Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it."

Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use. "There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public," said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools. Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash. Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it...

Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don't have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling. Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future." Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies. Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars. When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep "storytelling human" by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while "keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists...."


Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics. The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software.

None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors.

Ironically, the Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify the job postings, their article acknowledges.


Three Disney jobs were for "content security," assessing AI tools and guarding against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work. But Disney is also hiring PhD-level talent "to study 'computer graphics and AI' for Pixar and Disney films," according to the article, and "people to 'bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.'"
Disney-owned visual effects shops Industrial Light & Magic "was searching for supervisors to 'explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)' to develop new production workflows."
Audio post-production unit Skywalker Sound "seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker's tone and pitch, and applying it to new content."
Amazon "was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fern Brady and Alison Spittle return for natter with no rules. Plus, the viral red phone is back on the bridge

Comedians Fern Brady and Alison Spittle return for a second series of comically chaotic chat. Expect plenty of wildly pinballing discussions with no theme other than what pops into their heads. Topics so far include Robert De Niro’s much younger partner, podcasts about nuns playing ultimate frisbee – and Brady on how “so many of Bonnie Blue’s views are so close to mine”. Business as usual, then. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

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Researchers employ technology in a bid to identify and retrieve remains in Spain’s Valley of the Fallen, in Manuel Correa’s emotional documentary

Perched on the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range overlooking Madrid is the Valle de los Caídos, a colossal memorial site constructed under the Franco regime. Supposedly a symbol of atonement and reconciliation, it has been criticised as an emblem of fascist glorification; it was where Franco was buried until his exhumation in 2019. There are, however, tens of thousands more bodies are trapped inside; in the aftermath of the White Terror, the corpses of those executed under the dictatorship were clandestinely removed from mass graves and deposited in the monument’s crypt. Both thought-provoking and heartwrenching, Manuel Correa’s documentary follows three grieving families and their fight to rescue their loved ones from this horrifying limbo.

Here, architecture emerges as a means of oppression. Through examining various construction blueprints, the film lays bare how the crypt was specifically designed for maximum inaccessibility. The bodies of the victims were meant to languish, hidden away, in perpetuity, as does the evidence of the dictatorship’s barbarity. To combat these efforts to bury history, Correa founded the Office of Documentary Research, where activists, geographers, and architects wade through the fog of secrecy with state-of-the-art technology.

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This brilliant account of attempts by the old guard to take back control captures the ludicrousness of it all beautifully

Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it’s struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour and former possession, Ukraine.

Why did the system of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev vanish so fast, without a fight? Because that’s how regimes fall in Russia: look at tsarism in 1917. (It almost happened again in June 2023, when the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men marched on Moscow largely unopposed; Vladimir Putin might have gone the way of Nicholas II had he not made some pretty wholesale promises to Prigozhin, then allegedly blown him up two months later.)

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From Blackpool to Bournemouth, these quintessentially British institutions celebrate a lot more than fish and chips and amusement arcades

Perched in our glass-fronted eyrie, 300 metres out to sea, we watch a murmuration of starlings rise and fall and swoop around us. When the show is over, we turn our attention to the food. I have a bespoke vegan menu based on the best early summer ingredients: jersey royals, asparagus, strawberries. My boyfriend orders off the weekly changing à la carte: slow-cooked beef dumplings followed by butter-poached halibut.

We are at Ebb, a restaurant at the end of the pier in Worthing, West Sussex, which opened in May. Its art-deco design and fine-dining dishes are a far cry from the fish-and-chip shops and ice-cream parlours more commonly found on seaside piers. But traditionalists need not despair: downstairs at Perch on the Pier, fish and chips – as well as tofish (tofu) and chips – are always on the menu, with a knickerbocker glory to round things off in fine retro style.

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Cortona on the Move 2026, an international photography festival, has opened with the theme Beautiful Country. More than 30 exhibitions explore Italy in all its complexity, blending the spirit of the aristocratic grand tour with the depth of contemporary documentaries

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The president’s pretext of stopping forced labour is only a ruse – he is trying to grab a share of global trade for the US

Here he goes again. The US President, Donald Trump, is increasing and decreasing tariffs willy-nilly, violating international agreements that he himself signed and almost surely violating federal law. The only difference this time is that he has a new pretext for abusing tariffs: stopping forced labour.

Of course, the administration is right that too little is being done about forced labour. But its stated concern is a ruse. With the new tariffs closely tracking the ones that Trump imposed on the basis of trade balances, are we supposed to believe that bilateral trade deficits just so happen to be highly correlated with the use of forced labour?

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RIO DE JANEIRO (ANP) - Beachvolleybalsters Katja Stam en Raïsa Schoon hebben in Rio de Janeiro voor het eerst sinds 2023 een Elite16-toernooi op hun naam geschreven. De nummers 6 van de wereldranglijst wonnen in de finale met 21-16 21-16 van titelverdedigsters Carolina Solberg en Rebecca Silva uit Brazilië.

Met de zege op Solberg en Silva, de mondiale nummers 1, veroverden Stam en Schoon hun derde medaille op rij in een Elite16-toernooi. De Nederlandse vrouwen pakten eind mei zilver in het Tsjechische Ostrava, waarna begin juli een bronzen medaille volgde in Gstaad in Zwitserland.

De laatste keer voor Rio dat Stam en Schoon een Elite16-toernooi wonnen, was in februari 2023 in Doha in Qatar. De twee vormen sinds 2019 een koppel. In 2022 bereikten ze de eerste plaats op de wereldranglijst. Ze waren actief als koppel op de Olympische Spelen van Tokio in 2021 (uitgeschakeld in tussenronde) en de Spelen van Parijs in 2024 (gestrand in de achtste finales).

De rattenoverlast bij vogelopvang De Houtsnip in Hoek van Holland is grotendeels voorbij. Het zorgcentrum voor gewonde vogels heeft ingrijpende maatregelen genomen om de rattenplaag in te dammen. Met succes: in de buitentuin worden overdag geen ratten meer gezien en ’s nachts nog maar twee tot vijf. En in de volières zijn ze helemaal verdwenen, meldt de opvang.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: