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The Good Journey

Dove review.

The Good Journey starts where the parable of the prodigal son ends. In the parable, one brother lives irresponsibly in a far-off city while the other brother stays home and does everything right. When the prodigal son returns, he finds his father’s acceptance and love regardless of his past, much to his brother’s disbelief. There the parable ends, leaving the reader to wonder if the brothers ever learned to forgive and love each other again.

Enter George and Allen: two brothers who don’t understand each other. When their parents pass, Allen, the black sheep, comes looking for money. George harbors anger towards Allen for his lifestyle that constantly made their parents worry, but Allen just doesn’t seem to care. Their father’s will held a surprise for them both—a sizable sum of money and a plan to get the brothers to reconcile their relationship. In order to receive their inheritance, the two brothers must embark upon a cross-country road trip thanking those who helped his parents long ago. They have a lot of time to think and talk. Allen begins to change when he realizes that the Bible holds stories that are relevant to his life. He finds peace and a new sense of self-worth.

The Good Journey reveals the Bible as something relevant to modern life and full of life-changing power—regardless of it being written thousands of years ago. The relatable stories found within the Bible bring Allen to find peace in Christ while George finds grace to forgive his brother.

Dove.org awards The Good Journey approval for all ages.

The Dove Take

The Good Journey is a feel-good modern take on the parable of the prodigal son with strong themes of forgiveness and redemption.

Dove Rating Details

This film is a mashup of parables that shows the life-changing power of the Gospel.

More Information

Film information, dove content.

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The Good Journey

Where to Watch

Nathan Todaro (Allen Barnett) Jeff Prater (George Barnett Jr.) Meredith Frankie Crutcher (Patricia Spalding) Kearney Ackermann (Denise Barnett) Lou Pizarro (Steve Cole) John Lina (George Barnett Sr.) Chloe Carter Zamarron (Katie Jared) Kaitlynne Postel (Gina Forrest) Alana Ghent (Motel clerk) Kathy Hobbs (Donna Collins)

Based on the New Testament parables The Prodigal Son and The Good Samaritan, this is the story of two estranged brothers sent on a cross country journey by their father in the hope that they can find common ground while offering gratitude and forgiveness to others.

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The Good Journey (Movie Review)

Plot Summary

George and Allen Barnett are extremely different as brothers, but when their father dies, part of getting their inheritances is working together. Though they don’t get along, the brothers are forced to retrace the steps of their parents’ honeymoon trip, which was aided by many different Good Samaritans. George and Allen are tasked with repaying these kind people for their good deeds, and along the way, they discover more about themselves.

Production Quality (1 point)

The production isn’t quite up to the mark despite its clear video quality. Camera work is inconsistent although it gets better as it goes. Audio quality is fine except for loud background noises and a generic soundtrack that hardly stops playing. Sets, props, and locations are okay, but there are cheesy graphics throughout. Elsewhere, the editing is average, and the amount of negatives overall isn’t enough to warrant a score any higher than this.

Plot and Storyline Quality (0 points)

Between the choppy story presentation and the lagging nature of many scenes in this screenplay, The Good Journey is a boring experience. Tons of time is wasted with musical montages that displace substantial conversations, making the film feel like a collection of randomly disconnected sequences. The character have absolutely no substance or depth, seeming strangely unconcerned about family deaths without good reason. They do things simply because the writers want them to. As a whole, the dialogue is bland and generic. Thus, with no real potential in this section, no points can be given.

Acting Quality (1 point)

Robotic acting dominates the first half of this movie, making for an annoying experience. Emotions are stoic and nonexistent as line delivery is uneven. Nonetheless, slight improvement in the latter parts keep this section from being nothing but still isn’t enough to buoy an overall underwhelming effort.

The Good Journey was based on a nice idea, one that seemed slightly different from other run-of-the-mill Christian entertainment. However, poor funding and misfired presentation sunk whatever creativity was possible here. As such, this film joins the long line of offerings in the Christian market that could have been something yet fell short of the mark for a number of reasons.

Final Rating: 2 out of 10 points

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The good journey.

Directed by Tom Whitus

Nathan Todaro Jeff Prater Meredith Frankie Crutcher Kearney Ackermann Lou Pizarro John Lina Chloe Carter Zamarron Kaitlynne Postel Alana Ghent Kathy Hobbs Joe Gatton Leonydus Johnson Alan Humphrey Aaron Kerfoot

Director Director

Producers producers.

Tom Whitus Lou Pizarro Mike VanZant

Writer Writer

Editor editor.

Kevin Avery

Cinematography Cinematography

Executive producer exec. producer.

Silver Hills Pictures

Alternative Titles

Una jornada de perdón, Uma Jornada de Perdão, 선한 사마리아인

Releases by Date

01 oct 2018, 27 feb 2022, releases by country.

Digital 12 VOD

90 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

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Review by weird girl veronica ½

a tremedeira dessa câmera mds. felizmente mais um formado no curso audiovisual da estácio

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A feel-good modern take on the parable of the prodigal son with a strong message of forgiveness and redemption. Now available On Demand the same day as DVD.

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The Good Journey (2018)

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The Journey

Where to watch.

Rent The Journey on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

The Journey 's narrative deficiencies undermine a powerful fact-based story, but those problems are often offset by solid work from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall.

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Timothy Spall

Ian Paisley

Colm Meaney

Martin McGuinness

Freddie Highmore

Harry Patterson

Toby Stephens

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In 2004, two years before the St. Andrews Agreement, I visited a friend in Belfast. Changes were already apparent, if you knew what to look for. A Starbucks had opened, an encouraging sign that corporations were no longer shying away from a war zone. There were still echoes everywhere of the decades-long strife that had shattered the community. I took a "black cab tour," and the guide pointed out a pub where a bomb had gone off in the past, adding, almost casually, "My girlfriend's Da got his leg blown off there." It was such a clear example of the multi-generational aspect to The Troubles, to any civil war really, how grief and loss are passed down.

When Martin McGuinness died this past March, the tone of the obituaries spoke to the complexity of his legacy. The headlines were mostly variations of: "From IRA Terrorist/Commander to Peacemaker." Or "From Sinn Féin Leader to First Deputy Minister." The comments sections seethed with arguments. This was a man who started out as a kid throwing rocks at British soldiers, who ended up shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth, a surreal moment if ever there was one, as well as sharing political power with long-time rabblerouser Reverend Ian Paisley (the man who heckled Pope John Paul II in 1988 with the immortal words: “I denounce you, Anti-Christ!"). Paisley and McGuinness actually did become if not friends then allies in their roles as First Minister and deputy First Minister of the new power-sharing government, post the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement.

"The Journey," directed by Nick Hamm , written by Colin Bateman , announces at the outset, "This story imagines that journey" ("that journey" being how Paisley and McGuinness decided to bury the hatchet). It's a weird sentence and I got tripped up on it initially. Since the film is filled with real-life people (Gerry Adams, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, etc.), and since it takes place at a real-life event (the St. Andrews peace talks), veering off into a pretend-universe where Paisley and McGuinness are trapped together via circumstances beyond their control and HAVE to get along ... is a simplified grade-school version of political realities. It's " The Odd Couple " with Irish accents. There's a naivete at work in the concept: If only these men could bond about football, their wives, their kids ... if only these staunch enemies could see one another as people, then maybe the Catholics and Protestants will join hands in love and harmony!

Did Ian Paisley ( Timothy Spall ) and Martin McGuinness ( Colm Meaney ), as the film shows, go on a bizarre little road trip where they were forced to listen, grow, change? Of course not. Unfortunately for the film, the real-life version of how these two mortal enemies became so close that they were referred to in the press as "The Chuckle Brothers" is way more interesting than the "imagined" version presented in the film.

According to the film's imagined universe, in the middle of the peace talks, Ian Paisley had to fly back to Belfast for his Golden Anniversary wedding celebration. Martin McGuinness insists on accompanying Paisley. Tony Blair ( Toby Stephens ) and M15 chief Harry Patterson (the late John Hurt ) are thrown into a panic. McGuinness and Paisley MUST have their emotional "breakthrough" during their hour-long car ride to the airport, otherwise there will never be peace in Northern Ireland. Their solution to this is to deck the car with hidden cameras, and provide the fake chauffeur with a Bluetooth (through which they whisper suggestions to get the two scowling adversaries talking). Patterson, Blair, and a taciturn Gerry Adams ( Ian Beattie ) watch the entire thing unfold over video monitors from a command post at St. Andrews, as though it's Mission Control in Houston.

Paisley sits in outraged silence for the first portion of the drive, while McGuinness tries to make conversation. Then a series of phony events—a detour through a forest, a run-in with a deer, a confrontation at a gas station—transforms the two men, and they finally start talking. McGuinness and Paisley argue over familiar territory: Bloody Sunday , the Enniskillen bombing, the hunger strike. Their views are so diametrically opposed that they basically live in alternate realities. They have fights, which include cliched lines like: "You are so defensive!" "Alright, walk away, walk away, that's what you do!" The moments where McGuinness gets the icily reserved Paisley to crack a smile are sitcom-phony, at best, and it's made even more egregious by Tony Blair and Gerry Adams gasping with excitement from afar that the Emotional Healing has begun.

In 2016, Spall played, back-to-back, two inflammatory and despised real-life men, Holocaust denier David Irving in " Denial " and now Paisley. Spall did so, in both cases, without pleading for any sympathy for the characters, suggesting the striations of fragility, narrowness, and rigidity in these men's emotional makeup. In "Denial," he is vigorous, staunchly upright. In "The Journey" he is believably decrepit and frail. His hatred of the man in the car with him—and all that that man represents—is so believable that it makes his rock-hard refusal to open up to McGuinness' joking comments understandable. His voice is a dead ringer for Paisley's booming religious-harangue tones. (After the doomed Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, Paisley addressed a crowd of protesters in Belfast, screaming, famously, "Margaret Thatcher tells us that that [the Irish] Republic should have some say in our province. We say NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER." Paisley's gigantic voice thunders "Never" over and over again in a kind of incantatory rhetoric, and Spall does not shy away from the intimidating size of Paisley's voice.) Meaney has a thankless role, the McGuinness of "The Journey" being the guy who has to persist in warming up Paisley, almost like a Life Coach, using his charm and humor.

The final exchange between Paisley and McGuinness, when they shake hands, is the best, but by then it's far too late. The plot-manipulations and artificial events stage-managed by Mission Control back in St. Andrews all serve to diminish the peace talks, the importance of tough compromise, and the reality of what is actually required of politicians when they decide to sit down at a table such as that one.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Journey (2017)

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including violent images and language.

Timothy Spall as Ian Paisley

Colm Meaney as Martin McGuinness

Freddie Highmore as Jack

Toby Stephens as Tony Blair

John Hurt as Harry Patterson

Catherine McCormack as Kate Elgar

Ian McElhinney as Rory O'Suaird

Ian Beattie as Gerry Adams

Barry Ward as Ian Paisley, Jr.

Mark Lambert as Bertie Ahern

Daniel Portman as Frank

Colin Bateman

Cinematographer

Greg Gardiner
Stephen Warbeck

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Journey Back to Mordor When ‘Lord of the Rings’ Extended Editions Return to Theaters

The critically acclaimed trilogy returns to cinemas in June.

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It had been announced in April that the fantasy epic would be returning to theaters this summer with remastered extended editions of the movies. Now, Fathom Events and Warner Bros. have added new dates to expand the opportunity for die-hard fans of the Lord of the Rings to see the trilogy beyond the previously announced dates of June 8, 9 and 10. Additionally, select Regal Cinemas will present the films in spectacular 4DX! The freshly added dates will see The Fellowship of the Ring playing on June 15, The Two Towers will stand tall on June 16, and we will celebrate The Return of the King on June 17 . The 4DX viewing experience will be available at select cinemas showing on June 22, 23, and 24 for The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers , and The Return of the King respectively.

As fans of the Lord of the Rings will tell you, Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's novels is centered on humanity's fight against callous hate. Sauron and Saruman ( Christopher Lee ) have joined forces to bring the world of Men to its knees, and standing in his way, with the sole purpose of destroying the One Ring are Frodo Baggins ( Elijah Wood ) and Samwise Gamgee ( Sean Astin ). The extended editions of the trilogy which are coming will see the likes of Gandalf ( Ian McKellen ), Peregrin "Pippin" Took ( Billy Boyd ), Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck ( Dominic Monaghan ), and Legolas ( Orlando Bloom ) strut their stuff against evil for copious amounts of time. The Fellowship of the Ring for a generous 228 minutes, The Two Towers , for a hefty 235 minutes, and The Return of the King , for an insane 263 minutes.

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A meek Hobbit from the Shire and eight companions set out on a journey to destroy the powerful One Ring and save Middle-earth from the Dark Lord Sauron.

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When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?

Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re “journeys.” The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all.

An illustration of the word "journey" done in a three dimensional typeface. The word is repeated and gets smaller in pink and green. At the end of the repetition is a butterfly.

By Lisa Miller

Drew Barrymore has been talking with Gayle King about her perimenopause “journey ,” and the soccer phenom Carli Lloyd has just divulged her fertility “journey .” By sharing her breast cancer story, Olivia Munn has said she hopes she will “help others find comfort, inspiration, and support on their own journey.” A recent interview with Anne Hathaway has been posted on Instagram with a headline highlighting her “ sobriety journey ,” and Kelly Clarkson has opened up about what Women’s Health calls her “ weight loss journey .” On TikTok, a zillion influencer-guides lead pilgrims on journeys through such ephemeral realms as faith, healing, grief, friendship, mastectomy, and therapy — often selling courses, supplements or eating plans as if they were talismans to help safeguard their path.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

“Journey” has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail, and expressing — in the broadest possible way — an individual’s experience of travails over time.

It’s often related to physical or mental health, but it can really be about anything: “Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery,” said Beth Patton, who lives in Central Indiana and has relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, she said, “journey” is a debated word. “It’s a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like, ‘Oh, this is something special and magical.’” Not everyone appreciates this, she said.

According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online. Mining a new database of conversational American English he and colleagues are building, Egbert could show exactly how colloquial “journey” has become: One woman in Pennsylvania described her “journey to become a morning person,” while another, in Massachusetts, said she was “on a journey of trying to like fish.”

Egbert was able to further demonstrate how the word itself has undergone a transformative journey — what linguists call “semantic drift.” It wasn’t so long ago that Americans mostly used “journey” to mean a literal trip, whereas now it’s more popular as a metaphor. Egbert demonstrated this by searching the more than one billion words in a database called COCA for the nouns people put before “journey” to clarify what sort they’re on. Between 1990 and 2005, the most common modifier was “return,” followed by words like “ocean,” “train,” “mile,” “night,” “overland,” and “bus.”

But between 2006 and 2019, usage shifted. “Return” remains the most common noun modifier to journey, but now it’s followed closely by “faith,” “cancer,” and “life.” Among the top 25 nouns used to modify “journey” today are: “soul,” “adoption,” and “hair.”

In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, “‘I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,’” Semino explained. “Or ‘I’m at a crossroads.’”

So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as Americans started seeing good health as a desirable goal, achievable through their own actions and choices — and marketers encouraged these pursuits and commodified them — the words “journey” and “health” became inextricably linked. In 1898, C.W. Post wrote a pamphlet he called “The Road to Wellville,” which he attached to each box of his new product, Grape-Nuts. In 1926, the Postum Cereal Company republished the pamphlet as a small book , now with the subtitle, “A Personally Conducted Journey to the Land of Good Health by the Route of Right Living.”

The language (and business) of self-help so completely saturates culture, “it gets kind of hard to trace where a word started and where it came from,” said Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of “Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture.” Americans like to put an optimistic, brave spin on suffering, and “journey” seeped in because, Lamb-Shapiro speculated, it’s bland enough to “tackle really difficult things,” yet positive enough to “make them palatable and tolerable.”

“Journey” had fully entered medical speak by the 2010s. Many cancer patients recoiled from the “battle” language traditionally used by doctors, as well as by friends and relatives. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag had noted back in 1978 that “every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology.” But now, opposition to the notion of disease as an enemy combatant reached a crescendo. To reflexively call an experience of cancer a battle created “winners” and “losers,” where death or long suffering represented a failure — of will, strength, determination, diet, behavior, or outlook — on the part of the patient.

Many patients “detest” the military metaphor, Robert Miller conceded in Oncology Times in 2010. Knowing this, Miller, then a breast cancer oncologist affiliated with Johns Hopkins, said he struggled to find the right words in composing a condolence note to a patient’s spouse. “I welcome suggestions,” he wrote.

“Journey” seemed less judgmental, more neutral. In Britain, the National Health Service had started to almost exclusively use “journey” language in reference to cancer (treatments were “pathways”). Semino, the metaphor expert whose father had died of cancer at a time when patients’ diagnoses were hidden from them, wanted to examine how patients talked about it — and whether that language caused them harm. In a research paper Semino published with colleagues in 2015, she looked at how patients talked about their cancer on forums online and found that they still used “battle” as often as they did “journey,” and that “journey” could be disempowering, as well.

For some people, talking about cancer as a “journey” gave them a sense of control and camaraderie — buddies traveling the same path — but others used the term to convey their exhaustion. Having cancer “is like trying to drive a coach and horses uphill with no back wheels on the coach,” one man wrote. Patients used “journey” to describe just how passive they felt or how reluctant to bear the burden of their disease. Separately, patients have told Semino how much they hate the word “journey,” saying it trivializes their experience, that it’s clichéd.

But it was too late: The metaphor already was everywhere. In 2014, Anna Wintour was asked which word she would like to banish from the fashion lexicon and she said, “journey.” The following year, Yolanda Foster, the mother of Gigi and Bella Hadid, told People magazine that while she was on her Lyme disease journey, two of her children were afflicted, too. Medical journals and government publications began describing insomnia , the effort to achieve health-care reform , diabetes , and the development of RSV vaccines as a journey. The term “healing journey,” in use since at least the mid-2010s, blew up around 2021. The phrase in news media referenced the experience of cancer , celebrity weight loss , trafficking of Indigenous children , Sean Combs’s creative process , spa vacations , amputation , and better sex .

On the Reddit channel Chronic Illness, one poster eloquently fumed that persistent sickness is not a journey. “It’s endless, pointless and repetitive. There’s no new ground to gain here.” The cultural insistence on illness as a journey, from which a traveler can learn useful, or even life-changing lessons, becomes something to “disassociate from, survive, endure.” It “causes social isolation.”

Although she concedes its downsides, Stephanie Swanson likes to think of herself as on a journey. Swanson, who is 37 and lives in Kansas City, was an engineer by training, with three young children, a career and a sideline as an aerialist, when she got long Covid in the summer of 2022. The things that had made her successful — her physical stamina, her ability to solve problems — evaporated. “I’ve had to give up my career, my hobbies, my physical abilities,” she said. “I’ve gained 30 pounds on my tiny dancer body. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

Swanson makes a distinction between “journey” and “trip”: The latter is circumscribed by a start, an end, and hotel and restaurant reservations along the way. She sees “journey” as a way to capture the arc of a whole life.

When she was running operations at a medical center at the University of Kansas, she always imagined slowing down to enjoy her kids more or to read a book, but “I felt like my head was going to explode.” Now Swanson has become a person who must rent a wheelchair for her upcoming trip to New York City, and she likes how “journey” accommodates all the challenging, unexpected circumstances she confronts. “To me, the word ‘journey’ resonates with choosing to be on a path of acceptance but not standing still,” she said. “I’m not giving up, but recognizing that this is the path I’m on.”

Ramani Durvasula uses “journey” advisedly. A clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who treats women in emotionally abusive relationships, she recognizes how “journey” has been “eye-rollingly cheapened” and has started to experiment with alternatives. She’s tried “process.” She’s tried “healing trajectory.” But she falls back on journey, because it, more than any other word, expresses the step-by-step, sometimes circular or backward nature of enduring something hard. “Arguably, a journey doesn’t have a destination,” she said. “Have you ever taken a hike in a loop? And you end up exactly where you parked your car?”

But Durvasula does object to the easy-breezy healing so many journey hashtags promote, what she calls the “post-sobriety, post-weight-loss, now-I’m-in-love-again-after-my-toxic-relationship” reels. Too many TikToks show the crying in the car then the cute party dress, skipping over the middle, when people feel ugly, angry, self-loathing, and hopeless. “I want to see the hell,” she said. “I want to see the nightmare.”

When in 2020 a Swedish linguist named Charlotte Hommerberg studied how advanced cancer patients describe their experience, she found they used “battle” and “journey,” like everyone else. But most also used a third metaphor that conveyed not progress, fight or hope. They said cancer was like “imprisonment,” a feeling of being stuck — like a “free bird in a cage,” one person wrote. Powerless and going nowhere.

Read by Lisa Miller

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own.

By the way, TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we’re upping the cadence of our semiregular AI column, which was previously twice a month (or so), to weekly — so be on the lookout for more editions.

This week in AI, OpenAI revealed that it’s exploring how to “responsibly” generate AI porn. Yep — you heard that right. Announced in a document intended to peel back the curtains and gather feedback on its AI’s instructions, OpenAI’s new NSFW policy is intended to start a conversation about how — and where — the company might allow explicit images and text in its AI products, OpenAI said.

“We want to ensure that people have maximum control to the extent that it doesn’t violate the law or other peoples’ rights,” Joanne Jang, a member of the product team at OpenAI, told NPR . “There are creative cases in which content involving sexuality or nudity is important to our users.”

It’s not the first time OpenAI has telegraphed a willingness to dip a toe into controversial territory. Earlier this year, Mira Murati, the company’s CTO, told The Wall Street Journal that she “wasn’t sure” if OpenAI would eventually allow its video generation tool, Sora, to be used to create adult content.

So what to make of this?

There is a future in which OpenAI opens the door to AI-generated porn and it all turns out… fine. I don’t think Jang’s wrong in saying that there are legitimate forms of adult artistic expression — expression that could be created with the help of AI-powered tools.

But I’m not sure we can trust OpenAI — or any generative AI vendor, for that matter — to get it right.

Consider the creators’ rights angle, for one. OpenAI’s models have been trained on vast amounts of public web content, some undoubtedly pornographic in nature. But OpenAI hasn’t licensed all this content — or even allowed creators to opt out of training until relatively recently (and even then, only certain forms of training).

It’s tough to make a living in adult content, and were OpenAI to take AI-generated porn mainstream, there’d be even stiffer competition facing creators — competition built on the backs of those creators’ works, not for nothing.

The other problem in my mind is the fallibility of current safeguards. OpenAI and rivals have been refining their filtering and moderation tools for years. But users constantly discover workarounds that enable them to abuse the companies’ AI models, apps and platforms.

Just in January, Microsoft was forced to make changes to its Designer image creation tool, which taps OpenAI models, after users found a way to create nude images of Taylor Swift. On the text generation side, it’s trivial to find chatbots built on top of supposedly “safe” models, such as Anthropic’s Claude 3, that readily spit out erotica .

AI has already created a new form of sexual abuse. Grade school and high school students are using AI-powered apps to “strip” photos of their classmates without those classmates’ consent; a 2021 poll conducted in the U.K., New Zealand and Australia found that 14% of respondents aged 16 to 64 had been victimized with deepfake imagery.

New laws in the U.S. and elsewhere aim to combat this. But the jury’s out on whether the justice system — a justice system that already struggles to root out most sex crimes — can regulate an industry as fast-moving as AI.

Frankly, it’s tough to imagine an approach that OpenAI might take to AI-generated porn that isn’t fraught with risk. Maybe OpenAI will reconsider its stance once again. Or maybe — against the odds — it will figure out a better way. Whatever the case ends up being, it seems we’ll find out sooner rather than later.

Here are some other AI stories of note from the past few days:

Apple’s AI plans: Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed a few tidbits about the company’s plans to move forward with AI during last week’s earnings call with investors. Sarah has the full story.
Enterprise GenAI: The CEOs of Dropbox and Figma — Drew Houston and Dylan Field, respectively — have invested in Lamini, a startup building generative AI tech along with a generative AI hosting platform aimed at enterprise organizations.
AI for customer service: Airbnb is launching a new feature that allows hosts to opt for AI-powered suggestions to reply to guests’ questions, such as sending the guests a property’s checkout guide.
Microsoft restricts AI use: Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition. It also banned global law enforcement from applying facial recognition tech on body cameras and dashcams.
Money for the cloud: Alternative cloud providers such as CoreWeave are raising hundreds of millions of dollars as the generative AI boom drives the demand for low-cost hardware to train and run models.
RAG has its limits: Hallucinations are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate generative AI into their operations. Some vendors claim that they can eliminate them using a technique called RAG. But those claims are greatly exaggerated, finds yours truly.
Vogels’ meeting summarizer: Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, open sourced a meeting summarizer app called Distill. As you might expect, it leans heavily on Amazon products and services.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.