Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Glenn Close acknowledged the ever-changing landscape of the entertainment industry during a stop in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. The Academy Award-nominated actress has been trying to keep her "equilibrium" lately, ahead of celebrating Sundance Institute icon Michelle Satter at a gala fundraiser. "I'm very lucky to have a job," Close told The Hollywood Reporter. "There were so many people impacted in LA already, and then now with the fires. I was astounded at how few jobs there are in our profession. I'm a big reader of history, and unfortunately, I think not enough people in this country understand the history and what we've just gotten ourselves into. "On top of that is [artificial intelligence].

Nicolas Cage continues to share his fears about artificial intelligence in Hollywood. At the 25th Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday, the actor gave a speech ahead of his Icon Award reception during the Honors Brunch where he emphasized the need to control your own image and performance as AI rises in popularity with studios. "There is a new technology in town. It's a technology that I didn't have to contend with for 42 years until recently. But these 10 young actors, this generation, most certainly will be, and they are calling it'EBDR.' This technology wants to take your instrument. We are the instruments as film actors. We are not hiding behind guitars and drums," Cage said, per Deadline.

Technology AI What a major movie studio's AI deal could mean for the future of Hollywood Generative AI might save studios'millions and millions of dollars,' but at what cost? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When Hollywood's actors took to the streets last year for a 118 day strike, many wielded signs reading "no digital clones," "AI is soulless," and "AI is not art." These ticked-off thespians were expressing a sentiment shared by a growing share of writers, video games voice actors, and many other creatives: generative AI tools, trained off their work, may threaten their jobs and shrink the entertainment industry. When the strike ended, actors were awarded new, hard-won protections against AI-generated clones .

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed into law two bills that will give actors more protections over their digital likenesses, addressing concerns brought up during last year's Hollywood strike led by performers guild SAG-AFTRA. One of the bills, AB1836, prohibits and penalizes the making and distribution of a deceased person's digital replica without permission from their estate. The other legislation, AB2602, makes a contract entered after Jan. 1, 2025, unenforceable if a digital replica of an actor was used when the individual could have performed the work in person, if the contract did not include a reasonably specific description of how the digital replica would be used and if the actor was not represented by their lawyer or labor union when the deal was signed. "No one should live in fear of becoming someone else's unpaid digital puppet," said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator in a statement. Newsom has led the way in protecting people -- and families -- from A.I. replication without real consent."

California has given the go-ahead to a landmark AI bill to protect performers' digital likenesses. On Tuesday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2602, which will go into effect on January 1, 2025. The bill requires studios and other employers to get consent before using "digital replicas" of performers. Newsom also signed AB 1836, which grants similar rights to deceased performers, requiring their estate's permission before using their AI likenesses. AB 2602, introduced in April, covers film, TV, video games, commercials, audiobooks and non-union performing jobs.

We have concluded that a new law is needed,

When OpenAI's new voice assistant said it was "doing fantastic" in a launch demo this month, Scarlett Johansson was not. The Hollywood star said she was "shocked, angered and in disbelief" that the updated version of ChatGPT, which can listen to spoken prompts and respond verbally, had a voice "eerily similar" to hers. One of Johansson's signature roles was as the voice of a futuristic version of Siri in the 2013 film Her and, for the actor, the similarity was stark. The OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, appeared to acknowledge the film's influence with a one-word post on X on the day of the launch: "her". In a statement, Johansson said Altman had approached her last year to be a voice of ChatGPT and that she had declined for "personal reasons".

Artificial intelligence began to reshape music, movies and art in 2023, sparking both enthusiasm and panic. Some artists used AI to aid their creative practices. Others took legal action against the companies that co-opted art to make their models more powerful. As battles played out across picket lines and courtrooms, millions of viewers and listeners around the world tuned into AI-created content with curiosity, disdain and glee. Here are the major ways AI impacted culture this year.

Imagine having a digital twin that gets ill, and can be experimented on to identify the best possible treatment, without you having to go near a pill or a surgeon's knife. Scientists believe that within five to 10 years, "in silico" trials – in which hundreds of virtual organs are used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs – could become routine, while patient-specific organ models could be used to personalise treatment and avoid medical complications. Digital twins are computational models of physical objects or processes, updated using data from their real-world counterparts. Within medicine, this means combining vast amounts of data about the workings of genes, proteins, cells and whole-body systems with patients' personal data to create virtual models of their organs – and eventually, potentially their entire body. "If you practise medicine today, a lot of it isn't very scientific," said Prof Peter Coveney, the director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London and co-author of Virtual You.

Recent 3D-based manipulation methods either directly predict the grasp pose using 3D neural networks, or solve the grasp pose using similar objects retrieved from shape databases. However, the former faces generalizability challenges when testing with new robot arms or unseen objects; and the latter assumes that similar objects exist in the databases. We hypothesize that recent 3D modeling methods provides a path towards building digital replica of the evaluation scene that affords physical simulation and supports robust manipulation algorithm learning. We propose to reconstruct high-quality meshes from real-world point clouds using state-of-the-art neural surface reconstruction method (the Real2Sim step). Because most simulators take meshes for fast simulation, the reconstructed meshes enable grasp pose labels generation without human efforts. The generated labels can train grasp network that performs robustly in the real evaluation scene (the Sim2Real step). In synthetic and real experiments, we show that the Real2Sim2Real pipeline performs better than baseline grasp networks trained with a large dataset and a grasp sampling method with retrieval-based reconstruction. The benefit of the Real2Sim2Real pipeline comes from 1) decoupling scene modeling and grasp sampling into sub-problems, and 2) both sub-problems can be solved with sufficiently high quality using recent 3D learning algorithms and mesh-based physical simulation techniques.