For $30m, OpenAI thinks it can make an AI-generated feature-length animated film. Toy Story cost the same 30 years ago. Which will be better? CC-licensed photo by Ken Yamaguchi on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Entertaining? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Learning lens blur fields • MIT/University of Toronto/ Adobe
Esther Lin et al:
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Optical blur is an inherent property of any lens system and is challenging to model in modern cameras because of their complex optical elements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a high‑dimensional neural representation of blur—the lens blur field—and a practical method for acquisition.
The lens blur field is a multilayer perceptron (MLP) designed to (1) accurately capture variations of the lens 2‑D point spread function over image‑plane location, focus setting, and optionally depth; and (2) represent these variations parametrically as a single, sensor‑specific function. The representation models the combined effects of defocus, diffraction, aberration, and accounts for sensor features such as pixel color filters and pixel‑specific micro‑lenses.
We provide a first‑of‑its‑kind dataset of 5‑D blur fields—for smartphone cameras, camera bodies equipped with a variety of lenses, etc. Finally, we show that acquired 5‑D blur fields are expressive and accurate enough to reveal, for the first time, differences in optical behavior of smartphone devices of the same make and model.
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Find this puzzling? Let’s boil it down a little.
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Every lens leaves a blur signature—a hidden fingerprint in every photo. A Lens blur field captures this device-specifc blur. It can be used to tell apart “identical” phones by their optics, deblur images, and render realistic blurs.
Two smartphones of the same make can have subtly different PSFs—your phone has its own blur signature. We show this with the lens blur fields of two iPhone 12 Pros. [Diagram omitted, but in paper.]
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What this boils down to, even further: 1) you could verify that a specific smartphone camera took a particular photo 2) you could verify, through the absence of microscopic blur, that something was, for example, AI-generated. It’s very interesting. (Thanks Adewale A for the link.)
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Johnson backs Virginia wind project in break with Trump • POLITICO
Kelsey Brugger:
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House Speaker Mike Johnson is going to bat for an offshore wind project near Virginia Beach at a time when the Trump administration has halted the construction of similar projects and the president has warned that support for the industry could cost politicians their careers.
The Louisiana Republican told POLITICO’s E&E News on Tuesday that he voiced support to Cabinet secretaries about the nearly complete Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. It’s the largest planned offshore wind venture in the country and has thus far escaped the administration’s wrath.
The speaker was responding to a question about his efforts to relay support for a project important to a vulnerable House Republican from the party’s more moderate wing.
“Yes, I’ve talked to the Trump team and there are ongoing conversations about that,” the speaker said. “I understand the priority for Virginians and we want to do right by them, so we’ll see.”
Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), who represents the competitive Virginia Beach area, raised her concerns with the speaker on the House floor last week, as soon as Congress returned from the August recess. She said the project was “important to Virginia” due to its ties with a major naval base there.
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Unexpected. (This is a different location from the one that Orsted is suing to get restarted, which is off Rhode Island and Connecticut.) The Trump admin is doing insane things to wind projects – pointless, stupid things which basically waste huge amounts of money – and it’s frankly astonishing to see Johnson doing something sensible.
But those are the times we live in: sensible government is a surprise.
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Snapchat allows drug dealers to operate openly on platform, finds Danish study • The Guardian
Miranda Bryant:
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Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an “overwhelming number” of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.
The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs.
Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as “coke”, “weed” and “molly”. When researchers reported 40 of these profiles to Snapchat, the company removed only 10 of them. The other 30 reports were rejected, they said.
Snapchat said it had “proactively disabled” 75% of the accounts reported and had now disabled all of them.
The investigation also found that despite previous criticism, Snapchat’s recommendation systems were spreading and promoting profiles of those selling illegal drugs to users – including to children who had not previously shown an interest in or interacted with drug-dealing profiles.
Within a few hours, the researchers’ 13-year-old test profiles had recommendations to add up to 70 suspected drug-dealing profiles because one friend was connected to a drug-dealing profile.
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OpenAI backs AI-made animated feature film • WSJ
Jessica Toonkel:
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OpenAI wants to prove that generative artificial intelligence can make movies faster and cheaper than Hollywood does today.
The startup is lending its tools and computing resources to the creation of a feature-length animated movie made largely with AI that is expected to be released in theaters globally next year.
“Critterz,” about forest creatures who go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger, is the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Nelson started sketching out the characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI’s new DALL-E image-generation tool.
Now, he has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles, aiming to debut a feature-length version of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The team is attempting to make the movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take, said James Richardson, co-founder of London-based Vertigo Films. Vertigo is producing the film along with Native Foreign, a studio that specializes in using AI along with traditional video-production tools.
“Critterz” has a budget of less than $30m, far less than what animated films typically cost. The production team plans to cast human actors for character voices and hire artists to draw sketches that are fed into OpenAI’s tools, including GPT-5 and image-generating models.
“OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it’s much more impactful if someone does it,” Nelson said. “That’s a much better case study than me building a demo.”
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Toy Story, in 1995, cost about $30m – which is about $64m in today’s money. I’ll bet that this film is not even half as good (not that there’s really a way to measure that). It grossed just short of $400m. Don’t think that will happen for this one.
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Anonymity is dead and we’re all content now • The Verge
Elizabeth Lopatto:
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Look, it’s easy to see why that Coldplay couple went viral. The exaggerated response to being on camera — and trying to duck an arena’s kiss cam — is funny. The couple is possibly cheating (immoral, loathed by TikTok) and Chris Martin (the man who knowingly married Gwyneth Paltrow and then consciously uncoupled!) gets a good dunk in. All someone had to do was identify them, and they had one of the world’s most powerful accelerants: the bad behavior of a CEO with one of his employees. It was perfect internet content.
The fact that it’s perfect internet content is also what encourages us to surveil each other. And the consequences of the funny internet video were very real. The CEO resigned. His former subordinate is getting a divorce, which I know because People and E! News reported on the filing as news. The humiliation didn’t end with the viral video — it’s still ongoing, and by writing about it, I am in some sense participating.
This is all possible because our society built a panopticon that any of us can use against any other at will. And while virality isn’t new, TikTok’s algorithm makes it easier than ever for videos to take off unexpectedly, because users don’t even have to share the video to make it go wide. You don’t even have to get caught on a kiss cam at a concert.
…Living in the panopticon means every person you meet is also someone who can ruin your life. Take “West Elm Caleb,” a guy who went viral for… dating. Apparently, he met women on dating apps, was briefly enthusiastic, and then ghosted them. (Not great behavior, but hardly uncommon.) Of course he was immediately doxxed. As the internet has increasingly traded on dating app screenshots for content, people have begun writing responses to each other with the assumption that the conversation won’t remain private. That does seem counter to, you know, dating, since a successful relationship requires vulnerability, the exact thing online daters now avoid.
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Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem • Ars Technica
Jonathan Gitlin:
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Earlier this week, Ars spent some time driving the new Nissan Leaf. We have to wait until Friday to tell you how that car drives, but among the changes from the previous generation are door handles that retract flush with the bodywork, for the front doors at least. Car designers love them for not ruining the lines of the door with the necessities of real life, but is the benefit from drag reduction worth the safety risk?
That question is in even sharper relief this morning. Bloomberg’s Dana Hull has a deeply reported article that looks at the problem of Tesla’s door handles, which fail when the cars lose power.
The electric vehicle manufacturer chose not to use conventional door locks in its cars, preferring to use IP-based electronic controls. While the front seat occupants have always had a physical latch that can open the door, it took some years for the automaker to add emergency releases for the rear doors, and even now that it has, many rear-seat Tesla passengers will be unaware of where to find or how to operate the emergency release.
A power failure also affects first responders’ ability to rescue occupants, and Hull’s article details a number of tragic fatal crashes where the occupants of a crashed Tesla were unable to escape the smoke and flames of their burning cars.
In fact, the styling feature might be on borrowed time. It seems that Chinese authorities have been concerned about retractable door handles for some time now and are reportedly close to banning them from 2027. Flush-fit door handles fail far more often during side impacts than regular handles, delaying egress or rescue time after a crash. During heavy rain, flush-fit door handles have short-circuited, trapping people in their cars. Chinese consumers have even reported an increase in finger injuries as they get trapped or pinched.
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Flush handles are just a puzzle to people who haven’t encountered that particular car before. They’re terrible UX.
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Roundtable – Multiple AI Models Brainstorm Together
Roundtable:
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Can AIs audit each other for bias and truth?
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This asks a series of chatbots (Google Gemini, Claude 4, etc) to answer this. They reply. The replies are all hedged around – “well yes but also no, and to sum up, maybe!” – in that annoying fashion that chatbots have when you ask them anything more complicated than how many Rs there are in raspberry.
Just feed them some questions and let them fight over it like piranhas. Cage fighting chatbots: that’s what I want.
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The Kong Edition • Why Is This Interesting?
Ryan McManus:
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It’s 1970. A guy named Joe Markham is operating a garage in downtown Denver, which at the time was plagued by burglaries. The local police were unable to provide much in the way of protection except for a bit of advice: Every good junkyard has a dog.
Turns out Joe knew of a dog in need of a home who might fit the bill—a German shepherd named Fritz, who was originally destined to become a K9 officer with the Denver Police Department, except for one problem—Fritz could not stop chewing.
Fritz would chew anything—dog bones, radiator hoses, even rocks. The last one got Joe worried, as Fritz’s obsessive rock chewing was wearing down his teeth. Then one day, as the legend goes, Joe was tearing down the suspension of a customer’s late 60’s VW Type 2 Bus (the hippie kind) when he heard Fritz going crazy: The dog was chewing on a bulbous rubber axle stop that had been laid aside during the repair.
Axle stops are a high-density rubber component of certain types of suspensions, designed to keep the axle from contacting the leaf springs under heavy load. By design, they need to be durable, offset deflection, and retain their shape under duress. This also turns out to be the ideal qualities of a chew toy.
The Kong represents a perfect case study in accidental innovation: The VW Bus bump stop had a distinctive conical shape: wider at the bottom to distribute impact force over a larger area, then tapering to a narrower top to fit snugly into the suspension housing. This automotive engineering requirement created an inherently unstable shape that would bounce erratically in any direction when dropped.
What’s wild is how perfectly this automotive function translated to canine psychology, despite serving a completely different purpose. Dogs are natural problem-solvers and foragers, with hunting instincts that crave unpredictable movement patterns.
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Very Post-It Note glue/WD-40 invention.
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A million weight-loss jab users at risk of invalid travel or health insurance • The Times
George Nixon:
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More than a million users of weight-loss jabs could be at risk of invalidating their travel and health insurance amid confusion over whether they should be listed as medical treatments.
Some 26% of 1,000 UK adults polled by the market researcher Consumer Intelligence said that they did not know how they would classify the use of drugs such as Mounjaro, Ozempic or Wegovy when buying cover.
Only 24% said that they would classify them as medical treatments for health conditions; 11% said that they would call them cosmetic treatments like botox; while 10% that they were lifestyle tools.
Insurers normally require consumers to disclose any pre-existing medical conditions when they buy insurance and their cover can be invalidated if they don’t, even if they make a claim that has nothing to do with that condition.
Ian Hughes, the chief executive of Consumer Intelligence, said that the confusion over how weight-loss jabs should be described could leave claimants out of pocket.
He said: “This confusion isn’t academic — it has real consequences for millions buying travel and health insurance. When a quarter of the population doesn’t know whether their medication counts as being for a pre-existing condition, we’re seeing a perfect storm for claim disputes and coverage gaps.”
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Still fascinated by the way these GLP-1 drugs are worming their way into our consciousness.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 