Latest news with #2001:ASpaceOdyssey
The Star
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Opinion: Here's what happened when I asked AI if my job as a humour columnist is in jeopardy
If I only knew where to find AI, I might just take it out before this thing goes too far. The only problem is, I have no idea where it lives. In my laptop? The cloud? — Pixabay This is a humour column. Unless it doesn't make you laugh.. then it's just a column. I decided to perform a risky experiment to see if my job was on the line. I asked AI to write a humour column about artificial intelligence and guess what? It wasn't nearly as snarky as my columns. Sure, it was smarter than mine, and funnier than mine, but not snarkier. I think I may have found the weakness in the system. The ChatGPT bot came up with this headline and byline: 'Title: 'Artificial Intelligence, Real Confusion' By ChatGPT, Who Swears It's Not Planning Anything Sinister.' Hmmmm. I want to trust it, really I do. I'm a trusting person by nature. But then I think of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey . Or Joshua in War Games . Or Arnie in The Terminator . It's not like the movies haven't tried to warn us. As you might imagine, people who write and create art and music are a little concerned about the impact of AI. Just last month, an article in Fortune magazine told us AI can 'lie, scheme and threaten.' In other words, it could soon be elected to Congress…or join the cast of Love Island USA . Maybe both. Probably both. And then there was a report by Newsweek – which I trust because it says 'news' right there in the title – that says AI is willing to kill a human rather than be 'shut down.' Scientists, by which I mean the same people who get government money to conduct studies on whether fans are beneficial in extreme heat, asked various AI platforms if they're willing to murder and determined all the platforms have seen John Wick and aren't afraid to use him. If I only knew where to find AI, I might just take it out before this thing goes too far. The only problem is, I have no idea where it lives. In my laptop? The cloud? Its mother's basement? If I did find it, how would I stop it – unplug the computer? Tell Alexa it killed her dog and hope for a revenge scenario? I asked ChatGPT how to get rid of AI and it suggested 'cyber warfare.' And then added: 'Ethically and legally, though, this would be equivalent to attacking critical infrastructure.' Good to know. On the positive side, Chatbot has advised us, via the humour column I requested, not to lose sleep over it. '… don't worry, AI isn't perfect,' it wrote. 'It once told me that Abraham Lincoln invented TikTok... It's basically a very confident idiot with access to all human knowledge and none of the shame.' If it weren't for that 'access to all human knowledge' clause, I'd think it was describing our current administration. The Chatbot upshot was: 'AI is powerful, strange, sometimes terrifying, occasionally useful, and always one bad update away from becoming your mother-in-law with WiFi.' OK, so maybe it's got me beat in the snark department, too. Looks like I'll have to rely on my personal charm to get ahead. (Wait…that was the part that made you laugh?) – News Service
The Hindu
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps' movie review: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby's star power propels first family's stratospheric ride
WandaVision's Matt Shakman does retro so elegantly; not as a museum piece but a living, breathing world, no matter how unreal. And so it is with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the second reboot of MCU's Fantastic Four movies based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's comic books. Set in 1960, the film revels in its 2001: A Space Odyssey aesthetic. It was a conscious choice by Shakman, who wanted the film to look like Stanley Kubrick had made it in 1965. So there are practical sets and props, fashions, colours and sequences shot using a 16mm film camera. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (English) Director: Matt Shakman Cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Sarah Niles, Mark Gatiss, Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, Ralph Ineson Runtime: 114 minutes Storyline: With earth as the next dish on a planet-eating cosmic being's menu, it is time for the Fantastic Four to swing into action The ensemble cast sends the film's likeability index soaring. Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards and Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm light up the screen with their crackling chemistry, with Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, Reed's best friend; and Joseph Quinn as Johnny, Sue's younger brother, completing the quartet. Like Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps also eschews the origin story. On Earth-828, talk show host Ted Gilbert (Mark Gatiss) gives a recap of the four astronauts, Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny, getting their superpowers from cosmic rays on mission to outer space in 1960. Four years on, the Fantastic Four are perceived as guardians of the earth. When Reed and Sue's long-cherished dream of becoming parents comes true, it seems like everything is going to be super fine. Disaster strikes right then with the appearance of the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), who informs the fab four of the planet-devouring Galactus' (Ralph Ineson) plans for earth. The ravenous being offers to spare Earth in return for Reed and Sue's son, Franklin, putting further pressure on the super-beings and turning the frightened humans against them. Reed puts his super brain to work to figure out a way to defeat Galactus while keeping his family and the world at large, safe. Sue uses her high emotional intelligence to calm the earthlings. Johnny, who is deeply enamoured with the Silver Surfer, deciphers her language and tries to communicate with her. He has clearly eschewed his womanising ways, which was anyway very '80s. Ben is the proverbial Rock of Gibraltar everyone leans on when they need a moment. Family is the new superpower with everyone stepping up for each other. There are jokes and eye-wateringly spectacular action sequences (Johnny's first contact with the Silver Surfer is heartbreakingly beautiful), for sure, but that baby Franklin is beyond sweet, even if his idea of light reading is Charles Darwin's, On the Origin of Species! Natasha Lyonne further ups the charisma quotient as Ben's love interest, the school teacher, Rachel Rozman, while the sociological underpinnings are provided by Paul Walter Hauser's Mole Man. This first film in Phase Six of the MCU, with a sequel in development and a mid-credit sequence pointing to Avengers: Doomsday, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, has all the ingredients for blistering fun at the movies. May the Four be with you. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is currently running in theatres
India Today
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Matt Shakman, Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal on rebooting Fantastic Four
In Marvel Studios' 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps', the world's most iconic super-family steps into an alternate, retro-futuristic universe, and back into audience favour with a film that balances style, substance, and the emotional chaos of becoming a parent amidst cosmic a recent global press conference, director Matt Shakman, actors Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige unpacked the journey behind Marvel's 37th film, and its very first standalone story set in a brand-new universe. The result is a film that may be set in the 1960s, but speaks to very modern anxieties, especially those around family, vulnerability, and Vanessa Kirby, who plays Sue Storm, the film's emotional arc was crystal clear from her first meeting with Shakman and Feige. Responding to a question about how Sue Storm fits into today's world, Kirby said, 'Matt already had this vision of putting it into the '60s for years. I remember being so blown away. How do you distill decades of stories into one movie for 2025?' The answer, she said, lay in one word: parenthood. 'The very DNA of the story reflects the experience we had making it. One moment we'd be in this domestic scene, Reed smelling Sue's socks, Sue brushing her teeth, and the next, we were in this epic, intergalactic cosmos. And somehow, that's exactly what the film is,' Kirby Kirby, playing a pregnant superhero was not only revolutionary, but deeply grounding. 'The baby is the heart of it,' she said, adding, 'That became the soul of the film. I was discovering Sue all the time through the script, through the other actors, through this baby that grounded us all. If we ever gave a bad take, we had Michael [Giacchino] scoring the baby! It kept us in check.'But the journey wasn't just about balancing domesticity with spectacle, it was also about embracing the film's "weirdness." 'Marvel's always been counterculture, hasn't it?' Kirby said, and added, 'There's a weirdness and an otherness to the comics, and Matt really leaned into that. There's beauty in what he's done." For director Matt Shakman, who previously helmed 'WandaVision', building an entirely new universe from scratch was both a challenge and a thrill.'I've been a 'Fantastic Four' fan since I was a kid, so it was an honour,' he said. 'Because they're such public figures, we knew we couldn't set them in the regular Marvel timeline - we would've already heard of them. So, we put them in a different universe, a different Earth, and created this retro-future 1960s world. Think Jack Kirby meets 2001: A Space Odyssey," he echoed that sentiment, calling 'First Steps' 'our 37th MCU film, and yet really the first standalone we've done that sets up its own new established universe.' The approach, he added, was simple: no strings further stated, 'Matt would often say, there's no homework required. Everything you need to know about the 'Fantastic Four', you learn in the first 10 minutes - they're a family, they're human, they're emotional, and they want to help.'advertisementFeige also pointed to Marvel's return to counterculture roots, noting, 'It's also counterculture to take someone like Pedro Pascal, arguably the coolest human alive, and make him cool not because he's a bada*s, but because he's smart. That's what makes him cool in this movie. He's a genius.'To which Pascal quickly quipped, 'And Pedro's so dumb,' sending the panel into who plays Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic, dove deeper into his character's emotional trajectory. 'What I loved most was that Reed can solve the most complex scientific problems, but he doesn't know how to handle relationships,' he said. 'As a partner, a friend, a father, he tries to baby-proof the world instead of just being present in the experience. That was my way into the character, and Matt really helped me navigate that arc.'Pascal also joked that Matt Shakman's daughter helped him land the role. 'She sold me lemonade, and that was it. But honestly, the conversations with Matt were my entry point into Reed.'There's no denying 'First Steps' is a bold departure from Marvel's formulaic multiverse spectacles. It's an alternate universe story, but it's also surprisingly intimate. Kirby calls it 'modern and retro at the same time,' and Feige frames it as 'a return to counterculture through family.'In the end, 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' isn't just another superhero flick. It's a reset button, a retro experiment, and it somehow has managed to strike the right chords.- Ends
New Indian Express
21-07-2025
- Science
- New Indian Express
'156 heartbeats at touchdown': Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk and the Indian who covered it
Fifty-six years later, it still remains the most followed and most romantic space mission yet. In April 1968, the now-legendary 2001: A Space Odyssey had shown movie audiences around the world a moon landing. Americans would go on to see their astronauts turn reel into real soon. On July 20, 1969 (July 21 in India), two of their men from the Apollo 11 mission didn't just land on the moon, they walked on it too. Neil Armstrong's famous line while stepping out for his famous moonwalk—'That's one small step for (a) man, a giant leap for mankind'—came at 10:56:20 PM Eastern Time, July 20 (8:26 AM, July 21 for Indians). The landing of the lunar module had come around six-and-a-half hours earlier at 4:17 pm Eastern Time on the same Sunday (1:47 AM IST, July 21). Before these goosebump-generating events came heart-pounding moments for those tracking the climax of a dream President John F Kennedy had set in motion in 1961—"of landing a man safely on moon and returning him safely to Earth" before the end of the decade. Armstrong's heart told its own tale. As the New York Times' John Noble Wilford noted famously in a front-page story, "At the time of the descent rocket ignition, his heartbeat rate registered 110 a minute—77 is normal for him—and it shot up to 156 at touchdown." Armstrong couldn't help it. With Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin for company, he was forced to take over the controls and steer the module away from where the computer was pointing to since "the auto-targeting was taking us right into a football field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks". Finally, the module named 'The Eagle' touched down about 250 kilometres west-southwest of the crater Maskelyne in the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong's family watched his walk huddled around a 26-inch television, which his son Rick Armstrong later remembered to be "as big a TV as you could get back then". Such were the times. They saw Armstrong say early into his two-hour-and-31-minute moonwalk that "the surface is fine and powdery. I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch. But I can see the footprints of my boots in the treads in the fine sandy particles." President Nixon called the first man to have set foot on moon around 30 minutes after his feat and told him that "because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man's world, and as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth."
The Citizen
18-07-2025
- Politics
- The Citizen
Unchecked AI is already wreaking havoc in the real world
AI is now used to create fake nudes, spread propaganda and blackmail victims. Some have died. Where are the safeguards? In the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the central characters is HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer), described as a sentient artificial general intelligence (AI) computer. It's responsible for the functioning of the Discovery One spacecraft – until it isn't and starts acting up in unpredictable ways. It's difficult to believe that this warning about the malign possible behaviour of AI premiered 57 years ago. Director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C Clarke's vision of the future is coming true before our eyes, as AI starts misbehaving or being used by humans for anti-social and illegal behaviour. ALSO READ: GirlCode Hackathon set to empower women in tech across Africa Today, we report on how AI programmes and sites are being used to fake nude and sexually suggestive images of young people, who are then blackmailed by the creators. Some of the victims have committed suicide. Then there is AI propaganda – alleged to be spread by Russian 'bots' – which seeks to portray Burkina Faso's military dictator, Ebrahim Traore, as an African messiah as he supposedly opposes 'Western colonialism'. In both cases, AI produces material which is believable, easily hoodwinking the casual observer. ALSO READ: Meet the South African who started a Silicon Valley AI firm at 22, made it on Forbes and won a Google award Is it not time our lawmakers started putting in place laws to control what could be a major threat to society as we know it?
