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    Lucia Aniello named keynote speaker at AFI DWW+ Showcase

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    Lucia Aniello (photo by Ryan Pfluger)
    LOS ANGELES --

    The American Film Institute (AFI) announced that Emmy® Award-winning writer/director/producer Lucia Aniello (Hacks, Broad City, Rough Night) will deliver the keynote address at the AFI DWW+ Showcase for the Class of 2025 which will take place on Wednesday, March 5 at 7 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles.

    The DWW+ Showcase is an integral part of the AFI DWW+ program and provides an opportunity for the graduating cohort to premiere their short films to an audience of agency and studio representatives, as well as working artists from throughout the creative community.

    The presenting directors from the Class of 2025 include Julia Bales, Jahmil Eady, MG Evangelista, Marissa High, Jasmine J. Johnson, Natasha Mynhier, Karina Lomelin Ripper and Ezra Rose. The directors were mentored by AFI DWW+ guest artistic director Hanelle M. Culpepper (Star Wars: The Acolyte, Star Trek: Picard, Westworld) who also oversaw the artistic curriculum for the 2024–2025 program.

    “Lucia Aniello is an imperative and dynamic voice in today’s storytelling landscape, and we are honored to welcome her as this year’s keynote speaker at the AFI DWW+ Showcase,” said Susan Ruskin, Dean of the AFI Conservatory and executive VP of the American Film Institute. “We look forward to bringing the entertainment community together to celebrate the DWW+ Class of 2025 directors and their bold new films.”

    Emmy® and Golden Globe winner Aniello is a writer, director, producer, performer and one half of the comedy team Paulilu with her partner, Paul W. Downs.

    Aniello and Downs have achieved critical acclaim and commercial success writing, directing, producing and acting in comedies such as Hacks, Broad City, Time Traveling Bong, Nora From Queens, The Baby-Sitters Club and more.

    Aniello is currently writing, directing and executive producing the fourth season of Max’s Original comedy series, Hacks (starring Jean Smart), which she also co-created alongside Downs and Jen Statsky. Hacks has received 48 Emmy® nominations and nine wins across its three seasons, including wins for Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing For A Comedy Series and Outstanding Directing For A Comedy Series as well as wins for four Golden Globe Awards, four Writers Guild of America Awards and a Peabody Award; and Aniello has won two Directors Guild of America Awards in the category of Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy Series. The series was honored as one of the Outstanding Television Programs of the Year at the AFI Awards for seasons one, two and three. Hacks has also received various award nominations and wins at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Critics Choice Awards, Producers Guild of America Awards and the Gotham Awards, among others. Season three of the show premiered on May 2, 2024, on Max with season four premiering in the spring of 2025.

    After the success of Hacks in 2021, Downs and Aniello signed a multiyear overall deal with Warner Bros. Television Group. Most recently, in November of 2024, HBO landed Kansas City Star, a half-hour comedy starring and executively produced by Kaley Cuoco, created by the Hacks trio of Aniello, Downs and Statsky.

    Tags:AFI DWW+ ShowcaseAmerican Film InstituteLucia Aniello



    Google leans further into AI-generated overviews for its search engine

    Wednesday, March 5, 2025
    Audience members gather at Made By Google for new product announcements at Google on Aug. 13, 2024, in Mountain View, Calif. (AP Photo/Juliana Yamada, File)

    Google is updating its ubiquitous search engine with the next generation of its artificial intelligence technology as part of an effort to provide instant expertise amid intensifying competition from smaller competitors.

    The company announced Wednesday that it will feed its Gemini 2.0 AI model into its search engine so it can field more complex questions involving subjects such as computer coding and math.

    As has been the case since last May, the AI-generated overviews will be placed above the traditional web links that have become the lifeblood of online publishers dependent on traffic referrals from Google's dominant search engine.

    Google is broadening the audience for AI overviews in the U.S. by making them available to teenage searchers without requiring them to go through a special sign-in process to see them.

    The stage is also being set for what could turn out to be one of the most dramatic changes to the search engine's interface since Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company in a Silicon Valley garage during the late 1990s.

    Google is going to begin a gradual rollout of an "AI mode" option that will result in the search engine generating even more AI overviews. When search is in AI mode, Google is warning the overviews are likely to become more conversational and sometimes head down online corridors that result in falsehoods that the tech industry euphemistically calls "hallucinations."

    "As with any early-stage AI product, we won't always get it right," Google product vice president Robby Stein wrote in a blog post that also acknowledged the possibility "that some responses may unintentionally appear to take on a persona or reflect a particular opinion."

    More stringent guardrails are... Read More

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