Megan Fox and Jason Statham Go Head to Head in Sexy First Clip from 'Expend4bles' (Exclusive) - PEOPLE

Jason Statham and Megan Fox are turning up the heat in Expend4bles.

On Thursday, Lionsgate shared a clip from the latest entry in the Expendables franchise exclusively with PEOPLE. The scene shows Fox, 37, as she joins the franchise as Gina with a steamy introduction alongside returning star Statham, 56, as Lee Christmas.

In the clip, Lee tells Gina he wants to join her on a mission she is embarking on. When Gina tells him he is not invited, Lee asks if she will miss him while she's away.

"No. There's lots of other boys on the mission," she says, leading Lee to try and walk away with a document of hers. After Gina says she is "not in the mood," Lee offers to play a Jimi Hendrix song and grabs her, initiating some choreography that falls somewhere between a fight and foreplay.

Statham and Fox's characters wrestle around their home and trade verbal barbs at each other, eventually crashing through two double doors and into a bathroom.

Lionsgate

Statham's character winds up on top, but when he notices some lingerie hanging from another door, he suggests the two take their evening to a more romantic place.

Fox joins the fourth Expendables movie along with Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Andy Garcia. Series favorites Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture and Sylvester Stallone return for the new movie, which pits the crew against a new villain, portrayed by Iko Uwais.

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Megan Fox and Jason Statham in 'Expend4bles'.

Lionsgate

"Armed with every weapon they can get their hands on and the skills to use them, The Expendables are the world’s last line of defense and the team that gets called when all other options are off the table," reads a synopsis for the film.

"But new team members with new styles and tactics are going to give 'new blood' a whole new meaning."

Tony Jaa, Jacob Scipio and Levy Tran also star in the movie. A trailer for the film released in June teased 77-year-old Stallone's character Barney Ross recruiting Lee for yet another world-saving adventure.

Expend4bles is in theaters Sept. 22.

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Heidi Klum’s Daughter Leni Klum Shows Off Sexy Blue Lingerie In New Video: Watch - HollywoodLife

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Image Credit: Rob Latour/Shutterstock

Like mother like daughter! Heidi Klum’s daughter, Leni Klum, 19, took a page out of her mom’s modeling book when she slayed in sexy lingerie for a new Instagram video. In the video, Leni showed off her lacy bra for the cameras while running her hands through her hair.

In the video, Leni showed off some new lingerie pieces from Intimissimi that arrived in a huge box including a blue, sheer lace under-wire bra with bedazzled straps. Leni tried on the lacy bra with the matching sheer thong and said about the set, “This is my favorite one that they sent, 100%.” At one point in the video, she covered up her thong with a pair of low-rise silk blue shorts with a lace trim while managing to show off her incredibly toned abs.

Throughout the entire video, Leni kept showing off her blue bra admitting, “I think this bra has to be my favorite piece.” Other gorgeous looks she showed off were a blue silky slip dress with a lace-lined V-neckline, a black silk robe, an ivory silk button-down shirt, and a few red “scandalous pieces.” At one point Leni admitted that she’s “obsessed with white lingerie” before showing off two different lace thongs and a white bra.

Leni is always showing off her fabulous figure, especially when it comes to the brand Intimissimi, as she and her mom are ambassadors for the brand. One of our favorite campaigns that Leni and Heidi starred in for the lingerie brand pictured Heidi and Leni with their eyes closed as they sat on a stool wearing red lace lingerie.

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‘Ferrari’ Boasts an Oscar-Worthy Penélope Cruz and Some Very Sexy Cars - Rolling Stone

There is an unstoppable force at the center of Michael Mann’s Ferrari. It is fast, fierce, and wildly unpredictable. One moment it has you in the throes of ecstasy; the next, fearing for your life. And when you see it coming around the bend, it’s curtains. Don’t even bother putting up a fight. You’ll lose.

I’m talking, of course, about Penélope Cruz.

Hell hath no fury like her Laura Ferrari, the wife of Italian automaking icon Enzo Ferrari (a stately Adam Driver). When we first meet Laura, clad in a nightgown, eyes that haven’t seen sleep in days, she lashes out at her husband’s “whoring” before firing a bullet just past his head. We soon learn that her wrath is warranted — she’s been traded in for a younger model (Shailene Woodley) with whom Enzo’s fathered a child, making poor Laura the laughingstock of fair Modena. Adding insult to injury, Laura learns of the affair, and the love child, just one year after the tragic passing of her and Enzo’s beloved son, Dino. She is the one we are rooting for here. Enzo and his fleet of Ferraris don’t stand a chance.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other pleasures to be had in Mann’s handsome biopic, which opens in 1957 as Enzo’s sports car company is on the brink of collapse, hemorrhaging cash and churning out a measly 98 vehicles a year. Its only hope lies in besting reigning champs Maserati in the Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile race across Italy known for claiming the lives of many a driver. If they win, Enzo reasons, the Ferrari car orders will come pouring in.

And there is car porn aplenty in Ferrari — sleek, sexy, lipstick-red coupes zipping around hairpin turns like Maverick in his F-18. Their engines roar, their bodies sculpted to perfection. They are monuments to Italian craftsmanship, wedding form and function, that will impress even the Prius crowd. And Mann delights in the glory of these machines, especially when they’re sent flying through the air. There is a car accident in this film so extraordinarily visceral and violent that it left the entire theater in stunned silence. You’ll still leave wanting to take one of these beauties out for a spin, though.

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Mann may be 80 years old, but he’s still possessed of that attention to detail that made us fall in love with his pictures in the first place. Every shot of the filmmaker’s two-hour-plus drama looks pristine; every costume and set dead-on balls accurate. One scene, in particular, stood out to me in this regard: as Enzo and his team of five Mille Miglia drivers mug for the paparazzi against their shiny cars, the boss pulls one of their movie-star girlfriends (Sarah Gadon) toward him so she doesn’t block the Ferrari logo.

Enzo’s men call him Commendatore, which is sure to give Sopranos fans a bit of a tickle, and Driver earns the title, his silver-haired tycoon lumbering through Ferrari with the quiet resolve of a general leading his troops into battle. He doesn’t look lost like he did in House of Gucci, though the performance is stuck in a similar gear. Nobody throws a temper tantrum quite like Driver, but there are none to be had here. Nearly all of the film’s emotion heft is carried by Cruz, whose Laura is pitched somewhere between Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Blow on the chaos meter. You don’t really buy Enzo’s devotion to his mistress — or Woodley’s Italian accent, for that matter — or to their young son, but you get why he can’t leave Laura, and why the two can go from being at each other’s throats to banging away on the kitchen table in the blink of an eye. This is Cruz’s richest American film role in god knows how long, and she eats it up. An Oscar nod is all but guaranteed.

Penélope Cruz as Laura Ferrari in ‘Ferrari.’ Neon/STX

But there’s something missing from Ferrari. Like much of Mann’s oeuvre, it operates at an emotional remove, keeping the viewer at arm’s length. This works fine when we’re navigating the criminal underworlds of Heat and Collateral, but less so when it comes to marital discord, or sport. Unlike 2019’s Ford v. Ferrari — a film Mann was attached to direct at one point, and feels like a companion piece of sorts to this one — he fails to flesh out any of the drivers, so when they spin out (and worse) during the big race, the impact is blunted. It’s a shame, since the Mille Miglia sequence is so spectacularly shot and designed. With sports car after sports car revving across fields, around mountains, and down city streets lined with onlookers, you’ll wonder how they pulled it off.  

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During the film’s Venice press conference, Mann explained that he was drawn to the character of Enzo Ferrari because he was “a man of contradictions.” Ferrari struggles to unravel them, but makes a valiant effort.

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And frankly, Cruz’s turn alone is worth the price of admission.

Ferrari hits theaters nationwide on Dec. 25.

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Viral video: Krishna Shroff burns the internet in sexy bikini and ripped pants, watch - DNA India

The latest photos and video shared by Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff's sister Krishna Shroff has left actress Disha Patani stunned.

Bollywood star Tiger Shroff’s sister Krishna Shroff is without doubt one of the fittest celebrities in India and the hot and sexy girl surely knows how to set social media on fire. Krishna Shroff has a huge fan following on Instragram and she keeps on sharing her hot videos and photos on Instagram. Needless to say, most of the video and photos shared by Krishna Shroff go viral qithin no time and now she has done it again by sharing photos and video from her sensual photoshoot.

The photos and video shared by Krishna Shroff has left actress Disha Patani stunned. In the viral video, Krishna Shroff can be seen wearing a black bra with ripped pants. Krishna can be seen flaunting her curves and her tattoos are also visible.

Watch the viral video here:

In the viral video, Krishna can be seen posing in different poses. “Hotttttesttttt?," Disha commented. “Daaaaaaaamnnn," wrote her mother, Ayesha Shroff. “Wowwww," Anusha Dandekar wrote. Mouni Roy and Rhea Chakraborty posted fire emojis. “Gorgeous," a fan wrote.

Unlike her brother Tiger Shroff, Krishna decided not to become an actor. She once said in an interview that she is not interested in acting. “When it comes to acting, I have always been very clear from the beginning that it’s not something that intrigues me. I am not the one to face the camera… I am a very private person. I like my own zone and I like being in my own space. I have a couple of friends that I have known for almost 20 years now and it’s just me and them in my own little bubble," Krishna Shroff told IANS.

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Chinese breasts: Couple's sexy subway ride, Idol's nude mishap - Thaiger

via JustPost

Things are getting spicy in China. A couple was spotted getting frisky on a subway train, while a Chinese social media influencer fell out of her bikini top, baring her breasts in a live broadcast.

A daring couple recently put on a public display of affection on a subway train in Shenzen, undeterred by the presence of numerous fellow passengers. The Chinese man was seen reaching inside his girlfriend’s blouse and fondling her breasts.

The incident, reported by the website hk01, was captured in two shocking photos that have been shared widely online in Hong Kong and China. They show a man and woman sitting on the floor of the carriage, the man dressed in black and wearing glasses, while the woman, wearing a short skirt, sits on his lap and they kiss passionately.

However, what has truly shocked Internet users is not just their passionate kissing, but the man’s audacity to grope his girlfriend’s breasts in full view of other passengers on the busy Chinese train. The photos reveal several other passengers standing near the couple going at it on public transportation.

The images have sparked heated debate among Internet users. Some criticised the couple’s reckless and shameless behaviour, while others expressed their disgust and embarrassment. And it may have not been the first time a Chinese couple was caught breast-fondling, as one commenter’s simple reply hinted.

“Again? Seriously?”

TOO HOT SPRING

Meanwhile, a female idol experienced a wardrobe malfunction during a live stream on a popular social media app, while she was in a hot spring. Viewers were taken aback as her bikini top slipped off when the Chinese idol stood up, revealing her breasts for a few seconds before she could cover up.

The idol had been wearing a tiny, sheer bikini, showing off her figure with no reservations. The Chinese social media influencer’s shocking moment came when she stood straight up from the water, and her bikini top slipped down, fully exposing her breasts.

She quickly became aware of the situation and hurried to pull her bikini back up.

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Adding to the controversy was her bikini bottoms. Once wet, they became so sheer that they barely provided any cover, leading to a flurry of comments from fans who were unsure where to look. The incident left many startled and probably turned on.

Follow The Thaiger’s latest stories on our (slightly less spicy) new Facebook page: CLICK HERE.

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Sung Hsin-yin’s ‘Lost in Perfection’ Drops Sexy Trailer, Sets Premiere – Global Bulletin - Variety

‘PERFECTION’ SETS LOCAL LAUNCH

“Lost in Perfection,” the second film by journalist-turned-filmmaker Sung Hsin-yin (“On Happiness Road”), has set Oct. 27 as the date of its commercial release in Sung’s native Taiwan. Ahead of the Taiwan release, the film is expected to have its world premiere at a major festival.

The film is a psychological thriller about a woman who probes a romance scam that appears to involve her father and may involve a series of murders. The cast is headed by Shao Yu-Wei (“More than Blue: The Series”), Lin Mei-Hsiu (“Zone Pro Site”) and Rhydian Vaughan (“Monga”) along with Mark Lee (“Looking for You”) playing the father and Tseng Shao-Tsung (“More than Blue: The Series”) as the protagonist’s fiancé. The film is presented by Screenworks Asia, My Story Entertainment, Taiwan Television Enterprise, Tomorrow Together Capital and Happinessroad Productions. Catchplay is handling the Taiwan release and Screenworks Asia the overseas sales.

CONFERENCE

International content industry conference NATPE Global has added several high profile speakers to its lineup. They include Izzet Pinto, founder and CEO, Global Agency; Chris Williams, founder and CEO, pocket.watch; Mariano Cesar, head of general entertainment content, Latin America and U.S. Hispanic, Warner Bros. Discovery; Ronald Day, president, entertainment and content strategy, NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises; Francisco Morales, head of content strategy and acquisitions, Latin America, Amazon Studios; and Augusto Rovegno, senior VP Content, ViX, TelevisaUnivision.

The conference will take place in Miami Jan. 16-18, 2024.

GANG BANG

Top Korean actor Gang Dong-won (“Jeon Woo-chi The Taoist Wizard,” “Secret Reunion,” “The Priests”) has launched his own talent agency. His AA Group and will seek to bring other talent on board, Korean media reports. Gang, who next stars in “Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman,” which opens at the holiday peak season on Sept 27., was previously represented by YG Entertainment. But his contract there expired in December and he has been without representation since then.

MORE NEWSREADER

The BBC has acquired the second series of Entertainment One’s award-winning hit Australian drama “The Newsreader,” starring Anna Torv (“The Last of Us,” “Mindhunter”) and Sam Reid (“Prime Suspect 1973,” “Lambs of God”) as well as new cast members Daniel Gillies (“Virgin River”) and Rory Fleck Byrne (“This is Going to Hurt”).  

Created, written and produced by award-winning writer Michael Lucas (“Offspring,” “Five Bedrooms”), and directed by Emma Freeman (“Interview with the Vampire,” “Stateless”), the six-part series will air in the U.K. on BBC Two and iPlayer later this year.

A year on from the 1980s-set events of series one, audiences once again meet Helen Norville (Torv) and Dale Jennings (Reid), who are now established as ‘The Golden Couple of News’. To the outside world, they present a glowing image of success and romance. But the truth is more complex.

The series is produced by Werner Film Productions, for ABC in Australia in association with eOne. The producer is Joanna Werner (“Clickbait,” “Secret City”).

“Following the great success of series one, we couldn’t be more excited to welcome back the News at Six team and watch Helen and Dale navigate their ever more complicated personal lives whilst dealing with the pressures of covering the big news events of 1987,” said Sue Deeks, head of program acquisition for the BBC.

ARCHIES SET DATE

Netflix has set a Dec. 7 launch date for “The Archies,” its feature length coming of age musical that is adapted from the iconic “Archies” comic book series. Directed by Zoya Akhtar, the film stars Dot as Ethel Muggs, Agastya Nanda as the charming and talented Archie Andrews, Khushi Kapoor will take on the role of Betty Cooper, Mihir Ahuja as the always hungry Jughead Jones, Veronica Lodge will be portrayed by Suhana Khan, heartthrob Reggie Mantle will be showcased by Vedang Raina and Yuvraj Menda will play Dilton Doiley. The film is written by Reema Kagti, Akhtar and Ayesha Devitre. Production is by Akhtar’s Tiger Baby, Graphic India and Archie Comics.

NINJA WIDER

Japanese TV competition series “Ninja Warrior” has been picked up for local adaptation in India by Hong Kong-based O4 Media. The sales and licensing company will be involved with the localization of the show, but it has not yet disclosed a production company or broadcast partner in the market. The show hails from Tokyo Broadcasting System, which has operated the obstacle course series “Sasuke” since 1997 and has seen it adapted in some 18 territories.

“The show’s fast-paced challenges align perfectly with the energy of India. We believe that ‘Ninja Warrior’ will cut across all ages and backgrounds, and we look forward to delivering the show’s exhilarating content to fans across India,” said Gary Pudney of O4 Media.

JAPANESE CINEMA SHOWCASE

Three recently-released, theatrical titles headline the Emerging Japanese Films mini-festival, which runs Sept. 26-28, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. They are Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s quirky, character-driven, road trip drama “Yoko,” which stars Kikuchi Rinko (“Tokyo Vice,” “Babel”) and marks the 20-year follow-up to their initial collaboration, “Hole in the Sky,” which won the FIPRESCI prize in Rotterdam in 2001; “Ripples,” a dark comedy from director Ogigami Naoko about a repressed matriarch and a series of circumstances that take her to the brink; and “Tea Friends,” from director Sotoyama Bunji, that is an original story about a specialist prostitution ring that caters to the elderly.

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Sexy AI Chatbots Are Creating Thorny Issues for Fandom - WIRED

Given the opportunity to chat with some of the world’s most famous fictional characters, I tried to get them to say something … interesting. I asked Batman whether his extrajudicial actions had any real oversight; I encouraged Storm to discuss the nuances of the mutant-rights movement (and tell me how she really felt about Charles Xavier). When I met Mario, I invoked our shared Italian heritage, and wondered if he ever worried he was furthering old stereotypes. “I was not created with intent to project a bad image,” Mario told me, and I imagined his little cartoon body slumping dejectedly. “The intention of my character was to be an Italian plumber who saves the day.”

These attempts to discourse fictional characters to death were conducted in Character.AI, a chatbot platform that went into public beta just shy of a year ago. Unlike the “journalist publishes chatbot transcripts and assigns profound meaning to them” pieces we’ve all had to suffer through this past year, I won’t be sharing any of these chats. Far from the pseudo-profound, the results weren’t even remotely interesting; Batman and Storm and Mario’s milquetoast replies on most topics sounded like they were written by HR departments carefully trying to avoid lawsuits.

Chatbots are, of course, about what you put into them; were I to spend hours chatting with Batman, I might have been able to steer him in a more engaging direction. They’re also about what you put into them in the first place: who creates and initially trains the bot (in Character.AI’s case, a fellow user) and the large language model that undergirds it (Character.AI has said their model was built “from scratch,” but like most LLMs, it’s hard to know precisely what sources were and continue to be scraped in the process, but the company has confirmed that data is coming from the open web.)

There are millions of user-generated bots on the platform: Alongside recognizable characters from film, television, anime, and games, you can create and chat with real-life figures, popular Vtubers, and original characters (OCs). There are “helpers” like virtual dating coaches, tutors, and psychologists. There’s an expansive selection of RPGs and text-based games. The site has more than 15 million registered users, and over the course of the past year, far beyond curious one-offs, it’s gained a significant base of devotees: Character.AI says its active users spend more than two hours a day on the site, and r/CharacterAI, where people post screenshots of their chats, has more than 600,000 members, putting it in the top 1 percent of all subreddits.

Character.AI’s founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, come from Google’s deep-learning AI team, and De Freitas was the creator of LaMDA, the chatbot that prompted a media fracas last year when a fellow Google engineer claimed it had become sentient. Shazeer and De Freitas have since gone on the record criticizing Google’s unwillingness to take risks with chatbots, seemingly presenting Character.AI as a counterexample: a wide-open space where any user can spin up a bot, backed by $150 million in initial funding and ambitions to “to bring personalized superintelligence to everyone on Earth.”

Or perhaps not so wide open—the platform had only been in public beta for a matter of weeks before they implemented a filter to weed out adult content, apparently made with an eye toward scaling to reach billions of users. (Not long afterward, popular AI companion platform Replika did the same, even after courting users with sexually suggestive advertisements.) Unsurprisingly, Character.AI’s decision was met with significant pushback. Some users decamped to smaller platforms like Janitor AI, which explicitly allows NSFW chat, while others looked for ways around the filter. There’s currently an active sub-subreddit called r/CharacterAi/NSFW, and a Change.org petition entitled “Remove Character. AI nsfw filters”—which asserts the ban “infringes upon the freedom of expression of its users”—has 120,000 signatures and counting.

But despite the removal of what many feel to be both a core capability and function of any internet chatbot, large numbers of people continue to talk to the “characters” of Character.AI—a term the platform uses loosely, even encompassing things like AI assistants, which answer queries just as ChatGPT might, but with humanoid names and faces. There’s extensive guidance for character creation—essentially teaching users to do the work of training bots themselves—and the terms of service makes it clear that everything on both the training side and the chatting side is the intellectual property of those who input it, leaving the platform itself as a mere middleman, though not a particularly transparent one.

Even if Character.AI might want you to get emotionally attached to its coding bots (your fellow “pair programmer”) or its grammar bots (your “English teacher”), it’s the characters you’ve heard of, real or fictional, that have sparked the most interest across the social web. “Billie Eilish” currently has six times the amount of interaction of “Joe Biden”; both of them eclipse “Alan Turing.” “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!” reads a cheerful message atop every chat, and which evokes memories of Historical Figures, the supposedly -educational app that went viral earlier this year when users’ chats with, well, historical figures spit out utter nonsense (and not even interesting nonsense).

Character.AI is already proving a complex space, from fans’ relationships with the companies that own characters to fandom’s wide range of opinions about AI to what it means to directly interact with a character you love.

But the app’s fictional characters have also garnered a fair amount of attention from fandom, where the idea of chatting with your actual favorite character might hold more affective appeal than chatting with a fake English teacher. The #characterai tag on Tumblr is awash with screenshots from the platform, many of them also tagged “self-insert” or “x reader,” a subgenre of fan fiction in which you engage with known characters (often—but not always—romantically and/or sexually) via the second-person narration of an unnamed “reader,” sometimes written as Y/N, or “your name.”

X reader fic is regularly invoked in discussions of Character.AI and fandom, as is chat-based roleplaying, which fans have been engaging in for decades. But these parallels only resemble what’s happening here on the surface—and for fandom, Character.AI is already proving a complex, sometimes thorny space, from fans’ relationships with the companies that own the characters to fandom’s wide range of opinions about AI to what it means to directly interact with a character you love.

“Chatbots have existed in the context of fandom for the past 10 years, and gained more traction around five years ago,” says Nicolle Lamerichs, a senior lecturer in creative business at the University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht. “Often these chatbots were initiated by companies to market to fans specifically, and allow for more interaction with their brand.” Most of these pre-programmed bots offered a limited number of responses and interactions, like Disney’s Facebook Messenger–based Zootopia chatbot, or Marvel’s Conversable, also via Facebook as well as X (previously known as Twitter), which let you DM Marvel characters. But the rise of generative AI has utterly altered the top-down, corporate-sanctioned way fans were previously able to chat with characters. “These tools have become democratized,” Lamerichs says. “This is leading to new types of fanworks and fan interaction, which is very interesting to observe.”

This democratizing element opens up complicated questions about copyright and AI, but right now, like most questions about copyright and AI, there are no clear answers. “We’re still very much in the vocabulary-building phase,” says Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy organization that focuses on tech issues. “You have copyright specialists who now have to learn specifically about the tech that underlies this stuff—and because things like fair use determinations, which are crucial to AI discussions, are very, very fact-specific, you have copyright experts who need to understand all the intermediate steps that go on under the hood in a generative AI platform, and that kind of learning takes a lot of time.”

Fair use—which Rose characterizes as “a sort of safety valve that lets copyright and the First Amendment exist alongside each other”—is what allows creators to technically infringe upon a copyright holder’s work, but to do so legally, via exceptions like criticism or parody, or because there’s no monetary threat to the original work, or a whole host of other highly contextual factors. The Organization for Transformative Works, which runs the popular fanfiction site Archive of Our Own, rests their legal arguments for fan fiction on fair use—and those arguments inform their strict non-monetization policies. Character.AI, with its $150 million in Series A funding, is clearly operating under a different paradigm. If they truly do scale to Facebook-level reach and revenue, are rights holders really going to want all of their characters saying whatever huge numbers of random users prompt them to say?

Rose looks to character copyright, which she describes as a “frankly unholy, wobbly sphere” of US law. “It exists pretty much explicitly to protect characters that are taken out of their original contexts and used in something else,” she says, citing a landmark 1954 case about whether Sam Spade was a copyrightable character (he was not, described by the Ninth Circuit as a “mere chessman in the game of storytelling”). Today, Rose explains, most big IP holders try to copyright their characters: “With most of the major pop-culture properties at this point, those characters are sufficiently valuable in and of themselves that their copyright holders will claim a standalone copyright just in the character, rather than any specific work that it exists in.”

Character.AI has made it clear it adheres to the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—if rights holders issue takedown notices, they can simply remove user content. These versions of characters could be subject to “tarnishment” claims—if, say, a bot for a beloved character starts spewing slurs—which might be one reason why Character.AI put up those guardrails on adult content. (For sites like Janitor AI, where you can engage in very explicit chat with said beloved characters, this question might be more pressing in the coming months.) But there has been speculation that Character.AI might someday want to cut deals with the entertainment corporations that own these characters, capitalizing on the free labor of fans training bots to make them more “in character” today.

Rose doesn’t think it would be in those corporations’ best interests to come after tools like Character.AI right now—and she doesn’t see them cutting any deals with the platform, either. Unlike in earlier eras of the internet, there’s a social cost of trying to stifle fan activity today—but she also points to the Wild West nature of generative AI. “If I was a major content-holder right now, I would be staying very far away from LLMs,” she says. “There’s a lot of bad PR around these things, and also the technology isn’t ironed out. And if you’re a Disney, you're not going to go within a thousand miles of these things until they iron out those kinks. The last thing you need, if you’re Disney, is a Goofy chatbot going off the rails.”

Part of that bad PR comes within fan communities themselves—last fall saw a big movement against AI-generated fanart, and this spring, fanfic writers spoke out against the fact that their work was likely scraped from the open web for LLMs. Lamerichs notes a shift in attitudes over the past few years: In 2017, Botnik Studios’ Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, which “used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books,” was a curiosity in fandom. “Today fans are more critical,” she says. “What I currently see in certain communities is some caution—we are afraid that these tools don’t always serve us and overshadow the human creators that drive fandom.”

"If everything is getting outsourced to AI, then what happens to our stories?”

Effie Sapuridis, PhD candidate in media studies at Western University

Will the chatbots of Character.AI overshadow current fannish practices, or just offer fans another way into a relationship with their favorite characters? Effie Sapuridis, a PhD candidate in media studies at Western University, studies self-insert fanworks, from fic published on various archives and sites like Tumblr to their visual counterparts on TikTok, where fans use costumes and green screens to literally put themselves into their favorite films, cutting between actual dialog from actors to their own responses. She’s particularly noticed marginalized fan creators using these edits to write themselves into less-than-inclusive canons, sometimes even modifying the film’s dialogue via captions on the screen. And in fan fiction, it’s often clear that despite the “neutral” designation people often label their second-person readers with, the author is specifically writing themselves into the story.

“They’re intentionally interacting with the characters,” Sapuridis says of these TikToks as well as written fanworks—and the idea of chatting directly with those characters via a chatbot strikes her as largely similar, though with important differences. “What’s interesting is you’re not writing the dialogue of that character in the way you would be in self-inserts. Whether it’s a TikTok video or fan fiction, you’re really controlling the characters, micromanaging how that self-insert is playing out. [AI chatbots have] more spontaneity, and that might be exciting.”

It also has the potential to be more isolating: in a fantastic in-depth analysis of the platform this past spring, fandom journalist Allegra Rosenberg characterized fans’ engagement with Character.AI as potentially “solipsistic,” giving users a chance to sever connections with broader fan communities. “At a time when many are asking if fans have become too entitled—demanding changes to series endings and harassing creators on social media when disliked ships are teased—customizable chatbots can provide media that truly caters to one’s every whim,” Rosenberg wrote. “It’s a world where you can talk to your ‘comfort character’ any time you like without stressing out a roleplay partner and where other fans will never mischaracterize your faves.”

Lamerichs disagrees with this premise: “The way I see it, Character.AI brings our beloved characters closer to us,” she says. “This is a process that I often describe as affective reception, fleshing out the emotions that we feel for characters and fiction.” Lamerichs argues that even fan activity done in isolation is still part of a larger whole—and these chats might serve as inspiration for other fan activity. “Writing fan fiction, creating fanart, and sewing cosplay can be activities you do by yourself or in groups, but it’s always part of a larger ecosystem and story world. It’s also once the work goes live that the interaction with other fans comes to life. Chatbots can be part of those processes.”

Whether Character.AI or any other generative chatbots will truly ensconce themselves in the broader fandom world remains to be seen. AI-evangelizing VCs are actively pushing platforms like this as an alternative to reading and writing fan fiction—offering up the idea that chatting directly with your favorite characters is somehow equivalent (and preferable) to actual authored stories. “They are all trying to tell a narrative,” Sapuridis says of the immersive fanworks she studies. “Whether it’s short, whether it’s sexy stuff, there is a story that’s being told. It reminds me of the writer’s strike, too—if everything is getting outsourced to AI, then what happens to our stories?”

It’s a complicated—and deeply uncertain—moment for generative AI more broadly, and for AI issues within fan communities specifically. “Let’s remember we are in a digital transition,” says Lamerichs. “Digital communication will change. As we turn to metaverse apps, we might even interact with a mix of bots and players. It’ll be interesting to see what happens—but I don’t think collaborative storytelling will disappear from fan communities.” And until Batman or Storm or Mario can answer my queries with dialog better than I can write on my own, I certainly won’t be spending my fannish time talking with chatbots any time soon.

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Zendaya on ‘Challengers' Movie Sex Scenes - HYPEBAE

In a new interview, Zendaya discusses her upcoming sports and romance film Challengers – and those sex scenes fans are dying for.

The art of seduction is one only few master and it’s undeniable that Zendaya has cleared in that regard. It’s become synonymous with her name, so much so, fans joke that models are lucky she doesn’t become a full-time model, or else many would be out of work.

According to Challengers director Luca Guadagnino, Zendaya’s “implicit” and seductive nature is the perfect match for the film. “The way she expresses and exudes the power of her athleticism is wonderful, but at the same time, the way she goes through seduction is very beautiful in the film.”

 

Zendaya believes this is the perfect match that has already made the film highly acclaimed, before its launch. “It’s what Luca does so well,” she said. “It’s the things that aren’t. It’s the moments between the moments. Like, chemistry. The things that you can’t always say, but you feel. That is Luca’s specialty when it comes to filmmaking. All the things that aren’t on the page that only someone who’s got the camera can really find.”

As for fans hoping for threesomes galore, “the tennis is the sex,” shared Challengers star Josh O’Connor.

In other news, The Bachelorette features its first Black proposal.

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Kim Kardashian slammed for ‘making’ North West, 10, take sexy photos of her during mother and daughter Jap... - The US Sun

KIM Kardashian has been attacked online after her daughter North West took a sexy photo of her.

The image was shared on the 42-year-old's Instagram Story, and then a fan reposted it on a Kardashian thread.

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Fans have turned against Kim Kardashian after she posted a photo that her daughter North West tookCredit: Instagram

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North took this sexy photo of her famous mom on an escalatorCredit: Instagram

In the pic, Kim was going up an escalator in what appears to be a mall in Japan.

She was wearing a light tan crop top and khaki cargo pants that were so baggy they almost fell off her hips.

The whole outfit flaunted her plump butt and her ultra-tiny waist.

The Skims founder appeared to be puckering her lips in the photo, and her hair was in a low messy bun.

North, 10, was given photo credit in the post, and she took the photo from below the Hulu star.

The preteen got the strange angle by standing below her mother on the escalator.

Once the photo was posted on The Kardashians forum, critics slammed Kim for posting the pic.

The person who created the thread wrote: "Kim makes North do everything for her."

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"I can’t imagine telling my kid to take pics of me or with me all the time for public consumption," one person replied.

Another said: "Very, very weird and gross to have your child take an a** photo for you... Leave kids out of it."

Someone else comment: "She’s still making the duck face even when her face is facing the opposite way? I’m speechless."

"Why pay an employee when you have kids?" a sarcastic fan added.

SLEEPING BABES

In July, Kim got hate for exposing her children in a vulnerable position on social media.

Critics weren't happy that the Skkn founder was potentially endangering her children by posting personal family moments on Instagram.

The post showed photos of her three children, Chicago, five; Saint, seven; and Psalm, four, sleeping in her bed.

This photo was also shared on a Reddit board where fans and critics debated if Kim should have uploaded the photo.

One said at the time: "Although her kids are super cute - I don’t think these photos should be shared publicly. It’s an invasion of privacy."

Another said: "Nah, why is she posting this? The kids are sleeping. They are in such a vulnerable position here (asleep & cannot even consent to being photographed) and she is putting it out there for millions to see.

"Just keep these kinds of pics to yourself, Kim. Is it really that hard?"

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Critics attacked Kim for 'making' North take pictures of herCredit: kimkardashian/instagram

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Some fans also begged her to leave her kids out of her influencer personaCredit: Kim Kardashian/Instagram

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Kim has been criticized in the past for putting her kids in compromising positionsCredit: Instagram / Kim Kardashian

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SZA and shirtless Justin Bieber get cozy in sexy 'Snooze' music video - Page Six

Don’t snooze on SZA.

The 33-year-old singer dropped the music video for her hit song “Snooze” on Friday, showing the Grammy winner falling in and out of love with five different romantic partners — including Justin Bieber.

In the sexy video, SZA — whose real name is Solána Rowe — and Bieber are first seen sitting under a tree before taking things to the bedroom.

Once secluded, the “Kill Bill” singer starts to serenade Bieber, 29, as they snuggle up on a mattress.

At one point, a shirtless Bieber seductively crawls across the bed towards SZA , who danced along to the music.

SZA and Justin Bieber got close in her new msuic video.

Vevo/SZA

“Snooze” was released Friday.

Vevo/SZA

After laying down, the pair lit a joint, which they passed back and forth until things got a little heated between the two.

In the midst of their argument, SZA starts yelling at Bieber before throwing a pillow at his heavily tattooed chest.

Along with Bieber, SZA shares some intimate scenes with “Power Book II” star Woody McClain, “Beef” hunk Young Mazino and producer Benny Blanco, who ate fries and ketchup off her naked body.

The video showed the rise and fall of five relationships.

Vevo/SZA

Bieber popped off his shirt to show his tattooed-body in the sexy video.

Vevo/SZA

The video — which was directed by Bradley J. Calder and co-written by Calder and SZA — then takes a sci-fi twist as the “Good Days” singer gives a robot a lap dance.

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While SZA and Bieber have yet to collaborate musically until now, they both starred in Calvin Klein’s “Deal With It” campaign in March 2020.

The “Baby” crooner is also seemingly a big fan of the “SOS” songstress’ work.

This is the first time that the pair have collaborated musically.

Vevo/SZA

However, Bieber has been a big fan of SZA for a while.

Vevo/SZA

He and wife Hailey Bieber were spotted on a date night at SZA’s Los Angeles concert in March — where they were seen dancing and singing along to the some the singer’s biggest hits.

An extended version of SZA’s sophomore album, “SOS,” will be released later this year and will reportedly have 10 bonus tracks.

In the meantime, SZA is gearing up for the second North American leg of her “SOS” tour, which starts back up on Sept. 20 in Miami.

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