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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whether it’s monsters or just unfair labor practices at the gate, the artists and workers behind Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering are standing together. This morning, the D&D team and Studio X, which includes Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters teams, announced their intention to unionize. They’ve asked the Wizards Of The Coast leadership to voluntarily recognize their union by October 13, and have shared a petition that the public can sign if they wish to support the cause.

Don’t look for Corporal Tonc in Andor—apparently his hair just wasn’t realistic enough for the Rebel Alliance. That’s what Tonc actor Jordan Stephens told Zeteo UK on Monday, where the actor and rapper (one half of British rap duo Rizzle Kicks), explained his reasons for declining the opportunity to reprise his small but heroic Rogue One role.

By design, large language models plagiarize because for generative AI to work at the scale we’re told it must, the LLM must ingest everything it can to spit out something similar. As the technology has proliferated, it has found a home on social media, where relaxed moderation policies meet an endless appetite for more content. As we’ve seen time and again, once something hits social media, its creator no longer owns it. In the past, that could mean an idea becoming a meme that’s outside the creator’s control. But now, much of what people post becomes material for AI to ingest and regurgitate. That’s what’s happening to comedian George Brett Olson, who realized an AI-generated woman was stealing his jokes, movements, and even the color of his outfit from a video of his stand-up set.
Caught by writer Nate Bowling in his Takes & Typos newsletter, Olson’s video breaks down how Tiffany Sloan, a fake woman with massive physical features very different from his own, uses his jokes and movements as motion capture, like he was Andy Serkis and “she” was Gollum. Sloan’s creators are stealing all the way to the bank, amassing a massive following on others’ hard work (Olson isn’t the only comedian it copied) and directing viewers to the AI’s OnlyFans page. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t violate Meta’s terms of service. Even weirder, it’s telling Olson’s joke about AI taking everyone’s jobs. Or as Bowling succinctly puts it: “A working comedian had his joke stolen by an anonymous person who created a big-butted hot girl AI avatar, which then stole his jokes and dozens of others’, monetized the theft, ran an adult content side hustle, and somehow managed to violate none of Meta’s terms of service.”

Letterboxd users are trying to put the future of their beloved film-centric platform into their own hands. For months, Tiny, the Canadian holding company with a controlling stake in Letterboxd, has been shopping the user-focused social media platform around to interested parties. And there are plenty of interested parties, to say the least. The potential sale has sent users into a frenzy—and who could blame them, especially amid the near-complete merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery and what the last few years have done to Twitter. Now, Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative, a public benefit company, has launched a grassroots campaign called Letterboxd4All to rally the Letterboxd community to buy the majority stake by making a minimum $100 investment for equity ownership on Wefunder or donating $1 or more through GoFundMe. “The valuation of Letterboxd reflects the years of creative labor users have contributed to building the platform,” Elizabeth Joyce, founder of Intrinsic, told TheWrap. “Our campaign is a reflection of people’s frustration at seeing value extracted from their communities. Our model offers communities the chance to be the owner, not the product.”

A coalition of 57 community, faith, policy, and social service organizations is calling on the Cook County Board of Commissioners to freeze law enforcement spending amid a projected $550 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2027. The groups argue commissioners should freeze spending on the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s […]
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