Barely three months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would be bringing user-generated AI slop to Disney+ as part of a landmark $1 billion investment into OpenAI that would allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters. The announcement was so important that Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both championed it in a press release that is full of the kind of cope that Silicon Valley AI boosters and some Hollywood executives suggest would unleash a new era of moviemaking and storytelling powered by AI that is cheaper than making movies with human workers.

“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Iger said. 

“Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees,” the press release stated. “Under the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+, and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI’s models to power new experiences for Disney+ subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney’s stories and characters. Sora and ChatGPT Images are expected to start generating fan-inspired videos with Disney’s multi-brand licensed characters in early 2026.”

Tuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney’s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood. Disney did not even get to the point here it allowed people to build anything with Disney characters before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor and its investment.

Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing. 

Disney is pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI entirely. Other efforts to slopify Hollywood look underwhelming, appear to have been quietly shelved, or have utterly failed to gather any audience whatsoever. This news does not bode well for OpenAI and it likely does not bode well for Paramount’s megamerger with Warner Brothers, a deal whose financial terms and the debt involved only make sense if you can believe in a future in which the cost of creating blockbuster movies is drastically reduced by AI via huge numbers of people losing their jobs. 

At the time of Disney’s announcement with OpenAI, it was hard to imagine why Disney would infect its flagship paid streaming service with content from a service whose viral videos consisted of users turning Pikachu into a felon and SpongeBob into Hitler. It was not clear why Disney would want AI slop made by randos to live next to, say the $200 million Toy Story 4 or any number of Disney’s masterpieces. It was also hard to imagine why a company that has so aggressively enforced its copyright would suddenly say all bets are off for Sam Altman’s plagiarism machine. The only thing that made any sense is that Hollywood executives, like Silicon Valley executives, hate paying for human labor so much that they have convinced themselves that their customers would happily consume AI slop if it was shoved down their throats. 

After Sora’s initial novelty wore off, it became clear that people do not actually want this, and that the people using Sora were using it at great financial cost to OpenAI in order to largely take videos off-platform to spam other social media sites. The Sora subreddit has been basically dead for months outside of people attempting to figure out how to get it to create nudes or people complaining about content violations. When I scrolled Sora Tuesday evening I almost exclusively saw videos that had few or no likes or comments. I saw very little Disney content, though I did see a lot of South Park, Peppa Pig, and SpongeBob videos, none of which were very good. 

The death of Sora is a good time to check in on how other attempts to slopify Hollywood are going. In December 2024, I wrote about Chinese television giant TCL’s attempt to make an AI-generated movie studio called TCL Film Machine, which was pitched as a “key pillar of TCLArt, an important brand initiative of TCL to make art more accessible and inspiring worldwide.” I went to the premiere of a series of short films that were pitched as a new way of making movies faster and cheaper. At the time, I asked Chris Regina, TCL’s then Chief Content Officer and a leader of the TCL Film Machine project what the plan was. 

“If you can imagine where we might be a year or 18 months from now, I think that in some ways is probably what scares a lot of the industry because they can see where it sits today, and as much as they want to poke holes or be critical of it, they do realize that it will continue to be better,” he said, 14 months ago. 

Regina and another TCL executive on that project now have other jobs. TCL itself has released the five shorts I saw, as well as an 11-minute, widely mocked romcom film called Next Stop Paris, and a four-minute film called Memory Maker. Memory Maker was released 13 months ago and has 1,771 views on YouTube. Next Stop Paris has 10,000 views on YouTube. Comments have been turned off for both movies. The “applications” page for prospective TCL Film Machine projects is now just a static page, and TCL hasn’t mentioned AI films in any of its press releases in roughly a year; many of its recent announcements have to do with releasing reruns of shows from the 80s and 90s. 

Meanwhile, much-hyped “AI movies” or “AI special effects,” including the Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise AI fight scene that the New York Times boldly declared “spooked Hollywood” have been wildly overhyped, still have various continuity errors and an uncanny feel, or are simply not movies in any meaningful sense. 

This is not to say that AI will have no role in Hollywood or that people are not making money from AI slop. Hollywood studios are using AI behind the scenes for editing, storyboarding, scratch voiceover, and a handful of other things. But the wild hype of AI slop as a direct threat to human storytelling and AI tools as a replacement for talented humans in Hollywood has not come to pass and it’s not clear if it ever will. The AI movies at AI film festivals continue to suck and the people who show up to them are largely people involved in making them or invested in having them work out. AI slop is effective on social media, meanwhile, not because it is good or because people like it but because these platforms are flooded with it, because social media companies are invested in making generative AI tools, and because their algorithms are wildly broken. It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.

And the end of Sora does not mean there is no demand for AI video generators, but it does mean that the overwhelming use case for AI video generators continues to be what it has always been: people making porn, nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation, and low-effort slop at scale. The people making this type of content do not want to deal with guardrails or limitations and so have largely flocked to open source and Chinese models. When you take away those use cases, it turns out there’s basically nothing left.

When Meta announced its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds last week a lot of us laughed. 

Social scientist Dr Ruth Diaz was not one of them. 

Diaz worked for Meta as a VR community design developer in the early days of the Horizon Worlds project and left in 2022. After Meta’s announcement last week, Diaz wrote a post on LinkedIn attempting to articulate her feelings. “I cannot overstate the scale of institutional betrayal this represents,” she said in her post. “Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta to claim transformation. What he has actually done is strip-mine the trust and labor of every creator who took that promise seriously. That should sit on his record permanently. I feel horror. Rage. Grief. Shame. The specific shame of having believed.”

Diaz said she fell in love with VR after her brother lent her a PC virtual reality setup and she collaborated on art with people spontaneously in a virtual world. “VR puts us into a very disinhibited state where we can open our hearts and try on new identities,” she told 404 Media. “It's an equalizer of identities, some because of the anonymity, but some because we all choose our own skin. That creates an even footing of sorts.”

She said she signed on with Meta after being impressed by an early version of their Horizon Worlds toolkit. After joining the company, she spent some of her time getting employees into headsets and showing them around the virtual worlds people had made. “And many times, I had them in tears by the end because they finally understood what was possible,” she said. “And I don't think any other social app has ever built a tool that had that combination of simplicity and hands on learning how to create.”

In a follow up post on LinkedIn, Diaz shared some of these worlds including the interactive biography of an amputee named Lacey and an Underground Railroad experience from a woman named Bizerka. She pointed out that Alcoholics Anonymous holds meetings in Horizon Worlds and shared a church that meets on Meta’s platform every Sunday.

Diaz’s fears were allayed somewhat on March 18 when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth backpedaled on shutting Horizon Worlds down completely. During an AMA posted to Instagram, he told fans that the company would keep Horizon Worlds accessible for “the foreseeable future.” But Meta is capricious and it’s impossible to know exactly how far into the future its imagining.

“I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll work, but I think it could, because it’s very unusual for them to flinch,” Diaz told 404 Media. “They usually just kind of hunker down and pretend they don’t see it and go full PR.”

She said that Bosworth’s promise to keep Horizon Worlds running wasn’t a big enough promise.  “The way they have behaved here is profoundly harmful and I would deem it a type of psychological torture from corporate neglect,” she said. “But the horror of this is ongoing, because [Bosworth] came out and said: ‘we’re going to keep it for now,’ that doesn’t reassure anybody, that doesn’t help anybody. That makes people feel foolish for being upset but also completely uncertain about their futures.”

Wagner James Au, author of Making a Metaverse That Matters and the blog New World Notes, told 404 Media that he’s sympathetic. He also noted that building the type of community she did without the support and infrastructure of a company like Meta is difficult. “A common mistake is to assume the Metaverse should be a non-corporate open source project. Those have been tried and they've all failed to gain traction,” he said.

In the end, the social connections Diaz fostered will remain even as the spaces fade. “Metaverse communities are what's important and permanent, not any particular 3D space they're associated with,” James Au said. “User communities create, congregate, and socialize around 3D spaces, but those spaces age over time and lose their luster. What's important is that they helped foster social connections which can be resilient beyond any one platform. It's why so much metaverse activity happens outside the immersive space on Bluesky, Reddit, etc.”

Like Diaz, James Au doesn’t trust the Zuckerberg. “Meta has consistently failed in its responsibilities to users, so I'm not sure it's realistic for Horizon Worlds users to expect anything from it now,” he said.

Meta’s Metaverse was doomed from the start but that doesn’t mean the idea itself is bad or even Meta’s underlying technology. Diaz and others found community there. “Despite the ups and downs and branding and ‘Metaverse is dead’ and whatever, all these twists and turns, the tools [themselves] have incredible merit. And that’s the only message I’ve ever tried to bring, and I’m just heartbroken that it got attached to these companies,” Diaz said.

De hoogste militair van Nederland en die van een dertigtal vooral Europese landen gaan overleggen over het breken van de Iraanse blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz. Ze komen later deze week bijeen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk, dat het voortouw wil nemen in de nieuwe 'Hormuz-coalitie'.

Nederland en andere bondgenoten van de VS bewaarden aanvankelijk afstand van de Amerikaans-Israëlische oorlog met Iran, maar komen nu meer in beweging. Ze voelen de gevolgen van de blokkade, met hogere brandstof- en kunstmestprijzen en mogelijk zelfs tekorten. Bovendien eist de boze Amerikaanse president Donald Trump hun assistentie bij het weer op gang brengen van de scheepvaart door de zeestraat.

Toen grote Europese landen en Japan donderdag verklaarden te willen helpen met "passende" maatregelen, was Nederland daar meteen bij. Commandant der Strijdkrachten Onno Eichelsheim hield zondag al een videovergadering met deze collega's. Inmiddels telt de coalitie in wording een dertigtal landen.

In een kliniek waar je wordt behandeld voor techverslaving, gaat het niet om je wifi-wachtwoord, maar om afkicken alsof het om alcohol of heroïne gaat

Een grijze, splitlevel villa tussen de naaldbossen bij Seattle. Binnen geen smartphones, geen gameconsoles, geen VR-brillen – alleen een groep twintigers die ontwenningsverschijnselen hebben omdat hun telefoon is afgepakt. In de reSTART-kliniek wordt techverslaving behandeld als een gedragsverslaving op het niveau van alcohol- of drugsgebruik, met wekenlang totaalverbod op internet, social media en games

De cliënten zijn niet de cliché tieners met “iets te veel schermtijd”, maar jongeren en jongvolwassenen die zijn uitgevallen op school, nauwelijks nog douchen en sociale contacten hebben ingeruild voor VR-werelden, Discord-servers en AI-chatbots. Een verblijf kost zo’n 1.000 dollar per dag en duurt gemiddeld 12 tot 16 weken, inclusief 24 tot 30 uur therapie per week, van groepstherapie tot lichaamsgerichte oefeningen.

Wat hier gebeurt, raakt aan een breder debat: is “techverslaving” een modewoord, of een reële aandoening? Techbedrijven benadrukken dat er geen hard causaal bewijs is en spreken liever van problematisch gebruik. Tegelijk erkent de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie sinds 2019 “gaming disorder” als officiële diagnose: een patroon van gamen waarbij controleverlies, prioriteit boven alles en doorgaan ondanks schade centraal staan.

Neurowetenschappers wijzen erop dat sociale media, games en eindeloze scroll-feeds het beloningssysteem in de hersenen prikkelen met dopaminepieken die lijken op die bij middelenverslaving. Het verschil: van alcohol kun je volledig afblijven, van technologie niet. De oprichter van reSTART vergelijkt het daarom eerder met een eetstoornis: je moet leren doseren in een wereld waar het “verslavende middel” overal is.

Voor ouders en beleidsmakers wordt de vraag urgent. In de VS lopen rechtszaken tegen Meta, YouTube en andere platforms wegens “addictief ontwerp” – oneindig scrollen, autoplay, notificaties – die jongeren naar 16 uur schermtijd per dag zouden hebben geduwd, met depressie en zelfbeschadiging tot gevolg. In Europa groeit ondertussen de roep om strengere regels rond algoritmes, dataverzameling en kinderbescherming.

De werkelijkheid in die kliniek in het bos laat zien wat er op het spel staat. Cliënten leren weer slapen zonder blauw licht, een gesprek voeren zonder notificaties, verveling verdragen zonder TikTok. Eén van hen stapt na maanden afkicken over op een “domme” telefoon, en schrikt wanneer zelfs het eindeloos kiezen van een nieuw achtergrondscherm alweer voelt als de eerste trek.

De vraag is dus niet alleen of Big Tech juridisch verantwoordelijk is, maar ook hoeveel schermtijd we zelf nog normaal vinden – tot de intake in zo’n kliniek dichterbij blijkt dan gedacht.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn woensdag met flinke winsten geopend na de koersverliezen een dag eerder. De stemming onder beleggers op Wall Street kreeg steun van berichten dat de Verenigde Staten Iran een plan hebben voorgelegd dat een einde aan de oorlog zou moeten maken.

De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde kort na opening 1,2 procent hoger op 46.690 punten. De brede S&P 500-index klom 1,1 procent tot 6628 punten en de technologiebeurs Nasdaq steeg 1,2 procent tot 22.029 punten. Op dinsdag waren nog minnen tot 0,8 procent te zien.

De olieprijzen gingen fors omlaag door de hoop op een hervatting van de olieaanvoer via de Straat van Hormuz. Een vat Amerikaanse olie werd 5 procent goedkoper op 87,60 dollar en Brentolie kostte ruim 5 procent minder op 98,81 dollar per vat.

Arm Holdings

Arm Holdings behoorde tot de winnaars met een plus van 12 procent. De chipontwikkelaar gaat voor het eerst eigen chips verkopen. De stap levert naar verwachting binnen vijf jaar zo'n 15 miljard dollar per jaar aan extra omzet op. De totale omzet zal daarmee toenemen tot ongeveer 25 miljard dollar, vijf keer zoveel als nu. Meta Platforms, de eigenaar van Facebook en Instagram, wordt de eerste grote klant voor de nieuwe AI-chips voor datacenters van Arm. De Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC zal de chips voor het bedrijf gaan produceren.

ConocoPhillips zakte 0,9 procent. De olieproducent is niet van plan om snel terug te keren naar Venezuela. Volgens topman Ryan Lance heeft het land nog een lange weg te gaan om de miljardeninvesteringen aan te trekken die nodig zijn om de oliesector te herstellen. ConocoPhillips behoorde tot de bedrijven waarvan de bezittingen in Venezuela in 2007 onder president Hugo Chávez in beslag werden genomen.

Destiny Tech100

Destiny Tech100 werd 16 procent meer waard na berichten dat SpaceX mogelijk deze week een aanvraag indient voor een beursgang in New York. Het investeringsfonds heeft een grote positie in het commerciële ruimtevaartbedrijf van Elon Musk.

Robinhood Markets klom bijna 7 procent. Het handelsplatform kondigde een nieuw aandeleninkoopprogramma van 1,5 miljard dollar aan. Huizenbouwer KB Home zakte 2,4 procent na tegenvallende resultaten en vooruitzichten.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De minimale leeftijd waarop mensen vuurwerk mogen afsteken, moet naar 18 jaar, vindt het kabinet. Staatssecretaris Annet Bertram (Infrastructuur en Waterstaat, CDA) sprak in een debat steun uit voor een voorstel van CDA en de Partij voor de Dieren om dat te regelen. "Ik denk dat het verstandig is om dat te doen."

Komende jaarwisseling is siervuurwerk naar verwachting verboden. Groepen mensen die toch vuurwerk willen afsteken, moeten daarvoor een uitzondering aanvragen bij hun gemeente. In het kabinetsbesluit over de voorwaarden voor zo'n uitzondering staat nu nog dat de "ontbranders" minstens 16 jaar moeten zijn.

"Een leeftijdsgrens van 18 jaar sluit beter aan bij bestaande regels rond veiligheid en verantwoordelijkheid", schrijven Jantine Zwinkels (CDA) en Ines Kostić (Partij voor de Dieren) in hun motie. Ook de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Gemeenten (VNG) pleitte voor een grens van 18 jaar.

'Volstrekt ridicuul'

"Volstrekt ridicuul", reageerde Caroline van der Plas (BBB). "Ik snap wel dat een peuter van 3 dat niet mag doen, dat begrijpt iedereen. Als jij 17 jaar bent, en je weet gewoon hoe je met vuurwerk moet omgaan... Dat gaan we toch echt niet doen, hoop ik."

Zwinkels antwoordde dat ze geen nieuwe regel voorstelt. "Het is een aanpassing van de bestaande regels. Er komt geen enkele regel bij." De handhaving en de uitvoerbaarheid gaan er volgens haar juist op vooruit.

When we can’t control what’s happening in the world, there is some solace in the predictability of a comforting routine and the safe landing of a warm bed

An early bedtime is my number one prescription when things go awry. It’s a reliable comfort through all life seasons, especially when uncertainty is rife and sleep is disturbed.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I spend a considerable amount of time each day thinking about how nice it would be to get into bed. We’ve just passed the autumn equinox which means we’ll light the first fire soon and “hottie season” will officially commence. Yes, my partner of 20 years is handsome but it’s the hot-water bottle that gets preference when the temperature drops, the world threatens to implode and extra cosiness is required.

• UK participation levels more than doubled in 2025

• 860,000 Britons played padel at least once last year

It was once seen as a quirky upstart or continental fad. But padel now has nearly a million players across the UK after participation levels more than doubled in 2025.

According to LTA figures seen by the Guardian, 860,000 Britons played padel at least once last year – up from 400,000 in 2024 and 129,000 in 2023 – as the racket sport’s dizzying rise continued.

Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me and Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul are joined by books on exile by Ece Temelkuran and Judith Mackrell and an ode to the arts by Daisy Fancourt

Arundhati Roy, Lyse Doucet and Judith Mackrell are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Jane Rogoyska, Ece Temelkuran and Daisy Fancourt are also in contention for the £30,000 prize, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

To browse all books in the 2026 Women’s prize for nonfiction shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The true quality of a fabric is revealed by a neutral tone – one that beautifully offsets the brighter tones of 2026. Just don’t mention John Major

Sometimes a colour name is a whole mood. Rouge Noir: the stamp of cult 1990s glamour. Millennial pink: the colour of overthinking and oversharing. Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball: the imperial age of the gastro pub.

I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.

Human Rights Watch and others say they have documented use of weapon in civilian areas, which some argue is illegal

When the M825-series 155mm artillery projectile airbursts, expelling its felt wedges containing white phosphorus, it leaves a distinctive knuckle-shaped plume. That is how Human Rights Watch (HRW) researchers said they were able to verify that Israel was again using the notorious weapon over south Lebanon, reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war.

The New York-based rights group said it had verified and geolocated eight images showing airburst white phosphorus munitions exploding over residential areas in the southern Lebanese town of Yohmor in the opening days of Israel’s assault during the war on Gaza.

Tristan Roberts, who expressed misogynistic views and had fascination with American Psycho, carefully planned attack

An 18-year-old man who expressed misogynistic views and had a fascination with the horror film American Psycho has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 22 years and six months for killing his mother with a hammer.

Tristan Roberts carefully planned the crime, researching methods of killing and how to avoid being caught before buying potential weapons such as knives, hammers and an axe.

UK urged to tackle transnational repression, as dissidents say Beijing has targeted them with tax letters and other threats

“I didn’t feel safe, even though I’m not based in Hong Kong any more,” said Christopher Mung Siu-tat after getting tax bills from Hong Kong authorities. “The regime can reach me by their long arms wherever I am.”

Siu-tat, the executive director at the Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor, a UK-based NGO, fled Beijing’s sweeping national security laws years ago. The letters are the latest example of a series of transnational repression (TNR) tactics the 54-year-old has faced in recent years.

In highly unusual move, Metropolitan police have released full transcript of call made by PM’s then chief of staff

• UK politics live – latest updates

Morgan McSweeney did not disclose he was the prime minister’s chief of staff when he reported his phone stolen, according to a transcript released by the Metropolitan police.

The Met has admitted the wrong address was recorded for the theft meaning that it was thought to be a street in Tower Hamlets, rather than a Westminster street of the same name.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: