Charles Pulliam-Moore | The Verge

Japanese man sentenced to prison for posting spoilers

2026-04-20T16:02:58-04:00

Though it’s very common for entertainment writers to describe some narrative elements of the films and shows that they’re covering, a Japanese court has determined that the practice can sometimes be tantamount to copyright infringement.

Last Thursday, the Tokyo District Court ruled that 39-year-old Wataru Takeuchi was guilty of violating Japanese law that prohibits the creation of “a new work by making creative modifications to the original while preserving its essential characteristics.” Takeuchi worked as administrator of a website that published lengthy, spoiler-heavy descriptions from popular movies and series. And two of Takeuchi’s “articles” — one about Godzilla Minus One and another focused on the Overlord anime adaptation — prompted Toho (owner of the Godzilla IP) and Kadokawa Shoten (the publisher behind Overlord) to file joint lawsuits through the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA).

In a Japanese statement (which we’ve run through translation software) about the case, CODA described how Takeuchi and two other men were first arrested back in 2024 due to concerns about how posts on their “spoiler site” featured large chunks of transcribed dialog and numerous images. CODA acknowledged that fair use gives entertainment journalists the ability to publish some pieces of copyright material. But the organization argued that, because the website’s posts contained so much detail, they were essentially the same thing as adaptations that could cause “significant damage to rights holders” because of their potential to discourage would-be customers from paying to see the film / series.

“Numerous websites that extract text from movies and other content have been identified and are considered problematic as so-called ‘spoiler sites,’” CODA said. “While these actions tend to be perceived as less serious than piracy sites or illegal uploads that upload the content itself, they are clear copyright infringements that go beyond the scope of fair use and are serious crimes.”

As Tom’s Hardware notes, one of the more damning aspects of CODA’s argument was the fact that Takeuchi’s website ran ads on its posts, which meant that it was able to monetize the publication of copyrighted IP. Though Takeuchi reportedly did not write any of the infringing posts himself, in 2023 he was able to rake in 38 million Yen ($239,254.04) from the site’s ad sales. And now, he has been sentenced to a one year, six month stint in prison and ordered to pay a 1 million yen ($6,296.16) fine.

Even if you don’t buy CODA’s argument that looking at a combination of transcribed dialog, scene description, and press images is the same thing as seeing a movie, the court’s landmark decision is significant because of the way it’s tackling some of the thornier elements of modern entertainment coverage. Sites like Takeuchi’s are the products of an online media landscape where writers are fighting desperately to capture readers’ attention, make money, and keep traffic up as search engines make their content less discoverable. Brazenly posting spoilers under the guise of making commentary has become one of the more common ways that people try to drive engagement on their social media profiles. Just last week, the entirety of Paramount’s forthcoming The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender leaked online, and people were quick to begin sharing it around. And at a time when many online fandoms seem more interested in consuming leaks / disseminating spoilers than meaningfully engaging with the art they supposedly love, sites like Takeuchi’s have a prime chance to thrive.

Though there are plenty of other publications like Takeuchi’s, CODA has said that it plans to “strive for the proper protection of copyrights and implement effective measures against similar websites.” The organization might not be able to fully stamp out this aspect of modern spoiler culture, but it’s sending a clear message to the public that these kinds of posts can come with big consequences.

The Iranian Lego AI video creators credit their virality to ‘heart’

2026-04-10T16:58:38-04:00

Donald Trump has spun the recent rescue of a downed airman whose fighter jet was destroyed behind Iranian borders as a resounding success. But the story is very different in one of the many viral, AI-generated Lego videos that have been produced by Iranian content creation group Explosive Media in the weeks since the US and Israel began dropping bombs on the country. In Explosive Media’s music video take on how things played out, the US military is a joke for losing multiple planes and helicopters, and spending “$100 million just to save one guy.”

The video’s shots of Lego jets exploding into $100 bills and golden coins reinforce the idea that the US is wasting taxpayer dollars just to be outmaneuvered by Iranian forces. And the accompanying AI-generated lyrics send a clear message about Iran being ready to do it all again if and when the US strikes next.

Explosive Media’s content plainly reads as propaganda. But the simplicity of its messaging has helped turn the group’s videos to a viral phenomenon. The videos are being shared across the internet, and people — many of them located within the US — are praising them for the way they humiliate Trump and urge viewers to remember that before this war began, the Trump administration was busy downplaying the president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. On TikTok, unofficial uploads of the videos have racked up thousands of comments from people cheering Explosive Media on and saying that their videos and surprisingly catchy AI songs are more informative than what’s being reported by Western outlets.

By playing into the public’s disdain for Trump and his peers, groups like Explosive Media are helping Iran win a meme-fueled war of ideas and perceptions. And at a time when the White House has tried to present itself as having a deep understanding of how to shape online discourse, it seems very much like the Iranians have Trump outgunned.

@mahdihemmat
$100 MILLION dollars… just to rescue ONE pilot 😂 Lost a C-130 + Black Hawks in the process. “World’s strongest military” everybody… We’re waiting for the boots on the ground — please come back! 🇮🇷 Lego animation 🔥 Iran IranStrong OnePilot Lego #LegoAnimation
♬ original sound – Mahdi.Hemmat – Mahdi.Hemmat

Explosive Media’s official YouTube and Instagram pages were both recently taken down — YouTube says that their videos violated the platform’s policies regarding spam, deceptive practices, and scams. But it’s not hard to find the group’s AI-generated shorts lambasting the US and Israel’s attacks on Iran. Even if you aren’t keeping up with news about the war, you’ve probably seen some of Explosive Media’s work while doomscrolling through X or TikTok. The way Explosive Media has been consistently putting out new videos almost every day that explicitly comment on recent events — despite the internet blackout — makes the group seem like it could be a large outfit with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ content creation machine. This would make the group an extension of the same governmental organization that turned Iran into an authoritarian theocracy in which political dissent has been violently repressed.

But when I recently spoke with a member of the group via the Telegram channel linked in multiple Explosive Video accounts, they claimed that they are a team of about 10 people who are operating independently from Iranian state media. Explosive Media claims it sees maintaining its independence and being relatable to Gen Z (their peers) as important elements to achieving their larger goals. And the representative stressed that using Lego aesthetics to spread their message has been a key part of building a global audience.

“Lego is a universal language,” the Explosive Media member said. “It conveys messages easily, it’s playful, it doesn’t require extreme realism, yet it can include astonishing detail.”

Explosive Media’s latest videos lean into dark, absurd comedy as they depict the US and Israel’s heads of state as emotive minifigs. In one, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nervously draft a ceasefire request as the devil sits next to them with a grin on his face. After making fun of whatever is going on with Trump’s hands and taking a beat to draw a comparison between the children killed by the US strike on an elementary school in Minab and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the video cuts to a montage re-creating a number of the Iranian military’s recent successful attacks. Another video is addressed directly to Pete Hegseth, and uses an AI-generated vocal track that sounds a lot like Macklemore to make fun of multiple scandalous allegations about the sitting defense secretary having a drinking problem and sexually assaulting women that have been leveled against him.

It is immediately clear that Explosive Media’s animations are made with AI. But their content feels different than most slop polluting the internet, and not just because the war is unpopular. Each video tells a cohesive story with clearly defined characters whose (general) visual consistency helps you follow their narrative arcs even if you aren’t watching with the sound on. Explosive Media maintains a running list of potential concepts that could be turned into videos, but each project begins with a script, which is used to generate AI footage and an accompanying song before it is all merged together using post-production software.

The member of Explosive Media I talked to explained that they are using generative AI “as a tool to present truths in a compelling way and to break through walls of censorship” that have negatively impacted the way people see Iranians. To the group, there is little difference between gen AI and any other kind of technology that “can be used for good or bad,” and they see their videos as prime examples of how dynamic Iranian storytelling can be.

“Western audiences have, for years, been fed distorted views of our nation by mainstream media,” the representative told me, referring to the idea that Iran is an undeveloped, uneducated country. “When we release these animations, Western viewers are initially surprised that such work comes from Iran. That’s when misconceptions start to shift—and that’s exactly what we aim for.”

Explosive Media’s content is far more polished and, frankly, interesting to watch than any of the White House’s trolling shitposts or the slop videos Trump regularly posts on his social feeds. But they are all reflections of the way that people are using AI-generated content to shape online discourse about serious real-world events. Part of what makes Explosive Media’s videos feel more resonant is the fact that, in addition to making fun of the US and its allies, they are imploring you to see Iranians as people with very pointed senses of humor who are fighting back against foreign threats to their nation.

By contrast, the White House has been using AI “memes” shared through official channels to punch down at its own population and make light of its draconian policies. When Trump posted a video of himself using a fighter jet to dump feces on No Kings protesters, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson insisted that the president was merely “using satire to make a point.” The point seemed to be the explicit dehumanization of Trump’s critics, which is one of the main reasons the US’s meme content feels different from what’s coming out of Iran.

When I asked whether Explosive Media sees its content as being in conversation with the White House’s social media posts, the representative said that they do not “compare [themselves] to those childish pieces” because “hands stained with innocent blood cannot create work that touches hearts.”

It’s not just that Explosive Media’s memes are more compelling — they highlight the larger problems the White House has had communicating about this war at all. The US’s messaging about why it’s attacking Iran and how much devastation the war is truly causing has been incredibly muddled. When Trump insisted to CBS last month that the US and Israel’s bombardment of Iran was “very complete, pretty much,” he was lying. The very same day in a separate speech, Trump said the US would “not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated,” adding that the war “could go further.”

“Hands stained with innocent blood cannot create work that touches hearts.“

Since then, the conflict has raged on, Trump has threatened the whole of Iranian civilization with death, and a tenuous ceasefire has reportedly been violated by Israeli forces. The White House’s lack of transparency throughout the war has made it all but impossible to take anything said by governmental officials like Hegseth at face value. Hegseth has repeatedly overstated the effectiveness of the US’s operations against Iran, and the Pentagon has been accused of drastically underreporting military deaths and injuries.

As much as Explosive Media is trying to speak to ordinary people who might not think of themselves as being directly connected to the US’s participation in this war, the group also sees its current popularity as a teachable moment that larger, more established media organizations should be paying close attention to. The lesson here, the group’s representative insisted, is that legacy news organizations have a duty to “let the world hear the voice of the people” — especially those who are young and fighting for their lives.

But there are other things to take away from Explosive Media catapulting itself into the spotlight using gen AI. The group and others like it are crafting polished pieces of propaganda that are designed to speak directly to people outside of Iran (where The Lego Movie was never theatrically screened) using a familiar and accessible visual language. The videos’ playfulness and creativity have made them exactly the kind of content that thrives on social media platforms. And they make the US government’s sloppy attempts at controlling online narratives about this war feel slipshod at best.

The Miniature Wife was an exercise in visual trickery

2026-04-08T18:29:32-04:00

In Manuel Gonzales’ 2013 short story “The Miniature Wife,” a woman starts to become a different kind of person after her husband accidentally shrinks her down to the size of a coffee mug. Because of her new stature, the woman is more physically vulnerable, and it’s difficult for her to effectively communicate with normal sized people. But for all the danger that the woman’s tininess puts her in, it also pushes her to tap into a strength that takes her husband by surprise.

The marital dynamics are very similar in Peacock’s new The Miniature Wife series adaptation starring Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen. The show adds depth to both of its leads with commentary about tech bro chauvinism, and it spends more time with the wife’s interior thoughts. But like the short story, Peacock’s series emphasizes that mundane objects can be terrifying to a person who is just a few inches tall. And it fell to VFX supervisor Ashley Bernes to make The Miniature Wife’s world of ordinary things feel menacing.

Bernes spent months working with a team of artists figuring out just how to present the show’s core conceit in a way that was both fantastical and loosely grounded in real-world physics. When I spoke with Bernes recently, he told me that, while much of the show could have been entirely green-screened, he believed that the project could be made stronger by using a blend of practical, in-camera filmmaking trickery and complex VFX post-production. But to blend those two modes, Bernes knew that there needed to be strong communication between the show’s various creative teams long before cameras started rolling.

“There’s no case where those things aren’t critical, but with a project like this, there is no ‘fix it in post’ because it just can’t work like that,” Bernes said. “This is a show that has about 3,000 VFX shots, and we were working with up to five different VFX vendors at times.”

Though Lindy Littlejohn (Banks) is alarmed when she wakes up in a dollhouse after her husband Les (Macfadyen) shrinks her, it isn’t until she gets out into their full-sized living room that she starts to understand what kind of predicament she’s in. The carpeted floor is soft, but it’s a relatively long way down from the table Lindy finds herself on, and she knows that she would probably die if she were to fall while trying to climb down.

To ease viewers into the show’s fantasy and its dark sense of humor, Bernes thought that it was important for Lindy’s dollhouse to be a fully realized set that Banks could physically interact with. And while VFX would be necessary to depict characters’ size differences, Bernes was keen on keeping the series from feeling like too much of a “CGI Fridays” situation.

“When we’re inside the dollhouse, that is a real set that we built based on the dimensions and specs of a real toy,” Bernes told me. “We actually scanned objects from a real dollhouse, blew them up into a larger scale, and then had them made so that we could use life-size versions of these tiny things.”

As much as The Miniature Wife is a dramedy, it’s also punctuated by moments of action as Lindy escapes her dollhouse and ventures out into the larger world around her. She’s exhilarated when she realizes that she has the strength and know-how to make her way down onto the floor. But her feelings quickly turn to fear when she encounters everyday things like houseflies and her vacuuming robot — both of which are gargantuan from her miniscule perspective.

Crafting those kinds of shots posed a series of challenges to Bernes and his team, who were committed to keeping the show from feeling like a straight rehash of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Marvel’s Ant-Man films. They wanted to make it so that viewers could always understand Lindy’s perspective in relation to their own, which required the crew to establish some hard artistic rules.

“We understand the premise that there is a miniaturization process that has happened, but how miniature is she?” Bernes explained. “Ultimately, we landed on a scale of 12:1 meaning that she is approximately 5.5-6 inches, and all of the props and sets were very regimented with this 12:1 scale. That’s a scale where things are still pretty recognizable. We’re seeing weaves in the fabric and oversized dust bunnies on the ground, but we still know what they are.”

Though there was an understanding that the scale rule could be bent a little in certain situations for dramatic effect, Bernes had to ground his work even further in reality for some of The Miniature Wife’s more action-heavy set pieces, like a scene involving her riding a toy train. Bernes told me that sequences like those are strong examples of how digital and practical effects can blend together to create visuals that are as fantastical as they are rooted in actual physics.

“The realities of this scale relationship makes it so that, in the big world of 1:1, when you move a camera one foot, that means you have to move it 12 feet in the small world,” Bernes said, describing how the train scene came together. “Now picture yourself tracking with a train. So we’re having to move hundreds and hundreds of feet at the same speed as the big world, which means 12 times faster.”

While crafting each of The Miniature Wife’s VFX shots was a huge undertaking, Bernes and his team chose not to use generative AI in the name of making things faster or more efficient. Bernes told me that even though he has used AI tools in the past on other projects and seen how it can be a valuable asset, he still thinks the technology isn’t suited to replace human creativity “because there’s too many steps in the process and too much control needed.”

“Is generative AI a tool that enables us to rapidly prototype ideas and then go to a more traditional visual effects vendor with a clearer idea of what we want to do?” Bernes said. “For sure. But there is not a single VFX frame in this show that was made with generative AI. This is all the result of artists and hundreds of visual effects workers putting things together themselves.”

The Miniature Wife premieres on Peacock on April 9th.

Correction, April 8th: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly referred to Manuel Gonzales’ The Miniature Wife as a book rather than a short story.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is beautiful but a little too busy

2026-04-04T12:08:24-04:00

With The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo entered the next phase of its plan to become a different kind of entertainment giant. Though it wasn’t the company’s first go at putting its iconic plumbers on the big screen, the film demonstrated that Nintendo could collaborate with partners like Illumination to produce box office hits. The first movie supercharged game sales at a time when the original Switch was nearing the end of its life cycle. And with Nintendo also looking to drive interest in its theme park experiences, it was a foregone conclusion that another Mario feature was in the pipeline.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is more of a remixed reimagining than a straight adaptation of the 2007 Wii game it’s named for. The movie weaves elements from multiple Mario games together in a way that’s meant to light up the parts of your brain that activate when you’re experiencing intense nostalgia for something you love. This reference-forward approach makes for some visually stunning set pieces and a number of charming cameos. But there’s a by-the-numbers quality to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s story that’s hard to ignore. And while that doesn’t keep the film from being enjoyable, it does make it seem like Nintendo might be too comfortable relying on its established moviemaking formulas.

Set some time after The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the Galaxy sequel picks up the stories of plumber brothers Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) as they settle into their new lives as world-hopping heroes. With Bowser now miniaturized and no longer posing an imminent threat to the Mushroom Kingdom, Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her confidant Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) know that their people are relatively safe. But with so many different emergencies popping off in locales near the Mushroom Kingdom, Peach relies on assistance from the Mario brothers and their new friend Yoshi (Donald Glover) so that she can focus on her duties as a ruler.

On the whole, things are pretty chill for Mario and his pals until Bowser’s bratty son Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) breaks out of boarding school with a plan to free and bond with his father as they take over the entire galaxy. The key to Bowser Jr.’s scheme to build a “boomsday” weapon is Rosalina (Brie Larson) — an otherworldly princess with a magical power that connects her to the stars. And when Bowser Jr. manages to capture Rosalina, Peach and Toad take it upon themselves to free her while the Mario bros stay behind to mind the mushrooms.

Though returning co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and writer Matthew Fogel once again give Mario and Luigi plenty of time in the spotlight with gorgeous action set pieces, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s focus on Peach is one of the big things that sets it apart from the last film. The new movie spends more time fleshing out the details of her mysterious backstory while introducing aspects of the character people know from the games, like her romantic relationship with Mario. And here, Peach is given more opportunities to shine as the centerpiece of some truly dazzling action set pieces, something that can often be missing from her video game exploits.

Peach and Toad’s interplanetary odyssey takes them to a variety of gorgeous new worlds that hardcore Mario fans will immediately recognize just from the way that composer Brian Tyler’s score morphs to allude to different Mario songs. But as much of Super Mario Galaxy’s gameplay as you’ll be able to recognize in the movie’s shots of Peach and Toad flying through space, you would be hard-pressed to call this a faithful adaptation of the game’s narrative. That disconnect made some sense for the last movie, which had to introduce us to all of these characters in a way that made sense on screen. Here, though, it feels like Nintendo’s piling on a few too many nods to different parts of the Mario franchise while not giving any single one of them enough time to properly breathe.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie feels busy as it introduces the Honey Queen (Issa Rae) and shady kingpin Wart (Luis Guzmán) while catching everyone up on what Yoshi’s whole deal is. There’s just a lot going on — some of which makes it seem like Nintendo’s using this project to hint at bigger things on the horizon. As fun as it is to see characters from other Nintendo franchises like Fox McCloud (a surprisingly excellent Glen Powell) show up, those cameos (there are a few the studio hasn’t revealed yet) and the way everyone brawls make it seem like Nintendo is more concerned with teasing a potential interconnected cinematic universe. That’s unfortunate because The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is strongest when it slows down to give its core characters new depth, and the time it spends bringing newcomers into the picture would have been much better used making sure that everyone felt more three-dimensional.

As thin as the movie’s story is, it moves with a briskness that reminds you that this is very much a movie for people with short attention spans who can’t be bothered to sit in a theater for two-plus hours (read: children). But while that enthusiasm might be enough to turn The Super Mario Galaxy Movie into another $1 billion hit, Nintendo will probably need to take a different approach as it makes a name for itself in Hollywood — especially with a much more challenging adaptation on the horizon.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie also stars Kevin Michael Richardson, Juliet Jelenic, and Ed Skudder. The movie hits theaters on April 1st.

There is no ethical consumption of HBO’s Harry Potter series

2026-03-29T16:15:27-04:00

In the coming years, HBO wants its new Harry Potter series to become “the streaming event of the decade” as it adapts each of the franchise’s seven original books. The show could very well become a hit that captures the imaginations of a new generation of fans who weren’t there for the first wave of Pottermania that intensified with the releases of each book and Warner Bros.’ subsequent film adaptations. And if this Harry Potter is a success, it could give author J.K. Rowling a reason to consider writing more stories set in the magical world that turned her into a billionaire.

But all of that hinges on whether people will actually watch HBO’s Harry Potter, which is being executive produced by Rowling. In some cases, a franchise’s creator being so closely involved with new versions of their work can be a good thing, but Rowling’s involvement in this show casts a shadow over it that HBO can do very little to counteract. Rowling has made it abundantly clear that she thinks attacking transgender people via the legal system is a worthwhile cause and a good use of her vast personal fortune. And as much as Harry Potter fans might be excited to see what HBO has cooked up, there’s no way to watch this show without supporting Rowling’s bigotry and the structural violence she’s inflicting on a vulnerable minority.

For years, Rowling has trafficked in garden variety transphobia under the guise of being a champion for cisgender women’s rights. Last Thursday in a post praising the International Olympic Committee for banning transgender women from competing, Rowling implicitly misgendered 2024 boxing gold medalist Imane Khelif. The post was the latest instance of Rowling using transphobic dog whistles to attack Khelif, which is what led the athlete to file a criminal complaint against Rowling last summer.

Many people had previously gleaned from Rowling’s online interactions with trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) that she might hold transphobic views. But it wasn’t until 2019 that she came out as a TERF herself while weighing in on a precedent-setting UK legal battle. On Twitter, Rowling voiced her support for Maya Forstater, a British tax consultant whose contract with the Centre for Global Development was not renewed in response to concerns about her tweeting and retweeting multiple posts misgendering and denying the existence of trans people. Forstater — a self-identified “gender-critical activist” — filed a lawsuit against the CGD and its president Masood Ahmed alleging that her non-renewal was a violation of Britain’s 2010 Equality Act.

While the Equality Act barred discrimination based on “gender reassignment,” Forstater claimed that she was being unfairly persecuted for her personal beliefs. One judge tossed the case out, ruling that Forstater’s views were “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others.” But Forstater was able to appeal, and in 2021, the Employment Appeal Tribunal decided in her favor.

Rowling’s tweet was not what led to Forstater ultimately receiving £106,400 ($141,683) in lost earnings and aggravated damages in 2023. But Rowling’s willingness to openly align herself with TERF agitators was significant because she was lending credence to the larger culture of transphobia that has plagued the UK for decades. By supporting Forstater, Rowling was encouraging the public to embrace their hateful beliefs and to think of transgender people as threats to society. That kind of rhetoric has been linked to spikes in hate crimes directed at queer people. Rowling knows full well that her celebrity helps her amplify transphobic ideology in ways that people like Forstater could not on their own. Rowling also understands that her wealth puts her in a prime position to advance the TERF agenda (read: enforcing gender essentialism and erasing trans people from existence) on a societal level.

That’s exactly what Rowling was doing in 2024 when she donated £70,000 ($93,212) to For Women Scotland (FWS), an advocacy group that challenged Scotland’s 2018 Gender Representation on Public Boards Act 2018. The Act’s definition of women included people who had “the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.” FWS won its initial judicial review in 2022, which deemed that defining women was outside of the Scottish Parliament’s purview. That decision was reversed in 2023, and in 2024, an amended version of the Scottish Gender Representation Act that used the British 2010 Equality Act’s definition of women — which included trans women — was signed into law. That same year, FWS filed and lost another judicial review against the amended Scottish Gender Representation Act challenging its use of the British 2010 Equality Act’s definition. And while FWS could not appeal that decision, the case went all the way to the UK Supreme Court, which ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex assigned at birth. To pay for this extensive legal battle, FWS turned to crowdsourcing, and Rowling was all too happy to dump tens of thousands of dollars into their cause.

This UK Supreme Court’s definition is itself problematic because human sex biology is not a binary. And in addition to preventing transgender people from having their gender identity legally recognized, the ruling makes it much harder for them to pursue legal action for gender-based discrimination. Rowling celebrated the Court’s decision by posting a photo of herself with a very clear message: “I love it when a plan comes together.” The plan in this case was to help bankroll an anti-trans group’s campaign against trans people, and it culminated with the passage of a law that reduces all women living in the UK down to the way their bodies are perceived when they are born.

Rowling has been transparent about her desire to keep assisting people in their efforts to rob transgender people of their dignity and human rights. That seems very much to be the entire point of The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund — an organization Rowling launched in 2025 that claims to be “fighting to retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights in all aspects of life.” The Fund offers financial support provided by Rowling to cisgender women who are looking to file lawsuits. The Fund’s website makes no mention of gender as a concept, but it explicitly points to the For Women Scotland case as the kind of “victory” that it wants to see more of in the world.

Rowling has been rich enough to pour cash into organizations like this for some time now because she continues to hold primary intellectual property rights to the entire Harry Potter franchise. Every Harry Potter book, movie, video game, stage show ticket, theme park pass, and piece of merchandise that’s sold puts money into Rowling’s pocket, which she can use to keep her crusade against trans people going. Given the property’s lasting popularity, Rowling, who is currently worth about $1.2 billion, could probably do all of this even if HBO wasn’t producing a new Harry Potter series. But because the network is and it wants to keep the show going for at least a decade, Rowling will have even more capital at her disposal to impose her retrograde views onto others.

Clearly, this doesn’t concern HBO’s executive leadership whose primary goals are to boost the company’s stock value while taking home outsized paychecks and hefty exit packages of their own. But it is absolutely something that HBO’s subscribers should be thinking about as Warner Bros. cranks the Harry Potter hype machine up ahead of the show’s premiere later this year. HBO does not want you to think about how it is platforming a known bigot and making it easier for her to spread patently hateful, harmful messaging that can endanger people. And Rowling would probably rather people not consider the fact that there are plenty of other magical academia series to become obsessed with.

Webtoon is adding AI localization tools to its comics platform

2026-03-26T12:31:42-04:00

Canvas, Webtoon’s platform for user-uploaded comics, is about to get a major overhaul that’s designed to help creators make more money and share their art with a wider audience.

Today, Webtoon announced its plans to roll out a number of new features for Canvas that will make it easier for artists to build global followings and gain a deeper understanding of who’s engaging with their work. Soon, manga creators who upload their work to Canvas will be able to use an AI-powered translation tool to localize their scripts into English, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and German. A beta version of the translation feature — which is optional — will first be made available to English-speaking Canvas users sometime this spring before Webtoon rolls it out to other markets later this summer.

Additionally, Webtoon is introducing an updated Canvas dashboard that the company says will provide “improved insights into series performance, deeper analytics to understand readership, and new tools to manage community engagement.” Webtoon also plans to make its ad revenue share program accessible to all creators producing work in any of the languages supported on Canvas.

Speaking to The Verge Webtoon president Yongsoo Kim said that all of the big changes coming to Canvas are meant to assist creators “grow their audience, build fandoms, and earn more from their work.” Kim told me that Webtoon’s chief concern is to help its creative overcome some of the challenges they might face with traditional distribution channels. Kim also described Canvas’ new translation functionality as a tool that’s designed to make creators’ lives easier.

“For a long time, language barriers and distribution challenges have limited creators’ reach,” Kim said. “With these tools, we want to help creators reach readers around the world while keeping full creative control of their work.”

On paper, Canvas’ AI tool sounds a lot like the Kindle Translate tool Amazon rolled out last fall. When I asked Kim about how the translation program works, he explained that the tool is built on a combination of Webtoon’s own proprietary language model and “a powerful, external LLM.” Kim said that the program only processes textual elements of a manga page and no content is stored or used to further train the LLM. And because there’s more to localization than translating text from one language to another, the AI tool also features a glossary section that creators can fill out with information about their series that will help the tool maintain translation consistency and understand narrative context.

“The model will have relatively less context for titles that have just started and only have a few episodes published on the platform,” Kim explained. “But once a creator has begun translating their episodes and publishing more, the model will develop more cumulative context about the title and the overall quality of the AI-generated translations will improve.”

Given AI models’ tendency to make mistakes, creators might still want to check their translated work for potential errors. But Kim noted that, if creators or readers find errors, they will be able to submit reports to Webtoon’s quality assurance team, which will trigger a human reviewing process. In response to being asked about whether Webtoon had given any thought to the possibility of readers being turned off by the company encouraging its partners to use AI, Kim stressed that the translation tool is completely optional and translated versions of a series will be removed from the platform if a creator opts out.

“At Webtoon, we strongly believe that this kind of technology should only be used to help our creators, not replace them,” Kim said. “We are starting with the translation program, but we’re still thinking about what kinds of support based on AI and other technologies will genuinely support our creators’ daily lives.”

Disney’s big bets on the metaverse and AI slop aren’t going so well

2026-04-03T11:59:15-04:00

Less than a week into his tenure as Disney’s newly appointed CEO, Josh D’Amaro, is already dealing with two separate crises that have cast a shadow over the company’s future plans. OpenAI is shutting down its Sora image-generation program just months after Disney announced a $1 billion dollar collaboration to bake the tech into Disney Plus. And Fortnite maker Epic is laying off 1,000 employees at a time when we’ve heard basically nothing about the game studio’s $1.5 billion investment deal with Disney to build a metaverse.

Disney could still integrate generative AI into its streaming service, and we might end up seeing some version of the company’s metaversal dreams become reality. But yesterday’s news from OpenAI and Epic point to an uncertain future for some of Disney’s biggest bets.

There have always been signs that Sora was far from being ready for the big leagues (read: used to produce studio-approved entertainment). But OpenAI’s decision to shutter Sora came as a surprise, in part, because of how the Disney deal helped normalize the idea of major companies getting into bed with gen AI firms. In addition to giving OpenAI a massive influx of capital, the deal with Disney — which would put user-generated AI content directly onto Disney Plus — gave Sora a level of legitimacy that could have had a huge impact on how the public thinks about and engages with this kind of tech.

Disney Plus would have also become flooded with AI slop that truly no one would see as a compelling reason to sign up for the service. But the legacy studio could have still patted itself on the back for being a trailblazer in the AI space and spun that to investors as a sign of it having a deep understanding of how to capitalize on tech trends. The situation reads very differently now — especially with OpenAI currently being under fire for helping the Pentagon conduct mass surveillance. Disney seems like it wants to cut its losses by distancing itself from OpenAI, which makes sense, but that move only highlights how ridiculous it was for D’Amaro to spearhead the collaboration in the first place.

You don’t need a background in corporate leadership to understand how ridiculous Disney’s plan to pay OpenAI $1 billion so that Sora could churn out slop featuring some of the studio’s characters was. Disney appears to have figured that out now, and late is better than never, but the OpenAI deal falling apart is going to make any future AI plans the company announces feel like they might be just as misguided and doomed to fail the same way.

While the Epic layoffs haven’t been attributed to anything Disney-related, the sheer number of people who just lost their jobs gives us some insight into how things are changing at the company. Like every other live-service game, Fortnite has been struggling to keep its momentum going, and in-game currency price hikes could only do so much to offset lower player engagement and higher operating costs. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told staffers that the layoffs and $500 million reduction in spending will put the company “in a more stable place,” which might be true, but it raises some questions about how the Disney partnership is being prioritized.

Last week, Epic announced that Fortnite creators will soon be able to build Star Wars-themed games on the platform. That was the first bit of concrete news about the Epic / Disney collaboration the company shared since releasing a batch of Disney-focused minigames last fall. But what we haven’t heard about or seen is the ambitious “persistent universe” the two companies planned to build together as part of Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic back in 2024. While Fortnite isn’t going away anytime soon, its struggles as one of the biggest online games in the world don’t bode well for the idea of a Disney-branded metaverse, which would be competing in the most cutthroat segment of the games industry. And now Epic will be building it with a significantly smaller team.

With both the Sora and Epic deals, Disney was clearly trying to get ahead of the game by making a big bet on the future through investments in AI and the metaverse. But in a single day, that future looks much less certain — which means Disney may have made a pair of very expensive mistakes.

Pokémon Champions is coming to the Nintendo Switch on April 8th

2026-03-24T16:33:47-04:00

Right now, Pokopia has everyone busy building houses and beautifying the world, but next month, we’ll be making our pocket monster friends fight for sport in Pokémon Champions.

Today, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Champions is set to make its debut on the Nintendo Switch family of consoles on April 8th before the mobile phone version of the game releases sometime later this year. People playing the game on the Nintendo Switch 2 will also receive a free update on April 8th that improves the game’s graphical quality. In addition to the new launch date, Nintendo also dropped a new trailer that showcases new footage and explains how Champions will be able to connect with other games in the Pokémon franchise.

While Champions will give you access to a random selection of pokémon that you can temporarily recruit to use in battle, you will also be able to bring your own monsters over from Pokémon games like Scarlet and Violet and Pokémon Go via the Pokémon Home app. This could make Champions a great place to show off groups of your favorite pokémon who might otherwise just be stuck in boxes. But The Pokémon Company says that Champions is set to become the new primary platform for competitive play, so you might want to pick the monsters you bring over very carefully.

The gen AI Kool-Aid tastes like eugenics

2026-03-22T23:43:53-04:00

Like many people, director Valerie Veatch was intrigued when OpenAI first released its Sora text-to-video generative AI model to the public in 2024. Though she didn’t fully understand the technology, she was curious about what it could do, and she saw that other artists were building online communities to share their new AI creations. The hope of connecting with people drew Veatch into the AI space, but once she was there, she was shocked to see how often the technology would generate images dripping with racism and sexism.

Veatch was even more unsettled by the way her new AI-enthusiast peers did not seem to care that the machine they rallied around spewed out hateful, bigoted garbage without being explicitly prompted to do so. The bizarre situation drove Veatch away from her early experimentation with gen AI. But it also inspired her to make Ghost in the Machine, a new documentary about the technologies and schools of thought that laid the groundwork for gen AI’s existence.

Instead of focusing on the potential (if highly improbable) benefits to society that gen AI accelerationists swear are just around the corner, Ghost in the Machine explores the technology’s history to explain why it works the way it does now. When I recently spoke with Veatch about the film, she told me that she wanted to chronicle gen AI’s genesis to give people a clear view of the very intense cycle of industry hype we’re currently living through. First, however, she had to cut through AI firms’ purposeful obfuscation of the entire concept.

“In order to use the phrase ‘artificial intelligence,’ we have to know what the fuck that phrase means,” Veatch told me over a video call. “The truth is, it doesn’t mean anything; it’s a marketing term and always has been. It’s a completely misleading, stupid phrase that has taken on its own cultural meaning, and I think being really clear about the words we use and the meaning of those words is essential.”

As Ghost in the Machine repeatedly stresses, “artificial intelligence” was originally coined in 1956 by computer scientist John McCarthy when he was trying to secure more funding for his projects. But the documentary presents the term’s coinage as just one of many important points on a timeline that actually begins in Victorian-era England with the birth of eugenics. In addition to being Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton was the originator of eugenics — the racist and discredited belief that humanity can be improved through the systemic elimination of “inferior” (read: non-white) races.

While Galton definitely made some useful contributions to academia, in our interview, Veatch explained that it is important to not minimize the fact that his deeply held white supremacist beliefs informed the era’s social sciences. Galton and his fellow eugenicist / protegee Karl Pearson were not directly involved in the development of early computational machines. But Galton’s foundational work with multidimensional modeling — a technique he used while measuring the attractiveness of African and European women — shaped Pearson’s thinking as he developed statistical tools like logistic regression, which is one of the fundamental components of modern machine learning.

“Am I going to hug Sam Altman on camera? Is that a truthful film about this technology? That’s propaganda.”

Galton Pearson helped normalize the idea that people of various races were fundamentally different in quantifiable ways. This kind of racist thinking is what led to Galton and his peers believing that human intelligence could be measured, and that human brains function very much like machines. That jump, Veatch says, played a major role in selling the public on the fantastical idea of artificial intelligence.

“What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science because it’s baked into this technology,” Veatch said, explaining that these concepts are “soaked” in eugenic thinking.

Rather than trying to disprove the idea that gen AI models produce hateful ideology because they’ve been trained on it (a concept commonly known as “GIGO” — garbage in, garbage out), Ghost in the Machine uses its historical analysis to explain why the companies building this technology seem so disinterested in addressing its present-day issues. This historical context helped Veatch make sense of some of her own troubling experiences with gen AI, back when she was playing around with an early version of Sora in an artists’ Slack. Veatch remembers the group as being a friendly, welcoming place right up until another member — a woman of color — began voicing concerns about the way the model whitewashed her every time she prompted it to generate images based on photos of herself.

“It kept her braids and it kept her fashion, but she was prompting herself into an art gallery, which the program understood to be a ‘white space,’” Veatch explained. “My reaction was ‘what the fuck,’ and I tried explaining to the group how this was really a problem with the software itself.” No one else in the group engaged with her post. “This was a Slack where, normally, there are always like dozens of screaming koala emoji reactions on every post. But this time, there was nothing.”

Veatch took it upon herself to get in contact with OpenAI directly to alert the company about “how racist, sexist, and misogynistic the outputs [she] was seeing were — outputs where women would start growing extra tits and twerking after like two rounds of generating a scene.” Veatch thought OpenAI would see this as a critical bug worth fixing before encouraging more people to adopt Sora into their lives; instead the company brushed her concerns aside.

“The feedback I got was basically, ‘This is very cringe to be bringing up; there’s nothing we can do to change it,’” Veatch recalled.

That situation lit a fire within Veatch to learn about why so many different forms of generative intelligence consistently behave in such ugly, troublesome ways. At first, she didn’t really think that having Zoom calls with the authors of white papers about the technology could be turned into a compelling documentary, but that changed as she began to see a clear line from Galton’s eugenic statistics work to modern gen AI outfits.

The voices featured in Ghost in the Machine — a blend of AI researchers, historians, and critical theorists — make a compelling case that basically every facet of the AI space has been profoundly influenced by its historical connections to fields of science built to support discriminatory world views. When I asked Veatch if she had ever been interested in speaking directly with the heads of the companies Ghost in the Machine takes to task, she laughed. Getting that kind of access, she said, would require her to go through all kinds of ideological gymnastics and make compromises that would make her film complicit in gen AI’s harms.

“There’s the idea, you know, these people won’t trust just anyone,” Veatch said. “Yeah, no shit, and I certainly hope they wouldn’t trust me. I don’t want them in the film and they already speak enough to the media. Am I going to hug Sam Altman on camera? Is that a truthful film about this technology? That’s propaganda.”

Ghost in the Machine will be available to stream via Kinema from March 26th to March 28th before it airs on PBS some time this fall.

Correction, March 21st: An earlier version of this story used the phrase “logical regression” when “logistic regression” is correct.

Tubi and TikTok are partnering to produce long form series

2026-03-19T12:20:52-04:00

Soon, some of TikTok’s biggest personalities are going to be launching new streaming series on Tubi.

Today, Tubi and TikTok announced that they are working together to launch a new Creatorverse Incubator that will help content creators produce long form original series for the Fox-owned streaming service. Once selected for the program, a group of Tiktokkers will work with Tubi to develop a variety of scripted and unscripted (think competition / dating / game shows) projects covering a number of different genres. In a statement about the initiative, Tubi said that it plans to announce its first cohort of participants some time later this summer. TikTok’s global head of entertainment partnerships Dawn Yang also stressed that the company sees the incubator as another way of “empowering creators on our platform and throughout their career journey.”

“Our creators have built deeply engaged audiences on TikTok, and our partnership with Tubi will give the next generation of entertainers more opportunities to expand their audiences, tell bigger stories, and turn their creativity into lasting impact,” Yang said.

The Creatorverse Incubator sounds a bit like Tubi’s Stubios initiative, which gave up-and-coming filmmakers an opportunity to develop new streaming projects whose funding was contingent on hitting certain fan engagement metrics. While the Stubios program has featured social media stars, the Creatorverse Incubator seems like it’s going to be much more focused on directly capitalizing on its participants’ previous success on TikTok.

That makes some sense in a media environment where more studios are beginning to invest in TikTok-inspired vertical videos. But Tubi’s emphasis on the incubator being meant for long form content raises some obvious questions like whether people are actually interested in watching TikTokkers speak at length. The brevity of TikTok’s content compared to traditional series is a core part of its appeal, and if Tubi wants this incubator to work, it has to figure out how to get people excited about a related, but very different kind of medium.