Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has a new mission: Bringing more transparency to data center construction and the impact those data centers have on nearby communities.

Brockovich — who was famously played by Julia Roberts in a film dramatizing her legal case against Pacific Gas & Electric — recently launched a website with a map of data centers across the United States.

The website describes the map as “work in progress” that includes data centers reported by members of the surrounding community. In a Substack post, Brockovich said that after putting out a call for reports of data center-related issues in April, she received nearly 4,000 submissions in the first month alone.

“The single most common concern — more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills — is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency,” she wrote.

Brockovich added that she’s not making a “making a blanket argument against data centers” or AI, but rather against “the pattern our map documents: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.”

After criticizing a startup called Artisan for misusing his work, artist KC Green — creator of the famous “This is fine” meme — said he’s reached an agreement with Artisan. 

The dispute arose after the startup appeared to use a version of Green’s art to promote its AI assistant Ava. In Artisan’s bus and subway ads, Green’s recognizable dog sat amid recognizable flames, but instead of saying “This is fine,” it declared, “My pipeline is on fire,” while the ad urged people to “Hire Ava the AI BDR.”

Earlier this month, Green posted on social media that his art had been “stolen like AI steals” and urged his followers to “vandalize” the ads if they saw them. He also told TechCrunch he was frustrated about having to “try my hand at the American court system” instead of putting that time into his comics.

Artisan, meanwhile, told us it has “a lot of respect for Green and his work.” Then, earlier this week, founder and CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack said the two sides had come to an agreement.

When TechCrunch reached out to Green, he confirmed that they’d “reached a settlement pretty quick,” with Artisan taking down the ads in New York and San Francisco that used his character, and Green taking down his initial post.

The YouTube-to-prestige-horror pipeline is looking very strong this weekend.

Taking the number one spot at the box office is “Backrooms,” a feature film expansion of Kane Parsons’ series of YouTube videos featuring eerie found footage of a mysterious office space (drawn from a 4chan thread) that defies physics.

Directed by Parsons, “Backrooms” will bring in an estimated $81 million at the domestic box office this weekend alone. That’s the biggest opening by far for indie studio A24 — the previous record was held by “Civil War,” which made $25.7 in its first weekend of release.

The number two film, “Obsession,” is pulling off something that’s arguably even more impressive. True, its estimated weekend total is a mere $26.4 million — but the movie (about a romantic wish gone nightmarishly wrong) already made more money in its second weekend than its first, and now its third weekend is set to grow another 10 percent.

For context, most wide release films normally fall between 50 to 70 percent in their second weekend; last year’s “Sinners” was considered an extraordinary word-of-mouth success because it fell less than 5 percent. Outside of Christmas releases (which have more staying power, thanks to the holidays), growing from weekend to weekend is unheard of — according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Obsession” is the first film since 1982 to grow on both its second and third weekends.

And like “Backrooms,” “Obsession” is a horror movie directed by someone who first made his name on YouTube — Curry Barker, whose YouTube filmmaking culminated (for now) in the hourlong found footage horror film “Milk & Serial” released in 2024. Barker has already shot his next film and is set to direct a new remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

The two releases follow the surprise success of “Iron Lung,” a video game adaptation released earlier this year. Directed by Mark Fischbach — better known under his YouTube account name Markiplier — “Iron Lung” grossed nearly $41 million domestically.

In a New York Times article about the recent “YouTube-to-filmmaker boomlet,” Rutgers Cinema general manager Mark DelVecchio noted that “lots of YouTubers have tried to make the leap to mainstream movies and come up short.” What sets Parsons, Barker, and Fischbach apart? DelVecchio said that despite their youth (Parsons is 20, Barker is 26), they all have “longevity.”

“At this point, some of them have been making videos for a very long time, and that’s how you develop a loyal audience that will follow you,” he added.

By the way, while I haven’t seen “Backrooms” yet (fingers crossed for tomorrow), I have seen “Obsession.” So I can confirm that it absolutely does not disappoint — I watched most of the second half with my fingers over my eyes, and I may even have screamed a few times.

This post was first published on May 30. It has been updated with current box office numbers.