Disney and OpenAI have made a surprise deal - what happens next? Disney's famous Mickey Mouse character will soon be available for use in AI-generated videos The world's best-known AI company and the world's best-known entertainment firm have come to a surprise agreement to allow AI versions of some of the most iconic characters in film, TV and cartoons to be used in generative AI videos and images. Social media is dead - here's what comes next The Walt Disney Company has signed a deal with OpenAI that will allow the AI firm's Sora video generation tool and ChatGPT image creator to use more than 200 of Disney's most iconic characters. Meanwhile, Disney remains in dispute with another AI firm, Midjourney, over alleged infringement of their intellectual property (IP), claiming Midjourney aims to "blatantly incorporate and copy Disney's and Universal's famous characters" into their image generating tool. The characters now deemed fair game for OpenAI users include the likes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Simba and Mufasa from and Moana, as well as Marvel and Lucasfilm characters, including some of's most well-known names.

The three years since the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI's generative AI chatbot, have seen huge changes in every part of our lives. Social media is dead - here's what comes next The most high-profile case was filed by Disney and Universal in June, both of whom alleged in a lawsuit that AI image generator Midjourney had been trained on their intellectual property, allowing users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy Disney's and Universal's famous characters". The latest on what's new in science and why it matters each day. In October, the Japanese government formally asked OpenAI, the company behind the Sora 2 AI video generator, to respect the intellectual property rights of its culture, including manga and popular video games such as those published by Nintendo. Sora 2 has faced further controversy due to its ability to create lifelike footage of real people.

Midjourney's tool, which creates images from text prompts, has 20 million users on its Discord server, where users type their inputs. In the lawsuit, the two movie-making giants share examples in which Midjourney is able to create images that uncannily resemble characters each company owns the rights to, such as the Minions, controlled by Universal, or the Lion King, owned by Disney. They also say Midjourney "ignored" their attempts to remediate the issue prior to taking legal action. Midjourney did not immediately respond to New Scientist's request for comment. The lawsuit has been welcomed by Ed Newton-Rex at Fairly Trained, a non-profit organisation that promotes fairer training practices for AI companies.

More than half of undergraduates say they consult artificial intelligence programmes to help with their essays, while schools are trialling its use in the classroom. A survey of more than 1,000 UK undergraduates, conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), found 53% were using AI to generate material for work they would be marked on. One in four are using applications such as Google Bard or ChatGPT to suggest topics and one in eight are using them to create content. Just 5% admitted to copying and pasting unedited AI-generated text into their assessments. Teachers are also seeking to use AI to streamline their work, with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) signing up secondary schools for a new research project into the use of AI to generate lesson plans and teaching materials as well as exams and model answers.

Mona Awad, whose books include Bunny and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, and Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World, filed the class action complaint to a San Francisco federal court last week. ChatGPT allows users to ask questions and type commands into a chatbot and responds with text that resembles human language patterns. The model underlying ChatGPT is trained with data that is publicly available on the internet. Sample summaries are included in the lawsuit as exhibits. The lawsuit will explore the uncertain "borders of the legality" of actions within the generative AI space, he adds.

Couples for whom the spark may have gone from their relationship will find it a little easier to rekindle the romance this Valentine's Day. Moonpig, the online customised greetings card retailer, is trialling using ChatGPT to generate personalised messages or poems for loved ones. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, developed by San Francisco company OpenAI, in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. In the few months since a beta version of ChatGPT was released to the world, it has rapidly become an integral part of many people's lives. Estate agents in the United States now say they can't live without the tool's automation to write up property descriptions.

This morning, the New York Times' Kevin Roose called what has been a big week for generative AI tools a "coming out" party [subscription required]. He detailed an actual party, on Monday night, which celebrated a massive funding round for Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, the uber-popular image-generating algorithm that was only launched publicly two months ago. But this week was chock-full of other significant news around generative AI (which refers to using unsupervised learning algorithms to learn from existing text, audio or images and create new content -- and now includes popular tools including GPT-3, DALL-E 2 and Imagen as well as nascent text-to-video options from OpenAI and Google). There was the news that Microsoft would add DALL-E to its Office suite and to Azure AI, while Adobe was planning to add generative AI tools to Photoshop and also committed to transparency in its use of generative AI. Then, besides Stable Diffusion's news, content generator Jasper also announced a massive funding round of $125 million, solidifying VC interest in the generative AI space.

When it announced that "the world's first robot artist" would be giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, the House of Lords probably hoped to shake off its sleepy reputation. Unfortunately, when the Ai-Da robot arrived at the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday, the opposite seemed to occur. Apparently overcome by the stuffy atmosphere, the machine, which resembles a sex doll strapped to a pair of egg whisks, shut down halfway through the evidence session. As its creator, Aidan Meller, scrabbled with power sockets to restart the device, he put a pair of sunglasses on the machine. "When we reset her, she can sometimes pull quite interesting faces," he explained.

Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag is known for haunting paintings that blend natural landscapes with the eerie futurism of giant robots, mysterious industrial machines, and alien creatures. Earlier this week, Stålenhag appeared to experience some dystopian dread of his own when he found that artificial intelligence had been used to mimic his style. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. The act of AI imitation was performed by Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex in the UK who has been studying legal issues around AI-generated art. He used a service called Midjourney to create images resembling Stålenhag's spooky style, and posted them to Twitter.

Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag is known for haunting paintings that blend natural landscapes with the eerie futurism of giant robots, mysterious industrial machines, and alien creatures. Earlier this week, Stålenhag appeared to experience some dystopian dread of his own when he found that artificial intelligence had been used to mimic his style. The act of AI imitation was performed by Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex in the UK who has been studying legal issues around AI-generated art. He used a service called Midjourney to create images resembling Stålenhag's spooky style, and posted them to Twitter. Guadamuz says he created the images to highlight the legal and ethical questions that algorithms that generate art may raise.