The rise of artificial intelligence in our media and entertainment industries has raised a lot of concerns about programs like Open Al's text-to-video maker Sora replacing the artistic endeavors and aspirations of humans. If those AI made movies are anything like a new brand film about the Toys'R' Us toy store chain's origin story, the only thing we'll have to fear is watching them. Toys'R' Us's current owner WHP Global worked with the Emmy nominated creative agency Native Foreign to create a short brand film called The Origin of Toys'R' Us using OpenAI's text-to-video creator Sora. The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and can currently be viewed on the toy retailer's website. The Origin of Toys'R' Us is only a little over a minute long but it's a mix of confusing and eerie.

As I survey the garden from my miniature spaceship – watching a team of minions breaking down a brick wall over there, another transporting treasure (a discarded rubber duck) back to base, and a third lot building a clay bridge – I feel a sense of peace and mastery, but also nagging annoyance. In real life I am the sort of person who forgets meetings and appointments even when they happen at the same time every week, can't multitask, and I am continually, unpleasantly surprised by how few hours I have at my disposal and how much there always is to cram into them. Why can't I manage myself half as well as I manage this virtual garden? Perhaps what I need is an army of tiny plant people as personal assistants. Pikmin are cheerful, obedient creatures, colourful sprouts with eyes, some with noses and little boulder bodies.

And hey, more CG footage of Beyond Good & Evil 2. With Ubisoft's E3 press conferences, you always know exactly what you're going to get, and yet it's also impressive (to me at least) to watch the machine at work, to watch Ubisoft trot out such a full lineup of experiences every year, without fail. We've rounded up all the trailers from Ubisoft's E3 2018 press conference below, and it's exactly what you'd expect. And damn, it might not be inspiring but on some level I can respect the craft. After a fever dream of an introduction for Just Dance 2019 (featuring a dancing panda), Ubisoft finally moved into something we could care about: Beyond Good & Evil 2. First up, just a stunning CG trailer. Like, good enough that I wish Ubisoft would make a Beyond Good & Evil film. It has some fantastic shots of the world itself--including a faux X-Wing flying through empty space, a ship AI being channeled through a jewel-encrusted skull, and the return of the original game's protagonist Jade.

This weekend marks the unofficial beginning of summer. That means the time has come for taking hikes, playing frisbee, and spending long hours in a pool near you. But for a certain class of folks--the species known as "bookworm"--summer is the ideal time to practice their page-turning. But with so many new tomes hitting shelves, it's hard to know where to start. Below are some of our favorite books of 2017.

Last year, Google's DeepMind A.I. development house released a "tool" called DeepDream that let neural networks loose on innocent imagery, with truly terrifying results. Though it was hailed as a window into the secret experiences of A.I, in reality, DeepDream was a demonstration of just how primitive the mind of modern a A.I. really is. But could even an artificial intelligence be alien enough to pervert the peaceful, soothing imagery of the great Bob Ross? A new video titled "Deeply Artificial Trees," which applies DeepDream to every frame of a Bob Ross video, proves that the answer to this question is, well, yes. Further, it even applies the technique to the audio -- making the experience truly nightmarish.