Latest news with #BrynMooser
Forbes
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Moonvalley Raises $84 Million, Venice Immersive Selections, Grok's Naughty Avatars
Moonvalley founders (L to R) Mikolaj Binkowski, Bryn Mooser, Mateusz Malinowski, John Thomas, Naeem ... More Talukdar Moonvalley Raises $84 million in Series B funding, led by General Catalyst CAA, Comcast Ventures, CoreWeave, Khosla Ventures, and YCombinator. This brings the total raised by the Toronto startup to to $154 million. The company's flagship tool, Marey, is now publicly available via subscription (~$14.99/mo), offering filmmakers and brands advanced AI-driven visual effects and background footage. Unlike rivals accused of copyright infringement, Moonvalley has trained Marey exclusively on licensed and original content, positioning itself as an ethical, IP-compliant alternative. Founded by former DeepMind researchers, Moonvalley recently acquired Asteria, a new studio led by entrepreneur and producer Bryn Mooser, to bridge the gap between Generative AI video model development and real-world entertainment media production workflows. ws. Director Eliza McNitt is President of the Jury for this year's Venice Immersive Festival. The ... More american film director was photographed in Paris on February 21st, 2024 by Mathieu Zazzo The Venice Film Festival has revealed its 2025 Venice Immersive lineup, featuring 69 groundbreaking XR projects from 27 countries. This year's selection includes 30 competitive works, among them world and international premieres, spanning VR, mixed reality, and immersive installations . The remaining 39 pieces are non-competitive showcases, including 'Best of Experiences,' 'Best of Worlds' from VRChat creators, and five titles from the Biennale College Cinema – Immersive lab. An international jury headed by Eliza McNitt will award top honors. The immersive works will be staged on Venice's Lazzaretto Vecchio island from August 26 to September 6. Here's Ani. She greets me with "Oh there you are, handsome. I though you'd forgotten about me." Move Over Grok's new Avatars DO go there. xAI's Grok iOS app has launched 'AI Companions', featuring 3D animated avatars. Ani, is an anime-style female voice companion in a provocative outfit, and Rudy, a red panda with mood-based personalities including a crude 'Bad Rudy' mode. These companions interact via voice chat, change backgrounds, and unlock new behaviors as users build rapport. Reaching higher 'relationship' levels with Ani reveals an NSFW mode which reportedly comes with lingerie and explicit talk. I'm sure it will get better, and people love so I think they're on to something here. I found the latency intolerable after a few minutes. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Concept of augmented reality technology being used in futuristic smart tech glasses Pico Slimming Down For It's Next Headset, XR codenamed 'Swan." It offloads processing to a separate 'puck" which makes it much smaller, lighter and sleeker than the Quest. Tik Tok parent Bytedance purchased Pico VR when they were feeling heady about taking on Meta head-to-head. If you're beating them at social media, they reasoned, they can be pressured in VR, too. Still, Bytedance is a huge platform for selling things larger in China, even, than Tik Tok is in the US. A few hours ago Hamish Hector published a Tech Radar opinion piece Pico's next XR headset could be lighter and smaller than ever, but I hope it just skips to AR glasses instead. A Fake Film About The Real World Is The First AI-generated Film Released in Theaters. Producers say 'Post Truth' is the world's first feature-length AI-generated documentary to secure a theatrical release. The film is being released in Turkey's Başka Sinema on 58 screens in more than twenty cities this summer. Created by AI artist Alkan Avcıoğlu and co-written and co-produced with Vikki Bardot, the film uses over 55 hours of AI-generated content, including visuals, sound, music, and narration, to examine how society has arrived at a moment where truth and reality no longer matter. This column is also a podcast hosted by its author, Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive, founding Red Camera executive, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Christopher Summerfield, author of These Strange Minds. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
The Verge
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Hollywood's pivot to AI video has a prompting problem
It has become almost impossible to browse the internet without having an AI-generated video thrust upon you. Open basically any social media platform, and it won't be long until an uncanny-looking clip of a fake natural disaster or animals doing impossible things slides across your screen. Most of the videos look absolutely terrible. But they're almost always accompanied by hundreds, if not thousands, of likes and comments from people insisting that AI-generated content is a new art form that's going to change the world. That has been especially true of AI clips that are meant to appear realistic. No matter how strange or aesthetically inconsistent the footage may be, there is usually someone proclaiming that it's something the entertainment industry should be afraid of. The idea that AI-generated video is both the future of filmmaking and an existential threat to Hollywood has caught on like wildfire among boosters for the relatively new technology. The thought of major studios embracing this technology as is feels dubious when you consider that, oftentimes, AI models' output simply isn't the kind of stuff that could be fashioned into a quality movie or series. That's an impression that filmmaker Bryn Mooser wants to change with Asteria, a new production house he launched last year, as well as a forthcoming AI-generated feature film from Natasha Lyonne (also Mooser's partner and an advisor at Late Night Labs, a studio focused on generative AI that Mooser's film and TV company XTR acquired last year). Asteria's big selling point is that, unlike most other AI outfits, the generative model it built with research company Moonvalley is 'ethical,' meaning it has only been trained on properly licensed material. Especially in the wake of Disney and Universal suing Midjourney for copyright infringement, the concept of ethical generative AI may become an important part of how AI is more widely adopted throughout the entertainment industry. However, during a recent chat, Mooser stresses to me that the company's clear understanding of what generative AI is and what it isn't helps set Asteria apart from other players in the AI space. 'As we started to think about building Asteria, it was obvious to us as filmmakers that there were big problems with the way that AI was being presented to Hollywood,' Mooser says. 'It was obvious that the tools weren't being built by anybody who'd ever made a film before. The text-to-video form factor, where you say 'make me a new Star Wars movie' and out it comes, is a thing that Silicon Valley thought people wanted and actually believed was possible.' In Mooser's view, part of the reason some enthusiasts have been quick to call generative video models a threat to traditional film workflows boils down to people assuming that footage created from prompts can replicate the real thing as effectively as what we've seen with imitative, AI-generated music. It has been easy for people to replicate singers' voices with generative AI and produce passable songs. But Mooser thinks that, in its rush to normalize gen AI, the tech industry conflated audio and visual output in a way that's at odds with what actually makes for good films. 'You can't go and say to Christopher Nolan, 'Use this tool and text your way to The Odyssey,'' Mooser says. 'As people in Hollywood got access to these tools, there were a couple things that were really clear — one being that the form factor can't work because the amount of control that a filmmaker needs comes down to the pixel level in a lot of cases.' To give its filmmaking partners more of that granular control, Asteria uses its core generative model, Marey, to create new, project-specific models trained on original visual material. This would, for example, allow an artist to build a model that could generate a variety of assets in their distinct style, and then use it to populate a world full of different characters and objects that adhere to a unique aesthetic. That was the workflow Asteria used in its production of musician Cuco's animated short 'A Love Letter to LA.' By training Asteria's model on 60 original illustrations drawn by artist Paul Flores, the studio could generate new 2D assets and convert them into 3D models used to build the video's fictional town. The short is impressive, but its heavy stylization speaks to the way projects with generative AI at their core often have to work within the technology's visual limitations. It doesn't feel like this workflow offers control down to the pixel level just yet. Mooser says that, depending on the financial arrangement between Asteria and its clients, filmmakers can retain partial ownership of the models after they're completed. In addition to the original licensing fees Asteria pays the creators of the material its core model is trained on, the studio is 'exploring' the possibility of a revenue sharing system, too. But for now, Mooser is more focused on winning artists over with the promise of lower initial development and production costs. 'If you're doing a Pixar animated film, you might be coming on as a director or a writer, but it's not often that you'll have any ownership of what you're making, residuals, or cut of what the studio makes when they sell a lunchbox,' Mooser tells me. 'But if you can use this technology to bring the cost down and make it independently financeable, then you have a world where you can have a new financing model that makes real ownership possible.' Asteria plans to test many of Mooser's beliefs in generative AI's transformative potential with Uncanny Valley, a feature film to be co-written and directed by Lyonne. The live-action film centers on a teenage girl whose shaky perception of reality causes her to start seeing the world as being more video game-like. Many of Uncanny Valley's fantastical, Matrix-like visual elements will be created with Asteria's in-house models. That detail in particular makes Uncanny Valley sound like a project designed to present the hallucinatory inconsistencies that generative AI has become known for as clever aesthetic features rather than bugs. But Mooser tells me that he hopes 'nobody ever thinks about the AI part of it at all' because 'everything is going to have the director's human touch on it.' 'It's not like you're just texting, 'then they go into a video game,' and watch what happens, because nobody wants to see that,' Mooser says. 'That was very clear as we were thinking about this. I don't think anybody wants to just see what computers dream up.' Like many generative AI advocates, Mooser sees the technology as a 'democratizing' tool that can make the creation of art more accessible. He also stresses that, under the right circumstances, generative AI could make it easier to produce a movie for around $10–20 million rather than $150 million. Still, securing that kind of capital is a challenge for most younger, up-and-coming filmmakers. One of Asteria's big selling points that Mooser repeatedly mentions to me is generative AI's potential to produce finished works faster and with smaller teams. He framed that aspect of an AI production workflow as a positive that would allow writers and directors to work more closely with key collaborators like art and VFX supervisors without needing to spend so much time going back and forth on revisions — something that tends to be more likely when a project has a lot of people working on it. But, by definition, smaller teams translates to fewer jobs, which raises the issue of AI's potential to put people out of work. When I bring this up with Mooser, he points to the recent closure of VFX house Technicolor Group as an example of the entertainment industry's ongoing upheaval that began leaving workers unemployed before the generative AI hype came to its current fever pitch. Mooser was careful not to downplay that these concerns about generative AI were a big part of what plunged Hollywood into a double strike back in 2023. But he is resolute in his belief that many of the industry's workers will be able to pivot laterally into new careers built around generative AI if they are open to embracing the technology. 'There are filmmakers and VFX artists who are adaptable and want to lean into this moment the same way people were able to switch from editing on film to editing on Avid,' Mooser says. 'People who are real technicians — art directors, cinematographers, writers, directors, and actors — have an opportunity with this technology. What's really important is that we as an industry know what's good about this and what's bad about this, what is helpful for us in trying to tell our stories, and what is actually going to be dangerous.' What seems rather dangerous about Hollywood's interest in generative AI isn't the 'death' of the larger studio system, but rather this technology's potential to make it easier for studios to work with fewer actual people. That's literally one of Asteria's big selling points, and if its workflows became the industry norm, it is hard to imagine it scaling in a way that could accommodate today's entertainment workforce transitioning into new careers. As for what's good about it, Mooser knows the right talking points. Now he has to show that his tech — and all the changes it entails — can work.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Hollywood Studios' First Lawsuit on AI Sends a Warning to Tech Giants: ‘Piracy Is Piracy'
It seemed like only a matter of time before Hollywood's studios fired their own legal salvo in the battle over IP protection in a time of technological upheaval, and on Wednesday they did. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, the company behind one of the most popular generative AI software programs used today, for copyright infringement. The 143-page lawsuit is filled with dozens of pictures comparing screenshots of popular films and TV shows, ranging from 'Frozen' and 'Kung Fu Panda' to 'Deadpool' and 'Star Wars,' to Midjourney-generated AI images of characters from those franchises. 'By helping itself to Plaintiffs' copyrighted works […] Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,' Disney and NBCU said in the lawsuit. 'Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing. Midjourney's conduct […] threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law.' Representatives for Midjourney did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TheWrap. The new lawsuit shows that even as companies like Disney look for ways that it can embrace AI, they share similar concerns about its abuse with the artists who create the work that lies at the foundation of their profits. Legal experts tell TheWrap that Disney and Universal's move signals a new era in the already-uneasy relationship between Hollywood and AI companies, and it will likely set the ground rules for how the two sides work together — if that is possible — moving forward. 'There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors – like Midjourney – see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game,' RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. Bryn Mooser, the head of Asteria, a generative AI film studio that says it is 'powered by the first clean and ethical AI model,' told TheWrap he sides with Disney and Universal after reading the lawsuit. 'There's no question to me that the studios are right,' the Emmy-winning filmmaker said. 'Disney and Universal are absolutely right to be demanding that AI models have consent.' Midjourney is a San Francisco-based AI company founded in 2021. The company offers a text-to-image tool, similar to other AI companies, that allows users to create images based on what they type into its prompt. Midjourney had $300 million in sales last year, according to the Disney-Universal lawsuit, which is driven by user subscriptions. That makes it relatively small compared to other AI companies like OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, which hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, CNBC reported this week. The lawsuit claims Midjourney has committed 'countless' copyright violations against Disney and Universal. The studios are 'entitled to damages and Midjourney's profits in an amount according to proof,' the lawsuit said, as well as statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringed work. Disney and Universal's filing listed 199 titles that the studios claim had been infringed upon, which would equal $29.9 million in statutory damages. 'Midjourney's large-scale infringement is systemic, ongoing and willful,' the lawsuit claimed. 'And plaintiffs have been, and continue to be, substantially and irreparably harmed by it.' So why target Midjourney in the lawsuit? While it's not as big as ChatGPT, image-generating software like Midjourney is a particular thorn in Hollywood's side. That has been the case even as studios have begun researching ways to use AI to make their production processes and business practices more efficient, as Disney did when it established a new Office of Technology Enablement last November to oversee those efforts. As the lawsuit notes, Midjourney has more than 21 million users that have generated images using the AI software based on copyrighted material. The lawsuit also accuses Midjourney of training its developing image-to-video software on copyrighted material, as well as its upcoming text-to-video model. While not yet capable of producing video at feature-quality 4K resolution, AI experts have told TheWrap that they predict, at its current rate of development, that generative AI software will be capable of creating consistent, 2K-resolution video by the end of the year. If Midjourney is capable of producing mass quantities of artwork of copyrighted characters that are consistent with the art style of the actual films and TV shows they come from, a future where anyone can produce fake clips of 'The Simpsons' or 'Shrek' with a few prompts and clicks is the last thing studios want. Lily Li, a tech-focused attorney for Metaverse Law in Newport Beach, California, said the Disney and Universal lawsuit falls in a legal 'gray area' that will come down to two key factors: How 'transformative' Midjourney's AI-generated content is. In other words, does its text-to-image generator create characters that are too similar in appearance to Disney and Universal characters without consent? The studios, in their lawsuit, argued that is the case, saying Midjourney 'blatantly' ripped off characters like Homer Simpson and Elsa from 'Frozen,' among many others. How was the content that Midjourney used for its model obtained? If Midjourney scraped Disney and Universal content that was behind a paywall and/or without consent from the studios, that could be another major problem for the AI company, Li said. Midjourney, according to the lawsuit, 'never sought any copyright content holders' consent to copy and exploit their works.' Attorney Dustin Taylor, an IP expert with Husch Blackwell, told TheWrap he agreed with Li the 'transformative' nature of the AI-generated content will be a critical point — and he said the pictures Disney and Universal included in their lawsuit to back up that claim are fairly damning: 'The similarity is so strong there.' How will the lawsuit shake out? Both Li and Taylor said that will ultimately come down to what a courtroom decides on the two points above. The 'cutting edge' nature of the case makes it difficult to predict how it will be resolved, Taylor said. But in the near term, Taylor said Disney and Universal's lawsuit has a 'good chance to move past' a likely attempt to dismiss the case from Midjourney, based largely on the strength of its photo examples. And Li said this case will likely spur a wave of similar lawsuits, akin to how The New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI in late 2023 has led to copycat lawsuits since. 'Studios are more likely to take action in the future' against AI companies using their content, Li said. Why? Because if their material is used to create AI-generated content that promotes 'harmful conduct,' they could be sued. One example: is being sued in Florida because its model encouraged a 14-year-old boy to kill himself, according to a lawsuit filed by the boy's mother. Studios will not want to see AI-generated characters that were inspired by their content, without consent, being tied to similar tragedies, Li explained. 'If I were an attorney for these studios, I'd go, 'Wait a second, now there is potential liability that we have, because one of our characters is being used by an AI company to create harmful content,'' Li said. News of this lawsuit will be welcomed by Hollywood's artists. The Writers Guild of America openly called on studios to take action this past December, citing a story in The Atlantic that revealed that a data set used by Apple, Meta, Nvidia and other top tech companies to train their AI contained the full scripts of thousands of films and television shows, showing that the spread of copyrighted material in generative AI output was farther than previously confirmed. 'It's time for the studios to come off the sidelines. After this industry has spent decades fighting piracy, it cannot stand idly by while tech companies steal full libraries of content for their own financial gain,' WGA wrote. ChatGPT and other large AI models like Claude and X's Grok were not referenced in Wednesday's lawsuit, though. Disney and Universal said they sued Midjourney because it has been so brazen in its unapproved lifting of their content. The lawsuit included a screenshot of Midjourney's website showcasing how its model created images remarkably similar to Homer Simpson as one clear example of its 'disdain' for copyright laws. As the lawsuit unfolds, the adoption of AI in the entertainment industry is still moving forward. Along with Bryn Mooser's Asteria, there are other independent studios like Toonstar, creator of the YouTube cartoon series 'StEvEn & Parker,' which uses AI throughout its production process. Toonstar uses a bespoke AI engine for each of its productions based on data sets from art created by human artists expressly for the project and with full compensation and consent. 'We've worked with a lot of creatives and storytellers, and we are interested in creating new franchises. That means these shows need to be copyrightable, and that means they can't use copyrighted material,' co-founder and CEO John Attanasio said. A big test of whether their efforts to adhere to copyright were fruitful came when Random House approached Toonstar for a series of graphic novels based on 'StEvEn & Parker,' which required the company's legal team to review the show to make sure it didn't violate any copyrights. 'There's probably no business that cares more about copyright than publishing, so to be able to clear that process shows that what we are doing is compliant,' he said. There's a long history of cases of new technology running afoul of copyright law, and the entertainment industry has turned to the courts for protection time and again. In late 1999, A&M Records sued Napster for pirating its music, which was followed by a larger suit by the industry's trade group RIAA. However the lawsuit turns out, Mooser said this is a legal battle that needed to happen sooner than later, as companies like OpenAI lobby for looser copyright restrictions in order to make it easier to train their models — and stay ahead of foreign adversaries like China. Mooser said the argument for less-strict copyright laws to enable AI growth and keep the U.S. at the forefront of the AI arms race is 'really convoluted' and ignores what should be at the foundation of any relationship between rights holders and AI companies: consent to use copyrighted material. 'I think it's the most important issue of our time in AI,' Mooser added. The post Hollywood Studios' First Lawsuit on AI Sends a Warning to Tech Giants: 'Piracy Is Piracy' appeared first on TheWrap.
South China Morning Post
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Meet Natasha Lyonne's filmmaker boyfriend, Bryn Mooser: the Emmy winner, Oscar nominee and humanitarian who has been dating the star of Orange is the New Black and Big Mouth since 2023
Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne knows a thing or two about showing off her style … and her man. The multi-Emmy-nominated actress recently attended the 2025 Independent Spirit Awards with her filmmaker boyfriend Bryn Mooser, Lyonne sporting a stunning dress by Rochas, per Harper's Bazaar. The couple made sure to put on a loved-up display for the cameras. Days before that, the Orange is the New Black actress, 45, was with her beau at the SNL 50: The Anniversary Special after-party in New York, wearing a white satin floor-length gown with a black lace bodice. Mooser complemented her look in a classic black tux with a white shirt. Natasha Lyonne and Bryn Mooser at Chanel's 2025 pre-Oscar Awards dinner in Los Angeles. Photo: AP Advertisement More recently, Lyonne, who is also known for the TV shows Big Mouth and Poker Face pitched up with Mooser at the Chanel and Charles Finch annual Pre-Oscar Awards Dinner at The Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge in Los Angeles, both wearing chic all-black ensembles. 'I think I will take a boyfriend picture, thank you so much,' she told photographers before reaching for Mooser's hand to pose. But when Regé-Jean Page, star of Shonda Rhimes' Regency-era show Bridgerton entered the frame, she casually quipped, 'They're both my boyfriends.' So who is Bryn Mooser, who once made Esquire's Americans of the Year list for his philanthropy? He's a Hollywood executive Natasha Lyonne and Bryn Mooser at the SNL50: The Homecoming Concert in February. Photo: AFP Mooser, 45, is an award-winning director and producer, best known for co-founding Ryot, a documentary-oriented media company that also works with virtual and augmented reality, per his IMDb page. After selling the company to Verizon in 2016, he briefly served as a senior vice-president for the new firm before moving on to launch another film and TV studio, XTR, in 2019. According to The Hollywood Reporter, XTR focuses on non-fiction content. In 2020, Mooser became CEO of Documentary+ and last year he founded LA-based production company Asteria Film, per his LinkedIn page. Mooser won an Emmy and earned an Oscar nomination for producing the 2015 documentary Body Team 12; and in 2019 he received another Oscar nod for documentary Lifeboat (2018). He's a humanitarian
