Former Disney Star Announces Cookbook After 'Challenging' Food Relationship
Former Disney Star Announces Cookbook After 'Challenging' Food Relationship originally appeared on Parade.
Demi Lovato announced that she's releasing a cookbook after years of food and body image struggles.
The former Disney Channel star's debut cookbook, ONE PLATE AT A TIME: Recipes for Finding Freedom with Food, is set to be released on March 31, 2026, by Flatiron Books.
"Demi Lovato's cooking journey started when she was almost thirty. After years of navigating a challenging relationship with food, she found that learning to cook — discovering how to truly nourish herself in mind, body, and spirit — was a revelation," the book's description reads. "It was in the kitchen, experimenting with flavors, connecting with loved ones, and channeling her creativity in a new way — that she truly began to appreciate and celebrate the joy of food."
In the book, Lovato, 32, will welcome "everyone into the kitchen with a collection of more than eighty recipes, all created to emphasize enjoyment over perfection."
The cookbook will include a variety of recipes ranging from "breakfast to dinner, comfort foods to fast food-inspired favorites, soups to salads, and even go-to sweet treats."
"Filled with beautiful food photography as well as snapshots that give fans a peek into Demi's home life, personal anecdotes, pantry tips, and cooking hacks, this is a cookbook for Demi Lovato fans, for people who struggle to enjoy food without guilt, and for anyone looking for a gentler, more grounded approach to cooking," the synopsis concludes. "One Plate at a Time is Demi's set list for a delicious new way of thinking about food and how it fits into our lives."
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Lovato announced her latest career venture after years of struggling with an eating disorder.
'I have a treatment team that I work with that helps me stay in recovery, and I've been in recovery from bulimia for five, going on six, years now,' she said while appearing on an October 2024 episode of Penn Badgley's "Podcrushed" podcast. 'I'm trying to learn body acceptance rather than body positivity, because body positivity feels like, 'I can't even reach that yet.' I have a nutritionist and a therapist that specializes in eating disorders.'
She hinted at her love for cooking in the interview, saying that making meals at home feels like 'the biggest 'F--k you'' to her eating disorder. 'The main thing that I'm working on is just body acceptance, and looking in the mirror and being like, 'This body is strong … This body saved my life and fought for my life when I overdosed. This body is a miracle,'" Lovato added.
Former Disney Star Announces Cookbook After 'Challenging' Food Relationship first appeared on Parade on Jun 25, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 25, 2025, where it first appeared.
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Lauren Goode: I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior correspondent at WIRED. Katie Drummond: And I'm Katie Drummond, WIRED's global editorial director. Michael Calore: So before we start today, our listeners should know that we have a special guest with us, the inevitable Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED, who has been closely covering the Disney Universal lawsuit and will be able to tell us all about it. Welcome to Uncanny Valley , Kate Knibbs. Kate Knibbs: Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Lauren Goode: Knibbs. Katie Drummond: Thank you for being here. Lauren Goode: Extreme Knibbs is on the show. Kate Knibbs: Well, last time I was here, this podcast had a different name and way less Katie, so this is very exciting. Lauren Goode: We've just been beta testing this for the day that we could bring you on, Knibbs. Michael Calore: Okay, well, let's start our conversation with Midjourney. Kate, can you tell us what this company is about? And also, I'm curious if any of us here have used it. Kate Knibbs: Midjourney is a pretty small player in the generative AI space, small potatoes compared to something like OpenAI. Its main tool that it offers consumers is actually quite similar though to OpenAI's DALL·E or Stability AI's Stable Diffusion product. So it's a tool where you put in a prompt and it creates an image using generative AI magic based on that prompt. For a long time, the way that you did this, this is an example of how small Midjourney was. You had to go on a Discord and then type your prompt into the Discord chat, and then that's how you would get your image. There wasn't even a dedicated web interface until 2024. So now it's just launched a video option, so it's definitely expanding and continuing to grow, but I'd say a secondary or tertiary player on the scene. Michael Calore: So why are Disney and Universal, these two Hollywood Juggernauts, suing Midjourney? Kate Knibbs: Well, they allege that Midjourney is infringing upon their intellectual property. If you've ever played around with the app, now it's just a web interface, you put in whatever you want and it spits out whatever you want. There's not the most sophisticated guardrails going on. So if you wanted to make an image that showed, for example, Homer Simpson or Wally or Darth Vader or the Boss Baby, which is one of Universal's most beloved cartoons apparently. Katie Drummond: I love Boss Baby. Kate Knibbs: Well, you can do it pretty easily and there have been a lot of people compiling different examples of how easy it is to create images that feature Disney and Universal and other popular characters using tools like Midjourney. I don't know what the conversations were like within Disney and Universal's offices, but apparently they had enough. They're late to the AI copyright lawsuit game here. There's already been dozens and dozens filed, including some against Midjourney, but they came in with a splash because their complaint against Midjourney features hundreds of images of their very, very recognizable characters that were spun up by Midjourney's AI tools. Katie Drummond: Who here has MidJourney? Is this a tool that you guys use, Mike and Lauren? Kate, I assume that you've played around with it quite a bit. Lauren Goode: I think I used it once, and having to go to the Discord server to type in the prompt was a total barrier, and I was like, I'm never using this again. Yeah. Katie Drummond: Poor user experience. Lauren Goode: Haven't tried it since, but sure. Yeah. How about you, Mike? Michael Calore: I've used it a couple of times, mostly just asking it to make cats surfing or cats making pancakes, just because I was put on the spot, but yeah, a friend of mine has access and showed it to me and I was able to type in some prompts. This was when it was just an image generator, so it wasn't doing video, but from what I understand now, you generate an image and then you just click animate, and then it just turns it into an animation. Lauren Goode: Wild. Michael Calore: Yeah. Lauren Goode: Kate, how much were you using it before you reported out the story? Kate Knibbs: I started playing around with a lot of the image generators back in 2023 when I started writing more about AI, just so I understood how they worked. And I don't know, I'm just not ever super keen to spend my time generating AI images. I'm definitely more of an LLM girl if you're going to get into what GenAI tools we use, so I think I used it basically just for testing. I haven't been incorporating it into my personal creative practice. Katie Drummond: I love the phrase personal creative practice. That is amazing. We all have one. Lauren Goode: Katie, have you used it? Katie Drummond: No. Well, I haven't, but I use it vicariously because I'm married to someone who loves generative AI, uses every possible generative AI tool at all times of day and night, and has used Midjourney a lot and is constantly generating new images as part of his personal creative practice. There's a lot of Midjourney activity in my household. I just cannot say that I personally am spending my time generating images with generative AI. No, Lauren Goode: Fair enough. I think we are just cruising towards an episode, Katie, where your spouse joins us on this show. Katie Drummond: Oh my God, we would never leave the studio. We would be in here for seven, eight hours. I'm married to a very talkative person. Lauren Goode: It would be like an acquired podcast, but Uncanny Valley . All right, so back to this lawsuit. Kate, something that caught my eye in your reporting is that Midjourney has been really, really open about the fact that it's just scraping the internet to train its model to create this data set of images. This is something that we know all generative AI startups do, but Midjourney CEO has been really candid about it and said a few years ago, there just isn't really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they're coming from. He said, quote-unquote, "It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner," or something. But that's not a thing. There's not a registry, and a lot of startups, rather than waiting for that technology to catch up or for there to be guardrails in place, it just moved full speed ahead, and openly was ripping Disney content from the internet. Is that what we're getting from this? Kate Knibbs: That is definitely what he said, and I do want to emphasize, at the time that these tools were being created, even a year or two ago, that thinking was almost universal in Silicon Valley. There wasn't that much debate about whether scraping the internet was kosher to create this kind of tool. It was just assumed that if you could scrape something off the internet, then it was fair game. And at the time that he made those comments, I think it was 2022, we were in a very different space. Since then, there has been this whole boom lit attached to the rise of generative AI where there's all of these different companies that are basically, I don't think they have metadata embedded in images, but there's licensing marketplaces, there's all of these different licensing startups. A lot of different companies are making licensing agreements. Lauren Goode: There was also a coalition I think spearheaded by Adobe, and a bunch of tech companies started to get involved around watermarking images specifically. Is that similar? Kate Knibbs: Yeah. Yeah. So that's exactly what I'm talking about. It just took off. People realized that there was a big market opportunity here to create licensing agreements and to pay for content used as training data. So at the time, I think he probably said that in good faith, but I think right now to say that would sound kind of ridiculous because you'd have to be ignoring all of these different initiatives and programs and startups that have cropped up, and all of the dozens of lawsuits that have cropped up saying, actually, no. It's a copyright violation to train your models this way. Katie Drummond: I will say it is unfortunate for him and his company that he said stuff like that on the record, when fast-forward to 2025, you have Disney, which is notoriously tough when it comes to copyright, actually leading this effort against Midjourney. And from what we know, Disney's top lawyer, Horacio Gutierrez, actually led this legal fight by basically asking his peers across Hollywood to join in. So asked a bunch of these different companies. Eventually, Comcast Corporation, which owns NBC Universal and Universal Studios, agreed to participate. So the fact that Disney is really taking the lead here, I would say I'm not a lawyer, but Kate, is your understanding that that is a particularly stressful place to find yourself if you are Midjourney, and all of a sudden, Disney, specifically Disney is coming out swinging, Kate Knibbs: It's literally the worst possible thing that could happen. Katie Drummond: Oh. Ouch. Kate Knibbs: Disney is the final boss of copyright litigation, and if there's a second final boss, so Midjourney has found itself in a real pickle. This isn't the first time Midjourney is being sued actually for copyright infringement. There's a group of visual artists who filed a lawsuit several years ago at this point, but this is a massive escalation. This is going from Pee-Wee Baseball to World Series type of thing. Katie Drummond: Oh, I have goosebumps. Michael Calore: So the lawsuit is filed at the beginning of June, and then within just a couple of weeks, Midjourney comes out with an update to its generative AI slate of tools. They release a video generation tool called V1. Now Kate, last week, you had an exclusive story for WIRED about V1, and you noted that it doubles down on this pattern of displaying Disney and Universal copyrighted imagery. So what did you find out when you tested it? Kate Knibbs: Yeah, I will say this about Midjourney. They are bold. They're bold company, because Reese and I, our colleague, tested it and we were still able to generate a number of different videos that prominently featured Disney and Universal characters. Not only that, but some of the videos that we were very quickly able to generate featured Disney characters doing un-Disney-like things like Wally, the lovable robot from the titular film, Wally, holding a gun, and then Yoda smoking a joint. And I did get a lot of feedback that it seems like Yoda's High anyways so maybe that's actually Canon, but still. Lauren Goode: These are just mascots for the ages. What is more representative of this time than Wally holding a gun? Kate Knibbs: Yeah. But yeah, so they did appear to have some guardrails. There were certain characters, I think Darth Vader was one of them, where we had to misspell the name, so there was at least a slight effort that appeared to be taken to stop people, but it was still incredibly easy to generate the videos. I don't know where that leaves Midjourney. It doesn't seem someplace great. Michael Calore: So that's interesting. So to get some characters to appear, obviously some of the names of the characters were blocked, but to get some characters to appear, you could just misspell their name and it would pass the filters and generate something that was exactly what you were typing? Kate Knibbs: Yes, unmistakably too. It wasn't a super off-brand Shrek or Darth Vader. It was the character that we know. Katie Drummond: Did you test Boss Baby? Kate Knibbs: That might be our big mistake. Katie Drummond: There's your next follow up. Kate Knibbs: I should do a follow-up just trying to see how much messed up stuff I can make Boss Baby do. Katie Drummond: My boss made me generate Boss Baby. Kate Knibbs: I like Boss Baby. I think those movies are hilarious. It's Alec Baldwin's Best Work. Well- Michael Calore: So there are dozens of lawsuits against AI companies for copyright infringement right now, and the fact that these models are trained on previously existing work has always been a controversial feature. So let's talk about the impacts that Disney and Universal specifically will have in this fight now that they've joined forces against generative AI. What makes this case different from the rest of the lawsuits that are still out there? Kate Knibbs: Well, as we were talking about earlier, just the fact that Disney is doing this alone is enough to make everyone take notice. This is the company that you don't want suing you for copyright infringement. Apart from that, and this ties into the fact that this isn't the company that you want suing you for copyright infringement, all of the copyright experts that I've spoken to have really emphasized how well-argued the complaint is, including some copyright experts who generally are very pro-fair use and aren't universally on the side of the plaintiffs. They've really been like, "Wow, I think this is going to be a struggle for Midjourney to make the fair use argument." One of the experts, Matthew Sag, who is a professor of internet law at Emory University, I believe, he's not a guy who thinks that all of these cases are going to turn out well for the plaintiffs. He tends to be pretty skeptical of these cases, and he even said, "I don't know how Midjourney is going to approach this because I just don't think that juries are going to buy that thousands of images of Darth Vader aren't copyright infringement." So the fact that Disney came with many receipts I think is additional cause for concern for Midjourney, and like all of the companies that aren't being sued right now but could possibly be next. Lauren Goode: Well, speaking of Darth Vader, Disney recently licensed the use of Darth Vader's voice for a chatbot in Fortnite. Everybody knows what Fortnite is, right? And what's interesting about this is this deal ended up causing some backlash from the actors in SAG-AFTRA, which is the union that represents actors and voice actors and stuff like that, where they were arguing that this is an example of AI-generated voices replacing their work, their very human work, without authorization, and Disney has also reportedly been in conversations with companies like OpenAI about potential partnerships. So what's interesting about this lawsuit is it's Disney pushing back against Midjourney for what it feels is unfair and illegal use of its intellectual property, but Disney itself is taking these steps to embrace AI in Hollywood. Katie Drummond: Well, and I think all of these lawsuits and this lawsuit, and then just even these deals that Disney is doing, these licensing deals, all of it combined I think just highlights how little regulation or legislation exists around how AI can and cannot be used when it comes to copyrighted work and IP. And so you're basically asking courts to make their own judgments on these cases, but there's no framework really to underpin exactly what they are deciding on or what those decisions are based on. Kate, is that your understanding of where we are in terms of any sort of actual regulation around this? Kate Knibbs: Yeah, it's definitely I think going to be something that the courts are going to be left to decide, especially because the Big Beautiful Bill's ten year moratorium on AI legislation at the state level seems to be going. And I will say, a lot of people on both sides don't seem that upset about this. I think there's a sense that it might be really difficult to regulate this properly without stifling innovation. We're not seeing a huge clamoring for federal law to provide the guard rails here. Basically, it's going to be decided by the courts. Probably the first case that goes will go all the way up to SCOTUS. Michael Calore: Wow. I hope that Yoda smoking a joint is on the official record at the US Supreme Court. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll come right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley . So we've been talking about the recent lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against Midjourney, but the AI copyright battle isn't just happening in Hollywood, it's happening everywhere. And our guest today, Kate Knibbs, created a tracking page where WIRED readers can see how AI copyright lawsuits are unfolding across many industries. Kate, can you tell us about some of the main lawsuits that have caught your eye, and which industries seem to be the most active in suing AI companies? Kate Knibbs: So there was a lot of movement initially with book authors suing AI companies and then now media outlets suing them, visual artists, and more recently, there have been some music labels. The Disney case is also notable because it's the first time Hollywood Studios jumped in. They weren't really in this world yet. The media companies, I would say the biggest player there is the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI. The lawsuit that it filed, I heard similar things about that one that I did about the Disney one, which is that it's just exceptionally well argued and it had a lot of emphasis on showing outputs of the LLMs that were identical to New York Times articles. So that one is definitely a major one to watch, but there have been some movement in a few others. Kadri versus Meta, which is Richard Kadri is a novelist, a group of novelists sued Meta. That one's been really spicy because it came out in discovery that Meta had pirated a lot of the books that it ended up training on and it openly admits that it did this, and the judge who's sitting on that case is just a character, so I really like watching the hearings for entertainment value. If anyone out there is as big of a nerd as I am, you can live stream them, and I recommend it. That might be one of the first to either go to trial or go to summary judgment. And then Barts verse Anthropic is another novelist. That one is also progressing quickly and the judge sitting is really well known being well-versed in fair use, so something might happen there. And then Suno and Udio, that are two AI song generators, they got sued by the major music labels, more recently, but there have been talks happening already between the labels and the song generators, settlement talks. So if those settle, that will be a huge deal because we've been looking for what's going to go to trial and what's going to settle. I could go on, but I think those are the ones that I think you guys should know about. Michael Calore: So publishing is definitely at the top of the list of industries that have been worried about AI plagiarizing original work, and we should all know because we're all in the publishing industry. But then there's the content that is the opposite of thoughtful, human-made work, and that is AI slop. The term explains itself when you say it out loud, but let's quickly talk about what AI slop is and why it seems to be everywhere. Lauren Goode: I can take this one, but also, I do want to toss it back to Kate, because Kate, you are the queen of AI slop, and I don't mean that you generate it. I don't mean that it's part of your personal content creation vector or whatever we're calling it, but you've written a lot about it. AI slop is just low-quality, shoddy AI content that is appearing online. It is proliferating our feeds. It's often on social media, but it's not just on social media. It is now being passed off as legitimate, quote-unquote, "journalism". For example, last month, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published these special sections recommending summer reading lists, and the list included a bunch of made-up books by real authors, and these names and titles were just thrown together at random. Slop isn't just made-up stuff though. I think it's got a certain aesthetic. It's part of this growing trend of the enshittification of the internet, which of course Cory Doctorow wrote about for a few years ago and now I'ts just the term we use. It feels like spam, and sometimes it's easily recognizable and sometimes it's just not. Katie Drummond: So you mean the videos I see on TikTok of Donald Trump and Jesus Christ walking on the beach are not real? Lauren Goode: No, those are real. Katie Drummond: Oh, okay. That's happens. Lauren Goode: Those really happened. Katie Drummond: Oh, okay. Because I've been faving all of them, because I want to see more. So those are AI. Got it. Okay. Lauren Goode: Yes, exactly. Same with JD Vance breakdancing with Pope Leo, those are real. Katie Drummond: Oh, I have... Yes, of course. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Hasn't killed him yet. Michael Calore: A lot of these examples are funny or fun, but then there are ones that are more serious. There was AI slop coming out of current events in the Mideast recently, right? Katie Drummond: Oh, of course. Yeah. Michael Calore: And politicians and world leaders will retweet these things, even knowing that they're fake, just because it appeals to their sensibility and it helps them spread the message they want to spread. Katie Drummond: Oh, I make jokes when I'm stressed out and uncomfortable, and I would say it is incredibly uncomfortable and stressful. I think you would all agree with me being a journalist right now. Try being the editor in chief, let me tell you. And actually watching AI slop proliferate across the internet, across all these platforms, sometimes be mistaken for factual information by consumers at the same time as we are in this very existential moment for news and media. Yet again, we are in an existential moment for news and media, in many ways because of AI, because of the way Google is changing their search, because of other ways that AI is changing how people access information. Publishers once again are essentially in the crosshairs of all of that, and to add insult to injury, you then open TikTok and Jesus and Donald Trump are fishing, and it's just like it's everywhere. It's like it's surrounding you if you are a journalist because you were experiencing the slop itself. You're seeing what it's doing to the information landscape online, and then you're banging your head against a brick wall because Google did this, that or the other thing with AI overviews, and all of a sudden I'm inventing numbers. I genuinely am inventing numbers, but all of a sudden, your search traffic is down 50%, and that has existential ramifications for publishers. There's also this weird thing happening that has caught my attention, and Kate, you've reported on this, which is where AI generated content is actually like a feature for some websites and actually works really well for them. So WIRED found that over 54% of longer English language posts on LinkedIn, everybody's favorite social network, are likely AI generated. Now, LinkedIn have said that they monitor posts to identify low quality and repetitive content, but AI is probably really good at LinkedIn because generic, bland writing is kind of what LinkedIn thrives on. I think that that's interesting. It's not necessarily a good thing, but it's just another indication of how pervasive generative AI has become online. Michael Calore: Yeah, and it's particularly difficult when it's become pervasive on the places that we used to rely on for accurate information or the places that we use for research. Not a lot of people are used to going onto Facebook to find out accurate information, but Facebook used to be the place that you went for news. Now, if you were still relying on Meta programs to find news, then you're not going to find as much accurate news as you used to. You may not notice that erosion happening, but it's happening. I think the bigger example is probably Google, because everybody is used to going to Google, typing something in and getting an answer that they can trust. And now with AI overviews and with AI mode and all of the different interfaces that Google is just doubling down on with putting AI tools in to generate these answers, you cannot guarantee that you're going to get accurate answers anymore. So if you're a person who is used to using these tried and trusted tools, what are you supposed to do now? Katie Drummond: I would add too, on the Google piece, not only are you potentially not getting accurate information. If you search something on Google and you get an AI overview, it is entirely possible that it is just completely inaccurate. It's also entirely possible that that AI overview was generated using journalism from publishers who rely on audiences coming directly to them, to their links to generate revenue, and they have then just missed the opportunity to make a little bit of money and bring someone into their publication because Google has basically sucked the information out and is now just providing it in a tidy list of bullet points at the top of the page. So two very bad scenarios there, depending. The information might be accurate and it was pulled from and we got nothing for it, or it might just be total garbage. Kate Knibbs: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Michael Calore: All right. Well, in order to not be all doom and gloom, I want to offer a little bit of advice to our listeners about what they can do if they are listening to this and feeling concerned. How do you get good information on the internet in the world of AI Slob? Lauren Goode: Subscribe to but truly, you should. Kate Knibbs: That's the big takeaway, subscribe to WIRED. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Kate Knibbs: I think it's really important that we all treat... I'm not saying never use an AI search product, okay? Because, I don't know, you're not going to listen to me about it and you're probably going to do it considering my husband absolutely loves asking ChatGPT for life advice about everything. Lauren Goode: Oh my God, mine does that too. Kate Knibbs: I'm going to tell him not to. Lauren Goode: Yeah, yeah. I'm just kidding. I don't have a husband, but I just really wanted to join the dialogue about it. Katie Drummond: This is AI slop, Lauren. Lauren Goode: Yeah, exactly. He just goes to a different school. Kate Knibbs: But you have to use it with the knowledge that it's a starting point. You have to fact check what it's spitting back at you. Okay. So I bought my real husband a snake for Father's Day, because I hate myself, but he really wanted one, and he has been using chat GPT to figure out how to take care of it, because I didn't look into how high maintenance they are and it turns out they eat rats. It's a whole thing. And most of the info actually has been accurate, but I've been like, "You got to double check, because what this is telling you." I was like, "Are you sure about the rat?" And it was true. But my point is, people, you need to fact check whatever the AI search engines are telling you. Don't just feed a snake or rat because that's what it says. Go to the library and look up a book. Katie Drummond: What a visceral, shocking example you provided to back up your assertion. Wow. Okay. Lauren Goode: I like how you didn't even say do some legitimate internet searching. You just went straight to, "I need you to go to the card catalog and I need you to dig through there and find the old Britannica on how to take care of a snake." I love this. My other recommendation, get off Facebook. Just get off the big blue main Facebook. Really, folks? Are we really still on there? Have you seen it lately? Michael Calore: Yeah. Kate Knibbs: That's where I got my snake. Lauren Goode: Are you serious? They need to spin off Marketplace. They need to make that a separate... They need to do an app split. I also am on Marketplace. Despite that, everyone should get off Facebook because of the incredible amount of AI slop that's on there. Michael Calore: And it's easy to say just fact check whatever you're searching for and check the sources, but so many people are just not doing that. And it's hard because it seems as though every search engine option is incorporating AI now. I remember when AI Overviews first came out and people were like, "I don't like this. What should I do?" I would recommend that people just use a different search engine like Brave or DuckDuckGo. But now both of those search engines have incorporated their own version of AI Overviews into the top of every page of search results, and I think that the only search engine that I've found that doesn't do that is Ecosia. E-C-O-S-I-A. Lauren Goode: It sounds like a cleaning product. Michael Calore: They call it Ecosia because it's good for the environment. They don't boil the oceans to power it. They offset their carbon emissions by planting trees. But that's the only search engine that I've found that it feels like a real search engine that actually gives you good results and does not put an AI overview at the top, so that's one step. Katie Drummond: I feel very firmly that people just need to go directly to the source, period, the end. When it comes to information or entertainment, I just think identify which sources you trust, pick a handful. If it's WIRED, we're grateful and that's fantastic. If it's the New York Times or the FT or the Wall Street Journal, whatever it is, and just go spend time with them directly. The less time I think people spend with intermediaries, whether it's Facebook or Google or ChatGPT or X or whatever else, the better. This is the internet as we now know it and it will be what the internet is in the future, and people need to start getting used to just going directly to the source of information or entertainment that they choose to spend time with. Lauren Goode: When I think about it philosophically, I think a lot about the fact that, going back to the history of the social internet, the consumer internet, there was this idea that we were offline and then you went online and that was like an alternate life and people literally did create alternate identities or they were living in second life, but there was this idea that that wasn't real life. And then I think sometime around the 2010s or so, we would constantly make the argument being on Twitter, "No, this kind of is real life, or at least it's a reflection of real life." And now it feels like the pendulum has swung back again where we're always online but a lot of it is not real life, and that is what it is starting to feel like because of things like V1 or Google Veo 3. Some of those videos are incredibly realistic, and sure, that's really cool for our personal creator Vector things that we've been talking about throughout this podcast, as Kate said, but it's also pretty terrifying. Michael Calore: Yeah. Katie Drummond: It's a personal creative practice. Lauren Goode: Thank you very much. Personal creative practice. Michael Calore: We'll share our prompts on LinkedIn. Find us there. Okay, let's take another break, and then we'll come right back. Thank you all for a great conversation today. We are going to shift gears now into our personal recommendations for our listeners, Kate, as our guest in the hot seat, you get to go first. What's your recommendation? Kate Knibbs: Well, building off what Lauren just said about Second Life, and by the way, I want to read an entire essay from you about that so I think you should pitch one. This book called Second Life by Amanda Hess, who's a New York Times writer. Second Life, it's about having a child in the digital age, and it's of great interest to me because one of my pet obsessions is that it should be illegal to put children on the internet. So I picked up this book not really knowing what to expect. It's much more about being a parent in the internet age. It's really well-written and interesting, and I loved reading a physical copy of it without any screens around me. Michael Calore: Nice. Lauren Goode: Love that. Michael Calore: Who wants to go next? Lauren Goode: I will go next. It is also book related. So I was in Texas, and in the hotel that I was staying in, there was a copy of American Short Fiction. It's a non-profit literary organization based in Austin, Texas where I was, that puts out these regular short fiction compilations. Listener, I have something to share, which is that I stole it from the hotel. It was just in the room and I started reading it and I didn't finish all of the short stories, and I had to. I had to because that is the art of the short story, of the American short story. And so I took it with me. I'm probably going to get charged for it. I will pay it, it's fine. But you don't necessarily have to read this literary journal, American Short Fiction, but I recommend diving into some short stories if you need a break from the news and you're not ready to tackle your next book, Michael Calore: I'm not going to judge you for taking it. When I stay in Airbnbs, every once in a while, I will pilfer a book. Katie Drummond: This is outrageous. Michael Calore: But then I try to make good by when I'm staying somewhere and I finish a book, I put it on the shelf Lauren Goode: Also. It's not like I'm taking it and then passing it off as my own writing by scrambling a bunch of the characters around and spitting it back out. I'm not saying people steal like that, but sometimes they might. Michael Calore: Sometimes they might. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Katie Drummond: My books stay with me and other people's books stay with them. That's how I run my book life, but I do have a recommendation. Michael Calore: Okay. Lauren Goode: Tell us. Katie Drummond: And I think this actually is interesting because I thought of this before we recorded, and then we just spent all this time talking about GenAI. And it maybe what is indicative of our complicated relationship with these tools, my recommendation is actually about ChatGPT, which is if you've ever wanted an interior designer but didn't want to spend money on one, sorry to all working in that profession. This weekend, I went into a little tizzy where I wanted to get new furniture for our living room, and you know I'm married to a chronic generative AI user and abuser, and I said to him, "Can you take photos of our living room and upload them to ChatGPT, and upload the URLs to the furniture stores that we like and where we typically buy furniture and tell it that we have this many dogs and this many kids and all the salient details about our life, and have it redesign our living room and then generate images of the living room with this new furniture? And then can you get a list of links to all the different items of furniture that are in the redesigns?" It was very, very cool. We got all these different designs for our living room with lists of furniture. It was very cool. Lauren Goode: That is very cool. Katie Drummond: So if you are thinking about buying new furniture or moving stuff around in your house or redesigning something, ChatGPT can help, and then you can find an interior designer and you can also pay them, because God forbid I recommend putting anyone out of work. I don't want to do that, but it was a very cool exercise. Kate Knibbs: I would read, I let chat GPT redesign my living room too. Katie Drummond: And then I could expense. I could expense all my new furniture to WIRED's budget. This is a very good idea. This is a very good idea. Kate Knibbs: We should all actually just pick a room. It could be like a themed issue. Katie Drummond: Yeah, it could be a whole group project. Michael Calore: I'm also going to recommend a book. It's called The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. This is a book that came out, oh, I don't know, nine years ago, 10 years ago, and I bought it used a couple of years ago and it sat on my shelf. It's a slim book, does not look like it's a chore to read, but I just never really got around to it. And then I picked it up on a whim a couple of weeks ago and I blew through it in about three or four days, and it is phenomenal. It's a memoir. It is about her life with her partner who is a gender-fluid person. They have a child together, and it is also a mix of philosophy and history and family history. It's just this beautiful stew of writing from a very personal and almost academic distance, mixed in with the personal aspects of it. It's a weird book, difficult to describe, as you can imagine, considering that I'm having a difficult time describing it, but I would say that it's a memoir more than anything, and it's really touching and just a really beautiful book and just phenomenal writing. I also really love the way that it swirls to a conclusion, Katie Drummond: Swirls to an ending. Michael Calore: Yeah. It really does. Katie Drummond: Just like we're about to. Michael Calore: Just like we did. Well, thank you all for being here. This was a great discussion. Good show. Lauren Goode: This was really fun. Kate Knibbs: Good job, guys. Happy to be back. Katie Drummond: Good job team. Michael Calore: Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley . If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@ Today's show was produced by Adriana Tapia and Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. James Yost was our New York studio engineer. Shireen Mohyi fact-checked this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director, and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's, head of Global Audio.
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
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Marvel's ‘Ironheart' reviews: Critics love Dominique Thorne — the show she's in, not so much
After a sleepy 2024 when Deadpool and Wolverine were the only ones stirring in the Marvel multiverse, Marvel Studios has kicked back into high gear over the past few months. Captain America: Brave New World led the way in February, followed by Thunderbolts in May. Critics praised the latter, but the former... not so much. Now, Ironheart is seeking to keep that momentum going on Disney+ as the studio gears up for The Fantastic Four: First Steps at the end of July. Dominique Thorne reprises her Black Panther: Wakanda Forever role as Riri Williams, the Tony Stark acolyte who builds her own suit of armor. Returning home to her native Chicago, Ironheart gets mixed up in some street-level action that ends up acquiring a more magical dimension. More from Gold Derby Paul Giamatti, Stephen Graham, Cooper Koch, and the best of our Emmy Limited Series/Movie Actor interviews 'The Penguin' star Colin Farrell would be the latest Batman villain to win a major award The first three installments of the six-episode limited series dropped on Disney+ on Thursday, with the final batch set to arrive on July 1. We've seen the full run and can say that the show ventures to some unexpected places and features some unexpected faces. But the creative team makes sure to keep Riri and her personal journey from idealist to pragmatist front and center throughout. So what do the critics make of Ironheart? The series is currently sitting at 67 percent on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer and 58 on Metracritic pointing to a mixed response. Writing in The New York Times, Mike Hale diplomatically calls Ironheart "a respectable piece of work" that won't "revive anyone's flagging interest" in the MCU shenanigans. "Fan service is prominent," he adds, giving away at least one big-name guest star who appears towards the end of the show. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Feinberg doesn't care for the way Ironheart begins or ends, but found elements to praise between those bookends. "Ironheart peaks in its fifth episode with an extended action scene/product placement that I thought was a goofy blast," he writes, adding: "What sets Ironheart apart and makes the middle of the season so enjoyable are the character-based relationships." One of the lowest scores comes from Kaiya Shunyata over at whose 1.5-star review dismisses the series as "bloated and uneven," and unable to answer a key question: "Who is Riri Williams beyond the suits she builds?" "We're told she's a genius, " Shunyata continues. "And her admiration for Stark's tech is clear, but the emotional and philosophical 'why' behind her drive to become a hero remains underexplored through most of the series." The one things most critics can agree on? Thorne rises to the occasion as the lead of the series and the MCU's next version of Tony Stark. (For the record, her predecessor agrees; Robert Downey Jr. FaceTimed with Thorne ahead of the premiere on Tuesday from the Avengers: Doomsday set, telling her: "We're in this love together. I've grown so fond of you, it's bananas.") Indiewire's Ben Travers kept the love going by singling out Thorne for praise in his largely positive writeup. "Thorne embodies Riri's gradual growth with a potent blend of juvenile bullheadedness and aching vulnerability," he writes. "Her losses sit right under the surface, and even though 'Ironheart' is a lot of fun, it never loses sight of the wayward soul going through a particularly difficult coming-of-age in a particularly difficult world." Best of Gold Derby Paul Giamatti, Stephen Graham, Cooper Koch, and the best of our Emmy Limited Series/Movie Actor interviews Lee Jung-jae, Adam Scott, Noah Wyle, and the best of our Emmy Drama Actor interviews Kathy Bates, Minha Kim, Elisabeth Moss, and the best of our Emmy Drama Actress interviews Click here to read the full article.
