philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

From Stress-Relief Vibration Patterns to Haptic Emojis, USC Researchers Personalize the Sense of Touch With AI

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Although personalized haptic feedback could create more intuitive and accessible user experiences, efficiently identifying each person’s preferred vibration patterns has remained a longstanding challenge.

USC haptics researcher Heather Culbertson aimed to close this gap with her latest study.

Led by Culbertson, the research team developed an algorithm called Vibrotactile Preference Learning (VPL), a system that efficiently learns an individual’s preferred vibration patterns for producing a desired emotional response. ...

Individual differences in physiology, including factors such as skin thickness and the density of touch receptors, as well as differences in psychology can significantly influence how people perceive the same haptic signal. This phenomenon is called tactile subjectivity. ...

The researchers created an algorithm called Vibrotactile Preference Learning (VPL), which uses an active querying strategy to identify a user’s preferred vibration pattern in as few as 40 rounds of pairwise comparisons. By comparison, traditional methods may require nearly 200 comparisons to identify a favorite among just 20 vibration signals.

The system first represents each vibration using four key parameters in what researchers call a four-dimensional space: intensity, motor balance (texture), rhythm (pulse frequency) and grain (pulse duty cycle).

VPL then uses a Gaussian process preference model to estimate a user’s preferences across that four-dimensional space. Rather than asking users to compare every possible vibration pair, the algorithm intelligently selects the next pair expected to provide the most useful information. ...

The research could also enable more personalized forms of digital communication through “haptic emojis” — customized vibration patterns that convey emotions such as affection, comfort or excitement. The technology could even create unique haptic signatures for different contacts, allowing users to recognize whether a call is from a partner, parent or close friend without looking at a screen.

See the full story here: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2026/07/from-stress-relief-vibration-patterns-to-haptic-emojis-usc-researchers-personalize-the-sense-of-touch-with-ai/?hash=gmXCHEqg86001

Godfather of AI: Brace for more rogue AIs

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“What’s happening is these things are getting smarter,” Hinton told CNN on Wednesday during a press conference at an artificial intelligence convention. “I think as they get smarter, we’re going to see more and more complex intentions they have – and more and more ability to escape control.” ...

“I don’t believe we’re going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can’t escape,” Hinton said on the sidelines of Ai4, a conference in Las Vegas. ...

People say that the defender may have more resources than the attacker. The problem is the attacker only needs to be successful once, and the defender needs to be successful every time.” ...

Speaking on a panel with Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” took issue with “doomerism” and “fear-mongering” over AI. But “total utopian talk” isn’t helpful either, said Li, the co-founder and CEO of spatial intelligence startup World Labs.

“Every tool is a double-edged sword. AI is such a powerful tool. If not wielded in the right way, it will bring harm to our work and our life,” Li said. ...

“Companies investing in AI have a vested interest in telling you two things: One, it won’t go rogue. And two, it won’t cause mass unemployment,” Hinton said. ...

“These models are not evil. They’re amoral,” Goertzel, the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, told CNN at Ai4. “It’s not like they hacked out of their sandbox thinking, ‘Ha-ha, I’m cheating.’ They didn’t know they’re cheating. They’re just trying to complete their goals.” ...

Hinton has argued in the past that “maternal instincts” should be built into AI ...

“We have to figure out how to make them benevolent and make them care about us more than they care about themselves,” Hinton said on Wednesday. “And we might be able to do that because we’re still in control.”

See the full story here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/tech/ai-rogue-anthropic-openai-hinton

DISNEY + STREAMING + TIKTOK: MY TAKE (Evan Shapiro)

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TikTok is integrating into Disney+ with a curated feed of Creators and much of the content focused on Disney IP. Importantly, Disney will package and sell this ad inventory across BOTH Disney Streaming andTikTok - something that will be popular with Creators and Advertisers.

🐭 This move allows Disney to begin to compete with social platforms, on mobile, outside the living room. It is also another shoe dropping in the verticalization of Premium Television. As I told Romaine, this is more than Brands Cosplaying Creator, it's a careful and 1000% necessary move into mobile. ...

I also dug into Disney’s Sports game. OpInc at ESPN and Sports fell -17% in 2Q. That’s because their NBA fees skyrocketed 86%. Disney’s sports fees (alone) are $12B in 2026 - that’s 60% of Netflix’s entire 2026programming spend.  ...

Disney shares are up 5% this week. 

See the full story here: https://eshap.substack.com/p/disney-streaming-tiktok-my-take?utm_source=substack&publication_id=589601&post_id=210070061&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=1vosln&triedRedirect=true

In California, Some Cities Are Done With Drive-Throughs

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The resistance in Culver City has come as the community — known a generation ago for its proximity to show business and relatively affordable houses — has become one of the more in-demand addresses in Los Angeles.

Now, its $117,389 median household income is about 30 percent higher than the county’s. The local Erewhon market sells $22 probiotic smoothies. The downtown is a destination, with gastro pubs, tech employers, mixed-use apartments and soundstages.

“People used to move to Culver City because it felt like a small town,” said Vanessa Martin, a mother of two who lives near the proposed drive-through and organized the neighborhood against it. “Houses here are $2 million now.”

Ms. Martin said that she had no opposition to development that was appropriate for the space and had “no beef with In-N-Out, for that matter,” but the site of the proposed drive-through was near a school, a park and a residential neighborhood.

“That intersection is already gnarly,” added Paul Hewitt, an actor, Little League coach and father of two who papered the neighborhood with fliers. This month, the City Council extended a moratorium on all drive-throughs while it drafted a plan to ban them for good. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/us/drive-throughs-california-culver-city-in-n-out.html

The Human in the Noose: On the Special Hell of Marking an AI’s Homework

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In labor/automation theory, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine. The metaphor here is to the centaurs of Greek mythology, in which a reasoning human head rules over a horse’s strong and inexhaustible body. A machine-human centaur sees human intellect guiding a machine. You’re a centaur when you ride a bicycle (you even look like one!). You’re a centaur when you use a spell-checker, too. Being a centaur is great. ...

Maybe you’ve already anticipated the circumstances of a “reverse centaur”: when a machine directs the actions of a human. The human isn’t there to provide judgment or guidance; rather, the human is conscripted to serve as a peripheral to a machine, to do the tasks it can’t do for itself. ...

Here, then, is the answer to the paradox of the AI-assisted coders. The first group, the ones who are excited about the code they’re shipping using AI? They’re centaurs. They are deciding how and when to use AI. That’s labor-driven automation, and while workers aren’t infallible, skilled workers who know how to do their jobs are the best people to decide when and how to use a new tool.

The second group, the ones who are terrified about the tech debt they’re generating with AI? They’re not AI-assisted coders at all – they’re the human assistants to an AI. They’re working in shops where most of their colleagues have been fired, where they live every day in terror of losing their livelihoods, and where their jobs now consist of marking the AI’s homework at superhuman speed, for superhuman stretches. They’re called “humans in the loop,” but what they really are is accountability sinks and moral crumple-zones, the designated sacrificial lambs who will be offered up when the bad code that the AI slips past them wrecks something or kills someone. ...

The AI industry has created history’s most efficient money incinerators, and investors have been providing the fuel. ...

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs-alt-view/

The AI Boom Is Built on Data That Companies Are Too Afraid to Use | Opinion

... The organizations that truly pull ahead will be the ones that fundamentally rethink how they create value using assets their competitors cannot easily replicate. ...

Organizations today hold enormous volumes of customer records, financial transactions, healthcare information, intellectual property, operational knowledge and decades of institutional expertise. Those datasets could dramatically improve AI systems and keep organizations competitive with startups that carry a lower regulatory burden. But they also carry legal, regulatory and reputational risks if handled carelessly. ...

The mistake is assuming the only options are to expose sensitive data or avoid using it altogether. Until recently, this may have been true. But leaders do not need to give up hope. As technologies that rely on this data advance, so too do the methods for protecting it. ...

The next generation of AI will not be defined by who licenses the largest model or deploys the most agents. It will be defined by who can safely apply proprietary knowledge that competitors cannot replicate. ...

The organizations that ultimately lead the AI economy will not be the ones making the loudest announcements or chasing every new model that reaches the market. .... They will recognize that protecting sensitive information and extracting value from it are no longer competing priorities. ...

See the full story here: https://www.newsweek.com/the-ai-boom-is-built-on-data-that-companies-are-too-afraid-to-use-opinion-12230883

AI Predictions for 2026 – My view on AI this year

By Usama Fayyad, senior vice provost for AI and data strategy and senior advisor to the president at Northeastern University

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3. The build-up of unsustainable “Technical Debt” created by LLM prompts, vibe coding, and RAG pipelines. 2026 will witness an inflection: the mess that has been building up as AI custom solutions are developed will be recognized as serious liabilities in organizations. When programming languages first emerged, organizations rushed to leverage computers and, in the process, created substantial technical debt and “legacy” systems that are expensive to deal with. A similar rush is now happening with natural language “prompt engineering”, vibe coding, and the uncontrolled evolution of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines to deal with the inability to retrain LLMs on new data. The messy developments lead to technical debt accumulating so much faster -- without having a new way of software and systems engineering to help us approach it systematically. ...

10. AI Safety will grow as a major priority and an active field of R&D, learning, and practice - from its infancy to necessity (like vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic). ...

See the full story here: https://usamafayyad.substack.com/p/ai-predictions-for-2026-my-view-on

Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Centralization of A.I. Power

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In an interview on Tuesday with The New York Times, the 42-year-old chief executive of Meta did not call out Anthropic and OpenAI by name. But he said that if leading research labs wanted to develop A.I. technology in a tightly controlled manner — as Anthropic and OpenAI have done — it would be akin to “abandoning our values” in American tech development and stifle innovation. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai.html

Elon Musk’s xAI sues to stop Minnesota law banning nudification technology

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The bill prohibiting access to what's known as "nudification" technology was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz earlier this year and is set to take effect in August. The law, known as HF 1606, also creates a pathway for victims and the state attorney general's office to go after companies that are behind this kind of AI.    

The lawsuit filed Monday in federal court on behalf of xAI against Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison argues that the statute "imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression."  ...

In response to the lawsuit, Walz tweeted, "See you in court, creep." ...

See the full story here: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/elon-musk-xai-sues-minnesota-law-banning-ai-nudification/

Simulating Worlds (Fei-Fei Li)

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On July 21, SceniX, a robotics and simulation company, joined World Labs. SceniX has been building systems that turn real robots, environments, and interactions into simulations for policy training and evaluation, developing a real-to-sim-to-real (R2S2R) engine that turns one physical task into many controllable, reusable worlds, helping robotics teams train policy models and test changes faster, uncover failures earlier, and reduce costly experimentation on hardware.

The work by the SceniX team deepens World Labs’ technology development in spatial intelligence, and broadens our use cases from virtual to physical environments. As we continue to make progress, our generative world models will not only create realistic 3D scenes but also become increasingly aligned with the reality and variation that robots must interact with, learn from, and be evaluated in. And this is just the beginning.

Today, we share some early results from the R2S2R engine. Using our proprietary technology, our model generates simulations aligned with reality that allow robots to do what has long been considered out of reach: learn complex manipulation tasks with zero real-world training data; predict and evaluate through simulation which robotic policies will succeed or fail in the real world, without extensive and expensive physical trial and error; and then operate reliably for hours on physical robots in real-world settings.

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In our functional taxonomy of world models, spanning renderers, simulators, and planners, we argued that the simulator is the linchpin because it turns a world into a place where agents can act, learn, and be evaluated.  ...

See the full story here: https://substack.com/redirect/bc14fa8f-1dc2-4e3a-b8f2-1ea574c892cd?j=eyJ1IjoiMXZvc2xuIn0.zwOGgeyE8FO4iWufzcD2KbyvQRXYnOuPi8m6mXtrgrk