SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE's Chris Miller Blasts The NBA For Its "Janky Ass" AI Imitation

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE's Chris Miller Blasts The NBA For Its "Janky Ass" AI Imitation SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE's Chris Miller Blasts The NBA For Its "Janky Ass" AI Imitation

During the All-Star weekend festivities, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver unveiled a new companion app for viewers that allows them to add a Spider-verse overlay to games in real-time.

By MarkJulian - Feb 19, 2024 05:02 PM EST
Filed Under: Into The Spider-Verse
Source: Toonado.com

The new AI companion app for the NBA has gotten the league involved in some controversy right now.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Rookie of the Year-favorite Victor Wembanyama gave a demonstration of the NB-AI to those in attendance at the NBA 2024 All-Star Technology Summit during All-Star Weekend. This AI voice assistant is trained by the NBA and will use text-to-video and generative AI technology to allow fans to personalize how they watch live games on the NBA app.

In the Tweet below, you can watch as Silver requests that the Pacers game be shown to him on the app as if it were a Spider-Man movie.

Perhaps because Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the most recent and (as of right now) most popular Spider-Man film, the AI voice assistant added an Across the Spider-Verse overlay to the game.

As you can see, writer and producer of Across the Spider-Verse Christopher Miller did not enjoy the demonstration. He continued by saying that he wasn't sure if the NBA had received clearance from Sony prior to the demonstration, but if not, it's possible that legal action may be explored.

What is your stance on the usage of films and visuals created by artificial intelligence? Given how quickly technology is developing, it won't be long until the AI sector is subject to national and municipal laws.

With a $100 million budget, Across the Spider-Verse generated $690.5 million worldwide, outperforming its predecessor. It was the sixth-highest earning movie of 2023 and the highest-grossing picture for Sony Pictures Animation.

But with the film's massive cliffhanger conclusion, fans of the animated Miles Morales trilogy are dying to know how the series will conclude.

The trilogy's finale was initially scheduled to open in theaters in March, but Sony withdrew it from its release schedule after word spread that animators were nowhere close to finishing work on the third installment.

An animated spin-off series centered on Hailee Steinfeld's Spider-Gwen and Issa Rae's Jessica Drew has already been confirmed to be in development at Sony, and there's already talk of a live-action version of the Spider-Verse movie.

Unfortunately, there is still no confirmed release date for Beyond the Spider-Verse. Current estimates suggest it might not arrive until late-2025, though this remains speculative.

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AmazingFILMporg
AmazingFILMporg - 2/19/2024, 5:35 PM
NBA-I.....😐




how embarrassing 🤡
lazlodaytona
lazlodaytona - 2/19/2024, 6:31 PM
@AmazingFILMporg - you have an issue with the NBA? don't get me wrong, the game itself was a travesty of uneducated, talented morons "just to have fun;" so disrespectful to the high-price paying fans.

The Friday night celebrity game and the Saturday 3pt contest with the slam dunk contest was great.

They gotta keep working on fixing it. Instead of the winning team earning money, the All-Star MVP should get a cash prize. However, there should be a Defensive Player of the All-Star game who earns triple what the mvp does. Watch dudes give a little effort then....
ModHaterSLADE
ModHaterSLADE - 2/19/2024, 5:45 PM
That's a damn embarrassment to easily one of the best animated film franchises ever. Looks like some Shaq-Fu level of effort with this shit.
EskimoJ
EskimoJ - 2/19/2024, 5:46 PM
@ModHaterSLADE - Shaq-tin' a Fool
lazlodaytona
lazlodaytona - 2/19/2024, 6:25 PM
@ModHaterSLADE - Kazam is lower than either one of those



@EskimoJ

Yet the big Aria$$hole is almost a billionaire. Yup. life is so fair....0.000000000000000000001% of the time.
bcom
bcom - 2/19/2024, 5:56 PM
I'm in the IT industry and I REALLY don't understand the buzz around AI. Pretty much in the space of one year AI is all anyone in the tech industry talks about. It's like everything has to be AI driven or have AI elements to be relevant and 'on trend'. Most of these companies have been in such a rush to get on the AI bandwagon that their implementation of it is absolutely terrible. It's a stupid trend that everyone is clambering over each other to try and be the best at.

I honestly think the experts are right. If we rush into making everything AI driven without fully understanding it then we really could mess things up.
Fogs
Fogs - 2/19/2024, 6:12 PM
@bcom - Out of curiosity, what do you mean with "mess things up"?
EgoEgor
EgoEgor - 2/19/2024, 6:19 PM
@Fogs -
-Massive amount of misinformation
-increased scams.
-job replacement with AI tech, when qualified humans are better, in order to make profit.
Etc.


The other over the top part; we could end up producing Skynet.
bcom
bcom - 2/19/2024, 6:24 PM
@Fogs - Well, to quote Geoff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could they didn't stop to think whether they should". I'm not predicting Terminator / Skynet levels of machine vs man here, but if AI / machine learning keeps being forced into driving our everyday tech and it goes wrong then depending on how it is implemented, it may not be an easy case of just turning it off and rebooting it.

AI could be a useful tool, but currently companies are for some reason rushing to get to the top of the ladder and AI is just being thrown into everything just for the sake of it. I think the world needs to slow down, take a step back and really think about AI's use rather than rushing to be the market leader in it by just throwing AI sh*t at the wall and going with what sticks.
bcom
bcom - 2/19/2024, 6:27 PM
@Fogs - Also, to add to my comment, AI is a very useful tool for spreading misinformation. In the wrong hands, it is a very dangerous tool.
Scarilian
Scarilian - 2/19/2024, 6:28 PM
@bcom -
It's financially incentive's by industries. The hopes being they can completely remove around 90% of the workforce by using A.I.

A lot of it is purely for the notion of what A.I. could be in the future, though a lot of hack writers do use it currently for scripts.
lazlodaytona
lazlodaytona - 2/19/2024, 6:33 PM
@bcom - I guess no one has seen a SINGLE TERMINATOR movie.
freakin' idiots.
EgoEgor
EgoEgor - 2/19/2024, 6:34 PM
@bcom - it's too late. Companies are spending billions on this shit. Hype is also a big part of the marketing; along with the doomsayer prophets. The thing isn't slowing down till the tech slows down. It's going to do a lot of harm. It honestly might kill the internet, when people realize they don't know what's real anymore.

But yeah, the AI train is on full throttle on a down hill track without brakes. Too late to stop it or slow it down.
lazlodaytona
lazlodaytona - 2/19/2024, 6:34 PM
@bcom - go ahead and predict a skynet level threat. it will happen.
Repian
Repian - 2/19/2024, 6:41 PM
@EgoEgor - Even I could be an A.I. and I can be learning from you right now. xd
StSteven
StSteven - 2/19/2024, 8:59 PM
@bcom - FWIW I'm a Senior Data Scientist (with a PhD in Comp. Sci.) and I regularly develop CV and NLP models as well as dabbling in Gen AI stuff (kinda off the books as we're very restrained as to what kind of Gen AI projects we're doing within the company's internal domain), and I agree with you overall. The rush to adopt any sort of "AI" solution (and I use quotes for a reason) seen across Industry is the same as when it was Cloud a dozen years ago, the Big Data, then ML, and now AI. I've been studying ML and AI going back to my grad school days and I like to think that I know quite a bit about it by now (currently working my way through Geoffrey Hinton's papers on model regularization), and I agree that everyone's going gonzo over Gen AI because it's like the new "it" thing that is pervading pop culture, and it's annoying as hell.

Most people don't know that open.ai released their first GPT (which is just a transformer model) model back in 2018, and they've had many different iterations of it, but no one cared until ChatGPT came out in Nov. 2022. Since then there's been a lot of visibility on these types of models, but it's not like Model Jesus (yes I'm borrowing that from "DP3") arrived and suddenly bestowed AI upon us all. Hell, deep learning has been around since 2011.
StSteven
StSteven - 2/19/2024, 9:00 PM
@bcom - So I don't know what everyone's getting so excited for. Is it an advancement in technology. Sure. Is it cool. Depends on how good it is, which really varies depending on the quality of the prompts ("garbage in, garbage out"). But at the end of the day is it real AI. Hell no. And in my opinion, Gen AI is NOT real AI. It's just advanced ML. If you want to see real AI then watch "Terminator", "AI", "Ex Machina", hell even "2001", etc. Gen AI cannot operate on its own, nor make decisions for itself. I know YOU know this but I'm just spelling it out for anyone who has the time to read this unnecessarily long rant.

One of my pet peeves is when companies claim that they have AI when they really have ML. And then when they claim that they have ML but they just have a bunch of "if else" statements in their code. And a good way to check is to ask them what algorithms they are using. Anyhow, I'll leave you with this, as I think you would dig it: Nvidia is pretty heavy into the ML and AI space and they have an "AI Playground" where you can try out some of their new "Large Multimodal Models" (i.e. ML + CV). Just Google "Nvidia AI Playground" (they won't let me post the link here). Enjoy!
StSteven
StSteven - 2/19/2024, 9:03 PM
@bcom - Sorry about breaking that post up and removing the question marks, but apparently this site thinks I was posting HTTP stuff. Apparently it needs smarter AI to avoid those issues 😳.
Nightwing1015
Nightwing1015 - 2/19/2024, 9:16 PM
@EgoEgor - not producing Skynet is pretty damn simple - I don’t see even AI advocates arguing we should had ChatGTP the nuclear codes
bcom
bcom - 2/19/2024, 9:25 PM
@StSteven - Thanks for the insights and yeah, various forms of AI have been around for years as you said, but it seems that for some reason over the past year there has all of a sudden become a race to dominate the AI space by all these tech companies. They're all jumping over each other like "Look what our AI can do!". I find it actually quite bizarre and puzzling as to why it became so important so quickly. I've also yet to see a really viable implementation of AI as well. I guess ChatGPT is probably the best but all these image and video generators that so called "AI artists" say will put Hollywood out of business are crap. What these people don't realise is that anyone can paint a painting or use Photoshop, but not everyone can paint a painting or use Photoshop well. It's the same with AI video generators. Just because you can tell a computer to make you a movie doesn't mean it'll be a good movie.
StSteven
StSteven - 2/19/2024, 11:11 PM
@bcom - Exactly. I put it like this: before Photoshop or Adobe Create Studio or Maya or 3DS Max or whatever tools, digital artists were having to do things by hand. Now they have these tools to help the process. They don't create the artwork/models for the artists, they just make it easier by automating the baseline ground work (I Zalsohave a background in game/3D model development) and if you want to make, let's say, a 3D model of Wolverine, there are already plenty of existing models that you can pull down and start with to make your own version. That doesn't make you any less of an artist, it just makes you smart for learning how to use the tools available to you.

I think that the same is true with using "AI" as a tool like Photoshop. Sure you can tell it to generate an image of ______ but chances are that that's not what you want for your final product. So the "AI" did the ground work, but now it takes the artist to take that image and craft it into what they really want.

As a fellow Comp. Sci. guy you may have already encountered "AI" powered code helpers, which so far by my experience are... only so helpful. Overall, I think that there's a long way to go here and advancements are happening at an accelerating rate, but we are far from the "AI Apocalypse" that some idiots were yelling about. Everyone just needs to cool their jets and embrace the new "AI" tools as just that: tools.
Fogs
Fogs - 2/20/2024, 2:46 AM
@StSteven - you summarized it all. """"AI"""" is currently either a deluxe (useful, don't get me wrong) autocomplete or a tool to get to the desired result faster, like a Photoshop filter or Premiere cam effect.
StSteven
StSteven - 2/20/2024, 11:24 AM
@Fogs - Exactly. If you try out Nvidia's SDXL (Stable Diffusion XL) model, which combines SD with an NLP model to allow you to create prompts in plain English to generate images and try to get it to create an image of yourself, unless you have a considerable visual presence on the Internet, what it comes up with is... not great (you can try it here: https://catalog.ngc.nvidia.com/orgs/nvidia/teams/ai-foundation/models/sdxl). And that's because all the Gen AI tool knows is what it can learn by scraping the Internet and discovering the common patterns between the millions of examples that it finds online and is able to deconstruct. That's it. There's no magic to it. And in my opinion it's not real AI because it can't do anything on its own without being prompted and without access to the Internet and all its information. It doesn't have an imagination. We may get there one day but we're not there yet. So in the words of the great sage Hedley LeMarr: "Gentlemen, rest your sphincters!". 😉
Deadinside
Deadinside - 2/20/2024, 5:21 PM
@StSteven - I read through every single word of your TED talk & as insightful as it was, the only part I understood was, "So in the words of the great sage Hedley LeMarr: "Gentlemen, rest your sphincters!""☮😜
StSteven
StSteven - 2/20/2024, 7:41 PM
@Deadinside - Haha. Yeah, that was quite the TED talk, wasn't it (wasn't meant to be)? Sorry but I can be rather verbose, especially talking about topics I happen to know something about AND have an opinion about (although my wife says that I just like to hear myself talk 😉). Fortunately she's a Comp. Sci. person as well so she understands what I'm talking about (most of the time). Otherwise I'd just be the crazy guy on the block who stands out in his front yard yelling at squirrels about Gen AI isn't going to kill us all and whom parents make their kids cross to the other side of the street to avoid and the kids dare each other to step on his porch. And no one wants to be THAT guy.
bcom
bcom - 2/20/2024, 10:33 PM
@StSteven - Agreed. The ones that are making the most noise are the ones that think of AI generators as being the 'be all and end all'. They type what they want into the generator and minutes later they get an AI generated image or video and they think they 'created' it. To most people it will look obviously AI generated but to the 'creator', as they don't have that natural artistic eye and talent, they think it is a Hollywood level production. Yes, I have dabbled in AI tools and yes, as you say many only work as starting points. they require a lot of fine tuning. Unfortunately, many AI developers are marketing their tools as 'total start to end solutions'. This is the real problem I think.
StSteven
StSteven - 2/20/2024, 10:57 PM
@bcom - Well and this is where the emerging field of "Prompt Engineering" is coming from because the quality of what the Gen AI tool puts out is only as good as the prompt (assuming that the tool has full access to the full Internet and not a restricted dataset). With each Gen AI tool (i.s. Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc.) having their own scripting language for prompts and the prompts themselves being VERY sensitive to the syntax as you provide it (like I think that it's SD where you can identify in the prompts how prominent you want a certain element to be in the image based on how many parenthesis you put around it like (bacon) vs. (((bacon))) in a prompt to create an image of bacon and eggs in a skillet).

So the prompts themselves are almost emerging as a sort of art form. That being said, now that we have large multi-modal models, you don't really need to know any particular model's syntax and can just do prompts in natural language, which was inevitable and makes sense, so I don't know how long-lived the role of "Prompt Engineer" is going to be around, but I expect things to kind of go the way that they are now with foundational models/model zoos, or like how there are all these 3D models that artists make that you can download for your games or whatever and you can use them as a starting point and then add/modify/delete to suit your needs.

So like you pay $5 or whatever to use a prompt that will get you close to the image of a dog riding a bicycle dressed as a clown, and then you take it from there. It still requires actual artist to pick that up and take it to the finish line, it just shortens the process. Same with writing a movie script. You can pay $50 for a generic superhero flick with an origin story, a bad guy who has similar powers as the good guy, and a damsel in distress who needs the hero to save her. Then you take that up and make it into your own. Or you're Sony and just put it into theaters as-is 😉.
NicolausCopernicus
NicolausCopernicus - 2/19/2024, 5:59 PM
This is the dumbest service that I´ve ever heard
EgoEgor
EgoEgor - 2/19/2024, 6:16 PM
OpenAI has recently won some copyright claims against them for copyright infringement; unfortunately style is not copyrightable. Anyone can create a film on the style of spider-verse; as long it's not using characters and writing(essentially final works or IP). I don't think the creators or Sony can sue.

But AI copyright is also a double edged sword because, as of now, anything generated by AI is not copyrightable. Might be different for NB-AI since they have trademarks.

This "NB-AI" just seems more like a snap-chat filter. If anyone wants to be blown away check out what OpenAI recently did with their AI text to video generator;

?si=RgVkLMkUzTo65XoY

While still mostly hype at this point, this AI shit is kinda scary. It'll do a lot of harm with misinformation.


Scarilian
Scarilian - 2/19/2024, 6:30 PM
@EgoEgor -
A.I. at its core is trained on pre-existing material. As such it does become a situation of either you'll need to have no copyright law regarding A.I. or you'd have to be extremely specific and difficult to enforce as a result as you'd need to prove the A.I. was sourced and is sourcing primarily your work and is more of a direct copy than an inspiration based off percentages of the different sources.
lazlodaytona
lazlodaytona - 2/19/2024, 6:38 PM
@EgoEgor - what a bunch of nerds. not cool nerds like us comicbook type. just computer geeks who will 1st make sex-bots then get their wanker cut off by a razor-sharp beaver.
Eventually the surviving researchers with their apparatus still attached will get to the point AI will decide we are useless since it's self-aware and eliminate the human race.

Or the Rapture happens 1st and things aren't as bad ... for those Raptured that is.
EgoEgor
EgoEgor - 2/19/2024, 6:44 PM
@Scarilian - the thing is copyright pertains to final works. the problem is copyright never thought of machine training. Is it any different than a human training themselves on already existing art and reproducing it? Maybe it is, but it's such a grey area. Judges at this point have sided with OpenAI; and I personally side with the artists whose work as been scrapped off the net but obviously its complicated.
EgoEgor
EgoEgor - 2/19/2024, 6:49 PM
@lazlodaytona - that's... oddly specific.
Kadara
Kadara - 2/19/2024, 6:55 PM
@EgoEgor - I was hearing about this AI scam in Malaysia the other day. A scammer video called an employee posing as the company's CFO and got a bunch of money transferred to scam accounts.
lazlodaytona
lazlodaytona - 2/19/2024, 7:28 PM
@EgoEgor - sorry, I have night meds that make me loopy and sometimes my rants are ridiculous.
I meant nothing bad towards you of course.
bobevanz
bobevanz - 2/19/2024, 6:39 PM
The AI bubble is just like the dot com bubble. It is the future, but there needs to be a correction before it becomes what it needs to be. Nvidia has earnings Wednesday, they'll need to double beat with amazing guidance to justify their stock price. The magnificent seven is holding up the stock market lol
CoHost
CoHost - 2/19/2024, 6:47 PM
NBA's the most evil organization in the world.
EgoEgor
EgoEgor - 2/19/2024, 6:50 PM
@CoHost - NFL:hold my beer
NicolausCopernicus
NicolausCopernicus - 2/19/2024, 8:04 PM
@CoHost - FIFA:hold my beer
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