<p>“Mythic Quest,” the Apple TV+ workplace comedy about the making of a popular online role-playing game, is ending after four seasons. A new version of the show’s fourth season finale — first aired on March 26, and now the de facto series finale — will premiere on Apple TV+ next week, with a new ending. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>YouTube is looking into potentially offering a feature that would allow users to set a daily timer to limit how long they spend on Shorts. Recent findings from the beta version of the YouTube app, first reported by Android Authority, suggest that the platform is developing a feature to help users stop the endless scrolling [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TechCrunch Sessions: AI is fast approaching. So, what does that mean for you? It means exhibit tables are nearly gone — and now’s your chance to grab one before they’re all sold out. If you’ve got a game-changing product to showcase to the AI world, don’t keep it quiet. Exhibit your brand in front of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Season 7 of “Black Mirror” premiered on Thursday, introducing a new mobile game connected to one of its episodes. The game, titled &#8220;Thronglets,&#8221; from Netflix&#8217;s own Night School Studio, serves as a companion to the episode called “Plaything.” Players interact with virtual yellow pets and strive to keep them alive. If players are successful in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>YouTube is launching a new feature that will allow creators to use AI technology to generate custom instrumental backing music that can be added to their videos. In an update published to its Creator Insider channel this week, the company shared that it&#8217;s beginning to roll out an update to its Creator Music marketplace that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The reboot of early-internet social news site Digg is underway. Original founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have launched an early-access community for some of the first people who signed up after last month&#8217;s announcement that the pair had bought Digg and planned to relaunch it as something new. The early-access program is [&hellip;]</p>

<p>YouTube on Wednesday announced an expansion of its pilot program designed to identify and manage AI-generated content that features the &#8220;likeness,&#8221; including the face, of creators, artists, and other famous or influential figures. The company is also publicly declaring its support for the legislation known as the NO FAKES ACT, which aims to tackle the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Amazon has upgraded its AI video model, Nova Reel, with the ability to generate videos up to two minutes in length. Nova Reel, announced in December 2024, was Amazon&#8217;s first foray into the generative video space. It competes with models from OpenAI, Google, and others in what&#8217;s fast becoming a crowded market. The latest Nova [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley, which is developing AI tools for video creation, has raised a fresh $43 million in venture capital, according to an SEC filing. The filing lists 11 unnamed investors and comes roughly a week after Moonvalley launched its first AI video-generating model, Marey. Moonvalley previously raised $70 million in seed funding from backers [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The British Broadcasting Corporation has filed a complaint with a U.K. antitrust regulator complaining that aggregators like Apple News and Google News minimize credit for the stories they feature. Apple Insider reports that the BBC is asking the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority to require Apple and Google to more prominently credit news sources. And [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The big screen adaptation of video game mega-franchise Minecraft brought in $58 million on Friday, putting it on track for a $135 million opening weekend domestically — or potentially even more. That would give “A Minecraft Movie” the biggest opening of the year, beating out “Captain America: Brave New World” (which earned $88.8 million during [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Midjourney, one of the earliest AI image-generating services on the web, has released its first new AI image model in nearly a year. Dubbed V7, the model began rolling out in alpha around midnight ET on Thursday, comes a week after OpenAI debuted a new image generator in ChatGPT that quickly went viral for its [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Amazon is introducing a new &#8220;Recaps&#8221; feature for Kindle users to help them recall plot points and character arcs before picking up the latest book in a series. While the company&#8217;s press release for the new feature doesn&#8217;t mention AI, Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that recaps are AI-generated. &#8220;We use technology, including GenAI and Amazon [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI&#8217;s new image-generation feature is on track to be one of the company&#8217;s most popular product launches ever. According to Brad Lightcap, who oversees day-to-day operations and global deployment at OpenAI, over 130 million users have generated more than 700 million images since the upgraded image generator launched in ChatGPT on March 25. &#8220;[W]e appreciate [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Spotify announced Gen AI ads, among other changes to its advertising business, at an event in New York City on Thursday. Notably, the company introduced a new programmatic offering, the Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), which allows advertisers to reach Spotify&#8217;s logged-in users via real-time auctions. Expanding on the SAX news, Spotify said it inked new [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Runway, a startup developing a range of generative AI models for media production, including video-generating models, has raised $308 million in a Series D funding round. General Atlantic led the round, which had participation from Fidelity Management &amp; Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank, and others. The fresh capital will be put toward AI research [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Patreon, a subscription platform for online creators, has signed podcasting partnerships with Sony Music Entertainment and Amazon&#8217;s Wondery, the company announced on Wednesday. Patreon says the partnerships are designed to make the site a home to fan engagement and exclusive perks for shows from major podcast networks, as the company looks to expand beyond its [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization of Wikipedia and a dozen or so other crowdsourced knowledge projects, said on Wednesday that bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons has surged by 50% since January 2024. The reason, the outfit wrote in a blog post Tuesday, isn&#8217;t due to growing demand from knowledge-thirsty humans, but [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI is still struggling to overcome the capacity issues brought on by the viral image generation feature the company launched last week. On Monday, OpenAI disabled video generation for new users of Sora, the company&#8217;s suite of generative AI media tools. &#8220;We’re currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled Sora video generation for new [&hellip;]</p>

<p>AI startup Runway on Monday released what it claims is one of the highest-fidelity AI-powered video generators yet. Called Gen-4, the model is rolling out to the company&#8217;s individual and enterprise customers. Runway claims that it can generate consistent characters, locations, and objects across scenes, maintain &#8220;coherent world environments,&#8221; and regenerate elements from different perspectives [&hellip;]</p>