Bidirectional motion planning often reduces planning time compared to its unidirectional counterparts. It requires connecting the forward and reverse search trees to form a continuous path. However, this process could fail and restart the asymmetric bidirectional search due to the limitations of lazy-reverse search. To address this challenge, we propose Greedy GuILD Grafting Trees (G3T*), a novel path planner that grafts invalid edge connections at both ends to re-establish tree-based connectivity, enabling rapid path convergence. G3T* employs a greedy approach using the minimum Lebesgue measure of guided incremental local densification (GuILD) subsets to optimize paths efficiently. Furthermore, G3T* dynamically adjusts the sampling distribution between the informed set and GuILD subsets based on historical and current cost improvements, ensuring asymptotic optimality. These features enhance the forward search's growth towards the reverse tree, achieving faster convergence and lower solution costs. Benchmark experiments across dimensions from R^2 to R^8 and real-world robotic evaluations demonstrate G3T*'s superior performance compared to existing single-query sampling-based planners. A video showcasing our experimental results is available at: https://youtu.be/3mfCRL5SQIU

Robin K. Hill Is Computer Science a Profession? We computer scientists--many of us--like to think of ourselves as professionals, as do doctors and lawyers, and police officers, and accountants. But there are definitions of "profession," with criteria and expectations, that we fail to meet. Are we ready, collectively, to confront the criteria? Do we want to be card-carrying members of a learned institution of service?

On Friday, TriStar Pictures released Here, a 50 million Robert Zemeckis-directed film that used real-time generative AI face transformation techniques to portray actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright across a 60-year span, marking one of Hollywood's first full-length features built around AI-powered visual effects. The film adapts a 2014 graphic novel set primarily in a New Jersey living room across multiple time periods. Rather than cast different actors for various ages, the production used AI to modify Hanks' and Wright's appearances throughout. The de-aging technology comes from Metaphysic, a visual effects company that creates real time face swapping and aging effects. During filming, the crew watched two monitors simultaneously: one showing the actors' actual appearances and another displaying them at whatever age the scene required.

A little more than a year ago, the world seemed to wake up to the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence when OpenAI released ChatGPT, an application that enables users to converse with a computer in a singularly human way. Within five days, the chatbot had a million users. Within two months, it was logging a hundred million monthly users--a number that has now nearly doubled. Call this the year many of us learned to communicate, create, cheat, and collaborate with robots. Shortly after ChatGPT came out, Google released its own chatbot, Bard; Microsoft incorporated OpenAI's model into its Bing search engine; Meta débuted LLaMA; and Anthropic came out with Claude, a "next generation AI assistant for your tasks, no matter the scale."

Not everyone in Hollywood is happy with the film industry's historic AI deal. A provision allowing for the creation of digital replicas and synthetic performers could, critics argue, decrease the number of jobs available to both performers and crew. This, in turn, could allow big-name stars--and their AI-generated clones--to feature in multiple projects at once, pushing out emerging actors as Hollywood becomes awash with synthetic performers. Feelings are so strong that 14 percent of the national board of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA for short, actually voted against taking the deal to its general membership for ratification. Leaders of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, in contrast, overwhelmingly agreed to have their members accept the agreements they hammered out with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

On Monday, the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, held a members-only webinar to discuss the contract the union tentatively agreed upon last week with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). If ratified, the contract will officially end the longest labor strike in the guild's history. For many in the industry, artificial intelligence was one of the strike's most contentious, fear-inducing components. Over the weekend, SAG released details of their agreed AI terms, an expansive set of protections that require consent and compensation for all actors, regardless of status. With this agreement, SAG has gone substantially further than the Directors Guild of America (DGA) or the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who preceded them in coming to terms with the AMPTP.

On Wednesday night, the actor Jeremy Allen White, of "The Bear," was working his way down a red carpet in Dallas. It was the première of "The White Claw," an A24 movie about the Von Erich clan of professional wrestlers. On the carpet, an "Entertainment Tonight" reporter informed White, "We just heard moments ago--the strike is over!" and stuck the mike in his face. "That's amazing," White said, seeming taken aback. Asked how he felt, he added, "I don't know the details of the deal, but I'm sure that SAG got what we wanted."

The thread was 10 tweets long--verbose by X standards--and 219 words, but there was just one word that stuck out. The message, posted on the @SAG-AFTRA account, summed up everything the actors union had fought to get in the tentative agreement with Hollywood studios. In the context of the rapid rise of generative AI, it's worth reading in full: "We have achieved a deal of extraordinary scope that includes'above-pattern' minimum compensation increases, unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI, and for the first time establishes a streaming participation bonus." "Threat," of course, is how many people have come to view artificial intelligence. US president Joe Biden's recent executive order on the technology was seen as, in part, a way to address the risks the technology presents to national security.

Between July and September this year, actors in the US were invited to participate in an unusual research project, designed to capture their voices, faces, movements, and expressions. The project, which coincided with Hollywood's historic strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, was run by London-based emotion AI company Realeyes and Meta. The information captured from the actors was fed into an AI database to better understand and express human emotions. Many actors across the industry worry that AI could be used to replace them, whether or not their exact faces are copied. And in this case, by providing the facial expressions that will teach AI to appear more human, study participants may in fact have been the ones inadvertently training their own potential replacements.

Rather, T's voice, face, movements, and expressions would be fed into an AI database "to better understand and express human emotions." That database would then help train "virtual avatars" for Meta, as well as algorithms for a London-based emotion AI company called Realeyes. The "emotion study" ran from July through September, specifically recruiting actors. The project coincided with Hollywood's historic dual strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA). With the industry at a standstill, the larger-than-usual number of out-of-work actors may have been a boon for Meta and Realeyes: here was a new pool of "trainers"--and data points--perfectly suited to teaching their AI to appear more human.