Taylor Sheridan, the most overextended man in television, has done it again. Landman, according to the internal metrics at Paramount, is the most watched original show the streamer has ever had. Remember, Yellowstone proper is on Peacock.) The West Texas–set story, which stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, an all-purpose problem solver for a fictional oil company owned by Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), has also developed a bit more of a critical halo than Sheridan's other TV ventures, popping up on best-of-2024 lists, edging into mainstream discourse via podcasts that typically cover more-prestige fare, and retaining a score of 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And the week before Landman wrapped up, this past Sunday night, its lead actor, Billy Bob Thornton, attended the Golden Globes as a nominee for his role in the series.

A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a speaker's pulse racing or "umms" lengthening, a generative AI bot that mimics their voice could simply take over. That cutting-edge idea wasn't revealed at a big company event or in an academic journal. Instead, it appeared in a 1,500-word post on a little-known, free website called TDCommons.org Until WIRED received a link to an idea on TDCommons last year and got curious, Google had never spoken with the media about its website.

In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) wanders through crowded city streets, bumping past sailors and women in red dresses, before learning that they aren't real people, but instead simulations. In future Keanu Reeves movies, it's possible that everyone around him might be simulated, too. On July 13, Hollywood producers advertised a "groundbreaking AI proposal" involving the "use of digital replicas or…digital alterations of a performance." The SAG-AFTRA union lambasted the proposal, accusing the studios of simply trying to replace background actors with AI. Studios could scan an actor, pay them for a day, and then simply use AI to insert them into the rest of the film, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's chief negotiator, said in a press conference. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers responded that this characterization was inaccurate and that they would "establish a comprehensive set of provisions that require informed consent and fair compensation when a'digital replica'" or similar AI technology is used.

The tools of modern cinema have become increasingly accessible to independent and even amateur filmmakers, but realistic CG characters (like them or not) have remained the province of big-budget projects. Wonder Dynamics aims to change that with a platform that lets creators literally drag and drop a CG character into any scene as if it was professionally captured and edited. Yes, it sounds a bit like overpromising. Your skepticism is warranted, but as a skeptic myself I have to say I was extremely impressed with what the startup showed of Wonder Studio, the company's web-based editor. This isn't a toy like an AR filter -- it's a full-scale tool, and one that co-founders Nikola Todorovic and Tye Sheridan have longed for themselves.

For every problem you can think of, someone is out there pitching a solution that involves artificial intelligence. AI could help solve such intractable problems as climate change and dangerous work conditions, the technology's most eager boosters promise. It could even fix the much-maligned "Game of Thrones" finale, if you believe one of the industry's most powerful proponents and a featured speaker at this month's South by Southwest conference. "Imagine if you could ask your AI to make a new ending that goes a different way," said Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, the research group behind the conversation software ChatGPT and the image-generation module DALL-E. "Maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something, having interactive experiences."

The question of whether AI-generated outputs can be patented is impacting how technology companies can protect their intellectual property. Some of the most hyped up AI technologies are systems that can produce surprisingly creative outputs. Uncanny poems, short stories, and striking digital art have all been generated by machines. The human effort required to initiate these processes are often trivial: a few clicks or typing a text description can guide the machine towards producing something useful. Similar generative AI models are also being applied in scientific and technological applications.

According to ancient Nine Inch Nails (NIN) lore, we're living in Year Zero, which began on February 10th, 2022. It's a period of extreme dystopia, where a fundamentalist religious government oversees an omniscient Bureau of Morality and a strange phenomenon known as "The Presence" -- two massive spectral arms reaching from the sky -- is spotted across the country. Year Zero was an alternate reality game (ARG) that accompanied the NIN album of the same name, and it included events that immersed fans in a theocratic police state. It was designed by 42 Entertainment, which also made Halo 2's I Love Bees ARG and Last Call Poker for Activision's Gun. The game began in February 2007 at the tail end of a "golden age" for commercial ARGs, which included an Audi campaign, ARG companions to major TV shows, and an "interactive clothing" company.

Wonder Dynamics aims to make "blockbuster-level" visual effects achievable by living-room-level creators using AI and cloud services, though it has kept its product closely under wraps. The secretive company, which boasts a star-studded set of advisors, has raised a $10 million A round ahead of a planned launch later in 2022. The company was founded by Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye Sheridan; they joined forces some years back after working on a film together and finding they shared a belief in democratizing cinema tools. Of course many tools have come down in price and difficulty, such as high-resolution cameras and the computing power to edit and color footage. But serious VFX are another matter, and the higher fidelity of today's cameras and displays demand improved quality in CG, something that has kept the cost and barrier to entry high.

To interact seamlessly with robots, users must infer the causes of a robot's behavior and be confident about that inference. Hence, trust is a necessary condition for human-robot collaboration (HRC). Despite its crucial role, it is largely unknown how trust emerges, develops, and supports human interactions with nonhuman artefacts. Here, we review the literature on trust, human-robot interaction, human-robot collaboration, and human interaction at large. Early models of trust suggest that trust entails a trade-off between benevolence and competence, while studies of human-to-human interaction emphasize the role of shared behavior and mutual knowledge in the gradual building of trust. We then introduce a model of trust as an agent's best explanation for reliable sensory exchange with an extended motor plant or partner. This model is based on the cognitive neuroscience of active inference and suggests that, in the context of HRC, trust can be cast in terms of virtual control over an artificial agent. In this setting, interactive feedback becomes a necessary component of the trustor's perception-action cycle. The resulting model has important implications for understanding human-robot interaction and collaboration, as it allows the traditional determinants of human trust to be defined in terms of active inference, information exchange and empowerment. Furthermore, this model suggests that boredom and surprise may be used as markers for under and over-reliance on the system. Finally, we examine the role of shared behavior in the genesis of trust, especially in the context of dyadic collaboration, suggesting important consequences for the acceptability and design of human-robot collaborative systems.

From writer-director Neil Burger ("Divergent") comes another young adult science-fiction tale, this one of a cruise ship in deep space full of restless teenagers under the supervision of a single adult. Some of the young people find out that the adult is keeping them drugged and docile and forcing them to reproduce artificially. Is that a recipe for YA trouble or what? Just when you thought you could not watch one more film of this kind, here is "Voyagers," a title that sounds enough like "Passengers" (2016) to put you off you spaceship-grown peas and carrots. The story is set in 2063 when Earth is ravaged, and scientists have searched for another planet to colonize.