Update, December 9, 2024, 5:45PM ET: X today formally announced its Aurora image generator. "Grok's new capabilities are now available on the X platform in select countries and will roll out to all users within a week," the company said in a blog post. The original story, previously headlined "X adds, then quickly removes, Grok’s new ‘Aurora’ image generator," follows unedited below:
Musicians Tegan & Sara, Open Mike Eagle, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and more have signed a letter organized by Fight for
Following an early preview at the start of the year, Sora, OpenAI's long-awaited video generation model, is ready for public use. If you're a ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscriber in the US or "most other countries" where the chatbot is available, you can begin experimenting with the tool starting later today, OpenAI announced on Monday.
A new image generator called Aurora briefly opened for testing for some Grok users, and the tool’s results shared on X appeared far more realistic than X’s previous image generators. It was a brief debut, though. By Sunday afternoon, Aurora was gone. For a short time, there was a Grok 2 + Aurora (beta) option in Grok’s model selection menu, which is now replaced by Grok 2 + Flux (beta).
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention this week.
Spotify's 2024 Wrapped results arrived this week, and while the whole package seems a bit thin compared to previous years, we're still getting a kick out of seeing our listening habits laid bare. Apple Music also dropped its annual Replay, and Tidal's 2024 Rewind has landed, so non-Spotify users have some data to pore over too. For those among us who don't use any of the big streaming apps, well, it's still a nice time to reflect on personal favorites from this year.
There’s a new TMNT game in town, and it’s unlike anything the franchise has attempted before. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, as the name suggests, is a turn-based strategy RPG. This means that players will control characters on a grid-based map, with each turn representing movement or an action of some sort.
Riot just announced a trading card game (TCG) based on League of Legends. It’s called Project K and looks like a whole lot of fun. The cards look exquisitely-drawn and pull from IPs throughout the wider LoL universe, including the Netflix hit Arcane.
Google Photos just unveiled a yearly recap feature, which is a play on stuff like Spotify Wrapped and PlayStation Wrap-Up. This is a highlight reel of notable photos culled from the entire year, along with “fun graphics and cinematic effects.” I can’t wait to see snazzed-up photos of my cats.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has no business being as entertaining as it is. Outside of the superhero genre, there aren’t many high-quality licensed games out there, and this one comes with decades of film lore to live up to. And, frankly, it’s a little bit of a mess on Xbox Series S. Some of its scenes are stunning, but it’s also infested with resolution issues, mechanical glitches and silly animation bugs. In most other games, the combination of these problems would make me throw down the controller and uninstall.