Commentary: Keep An Eye On The Spies

Every time a filmmaker or showrunner takes a gamble on a big Western, a million journalists and critics start tippety-typing about how “The Western is back!” or “The Western never went away!” or “The Western is the genre we need now!” or even just—apropos of the enormous popularity of Yellowstone—“At last the ‘older’ audience gets the Western it craves and deserves!” It will be easy for those writers to apply most of those truisms, if not all of them, to Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, an ambitious four-part epic about white people pushing into the west—and, with barely a moral qualm, taking for themselves land that had been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years.

Scarlett Johansson said Monday that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” when she heard that OpenAI used a voice “eerily similar” to hers for its new ChatGPT 4.0 chatbot, even after she had declined to provide her voice. Earlier on Monday, OpenAI announced on X that it would pause the AI voice, known as “Sky,” while it addresses “questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT.” The company said in a blog post that the “Sky” voice was “not an imitation” of Johansson’s voice, but that it was recorded by a different professional actor, whose identity the company would not reveal to protect her privacy. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But Johansson said in a statement to NPR on Monday that OpenAI’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman had asked her in September to voice the ChatGPT 4.0 system because he thought her “voice would be comforting to people.” She declined, but nine months later, her friends, family and the public noticed how the “Sky” voice resembled hers. “When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr.

(SARASOTA, Fla.) — Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of former President Donald Trump’s social networking site Truth Social, lost more than $300 million last quarter, according to its first earnings report as a publicly traded company. For the three-month period that ended March 31, the company posted a loss of $327.6 million, which it said included $311 million in non-cash expenses related to its merger with a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp., which was essentially a pile of cash looking for a target to merge with.

(ANCHORAGE, Alaska) — A 70-year-old Alaska man who was attempting to take photos of two newborn moose calves was attacked and killed by their mother, authorities said Monday. The man killed Sunday was identified as Dale Chorman of Homer, said Austin McDaniel, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Public Safety. The female moose had recently given birth to the calves in Homer. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “As they were walking through the brush looking for the moose, that’s when the cow moose attacked Dale,” McDaniel said. The attack happened as the two were running away, he said.

(MASSAPEQUA PARK, N. Y.) — Investigators returned Monday to the home of a New York architect charged in a string of slayings known as the Gilgo Beach killings. State and county police officials descended on Rex Heuermann’s rundown, single-family home in Massapequa Park on Long Island sometime before 7 a.m. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] They used their vehicles and set up barriers to cordon off the block and raised white tents in front of the red house. Officers removed boxes and bags of evidence from the house as forensic and crime lab units spent much of the day on site.

The city of Denver announced Monday that it would pay $1,000 bonuses to qualifying young people who log at least 100 hours at a job this summer. The payments — available to Denverites ages 14 to 21 years old — are part of a broader effort Mayor Mike Johnston’s office is spearheading this summer to drive down rates of youth violence. “We are thinking about this as a multi-pronged approach to how we can engage young people into positive summer activities and how we can help prevent the risks of summer violence,” Johnston said during a morning news conference. The YouthWorks initiative will be funded through a $1 million state grant, according to city officials. City officials say the program is designed to provide payments to up to 1,000 youths in the city.