Creators

HarperCollins probably dropped a pretty penny to get Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson and James Patterson to collaborate on their newly released novel, The Most Dangerous Games. But Semafor reports that the publisher might have a hard time making that money back due to the book’s very, very low pre-sales.

He admitted to being “scared” but excited about his new YouTube channel in his first video, but said that after 30 years making movies, he wants to “undo whatever stigmas are in my head or in anybody’s head.” Shyamalan dives into his Signs filmmaking diary in his second video on the channel.

It’s planning to run full-page ads in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times on Thursday, according to NYT reporter Mike Isaac, on the heels of Meta’s $17 billion settlement with state AGs. Meta is using the settlement to urge its top competitors to take on similar restrictions.

It would have been the next bellwether in the group of cases tried in a Los Angeles state court. In the first, Meta and YouTube were ordered to pay $6 million total. After settling with TikTok, the teen’s lawyer told The New York Times, she wanted to “resume her life.”

The Generate Music, Speech, and Sound effects tools are generally available in Adobe Firefly following their beta launches last year. Adobe is also trying to attract more users for its Firefly AI Assistant, so now it has a “free experience with daily generations,” instead of limiting the feature to Firefly subscribers.

A few years ago, Leo Mastrolia started a gadget repair shop. Little did he know he’d eventually become known across the internet as The Digital Doctor, and would learn to fix practically every gadget you can think of. On this episode, which is part one of our conversation with Leo, he tells us about his journey as a gadget fixer, the growth of his social channels, and how right-to-repair fights and upgrade cycles are affecting life in his store.

According to Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton, that’s the “honest answer” as to why the streaming platform has started training Amazon’s generative AI models on users’ content by default. Twitch users can choose to opt out, but Minton defends the default setting because “almost every content service in the world” is also doing it.

After initially being tested by “select creators,” Creator Studio is now available for iOS users in the US and Canada. The original Creator Studio page manager experience was shut down in 2023, but Meta describes this revived version as an “AI-powered companion app” that helps creators to grow and engage with their audience.

Nearly two years after the YouTuber’s first video accusing PayPal’s Honey browser extension of ripping off customers, affiliated creators, and even retailers, he’s back.

After acquiring the artist portfolio site ArtStation and Sketchfab in 2021, Epic announced that they will be taken over by Kitbash, which sells 3D assets for games. The changes are happing as Epic “continues to prioritize building Unreal Engine 6, Fortnite, the developer ecosystem, and the Epic Games Store,” according to the company.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal filed by the tech companies, allowing more than 3,000 child safety lawsuits to proceed, according to Reuters.

In his first video after expressing his feelings of over-reliance on LLMs, Green clarifies the AI usage policy at his education company Complexly, stating “no one is using AI to create Crash Course videos”. He also laid out a new AI policy for himself, and encouraged other creators to do the same.

The company has reportedly slashed its revenue forecast for 2026 by a third after relying too heavily on frontier models from other providers to drive AI features on the platform. According to Startup Daily, here’s what CEO Melanie Perkins had to say in an update to shareholders:

The new practice mode offers creators a chance test things out privately before really going live.

After launching ChatGPT connectors for Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express, Adobe has now combined everything into a single Adobe plugin. Adobe for ChatGPT includes a variety of tools from Firefly and Creative Cloud apps that let you make or edit images, videos, documents, and other content by giving conversational instructions and descriptions to OpenAI’s chatbot.

250 employees have been laid off, The New York Times reports, including members of the social network’s content moderation team. The closure was made “to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth,” a press officer for TikTok’s US joint venture told The Times.

A defamation lawsuit by Keith Bass over SpyTalk writer Jeff Stein’s report that Bass had been “effectively fired” from his post leading the CIA’s Office of Medical Services in 2021 has been dismissed with prejudice.

Network Boost is a new feature that aims to provide reliable connectivity for IRL streamers. It requires a Streamlabs Ultra subscription (which starts from $27 per month) and works by pooling cellular and local Wi-Fi connections together on both the iPhone you’re broadcasting on, and a secondary iPhone or Android device running the Streamlabs Controller app.

Only 3,300 more lawsuits to go, all filed by minors claiming that TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat were designed to be addictive, resulting in harm to their mental health. The plaintiffs’ claims against Meta, Google, and Snap are still on track for a bellwether trial in October. The first case to reach trial resulted in a $4.2 million verdict against Meta and $1.8 million against Google.