Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads
On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as the ad itself. That applies to TV commercials from multi-billion-dollar companies, as well as restaurants' ugly, crowded flyers about their wing specials.
Pennsylvania is one of the first states to require disclosures on AI content. And it requires those labels regardless of where an ad …
Fielded is obsessed with scammers and unhinged Japanese cyberpunk
Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B even means.
Her first album, Ninety-Thirty-Thirty, includes songs heavily indebted to '80s synth-pop and features multiple saxophone solos. Boy Angel is a quirky electronic exploration with huge saw-wave synths, jittery percussion, and sky-high vocal stacks. While 2020's Demisexual Lovelace …
LG’s brilliant C6 OLED TV is already $400 off ahead of Black Friday
Black Friday is still over a month away, but if you’re hoping to upgrade your TV, you don’t need to wait until November. LG has already kicked off its early Black Friday sale, letting you save on the LG C6 and various soundbars through November 1st. Right now, for instance, you can snag a 55-inch C6 for an all-time low of $999.99 ($400 off), with Amazon and Best Buy matching said price. Other sizes are also discounted, including the 65-inch model, which is on sale for $1,399.99 ($300 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and LG. If you purchase direct, you’ll also get a free Xbox Wireless Controller and a complimentary wall mount.
LG C6 OLED TV
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LG’s C6 OLED TV offers a few small but welcome upgrades over last year’s C5, including a faster Alpha 11 AI Gen3 processor designed to improve picture and sound quality, along with a brighter display. It also boasts a higher refresh rate of up to 165Hz for smoother gaming, up from 144Hz, while retaining four HDMI 2.1 ports and support for AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync, the latter of which helps reduce unwanted screen tearing while gaming.
Unsurprisingly, the C6 delivers the hallmarks of OLED technology, including inky blacks, vibrant color, and impressive contrast. Support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, meanwhile, helps make movies and shows appear more lifelike and immersive, while built-in access to Netflix, HBO Max, and the like lets you stream your favorite content without a dedicated streaming device. Google Cast and Apple AirPlay 2 also make it easy to share content from your phone, while Matter support lets you pair it with various smart home devices.
Solid specs aside, we’d be remiss not to mention that researchers recently raised concerns about how LG’s smart TVs collect and log user data. LG has since responded to some of the accusations, saying its TVs don’t continuously record conversations, and that features like voice recognition and interest-based advertising are optional and disabled by default. While LG hasn’t addressed all concerns, similar data-collection practices aren’t necessarily unique to LG TVs, and they don’t detract from the C6’s impressive feature set.
What to expect from Apple’s ‘Pro and tell’ event
It feels like Apple's Welcome Home event just happened. And the iPhone Duo announcement isn't all that far in our rearview mirror, either. Yet, the company is back with another launch, focused on the MacBook Pro, it looks like. Its "Pro and tell" event is scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles. While obviously nothing is confirmed yet, it sure seems like we're finally going to get that long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro.
Beyond that? There could be an OLED update for the iPad Mini, plus M6 updates across other devices, following the M6 debut with the Mac Mini in August.
A touchscreen MacBook Pro
A MacBook Pro with an OLED t …
I hope Apple’s touchscreen MacBook takes some lessons from this Lenovo laptop
It looks like the long-rumored touchscreen MacBook might actually get announced next week, and after using the Lenovo Yoga 9n for our testing of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, it got me thinking: this is a lot of what I want from a touchscreen MacBook.
Like the Apple silicon in modern MacBook Pros, RTX Spark is an Arm-based processor with a beefy integrated GPU and lots of unified memory. And the Yoga is the most fun RTX Spark laptop so far because it's a 16-inch 2-in-1 convertible with a stylus. Its Nvidia-powered compatriots also have touchscreens, like most Windows laptops, but they're conventional clamshell designs.
The Lenovo Yoga d …
Lee Chang Dong ponders the ethics of the camera
Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.
A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: "Thou shall not covet." What foll …
Laika has spent 20 years building up to Wildwood
Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood, the latest release from Coraline studio Laika. While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies. "When I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing …
It’s time to find a new browser
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I've been reading about Demis Hassabis and computer chips and permafrost, enjoying the first episodes of Machine Gods, filming the next season of Version History (pet season!), seeing You Can See Everything and then reading and listening to absolutely everything about it, painstakingly updating all the stuff in my 1Password, making tiny documents with Tiny Little O …
Xbox’s first chief operating officer is out after just a few months
Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well," said Sharma. As Chiang is departing today, her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders …
OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access
OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems."
OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. On October 1st, OpenAI resumed reinforcement learning training and internal inference with tighte …