How years of research built Grand Theft Auto VI's obsessively detailed world Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? I n 2015, a group of Grand Theft Auto developers from Rockstar North took their first trips to Miami to do field research for the next game in the phenomenally popular crime series. "Before you're doing hyper-organised research trips, you're immersing yourself in the place and its history, the vibe of it," Rob Nelson, one of the lead developers on GTA VI, tells me. "[You see] the physical places you want to move characters through, the experiences you want them to have, and the juxtaposition between the extremes of society that are in Miami." I wondered: did people ever recognise them on any of their research trips?

Going up in flames storyboard for Gone With the Wind (1939). Going up in flames storyboard for Gone With the Wind (1939). 'Without storyboards, I feel like I'm in Grand Central station in my underwear': film fights back against AI As Hollywood begins to adopt the technology, the professionals in most direct jeopardy are the illustrators mapping out directors' first visions. A film industry dominated by AI is a dystopian prospect: stories and dialogue generated by large language models, populated by reincarnated screen icons and uncanny humanoids . That is in the future, but the real-world impact of AI is already directly affecting jobs behind the scenes, as Hollywood's biggest film-makers begin to adopt the technology.

W e have all been there: packed shoulder to shoulder on the train while the person beside us coughs and sneezes. A protective flu jab offers some reassurance, but so does the thought that there will be a hospital bed for you, should you need it. Yet, in England, about 95% of adult hospital beds were occupied at the height of flu season last year. If hospitals were hotels, that level of occupancy would be good business, and we would commend them for their efficiency. But do we really want a hospital to have so few beds in reserve that it's just one bad flu week away from having to treat patients in corridors?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has revived the midnight game launch - but was it worth the wait? I t is Thursday night and I am sat blurry-eyed and runny nosed outside the Argos on Oxford Street. Incredibly, I am far from alone. This is not some strange protest against the popular retailer. When the clock strikes midnight, the lavish 4K Switch 2 remake of beloved N64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time will be released, and I have joined a lengthy queue of about 500 fans desperate to snag early copies.

'I don't think AI can be held back' Philippe Jaenada. 'I don't think AI can be held back' Philippe Jaenada. Philippe Jaenada told French radio that he used ChatGPT to'play with the reader', after the prize removed a different book from its longlist over allegations of AI use The winner of France's most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his novel, barely a day after collecting an award whose jury had thrown out another book over suspected AI use. Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI "three times" while writing it. The first, he said, was to slip in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to "play with the reader".

Will your jaded adult sensibilities render you unable to locate the magic that captivated your child self? Will revisiting it reveal that it was never actually that good, and that your tastes are built on a foundation of lies? With video games, there is the added complication of technological advancement: decades-old games can look so basic and feel so treacly to play that it's hard to explain why they were mind-blowing at the time. Light-touch remasters aim to bring such games up to modern graphical standards without fundamentally changing them; an ambitious remake attempts to transform the work into something that can stand alongside any modern masterpiece. Ocarina of Time is the latter. And I could not be more delighted to report that it is a dream come true.

Social media is full of weird video game mashups. Where are they all coming from? Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? I f your social media algorithms have clocked that you're into video games, something strange will have happened in the past few weeks. Your feed, like mine, will have been full of clips of streamers playing bizarre mashups of popular video games .

'Another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces' Castle Walls is the first fully AI-generated series to premiere on a major streaming platform. 'Another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces' Castle Walls is the first fully AI-generated series to premiere on a major streaming platform. Castle Walls review - Prime's first fully AI-generated show is here, and it's a Vaseline-smeared mess Billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series on a major streaming service, this Turkish show looks like the result of the prompt'make it cinematic' J ust as the world reels from Elon Musk's AI-powered The Odyssey remake - though "remake" feels rather generous for a seven-minute splat of synthetic sludge - another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces. For Prime Video's AI-generated TV series Castle Walls, produced by Turkish production studio Ay Yapım using a melange of generative video tools, has arrived, billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series to premiere on a major streaming platform. Set in the 11th century, the show revolves around the historic Alamut Castle, although it's entirely absent of any real sense of time or place.

'What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted' Jeanette Winterson at home in east London. 'What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted' Jeanette Winterson at home in east London. 'There is no inevitable dystopia': Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity The author believes we are at a turning point as a species - and even in the shadow of big tech it's up to us how we want to proceed'I am a storyteller by trade," writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. "And I know everything we do is a fiction until it's a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying - or of returning." She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years - her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor's travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots. When we meet, Winterson is just back from China, where, she tells me, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fictionalised account of her childhood, has sold more than a million copies in the past six years; more than 200,000 mostly young women tried to come to see her speak. She thinks this is because, in a world of long work hours and looming AI-engendered precarity, this fictionalised account of her own escape from an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves. She has since written 13 novels for adults, as well as nonfiction, short stories, children's books and screenplays. Now she wants to persuade the production company Goalhanger to give her a podcast. "I want to do one called The Rest is Human," she says, sitting at a bare wooden table in her home, a Georgian set of rooms above a shop - which she also owns - in Spitalfields, east London. "To see what we retain for ourselves in this absolute scramble to outsource everything we thought we were." Winterson: 'We've got a market that doesn't really know what education is for.' Because we are, she argues, at a turning point in our story as a species. Until the Industrial Revolution, change was all about "Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming", but then we "massively intervened.

Margot Robbie as Donna Freedman, left, with Jackie Woodburne as Susan Kennedy in Neighbours. Fremantle, the soap's producer, is working with RoseBerry Media to repurpose Robbie's old episodes to make a vertical drama designed for phones. Margot Robbie as Donna Freedman, left, with Jackie Woodburne as Susan Kennedy in Neighbours. Fremantle, the soap's producer, is working with RoseBerry Media to repurpose Robbie's old episodes to make a vertical drama designed for phones. Neighbours is being recut into a microdrama focused on Margot Robbie - and her co-stars aren't happy Robbie's storylines in the famous soap will be recut into vertical micro-episodes to be watched on phones - but her fellow cast members say they haven't been consulted T he long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours is being recut with AI into a microdrama designed to be watched on phones, sparking a debate among the show's actors and the industry over the wider implications of television archives being mined for new content.