How the candy makers at Hammond's Candies have made the sweet treats for over 100 years. Decembmer 26 is National Candy Cane Day. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Candy canes are a holiday staple with roots dating back to the 1600s. The story suggests that in 1670, a choirmaster in Cologne, Germany, gave children these sugary sticks shaped like a shepherd's staff for the long nativity church service.

Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader--the director of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and writer of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver--issued what seemed like the last word on artificial intelligence in Hollywood filmmaking. A few days after the release of Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two, Schrader asked his Facebook followers: "Will Dune 3 be made by AI? And, if it is, how will we know?" Schrader is well regarded not only as a director, but one of cinema's top-shelf curmudgeons, quick with a wry burn or baiting shit-post. But his Dune tweet seemed like more than another provocation. It spoke to a mounting feeling among many filmgoers, myself included: that Hollywood had stooped to producing sleek, antiseptic images so devoid of personality that they might as well have been made not by a living, breathing, thinking, feeling artist, but by a computer.

Two high school graduates who say they can't read or write are suing their respective public school systems, arguing they were not given the free public education to which they are entitled. Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson, director of the Securities Law Clinic, told Fox News Digital the lawsuits signify a "much deeper problem" with the American public school system. "I think these cases reflect a deeper problem in education. For each of these cases, there are probably tens of thousands of students who never got a proper education -- they get pushed along the system," Jacobson said. "Unfortunately … we've created incentives, particularly for public school systems, to just push students along and not to hold them accountable."

The first piece of AI-generated video I ever made moved me to tears – tears of laughter. Given the chance to fool around with Runway AI's Gen-3 Alpha, I dropped in an image of an eagle carrying off a wolf. Moments later, the picture sprang into life. Except the bird only had one leg – and its plummeting prey sprouted wings from its tail and morphed into a wolf-headed goose. It was weird and hilarious.

Now artists are fighting back. And some of the most powerful tools they have were built by Shawn Shan, 26, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Chicago (and MIT Technology Review's 2024 Innovator of the Year). Shan got his start in AI security and privacy as an undergraduate there and participated in a project that built Fawkes, a tool to protect faces from facial recognition technology. But it was conversations with artists who had been hurt by the generative AI boom that propelled him into the middle of one of the biggest fights in the field. Soon after learning about the impact on artists, Shan and his advisors Ben Zhao (who made our Innovators Under 35 list in 2006) and Heather Zheng (who was on the 2005 list) decided to build a tool to help. They gathered input from more than a thousand artists to learn what they needed and how they would use any protective technology.

When users first found out about Adobe's new terms of service (which were quietly updated in February), there was an uproar. Adobe told users it could access their content "through both automated and manual methods" and use "techniques such as machine learning in order to improve [Adobe's] Services and Software." Many understood the update as the company forcing users to grant unlimited access to their work, for purposes of training Adobe's generative AI: Firefly. Late on Tuesday, Adobe issued a clarification: In an updated version of its terms of service agreement, it pledged not to train AI on its user content stored locally or in the cloud and gave users the option to opt-out of content analytics. Caught in the crossfire of intellectual property lawsuits, the ambiguous language used to previously update the terms shed light on a climate of acute skepticism among artists, many of whom over rely on Adobe for their work.

As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in Google and Bing. OpenAI, the 80 billion start-up that has partnered with Apple and Microsoft, feels ubiquitous; the auto-generated products of its ChatGPTs and DALL-Es are everywhere. Rarely has a technology risen--or been forced--into prominence amid such controversy and consumer anxiety. Certainly, some Americans are excited about AI, though a majority said in a recent survey, for instance, that they are concerned AI will increase unemployment; in another, three out of four said they believe it will be abused to interfere with the upcoming presidential election.

AI image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion trained their models with the works of countless artists without their permission or compensation, artist says. A new image protection tool was designed to poison AI programs that are trained using unauthorized data, giving creators a new way to safeguard their pieces and harm systems they say are stealing their works. Nightshade, a new tool from a University of Chicago team, puts data into an image's pixels that damage AI image generators that scour the web looking for pictures to train on, causing them to not work properly. An AI program might interpret a Nightshade-protected image of a dog, for example, as a cat, a photo of a car could be seen as a cow, and so on, causing the machine to malfunction, according to the team's research. A visitor takes a picture with his mobile phone of an image designed with artificial intelligence by Berlin-based digital creator Julian van Dieken inspired by Johannes Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring" at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague on March 9, 2023.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Kelly McKernan's acrylic and watercolor paintings are bold and vibrant, often featuring feminine figures rendered in bright greens, blues, pinks and purples. The style, in the artist's words, is "surreal, ethereal … dealing with discomfort in the human journey." The word "human" has a special resonance for McKernan these days.

AI image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion trained their models with the works of countless artists without their permission or compensation, artist says. AI-generated images that mimic an artist's style is a form of identity theft and compete with the very creatives whose work was used to train the models, a fine artist suing two artificial intelligence firms told Fox News. AI platforms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion use text and images from across the internet and other sources to train their machines to create images for their consumers. "Somebody is able to mimic my work because a company let them," Ortiz told Fox News. "It feels like some sort of industrial-level identity theft."