A.I. re-creations of the "Magnificent Ambersons" stars Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, and Tim Holt. Edward Saatchi first saw "The Magnificent Ambersons," Orson Welles's mangled masterpiece from 1942, when he was twelve years old, in the private screening room of his family's crenellated mansion, in West Sussex. Saatchi's parents had already shown him and his brother "Citizen Kane." But "Ambersons," Welles's follow-up film, about a wealthy Midwestern clan brought low, came with a bewitching backstory: R.K.O. had ripped the movie from the director's hands, slashed forty-three minutes, tacked on a happy ending, and destroyed the excised footage in order to free up vault space, leaving decades' worth of cinephiles to obsess over what might have been. Part of this outcome was the result of studio treachery, but Welles, owing to some combination of hubris and distraction, had let his film slip from his grasp. Saatchi recalled, "Around the family dinner table, that was always such a big topic: How much was Welles responsible for this? Mum was always quite tough on him." Saatchi's father, Maurice, a baron also known as Lord Saatchi, is one of two Iraqi British brothers who founded the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, in 1970, which led their family to become one of the richest in the U.K. Edward's mother, Josephine Hart, who died in 2011, was an Irish writer best known for her erotic thriller "Damage," which was adapted into a film by Louis Malle. Edward, born in 1985, grew up in London and at the sprawling country estate, surrounded by palatial gardens and classical statuary. He described his parents as "movie mad." The actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, a Saatchi family friend, recalled, "They had a cinema of their own inside the house, and it was a ritual of theirs every week to watch a film together." Aside from old movies, Edward was obsessed with "Star Trek"--especially the Holodeck, a device that conjured simulated 3-D worlds populated by characters who could interact with the members of the Starship Enterprise. That kind of wizardry didn't exist in the real world, at least not yet. But the young prince of the Saatchi castle had faith that someday it would, and that it could bring the original "Ambersons" back from oblivion. "To me, this is the lost holy grail of cinema," Saatchi told me recently, like Charles Foster Kane murmuring about Rosebud. "It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened."

An AI company is to reconstruct the missing portions of Orson Welles' legendary mutilated masterwork The Magnificent Ambersons, it has been announced. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Showrunner platform is planning to use its AI tools to assist in a recreation of the lost 43 minutes of Welles' 1942 film, removed and subsequently destroyed by Hollywood studio RKO. Edward Saatchi, CEO of interactive AI film-making studio Fable, which operates Showrunner, said in a statement to IndieWire: "We're starting with Orson Welles because he is the greatest storyteller of the last 200 years … So many people are rightly skeptical of AI's impact on cinema – but we hope that this gives people a sense of a positive contribution that AI can make for storytelling." Reports suggest that Showrunner is partnering with film-maker Brian Rose, who has been working since 2019 on an attempt to reconstruct the missing portions using animated sequences, as well as VFX expert Tom Clive. Welles started production in 1942 on The Magnificent Ambersons, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's celebrated novel about a midwestern family in decline, as a follow-up to his Oscar-winning debut Citizen Kane.

Justine Bateman won't name names, but a TV showrunner friend once came to her with a dilemma: their show's team was well into filming its second season when a network executive had an idea. A character in the pilot hadn't tested well with audiences, so they were just going to go in, use a little AI, and swap in someone else. The showrunner – and Bateman, an actor and director – were understandably incensed. "When you change the beginning of something, you change the creative trajectory," says Bateman. "There's going to be whiplash for the viewer when they get to episode three or four because what was set up in the pilot got messed with and now doesn't make sense." Using AI might have seemed like a simple solution to the executive, but to the showrunner, it was catastrophic.

After a year in which industry was knocked off its axis by the coming of age of artificial intelligence and the transition to an online world continued apace, new businesses are emerging and old industries reinventing themselves to adapt. Here, we look at five companies making the most of these turbulent times. It's been a difficult year for the operators of electric scooters, bikes and mopeds: most notably in Paris, where its e-scooter rental scheme was shut down by city authorities after a popular vote. One big player, Tier, nominated here a year ago as a company to watch, also lost its business in London when trial licences were renewed. Increasingly, in the crowded streets of the UK, rental ebikes are looking a better bet than the e-scooter: a more familiar mode of transport for occasional users, feeling safer and with the bonus of sitting rather than standing.

A US company says it has cracked the formula for making an episode of South Park using artificial intelligence – and it allows users to be the star of the show. Fable Simulation has created an AI tool that can create brief original episodes of the cartoon. It animates, it does the voices, it does the editing," the company's chief executive, Edward Saatchi, told the GamesBeat website. The tool, called AI Showrunner, allows users to enter a one- or two-sentence prompt that then generates an episode, and can create a character based on the user's own looks and voice. Generative AI, the catch-all term for tech systems that produce convincing text and images from prompts, has gripped the public imagination since the launch of ChatGPT in November. It has also played a part in Hollywood actors joining writers on the picket lines over wages, technology and how to divide the profits of the digital streaming era. "We did the South Park episode as an example and for research to show generative TV.

It was just another day in South Park. The kids were making fun of each other on the playground, while the parents were all doing their best to maintain their sanity in the small Colorado town. And then there was me, a tech journalist going door-to-door warning about the impending AI apocalypse. No, I wasn't actually guest starring on the long-running TV series -- I was thrust into an episode entirely produced by the Showrunner AI model from The Simulation, the next iteration of the VR studio Fable. All it took was some audio of my voice (recorded during a call with The Simulation's CEO Edward Saatchi), a picture and a two-sentence prompt to produce the episode.

Artificial intelligence is used in almost all segments today – Fashion, Business, Sports, Manufacturing, Defence, Medicine and more. But, can they bring solutions to all the earth's problems? Can AI frame policies to fight climate change? The answer might be an artificially intelligent robot that can help nations to effectively derive a data-based policy framework. AI is a powerful tool that can address the challenges posed by climate change.

In a recent demo conducted over Zoom, I watched as the music composition app Dynascore transformed the entire emotional tenor of a short video multiple times in under a minute, all without altering a single frame of the visuals. What began in my short briefing as a very serious workout ad with a very serious soundtrack--something where you'd expect to see neon sweat pouring out of the athlete's head behind a Gatorade logo--quickly changed in tone to something a bit funnier. The machine intelligence engine inside Dynascore swapped out the action film theme music for Beethoven's somber Moonlight Sonata, suddenly transforming the video into a dark comedy. A few taps of the mouse on the other end of the Zoom window, a few seconds of rendering, and I was watching the same video with a modern pop song now layered over it, equally form-fitting to the burly close-ups on screen. This time, the result felt more like a music video.

Lucy, the virtual being AI from Fable Studio's Wolves in the Walls virtual reality experience, is getting around. Now she has busted the fourth wall and moved into the real, or virtual world, of the virtual Sundance Film Festival. This week, Lucy appeared as a guest at Sundance. She appeared in Zoom sessions with other attendees, and they were able to quiz her. As an artificial intelligence character, she responded with her own comments and views on watching expressionist movies at Sundance.

Through the pixel fuzz of a sputtering Zoom connection, it's hard to be sure if the eyes staring out from the laptop screen are human. Lars Buttler is a real person, but he is the CEO of AI Foundation, a company that makes fake ones: trainable, artificially intelligent agents that might one day take the place of a human personal assistant, a customer service representative, or you yourself (if you aspire to omnipresence or digital deathlessness). When Buttler appeared in a Zoom call last week, there was something strange about the light hitting his shaved head, and the stark white office behind him definitely wasn't part of the material world. His speech was awkward, with overlong pauses and canned jokes that fell on a silent audience, but video calls are like that, at least for now, while people adjust to working lives forced into the ether. His eyes seemed awake and alive in a way that the faces of the other participants in the Zoom call--venture capitalist, a tech founder, and an activist, all of them puppeted by artificial intelligence--were not.