Color-changing lights are a lot of fun, but it can be hard to figure out how to best use them in your home. Most smart lighting companies offer pre-designed scenes to help you light your space, but the lights don’t know where they are physically in your home, and the effect can get diluted. Philips Hue has a solution to this problem: SpatialAware.
SpatialAware knows your room’s layout and the placement of your Hue lights, so it can determine the best way to distribute the scene’s colors and effects across them.
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It gets the data when you scan your space with your smartphone in the Hue app. Using your phone’s AR capabilities, the system can create a 3D model of the placement of Hue lights in your room.
That’s then stored as a map in the Hue app, and when you apply one of Hue’s newly remastered scenes, it will distribute the light intelligently based on where bulbs and fixtures are.
So, for a sunset scene, for example, the lamps on one side of the room will show warm yellow tones to mimic the setting sun, while the ceiling lights on the opposite side will have darker tones and colors.
The company has reworked about half of its scenes to be compatible with the new technology, coding each to adapt to the new data on the lights’ placement.
I saw a demo of SpatialAware in a hotel suite at CES this week, and it made me realise I’ve been using smart lighting wrong all along.
Held in a dining room filled with Hue ambient lighting products and Hue bulbs in overhead can lighting, the demo showed the original scene, then the remastered scene.
As you can see in the video above, the lighting is distributed in a more polished and integrated way in the remastered version. “That’s because it’s actually being done the way the lighting designer intended,” says George Yianni, CTO and founder of Philips Hue.
The most noticeable difference is that the colors are more evenly distributed. For example, all the ceiling lights in the remastered Savannah sunset scene are a soft orange glow, whereas in the original, a couple are orange and a couple soft white, which creates an awkward look.
In the Nightlight scene, the original version has the ceiling lights on, but the remastered one turns them all off, “because you don’t want ceiling lights on in a night light scene,” says Yianni.
The new feature is coming in Spring 2026 and is compatible with Hue lighting connected to the Hue Bridge Pro.
Photos and video by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
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![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://i2.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
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