Latest news with #Arcana
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Trump Gaza' AI video intended as political satire, says creator
The creator of the viral 'Trump Gaza' AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a Dubai-style paradise has said it was intended as a political satire of Trump's 'megalomaniac idea'. The video – posted by Trump on his Truth Social account last week – depicts a family emerging from the wreckage of war-torn Gaza into a beachside resort town lined with skyscrapers. Trump is seen sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu on sun loungers, while Elon Musk tears flatbread into dips. The video first emerged in February, shortly after Trump unveiled his property development plan for Gaza, under which he said he wants to 'clean out' the population of about 2 million people to create the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. Trump then posted the clip without any explanation on his Truth Social platform on 26 February. Solo Avital, an LA-based film-maker, said he created the video in less than eight hours while experimenting with AI tools in early February, and that its spread had 'surprised the hell out of me'. 'We are storytellers, we're not provocateurs, we sometimes do satire pieces such as this one was supposed to be. This is the duality of the satire: it depends what context you bring to it to make the punchline or the joke. Here there was no context and it was posted without our consent or knowledge,' he added. Avital, who is a US citizen born in Israel, and his business partner, Ariel Vromen – director of the 2012 film The Iceman, starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder and Chris Evans – run EyeMix, a visuals company where they produce documentaries and commercials. Avital said he was experimenting with the Arcana AI platform, and decided to create 'satire about this megalomaniac idea about putting statues [in Gaza]' to see what the tool could do. He had shared the video clip with friends, while his business partner posted it on his popular Instagram for a few hours, before Avital encouraged him to take it down on the grounds 'it might be a little insensitive and we don't want to take sides'. The pair shared an early version with Mel Gibson, who Trump named as a special ambassador to Hollywood in January and who has previously collaborated with EyeMix and Arcana. Gibson told them he shared another video about the LA fires with people close to Trump, but denied sharing the Gaza video with the president, the creators said. The first Avital knew that the video had reached a wider audience was when he awoke to thousands of messages on his phone, as friends alerted him to Trump's post. Avital said he was surprised by some of the reactions to the video. 'If it was the skit for Saturday Night Live the whole perception of this in the media would be the opposite – look how wild this president is and his ideas, everyone would think it's a joke.' He said the experience had reinforced for him 'how fake news spreads when every network takes what they want and shoves it down their viewers with their narratives attached'. He hoped this experience would 'spark a public debate about rights and wrongs' of generative AI, including what the rights of creators are. However, as a creative industries professional, he said he generally welcomed AI, saying it is 'the best thing that's happened to creativity by a long shot. Everyone who thinks it will kill creativity, we're proof to the contrary. This film wouldn't have been created without human intervention.' Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialises in identifying deepfakes, said this was 'not the first time and won't be the last time' that AI-generated clips about news events would go viral. He noted there had been a flurry of content created around the LA wildfires, including a video of a burnt Oscars trophy. He said Avital's experience should make people realise 'there's no such thing as 'I just shared with a friend'. You make something, assume you don't have control.' He added the fact the video was intended as political satire but repurposed as 'very compelling, visceral' propaganda by Trump highlighted the risk of AI-generated video. 'It allows individuals without a lot of time, money and, frankly, skill you would normally need, to generate some pretty eye-popping content. That is really cool, you can't argue,' he said. But there is a dark side to this new capability: 'This tech is being used to create child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, hoaxes, conspiracies, lies that are dangerous to democracies.' Although this video is obviously computer-generated, since videos are typically not hyper-realistic, he warned: 'it's coming'. 'What happens when you get to a point where every video, audio, everything you read and see online can be fake? Where's our shared sense of reality?' He believes AI platforms have a responsibility to 'put guardrails' on this technology, to prevent it from being misused. 'Lots are following this model of 'move fast and break things', and they're breaking things again. We could forgive this mindset at the dawn of the modern internet, nobody is looking at this thinking we need more of this, more Elon Musk, more Mark Zuckerberg.'
NBC News
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
‘Trump Gaza' AI video creators say they don't want to be the president's ‘propaganda machine'
The creators of a controversial AI-generated video shared by President Donald Trump on social media say they never meant to become a 'propaganda machine,' and that their video, which depicts an outlandish vision of Gaza featuring bearded dancers in bikinis and a giant golden Trump statue, was created as satire. The video's creators, Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, are two of the co-founders of Los Angeles-based EyeMix Visuals, which partly uses artificial intelligence to create commercials and promotional media. Speaking for the first time about the video, the pair told NBC News that it came about as a sort of pilot project as they experimented with an AI software called Arcana. They're not sure how their video ended up in Trump's hands — but Vromen said he shared an early version with Mel Gibson, who Trump named as a special ambassador to Hollywood in January and who collaborated with EyeMix and Arcana on a previous project. While Gibson told them that he shared some of the creators' other work with people close to Trump, the creators said he denied sharing the Gaza video with the president. A request for an interview with Gibson was declined by a representative. As part of testing the AI software, Avital and Vromen tried to create a video with an eight-hour turnaround. But they hadn't decided their topic until Trump announced a bizarre idea for the future of Gaza. 'It was exactly the same minute that Trump was announcing this thing on TV, like, almost like in the background, you know, it was, 'Hey, why don't we do that? Let's do a little satire,'' Avital recounted. On Feb. 4, during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the U.S. could relocate Palestinians, at least temporarily, to other countries, and 'level the site' to create a 'Riviera of the Middle East.' Vromen said he was in Las Vegas when Trump made his proposal, which inspired the idea and aesthetics of the video. 'The idea was like, how Trump wants to turn Gaza into Vegas,' Vromen said. 'We wanted to have an internal laugh about it. It was a joke.' The video, completed on Feb. 6 according to records Avital and Vromen showed NBC News, delivered on that vision, with absurd depictions of Elon Musk eating pita, Trump sipping tropical drinks shirtless with Netanyahu, and dollar bills raining down on Palestinian children. Avital and Vromen, who are from Israel and now live in the United States, each said the video was satire, taking Trump's proposal and pushing it to an extreme level of imagination, but it wasn't necessarily critical. Vromen said that he thinks Trump's proposal is one of the few forward-thinking policy proposals that could address a longstanding stalemate in the region. 'You look at Trump Gaza, and you're like, 'Hey, gazillion times better than what it is right now, whether it's good or bad,'' he said. 'With humor, there is truth, you know, but it was not our intention to be a propaganda machine.' Trump's suggestion caused shock waves across the world, with some analysts and politicians comparing the proposal of displacing 2.2 million Palestinians to ethnic cleansing. While supported by some in Israel and the U.S., Trump's suggestion was widely condemned, even by some allies. After Hamas' attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and another 250 kidnapped, local Palestinian officials say Israel has killed over 47,500 Palestinians. Vromen explained that the bearded dancers in the video were meant to poke fun at members of Hamas. 'Yes, that was a disrespectful, maybe, portrayal,' he said, pointing out Hamas' recent handling of dead Israeli hostages, which outraged many Israelis. 'The real intention of this specific piece — I thought that Gaza will be so liberated that it will become woke,' Avital said. After the duo finished the video, they shared it with a limited group of people. 'We circulated it in a few groups of friends to get a reaction, like you're writing a draft of a script,' Vromen said. 'I posted [it] for about three hours on my Instagram, and I took it off because I started to get some brands that didn't understand, again, the context.' Vromen is a film director and DJ who may be best known for the 2012 movie The Iceman, which features Chris Evans, Winona Ryder, James Franco and Michael Shannon. He has 138,000 Instagram followers. Online, the video didn't appear to travel widely before Trump shared it on his pages. NBC News found several pro-Israel social media accounts that shared the video in the days after Vromen briefly posted it, but it had not picked up any notable traction in the weeks after. Avital said he was shocked when three weeks later Trump posted it on Truth Social and Instagram with no caption. He said he was surprised Trump would post a video that contained a scene of him dancing with a woman in a club that wasn't his wife, and a scene of 'himself standing erected in the center of the city as a golden statue, like some sort of a dictator.' 'I would never imagine in my life,' he said. The pair said they wish Trump would have given some context with the video, or offered some credit. 'At least give the context that this is something that was done with mixed intentions, because one intention was just like to react to news that was mind-blowing. And the other intention was like, 'Hey, maybe there is a vision behind it,'' said Vromen. He also said he feels Trump had stolen the video. 'Trump has stolen our content because this was made by artists,' Vromen said. 'The Gaza Strip movie is perfect, unique original content that was taken out of context and published by the president of the United States.' The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly previously said: 'As President Trump has said, Gaza in its current state is unhabitable for any human being. President Trump is a visionary, and his plan to have the United States involved in Gaza's rebuilding will allow for Palestinians to resettle in new, beautiful communities while improving conditions in the region for generations to come.' Generative AI has helped facilitate a boom of fake political imagery, which has been particularly embraced by Trump and members of the GOP. Trump and Musk have frequently shared AI-generated images glorifying themselves or denigrating others. Arcana Labs CEO Jonathan Yunger called the video 'complete insanity,' but welcomed the idea of artists expressing themselves via Arcana Labs' platform. 'The video is not breaking any laws, as far as I'm concerned. And artists are going to express themselves. What people decide to do with that, you know, is up to them,' said Yunger. 'The fact that the president took it and posted it as his own, I think, is the one of the most insane things I've ever seen in my life.'
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Hades II's second major update adds a 'final confrontation' and more
The second major update to Hades II adds a mysterious "final confrontation," an updated Altar of Ashes and the return of the god of war... Ares. (Were you expecting someone else?) And there's more to come: In addition to Wednesday's Warsong Update, developer Supergiant Games says its third big one is in the pipeline for "some months from now." Although Supergiant is staying mum about who is involved, it teased a "Final Confrontation on the surface" as the headlining feature of today's update. "Discover what lies beyond the Guardian of Olympus... if you dare!" The sinister and demonic voice in the video below suggests it might not have the best of intentions. Also new (in the sequel, anyway) is Ares, the god of war. He has "varied and vicious" Boons on offer, as one would expect from a bloodthirsty God of Olympus. Supergiant also updated the Altar of Ashes with new art and reworked Arcana effects, a new Animal Familiar and other changes. The Warsong Update is free and an automatic download. Of course, Hades II is still in early access. Given that the first game stayed there for nearly two years, you probably shouldn't hold your breath for an imminent public release. Regardless, you can check out the sequel's new content on Windows and macOS via Steam or Epic.
