USA Networks’ hit drama centered on the hacking group Fsociety, Mr. Robot, is so real, it has even inspired its actors to change their lives. In an interview with Digital Trends, Mr. Robot star Carly Chaikin explains how the show made her more paranoid about computers, what it is like to represent a woman in technology, and why Pokémon Go is stupid.
On Mr. Robot, Chaikin plays Darlene, the heart sunglass-wearing embodiment of the angst necessary for hackers like the members of Fsociety to want to save the world with hacking. Yesterday, Chaikin joined Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code, and Christina Mercando, founder of Ringly, at concept shop Story in New York City to discuss women in the tech field.
“Playing a woman in the tech world never crossed my mind as a thing until people started bringing it up all time,” Chaiking told Digital Trends. “People act like it’s unicorns speaking English all of a sudden.”
In the first episode of Mr. Robot’s second season, Charlene and Fsociety hacks into a woman’s smart home, causing her lights to flicker, heat to shut off, and TV to play uncontrollably until she leaves to escape the madness. After recently wrapping up filming the second season, Chaikin admits the show’s real life hacks have given her a new paranoia to obsess over. “I never leave my computer open. That becomes a big OCD thing. If I see people leaving their laptops open I always close them.”
Check out Digital Trends’ video interview with Chaikin above as she explains what the Mr. Robot set is like and which episode in the second season of Mr. Robot has her favorite scene.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?