of abusive videos were produced last year--that researchers know of. In 2025, new data show, the volume of child pornography online was likely larger than at any other point in history. A record 312,030 reports of confirmed child pornography were investigated last year by the Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that works around the globe to identify and remove such material from the web. This is concerning in and of itself. It means that the overall volume of child porn detected on the internet grew by 7 percent since 2024, when the previous record had been set.

From seemingly AI-generated videos to repurposed old footage, TikTok, Instagram, and X did little to stop the onslaught of misleading posts in the wake of the US invasion of Venezuela. A crowd outside of Miami reacts to the news of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. Within minutes of Donald Trump announcing in the early hours of Saturday morning that US troops had captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social media. Some people shared old videos across social platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, people shared AI-generated images and videos that claimed to show US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.

Assessing action quality is both imperative and challenging due to its significant impact on the quality of AI-generated videos, further complicated by the inherently ambiguous nature of actions within AI-generated video (AIGV). Current action quality assessment (AQA) algorithms predominantly focus on actions from real specific scenarios and are pre-trained with normative action features, thus rendering them inapplicable in AIGVs. To address these problems, we construct GAIA, a Generic AI-generated Action dataset, by conducting a large-scale subjective evaluation from a novel causal reasoning-based perspective, resulting in 971,244 ratings among 9,180 video-action pairs. Based on GAIA, we evaluate a suite of popular text-to-video (T2V) models on their ability to generate visually rational actions, revealing their pros and cons on different categories of actions. We also extend GAIA as a testbed to benchmark the AQA capacity of existing automatic evaluation methods. Results show that traditional AQA methods, action-related metrics in recent T2V benchmarks, and mainstream video quality methods perform poorly with an average SRCC of 0.454, 0.191, and 0.519, respectively, indicating a sizable gap between current models and human action perception patterns in AIGVs. Our findings underscore the significance of action quality as a unique perspective for studying AIGVs and can catalyze progress towards methods with enhanced capacities for AQA in AIGVs.

Google seems to be cracking down on the use of Disney characters in AI-generated videos on YouTube after it was hit with a cease and desist letter. The company on Friday that will bring Disney characters to Sora and ChatGPT, and bring AI-generated shorts from Sora to Disney+. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy . By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy .

As AI-generated video platforms rapidly advance, ethical challenges such as copyright infringement emerge. This study examines how users make sense of AI-generated videos on OpenAI's Sora by conducting a qualitative content analysis of user comments. Through a thematic analysis, we identified four dynamics that characterize how users negotiate authenticity, authorship, and platform governance on Sora. First, users acted as critical evaluators of realism, assessing micro-details such as lighting, shadows, fluid motion, and physics to judge whether AI-generated scenes could plausibly exist. Second, users increasingly shifted from passive viewers to active creators, expressing curiosity about prompts, techniques, and creative processes. Text prompts were perceived as intellectual property, generating concerns about plagiarism and remixing norms. Third, users reported blurred boundaries between real and synthetic media, worried about misinformation, and even questioned the authenticity of other commenters, suspecting bot-generated engagement. Fourth, users contested platform governance: some perceived moderation as inconsistent or opaque, while others shared tactics for evading prompt censorship through misspellings, alternative phrasing, emojis, or other languages. Despite this, many users also enforced ethical norms by discouraging the misuse of real people's images or disrespectful content. Together, these patterns highlighted how AI-mediated platforms complicate notions of reality, creativity, and rule-making in emerging digital ecosystems. Based on the findings, we discuss governance challenges in Sora and how user negotiations inform future platform governance.

A delivery driver posted a TikTok alleging she had been sexually assaulted by a customer. The deepfakes that followed reveal a growing digital blackface problem. When DoorDash delivery driver Livie Rose Henderson posted a video alleging that one of her customers sexually assaulted her in October, it set off a firestorm of reactions. Henderson's TikTok claimed that when she was dropping off a delivery in Oswego, New York, she found a customer's front door wide open and inside, a man on the couch with his pants and underwear pulled down to his ankles. Henderson was dubbed the "DoorDash Girl," and her video accrued tens of millions of views, including some supportive and consoling responses to what she said she had endured on the job as a young woman.

Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump have both posted AI-generated videos on social media. Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump have both posted AI-generated videos on social media. T he New York City mayoral election may be remembered for the remarkable win of a young democratic socialist, but it was also marked by something that is likely to permeate future elections: the use of AI-generated campaign videos. Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Zohran Mamdani in last week's election, took particular interest in sharing deepfake videos of his opponent, including one that saw the former governor accused of racism, in what is a developing area of electioneering. AI has been used by campaigns before, particularly in using algorithms to target certain voters, and even, in some cases, to write policy proposals.