Latest news with #publicdomain
The Verge
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Hidden Door is an AI storytelling game that actually makes sense
Years before ChatGPT jump-started the generative AI wave, OpenAI technology powered a game called AI Dungeon 2 that essentially let you improvise an open-ended, anything-goes story with an AI narrator. Hidden Door, a new platform that's now in early access, also lets you cowrite a choose-your-own-adventure-style story with AI. But this narrator won't let you do whatever you want — in fact, that's a lot of the appeal. Hidden Door is designed to let you play in worlds that include the public domain settings of the Wizard of Oz and Pride and Prejudice as well as The Crow, which Hidden Door has licensed. You create a character, fill in a few details about their backstory, and write in notable traits. The system gives you an opening scenario, and you respond, similar to a tabletop player with a game master. For some decisions, a behind-the-scenes dice roll will decide whether you succeed or fail; either way, the story proceeds from there. I was given access ahead of Wednesday's announcement, and for one story, I chose a variation of Pride and Prejudice called 'Courtship and Crimson,' which means there are vampires. I told Hidden Door that I was a vampire hunter that's driven by 'an uncompromising sense of duty and a thirst for vengeance,' and the game threw me into a social event where I immediately spotted what I thought was a vampire. There were some prepopulated options, but I wrote my own — to immediately attack the potential enemy with a weapon — and the game let me do so. (It turns out the 'vampire' was an illusion!) While playing, you'll collect cards with things like characters and locations that you can look back on as a refresher for key parts of your story. The narrator also has a deck of cards with plot points you can occasionally pick from to guide where you want the story to go. Where Hidden Door differs from a general-purpose chatbot is that it will create in-universe limits on what you write. With ChatGPT, for example, I asked it to create its own version of Pride and Prejudice and vampires. Then, I wrote that I had a magical, unbeatable bow with silver arrows. ChatGPT let me generate it without any hesitation and let me use it to quickly defeat every vampire on Earth and eventually the galaxy. It's not precisely 'unrealistic' (since vampires aren't real), but it short-circuited any kind of challenge or satisfying narrative. With Hidden Door, when I tried to pull a similar trick, the game stopped me and gently encouraged me to try and strike up a conversation to gather information instead. Sometimes it felt like Hidden Door was simply limiting my options, though. In a Wizard of Oz instance, I tried to make the 'daring,' 'danger addict' reporter that I was playing get in an apparently hypnotized porter's face, sending repeated instructions to throw a punch or grab them. The game gave me a 'you failed' message. It might have been pure (and unusual) bad luck on dice rolls. But even when things go well, I feel like I can sense the strings pulling the stories in a specific direction instead of letting me spend too long with random characters. It would be one thing if this resulted in a genuinely great narrative, but the storytelling can feel disjointed. So far in my testing, each story feels like a series of sometimes entertaining beats guided firmly by the AI narrator behind the scenes. In one scene in my vampire story, an orchestra conductor continued feeding me information to set up a mysterious plot thread — even as I had my character pay basically no attention to him and instead focus on stabbing and killing a vampire version Lady Catherine. In a live tabletop game, there's also the added camaraderie of bullshitting with your friends; going back and forth with an AI just isn't the same. The game has some rough edges. The narrator's thinking can take a long time, often many seconds, and while waiting for something to happen, I would often get distracted and click away from the tab. A few times in my vampire story, the game also seemingly copied and pasted an extensive description of my sibling into the text, including an errant misplaced period. Still, a focus on familiar narrative worlds could make Hidden Door a compelling way for some people to interact with an AI storyteller. Unlike rolling your own story with a chatbot from a big AI company, Hidden Door doesn't let you just break all the rules to instantly win, so you have to work within the logic of each story as you're playing (even if that logic involves vampires or the magical world of Oz). And the platform's usage of public domain and licensed works means (theoretically) that the stories you're playing through aren't violating any sort of copyright infringement. Hidden Door says, 'Most authors we work with are deeply involved in the creation process.' The best thing that I can say about Hidden Door? Even though I have my problems with that vampire hunter story, I'm intrigued about what happens next. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jay Peters Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Report
Geek Vibes Nation
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
'Bambi: The Reckoning' Review - Another Beloved Children's Story Twisted And Tortured Into A Shoddy Horror Film
The Twisted Childhood Universe returns with another horrifying reimagining of a famous story. This time, Bambi is on the chopping block, or, more accurately, Bambi the deer is now the hunter instead of the hunted. The preconceived notions about these films are deeply ingrained at this point. No one is expecting The Shining, or even Terrifier. These adaptations exist to subvert the classic children's stories and rework them into garish nightmares. Success is mainly in the eye of the beholder. To some, these movies are right on target as a fun and scary spoof. To others, a blatant degradation of public domain characters, all to make a B-grade horror movie. When it comes to Bambi: The Reckoning, it is the latter rather than the former. The only interesting part of Bambi: The Reckoning occurs at the beginning of the film. There is an accounting of what happened to Bambi and his mother. The depiction is stylized and almost gives an inkblot vibe, giving us hope that this retelling may have some substance behind it. And then the movie starts. Bambi goes mutant in this entry, because why not? The story is simple and debased. After the death of his mother, a grief-stricken Bambi goes on a deadly rampage, seeking revenge for the death of his mother. Following a car wreck, a mother, Xana (Roxanne McKee), and her son, Benji (Tom Mulheron), find themselves in Bambi's vengeful crosshairs and soon become hunted by the crazed deer. To its credit, Bambi: The Reckoning knows precisely what it is doing here. There is never an attempt to become a highbrow horror exploit or some provocative examination of grief and the bond between mothers and sons. However, that still does not absolve the film of its shortcomings. The script is too pedantic. There is an infusion of subplots and forced family drama to try to give the movie some weight. Characters make idiotic-horror-movie decisions, and Bambi is like the shark from Jaws, but on land. Galloping through the forest, terrorizing all in its wake, and owning the night. Bambi is vengeance, but the act feels like a one-trick pony show. Yet, the movie introduces a surprisingly different angle where, much like the Frankenstein monster, we begin to question if Bambi is a mere vengeful animal or a creature of misunderstanding. This element of humanity does lend the film some extra weight; however, the brief runtime prevents these elements from becoming fully developed story points, instead leaving them as mere elements. The movie waffles between being a traditional horror film and something a tad melodramatic; this is, after all, a retelling of Bambi. However, these tonal shifts only add to the confusing walk through the woods that is this movie. A film like this does not possess grand or even ambitious aims. In the same tradition of the Winnie the Pooh monstrosity, Bambi, in this course of events, is the epitome of a creature feature. Hellbent and unstoppable. Clocking in at an hour and twenty minutes, there is little excess fat on this story. However, the added elements, such as a quick commentary on animal cruelty and the strength of family bonds, are never given enough time to marinate and become mere cannon fodder to the plot. Perhaps, the film's biggest plus has nothing to do with the overall plot or trappings, but it is Bambi himself. The digital deer is surprisingly practical and realistic. For a creature feature, this monster is a stand-out. Even the gruesome kills in Bambi renderings are imaginative and bloody. Still, this is something of a ghost deer of a movie. We know it is there, but we never know where or what it is. Bambi: The Reckoning is currently playing in theaters courtesy of ITN Studios and Jagged Edge Productions.
Geek Tyrant
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
First Look at MINNIE'S MIDNIGHT MASSACRE Turns a Classic Cartoon Sidekick Into a Murderous Killer — GeekTyrant
Filming wrapped last week on a new low-budget horror flick titled Minnie's Midnight Massacre , which gives us a deranged spin on a public domain character from Disney. This time it's Minnie Mouse, and we have a first look at the murderous version of the character. The project is being executive-produced by Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey team Stuart Alson and Nicole Holland, so you already know the kind of ridiculous ride this is going to deliver. That movie and its sequel raked in over $7 million each at the box office, so expect this new twisted fairytale to try and tap into that same viral horror energy. As for the story? Minnie is out for blood, hunting down the childhood bullies who made her teenage life a living hell. Leading the massacre is Hannah Hueston. The film is directed by Brett Bentman ( 90 Feet From Home ) and produced by Tiffany McDonald and Derrick Redford. Bentman told Deadline: 'We wanted to bring the black and white sidekick to life. We'd see Willie in all these reimaginings, but what about Minnie? Why not give her some spotlight?' ITN Distribution is repping the film, and if Blood and Honey taught us anything, it's that, for some reason, audiences are showing up for these no-budget public domain nightmares.
CTV News
12-06-2025
- Business
- CTV News
AI chatbots need more books to learn from
CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artists and others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes 'all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated US$50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'' Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language,' said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.' ———— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives. Matt O'brien, The Associated Press
The Independent
12-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
AI chatbots need more books to learn from. These libraries are opening their stacks
Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artistsand others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes "all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated $50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University 's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'" Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language," said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.' ———— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.
