The World Science Fiction Society "administers and presents the Hugo Awards, the oldest and most noteworthy award for science fiction," according to Wikipedia. Its members vote on each year's winners, and this year they received 1,847 nominating ballots.

This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo: While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher's excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film's top honor, and The Expanse's finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And "By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo," reports Forbes: [Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. "Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances," the official teaser explains...
Other highlights from this year's awards:

• Best novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: "The Space-Time Painter", by Hai Ya (Galaxy's Edge, April 2022)
• Best Short Story: "Rabbit Test", by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)
• Best Series: Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
• Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday)

An anonymous reader shares a report: You could be entitled to a small chunk of a $16 million class action settlement against anime streaming service Crunchyroll. The Sony-owned company settled a data privacy lawsuit this week that will result in about $30 settlements for individuals impacted, according to firm behind the class action. The complaint, filed in September 2022, claims that Sony shared individual Crunchyroll viewing information with third-party sites without user's permission. That means Google or Facebook might have seen your anime watch history without your knowledge. It's a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which makes it illegal to video streaming services to disclose personally identifiable information without the individual's consent. Crunchyroll denies wrongdoing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: The Lockheed Martin X-59 is probably the strangest airplane ever designed. Its razor-sharp nose takes half of the airplane's length; there's no cockpit in sight; the wings are tiny compared to the entire fuselage; and its oversized tail engine looks like a weird hump about to fall off. Of course, there's a method to this madness. The design is the secret sauce that has produced a true unicorn: a supersonic jet that doesn't boom the hell out of people and buildings on the ground. [...] The X-59, developed alongside NASA, is designed as an experimental jet that NASA will use to test just how big of a boom people on the ground are willing to accept from a supersonic aircraft. According to Dave Richardson, the program director for X-59 at Lockheed Martin, with this new design, people shouldn't expect much of a boom at all.

The X-59's "quiet" supersonic boom isn't made possible by expensive magical materials or exotic engines, Richardson explains. "There is no radical technology in the airplane itself. It really is just the shape of the aircraft." And if the shape looks more like an anime alien spaceship than an actual vehicle created by human beings, that's because it was dreamed up in another dimension -- by computers and humans -- through special software created by the Bethesda, Maryland, company's engineers. [...] Richardson and his team learned a few important lessons about designing for supersonic boom. First, the heavy, bulky parts of the plane needed to be as far back as possible. "We really put nothing out in the front, but we want to have that long, fine ratio," he says. This resulted in an extremely fine nose and body, with no surface interruptions that can produce noise when the plane breaks the sound barrier. "You want to be able to stretch out and manage the different shocks across the length of the airplane," he adds.

They also learned that anything that causes discontinuity in the airplane's shape -- for instance a windshield or canopy -- can add to the boom effect. This led them to get rid of the windshield altogether. Instead, the X-59 uses an external vision system, which is the only advanced technology in the plane, according to Richardson. The pilot navigates using a camera, viewing the outside through a large display. This system had to undergo rigorous certification by the Federal Aviation Administration for use in the national airspace. [...] The X-59 has been designed to manage and distribute shockwaves differently from the very start while also flying at slower speeds than the Concorde (the Concorde's cruising speed was 1,350 mph, while the X-59 will cruise at around 925 mph). "I think most people look at the airplane and they say, 'Wait, something's wrong,'" Richardson says. "[They think] it's too long. The landing gear is too far in the back. And why is the nose so long?" The inaugural flight is scheduled for early 2024, notes Fast Company. "If they achieve their objectives, there's no reason why aircraft manufacturers can't take the concepts they discovered and turn them into commercial airliners, Richardson says."

"Someday, people might be able to look up and see an alien shape in the sky, with the X-59's design transcending experimental nature and ushering in a new era for high-speed travel across the globe."

samleecole shares a report from 404 Media, a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox: On the Discord server for Mage Space, a popular platform for creating AI-generated images, is a list of channels where members share adult content. There are channels for furries, hardcore and softcore porn, and anime. At the bottom of the list is a channel named "other-nsfw" which includes a few distinct erotic genres that don't fit neatly into any of the others. Mostly, it's gore, violence, and bizarre, in hyperrealistic erotic imagery entirely generated by AI. The images people create, and the long, meandering prompts they write, are a rich text that could offer a glimpse into where sexuality in the internet age is taking us next, and how we're steering it.

There's no shortage of fetish content on the internet, which might make the above statement sound ridiculous and unbelievable. Online, fetishists find their people and set to work making more of what they like, whether it's elaborate role-playing cosplays of themselves as sexy airplanes, blueberries, or slime monsters. Sometimes it pushes the bounds of the sane and legal: crush, fart, and scat porn all thrive online, and snuff films have been popular since before the internet existed. But with the rise in popularity of generative AI, and wildly popular sites like Mage.Space that let users generate anything they set their minds to, the limits are literally our own imaginations. With that power, people are wrangling images out of the AI that are on the edge of what's popular, let alone possible in the porn world. "This conversation we're having is literally on the edge of knowledge, nobody's writing about this in academia right now," Thomas Brooks, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico Highlands University, told me. "Everybody's still kind of caught up in deepfakes. And they haven't quite grappled with generative AI yet." "You, as the individual porn consumer, can now create your own special little fantasy and your own technological, disembodied sexuality," said Brooks, in what he refers to as gamified pornography. "There's an internal motivation to solve the puzzle and get the prize. But then there's an external motivation of, 'can I come up with this crazy thing to show my anonymous internet friends.'"

"We're letting technology become mediators of our different psychosocial expressions," Brooks added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When top anime streaming platform Crunchyroll was first gaining popularity as a pirated-video site in the mid-2000s, Japanese animation was considered a niche form of entertainment, appealing mainly to enthusiasts known as otaku. Today, it's a $20 billion industry spanning streaming, games and merchandise, and the company's hit series, such as One Piece and Demon Slayer, have drawn millions of US and European subscribers. Crunchyroll, now owned by Sony Group, is setting its sights on India as a major growth market -- one that could help the industry further expand from a made-in-Japan subculture into a mainstream and global phenomenon.

The company, founded in 2006 by graduates of the University of California at Berkeley, started off as an anime-sharing site. It eventually began streaming only legitimate content, helped by investment from venture capitalists including former News Corp. President Peter Chernin and ownership by AT&T's WarnerMedia. Now the largest anime-dedicated streaming platform in the world, it was bought by Sony in a $1.2 billion deal announced in 2020. Crunchyroll has more than 100 million registered members, including 11 million paid users, after rapid subscriber growth during the pandemic when people binge-watched exotic content. With growth in Western markets moderating, the anime giant is looking to India for its next breakthrough, according to President Rahul Purini.

According to Variety, Hulu is launching a new sub-brand focused on adult animation and anime called Animayhem. From the report: The new hub is meant to capitalize on Hulu's already popular lineup of adult animation and anime shows. Series like "American Dad," "Bob's Burgers," "Family Guy," "Futurama" and "King of the Hill" consistently rank among the service's top 10 shows based on hours streamed, per Hulu. So far this year, over one billion hours of adult animation content has been streamed on Hulu, along with over 288 million hours of anime content, the streamer claims.

Hulu currently has 46 adult animated series, which adds up to 174 seasons and 2,600 episodes. For anime, Hulu has 17 films and 272 series, adding up to 435 seasons and 18,400 episodes (including subtitled and English dubbed versions of episodes). As part of the launch, Hulu is debuting a range of ads for Animayhem, which they describe as the "Animation Destination," one of which can be seen below. "When you have the number one offering in adult animation and anime of any major streaming service, creating this destination is obvious. We know exactly where we can meet these fans, because they're already here," said Barrie Gruner, Hulu's executive vice president of marketing and publicity, in an interview with Variety.

"I would say that this brand really cements Hulu as the ultimate streaming destination for animation and we're not going to achieve that with single title campaigns," Gruner said. "This is truly an intersection with our original programming and our library."

Animayhem will also be coming to San Diego Comic-Con via an immersive experience dubbed "Hulu Animayhem: Into the Second Dimension."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, a Reddit user named "nhciao" posted a series of artistic QR codes created using the Stable Diffusion AI image-synthesis model that can still be read as functional QR codes by smartphone camera apps. The functional pieces reflect artistic styles in anime and Asian art. [...] In this case, despite the presence of intricate AI-generated designs and patterns in the images created by nhciao, we've found that smartphone camera apps on both iPhone and Android are still able to read these as functional QR codes. If you have trouble reading them, try backing your camera farther away from the images.

Stable Diffusion is an AI-powered image-synthesis model released last year that can generate images based on text descriptions. It can also transform existing images using a technique called "img2img." The creator did not detail the exact technique used to create the novel codes in English, but based on this blog post and the title of the Reddit post ("ControlNet for QR Code"), they apparently trained several custom Stable Diffusion ControlNet models (plus LoRA fine tunings) that have been conditioned to create different-styled results. Next, they fed existing QR codes into the Stable Diffusion AI image generator and used ControlNet to maintain the QR code's data positioning despite synthesizing an image around it, likely using a written prompt. Other techniques exist to make artistic-looking QR codes by manipulating the positions of dots within the codes to make meaningful patterns that can still be read. In this case, Stable Diffusion is not only controlling dot positions but also blending picture details to match the QR code.

This interesting use of Stable Diffusion is possible because of the innate error correction feature built into QR codes. This error correction capability allows a certain percentage of the QR code's data to be restored if it's damaged or obscured, permitting a level of modification without making the code unreadable. In typical QR codes, this error correction feature serves to recover information if part of the code is damaged or dirty. But in nhciao's case, it has been leveraged to blend creativity with utility. Stable Diffusion added unique artistic touches to the QR codes without compromising their functionality. [...] This discovery opens up new possibilities for both digital art and marketing. Ordinary black-and-white QR codes could be turned into unique pieces of art, enhancing their aesthetic appeal. The positive reaction to nhciao's experiment on social media may spark a new era in which QR codes are not just tools of convenience but also interesting and complex works of art.

Anti-piracy group CODA is reporting the shutdown of B9Good, a pirate manga site that targeted Japan but was operated from China. In response to a criminal complaint filed by CODA on behalf of six Japanese companies, which were backed by 21 others during the investigation, Chinese authorities arrested four people and seized one house worth $580,000. TorrentFreak reports: Manga piracy site B9Good initially appeared in 2008 and established itself under B9DM branding. SimilarWeb stats show that the site was enjoying around 15 million visits each month, with CODA noting that in the two-year period leading to February 2023, the site was accessed more than 300 million times Around 95% of the site's visitors came from Japan. B9Good had been featured in an MPA submission to the USTR's notorious markets report in 2019. Traffic was reported as almost 16 million visits per month back then, meaning that site visitor numbers remained stable for the next three years. The MPA said the site was possibly hosted in Canada, but domain records since then show a wider spread, including Hong Kong, China, United States, Bulgaria, and Japan.

Wherever the site ended up, the location of its operator was more important. In 2021, CODA launched its International Enforcement Project (CBEP), which aimed to personally identify the operators of pirate sites, including those behind B9Good who were eventually traced to China. Pursuing copyright cases from outside China is reportedly difficult, but CODA had a plan. In January 2022, CODA's Beijing office was recognized as an NGO with legitimate standing to protect the rights of its member companies. Working on behalf of Aniplex, TV Tokyo, Toei Animation, Toho, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), and Bandai Namco Film Works, CODA filed a criminal complaint in China, and starting February 14, 2023, local authorities began rounding up the B9Good team.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Netflix created an anime that uses AI-generated artwork to paint its backgrounds -- and people on social media are pissed. In a tweet, Netflix Japan claimed that the project, a short called he Dog & The Boy uses AI generated art in response to labor shortages in the anime industry. "As an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labor shortage, we used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts!" the streaming platform wrote in a tweet.

The tweet drew instant criticism and outrage from commenters who felt that Netflix was using AI to avoid paying human artists. This has been a central tension since image-generation AI took off last year, as many artists see the tools as unethical -- due to being trained on masses of human-made art scraped from the internet -- and cudgels to further cut costs and devalue workers. Netflix Japan's claim that the AI was used to fill a supposed labor gap hit the bullseye on these widespread concerns. According to a press release, the short film was created by Netflix Anime Creators Base -- a Tokyo-based hub the company created to bolster its anime output with new tools and methods -- in collaboration with Rinna Inc., an AI-generated artwork company, and production company WIT Studio, which produced the first three seasons of Attack on Titan. "Demand for new anime productions has skyrocketed in recent years, but the industry has long been fraught with labor abuses and poor wages," notes Motherboard's Samantha Cole. "In 2017, an illustrator died while working, allegedly of a stress-induced heart attack and stroke; in 2021, the reported salary of low-rung anime illustrators was as little as $200 a month, forcing some to reconsider the career as a sustainable way to earn a living while having a life outside work, buying a home, or supporting children.

"Even top animators reportedly earn just $1,400 to $3,800 a month -- as the anime industry itself boomed during the pandemic amid a renewed interest in at-home streaming. In 2021, the industry hit an all-time revenue high of $18.4 billion."

Netflix has confirmed that its live-action take on One Piece will be streaming in 2023. The Verge reports: That's about all we know so far; Netflix didn't give a specific date, though the company did show off a new poster for its adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's long-running pirate manga / anime. The adaptation was first announced back in 2020 and will be led by showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda. The main cast includes the likes of Inaki Godoy as Luffy (who you can see the back of in the new poster), Mackenyu as Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero Gibson as Usopp, and Taz Skylar as Sanji. The Verge notes that One Piece "follows some less-than-impressive live-action anime adaptations from Netflix, including a Death Note film and a Cowboy Bebop series that was canceled after one season."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Every day between 6 to 11 pm GMT, Neuro-sama streams herself playing Minecraft and osu, a musical rhythm game. Like many V-tubers, or virtual YouTubers, Neuro-sama appears as a Japanese anime-style character who interacts with her over 50,000 followers by responding to their comments in the chat. But there's one thing that separates Neuro-sama from her peers: she is controlled entirely by AI. [...] Vedal, the AI's pseudonymous creator, says that Neuro-sama was created as a fun experiment. "I made her a Twitch streamer so that she can interact with her audience in real time. A lot of the fun comes from her interactions with Twitch chat," Vedal told Motherboard. "I think the fans play an important role in her success and how fun her streams are. Having the interactions with Twitch chat are what makes her entertaining to watch, without that I don't think she would be as successful." Neuro-sama often impresses online users with her ability to successfully play games such as Minecraft and osu while also interacting with them in a conversational way. Vedal told Motherboard that Neuro-sama has already beaten the top-ranking osu player in a 1 v. 1 game. Though she is not allowed to be ranked on the main osu leaderboard, Neuro-sama is currently ranked number one on the private server she plays on.

Neuro-sama's earliest incarnation was first created in 2018, when Vedal made an AI that learned to play osu. But at the time, the virtual streamer did not have an avatar or speaking capabilities. Relaunched in December 2022, Vedal used a free sample avatar from Live2D, an online avatar maker, and paired it with an anime-style voice to create Neuro-sama. Vedal said that there are plans for her to get her own custom avatar and for her to play more games in the future. Like many modern AI chatbots, Vedal says Neuro-sama was made using a large language model, or LLM, a type of AI model trained from massive amounts of text taken from the open internet. As Motherboard has previously reported, many open-source AI models have a high propensity for human bias, and often mimic racist and sexist stereotypes. So while Neuro-sama's streams are 100 percent automated, Vedal has a team that monitors and moderates her and the chat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Lensa's AI popularity has had a notable impact on the App Store's Top Charts. The popular photo and video editing app recently went viral over its new "magic avatars" feature, powered by the open source Stable Diffusion model, allowing users to turn their selfies into styled portraits of themselves as sci-fi, anime, or fantasy characters, among other artistic renderings. Consumer demand for the app, and for AI edits more broadly, has now pushed numerous other "AI" apps into the U.S. App Store's Top Charts. As of Monday, the top three spots on the U.S. App Store are now all held by AI photo editors, and even more AI art apps are newly ranking in the Top 100.

The No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, however, continues to be held by Lensa AI, which has seen 12.6 million global installs in the first 11 days of December, up 600% from the 1.8 million installs it saw during a similar time frame in November (Nov. 20 through Nov. 30), according to new data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The U.S. accounted for 3.6 million of those new December installs, estimates indicate. In fact, 8 out of the top 100 apps by downloads on the U.S. App Store were AI art apps during the Dec. 1 through Dec. 11 time frame, the firm's analysis found. Following Lensa AI, the generic-sounding app AI Art: AI Image Generator has keyword-stuffed its app's name to rank in second place, promising AI avatars and AI art from text. Dawn -- AI Avatars is in the No. 3 position, offering AI avatars that can be changed with a text prompt.

[...] In addition to highly ranking overall among iPhone apps, the U.S. App Store's Graphics & Design category is also now filled with AI art apps within its own Top Charts. Here, Dawn is the No. 1 Top Free app, followed by AI Art and Wonder to round out the top 3. Profile AI: AI Avatar Creator, Inspire -- AI Art Generator, and Dream by Wombo -- AI Art Tool are ranked 8, 9, and 10, respectively. Lesser known "AI" apps pop up as you scroll down the category's Top 50 as well, filing slots No. 14, 19, 21, 25, 27, 31, 36, 44, and 47 -- too many to list. All use the keyword "AI" in their app's name along and reference activities like "AI art" or "AI avatars." And of course, the U.S. Photo & Video category's Top Charts have several AI apps charting as well, including No. 1 Lensa, No. 5 Prequel, No. 7 Voi, No. 8 Meitu, and No. 26 FacePlay. AI app demand is not limited to the App Store, however. Many of the same apps are trending on Google Play, too. When both app stores' rankings are combined, Lensa AI remains No. 1, AI Art is No. 2, Wonder is No. 8, Meitu is No. 10, Prequel is No. 68, Dawn is No. 72, Dream is No. 77 and FacePlay is No. 90.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI, was open sourced earlier this year, it didn't take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake nude imagery of celebrities. But while Reddit quickly shut down many of the subreddits dedicated to AI porn, and communities like NewGrounds, which allows some forms of adult art, banned AI-generated artwork altogether, new forums emerged to fill the gap. By far the largest is Unstable Diffusion, whose operators are building a business around AI systems tailored to generate high-quality porn. The server's Patreon -- started to keep the server running as well as fund general development -- is currently raking in over $2,500 a month from several hundred donors.

"In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators," Arman Chaudhry, one of the members of the Unstable Diffusion admin team, told TechCrunch in a conversation via Discord. "We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from." Unsurprisingly, some AI ethicists are as worried as Chaudhry is optimistic. While the use of AI to create porn isn't new [...] Unstable Diffusion's models are capable of generating higher-fidelity examples than most. The generated porn could have negative consequences particularly for marginalized groups, the ethicists say, including the artists and adult actors who make a living creating porn to fulfill customers' fantasies.

Unstable Diffusion got its start in August -- around the same time that the Stable Diffusion model was released. Initially a subreddit, it eventually migrated to Discord, where it now has roughly 50,000 members. [...] Today, the Unstable Diffusion server hosts AI-generated porn in a range of different art styles, sexual preferences and kinks. [...] Users in these channels can invoke the bot to generate art that fits the theme, which they can then submit to a "starboard" if they're especially pleased with the results. Unstable Diffusion claims to have generated over 4,375,000 images to date. On a semiregular basis, the group hosts competitions that challenge members to recreate images using the bot, the results of which are used in turn to improve Unstable Diffusion's models. As it grows, Unstable Diffusion aspires to be an "ethical" community for AI-generated porn -- i.e. one that prohibits content like child pornography, deepfakes and excessive gore. Users of the Discord server must abide by the terms of service and submit to moderation of the images that they generate; Chaudhry claims the server employs a filter to block images containing people in its "named persons" database and has a full-time moderation team. "Chaudhry sees Unstable Diffusion evolving into an organization to support broader AI-powered content generation, sponsoring dev groups and providing tools and resources to help teams build their own systems," reports TechCrunch. "He claims that Equilibrium AI secured a spot in a startup accelerator program from an unnamed 'large cloud compute provider' that comes with a 'five-figure' grant in cloud hardware and compute, which Unstable Diffusion will use to expand its model training infrastructure."

In addition to the grant, Unstable Diffusion will launch a Kickstarter campaign and seek venture funding, Chaudhry says.

"We plan to create our own models and fine-tune and combine them for specialized use cases which we shall spin off into new brands and products," Chaudhry added.

"Cixin Liu's sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem can't stop jumping to other formats," reports Gizmodo: In addition to next year's Netflix series from The Terror: Infamy's Alexander Woo and Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss, last year saw the release of a serialized podcast (different from the audiobook version).

And for 2022, we've got an animated series that's premiering actually pretty soon.

Come December 3, an anime version of The Three-Body Problem will release on the Chinese streaming platform Bilibili. This series was originally announced in 2019 with a trailer, but things have been fairly quiet on that front up until now. Developed by CG studio YHTK Entertainment in partnership with The Three-Body Universe, a studio built specifically for the purpose of managing the franchise, a new trailer for the upcoming anime was released earlier in the week during a Bilibili anime showcase.
"Having enjoyed the book, I think it looks promising," writes Slashdot reader Camembert. The 2008 book was the first in Liu's hard sci-fi series Remembrance of Earth's Past — and according to Gizmodo, this is just the beginning: Bilibili's adaptation is the first of a larger initiative called the Three-Body Global Creator Project. Per the press release, animation studios across the world are permitted to explore the Remembrance franchise to showcase its global potential through various art and animation styles....

And if animation or Netflix aren't your bag, Tencent Video has made a live action version of The Three-Body Problem, though that version has yet to receive a release date.

Studio Ghibli, the beloved animation producer behind worldwide hits like Spirited Away, Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies, is teaming up with Lucasfilm, home to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, for a mysterious new project. Polygon reports: On Thursday, the Japanese studio tweeted a cryptic video teaser, with the Lucasfilm and Studio Ghibli logos back to back and... maddeningly nothing else. The video is silent, so there are no John Williams-penned themes to work from here. But suffice it to say, the teaser is most likely for an animated project based on a Lucasfilm property, and Star Wars seems like a safe bet. Lucasfilm and Disney have multiple animated Star Wars series, including the recently released Tales of the Jedi and -- the most likely candidate for Studio Ghibli -- Star Wars: Visions.

A second season of Star Wars: Visions is coming to Disney Plus in spring 2023. And while Disney and Lucasfilm have not revealed much about who is contributing to it, Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 is pitched as a "global tour, celebrating the incredible animation happening across countries and cultures."

The animated series "Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi" premiered this week on Disney+, witih all six 15-minute episodes released on Wednesday.

CNN calls it a slick and well-produced "kind of super-service for the Star Wars faithful, rekindling old flames, and comfortably submerging them in the past." But they also add that animation "has also become a vehicle for greater experimentation, as witnessed in the Star Wars: Visions anime shorts that premiered last year." It's hardly a surprise that this latest addition to the mythology comes courtesy of producer Dave Filoni, who oversaw such series as The Clone Wars and Rebels before throwing his fertile mind for all things Star Wars into The Mandalorian and other live-action fare. Filoni wrote five of the six shorts, which are split between Ahsoka Tano (again voiced by Ashley Eckstein), soon to be featured in her own live-action spinoff; and Count Dooku (played in the movies by Christopher Lee, and voiced by Corey Burton).

Beyond a glimpse of a baby Ahsoka (just in time for holiday gift-giving, kids), in an episode that illustrates her home planet and its warrior streak, the episodes leap around in time. That includes additional insights into Dooku and his abandonment of the Jedi order to embrace the dark side and Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid). The anthology format creates the opportunity to drop in at different inflection points scattered across the "Star Wars" timeline.
"Fans will likely be particularly intrigued by some of the gradations surrounding Ahsoka, her relationship to Anakin Skywalker and the aftermath of the Clone Wars," the article teases...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: There's a new text-to-image AI in town. With ERNIE-ViLG, a new AI developed by the Chinese tech company Baidu, you can generate images that capture the cultural specificity of China. It also makes better anime art than DALL-E 2 or other Western image-making AIs. But there are many things -- like Tiananmen Square, the country's second-largest city square and a symbolic political center -- that the AI refuses to show you. When a demo of the software was released in late August, users quickly found that certain words -- both explicit mentions of political leaders' names and words that are potentially controversial only in political contexts -- were labeled as "sensitive" and blocked from generating any result. China's sophisticated system of online censorship, it seems, has extended to the latest trend in AI. It's not rare for similar AIs to limit users from generating certain types of content. DALL-E 2 prohibits sexual content, faces of public figures, or medical treatment images. But the case of ERNIE-ViLG underlines the question of where exactly the line between moderation and political censorship lies.

The ERNIE-ViLG model is part of Wenxin, a large-scale project in natural-language processing from China's leading AI company, Baidu. It was trained on a data set of 145 million image-text pairs and contains 10 billion parameters -- the values that a neural network adjusts as it learns, which the AI uses to discern the subtle differences between concepts and art styles. That means ERNIE-ViLG has a smaller training data set than DALL-E 2 (650 million pairs) and Stable Diffusion (2.3 billion pairs) but more parameters than either one (DALL-E 2 has 3.5 billion parameters and Stable Diffusion has 890 million). Baidu released a demo version on its own platform in late August and then later on Hugging Face, the popular international AI community. The main difference between ERNIE-ViLG and Western models is that the Baidu-developed one understands prompts written in Chinese and is less likely to make mistakes when it comes to culturally specific words.

But ERNIE-ViLG will be defined, as the other models are, by what it allows. Unlike DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, ERNIE-ViLG does not have a published explanation of its content moderation policy, and Baidu declined to comment for this story. When the ERNIE-ViLG demo was first released on Hugging Face, users inputting certain words would receive the message "Sensitive words found. Please enter again (...)," which was a surprisingly honest admission about the filtering mechanism. However, since at least September 12, the message has read "The content entered doesn't meet relevant rules. Please try again after adjusting it. (...)" In a test of the demo by MIT Technology Review, a number of Chinese words were blocked: names of high-profile Chinese political leaders like Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong; terms that can be considered politically sensitive, like "revolution" and "climb walls" (a metaphor for using a VPN service in China); and the name of Baidu's founder and CEO, Yanhong (Robin) Li. While words like "democracy" and "government" themselves are allowed, prompts that combine them with other words, like "democracy Middle East" or "British government," are blocked. Tiananmen Square in Beijing also can't be found in ERNIE-ViLG, likely because of its association with the Tiananmen Massacre, references to which are heavily censored in China. Giada Pistilli, a principal ethicist at Hugging Face, says it could be helpful for the developer of ERNIE-ViLG to release a document explaining the moderation decisions. "Is it censored because it's the law that's telling them to do so? Are they doing that because they believe it's wrong? It always helps to explain our arguments, our choices," says Pistilli.

"Despite the built-in censorship, ERNIE-ViLG will still be an important player in the development of large-scale text-to-image AIs," concludes the report. "The emergence of AI models trained on specific language data sets makes up for some of the limitations of English-based mainstream models. It will particularly help users who need an AI that understands the Chinese language and can generate accurate images accordingly."

"Just as Chinese social media platforms have thrived in spite of rigorous censorship, ERNIE-ViLG and other Chinese AI models may eventually experience the same: they're too useful to give up."

The world's largest comprehensive database on Japanese anime, Anime Taizen, was opened to the public today, August 25, at 13:00 (JST). Taizen means "A book that collects all things related to the matter" in Japanese. Crunchyroll reports: Since 2015, The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) has been promoting the "Anime NEXT_100" project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese animation. As a major initiative of the project, this database was first released on a trial basis on October 22, 2021, and after confirming functionality and operation, and making improvements and updates, it has now been released to the public. As of the end of July 2022, Anime Taizen has approximately 15,000 registered titles, mainly Japanese commercial anime works released from 1917 to the present. In addition to title name searches, the database has search functions for chronology, Japanese syllabary, keywords, etc. As a result of the research to date, the number of episodes amounts to approximately 180,000.

Crunchyroll announced that it's acquired Right Stuf, one of the world's leading online anime superstores. "Expanding Crunchyroll's eCommerce offerings, the acquisition aims to serve anime fans and collectors an even wider array of merchandise for online purchase including manga, home video, figures, games, music and everything in between," writes the company in a post. From the report: Founded in 1987, Right Stuf is a leading consumer source for anime pop culture merchandise online. By visiting its eCommerce portal, enthusiasts and collectors can find thousands of products, including Blu-rays, manga books, music, figurines, collectables, and more. Right Stuf also offers licensed anime home video products through its own label.

"For 35 years, Right Stuf's mission has been to connect anime fans with the products they love," said Shawne Kleckner, CEO of Right Stuf. "Joining forces with Crunchyroll allows us to accelerate and scale this effort more than ever before. There has never been a more exciting time to be an anime fan than today!" Kleckner and the Right Stuf team will join Crunchyroll's Emerging Businesses organization, led by Terry Li. Sony acquired Crunchyroll for $1.175 billion from AT&T, in a deal that closed in August 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by Jody Serrano: In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it was near to impossible for me to watch videos, TV shows, or listen to music. Far from feeling limited, I felt like I was lucky, for I had access to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about anything I wanted to know -- which in those days was anime -- the majority of which was conveniently located on GeoCities. For all the zoomers scrunching up their brows, here's a primer. Back in the 1990s, before the birth of modern web hosting household names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn't exactly easy or cheap to publish a personal website. This all changed when GeoCities came on the scene in 1994.

The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today's Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. "HotSprings" was dedicated to health and fitness, while "Area 51" was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.

Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers -- named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on -- instead of neighborhoods. [...] We can, however, ask GeoCities' founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the '90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion," Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. "It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge." When asked to share his thoughts on the internet of today, Bohnett said: "... The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn't about what you had to eat and where you've traveled. [...] It wasn't anything about your face." He added: "So, what has surprised me is how far away we've gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It's so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. [...] I've been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we've seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok."

Bohnett went on to say that he thinks it's important to remember that "the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we're not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber?"

"We're still in that trajectory where there's going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities," added Bohnett. "I'm very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It's so exciting to see where we might go."