The Japan Actors Union, an org consisting of around 2,600 actors and voice actors, recently announced a series of measures to protect the rights of performers in the industry with regard to generative AI (reported in English via Automaton Media).

It's been a hot topic both in Japan and here in the west, with Leon Kennedy actor Nick Apostolides arguing AI voice acting was something of an oxymoron: "AI can speak lines, but there's nothing human behind it," he said.

Rather than a full-on ban or tight regulation, the union's proposed guidelines push for consent at "every stage." Companies would have to disclose when an actor's voice will be used for training, and they would also be required to negotiate compensation with actors. In other words, agreeing to have your voice generated for a short-form advertisement or whatever would be like licensing your likeness to go on a cereal box.

These consent guidelines would also apply to AI-translated performances, and in a more restrictive way to the mimicry of deceased actors, such as Tupac's controversial "appearance" in the upcoming Stranger Than Heaven.

The guidelines would ban using AI to copy a dead actor's voice unless consent had been obtained prior to their death. They would also require consent from the actor's living family, estate, or other administrative org, as well as royalty payments to those parties.

"It protects the dignity, honor, and legacy of deceased performers from commercial exploitation," said the union (auto-translated from Japanese). "We respect the wishes of the person during their lifetime to the greatest extent, and when generating AI, strict permission from the family (or administrator) who inherits the rights is mandatory to prevent desecration of the deceased."

Given the AI-related catastrophes we've seen in this field of the voicework world, like a facsimile of James Earl Jones slinging AI-generated slurs in Fortnite, these guidelines seem fairly gentle and reasonable. Time will tell if these pushes for actors' rights will take hold on a larger scale within the Japanese entertainment industry and otherwise.

Unreal Engine maker Epic Games is running a game jam in November with thousands of dollars in prizes up for grabs. Contrary to so many art contests which ban the use of AI, participants in Epic's event are highly encouraged to use AI.

The theme of the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam will be revealed on November 11, and participating individuals and teams will then have from November 12–15 to produce their games with the help of AI tools.

Some will work in-person at a San Francisco event space, and there will be daily livestreams with progress updates. The winners in three categories will each receive $7,500, with smaller cash prizes for second and third place winners, as well as additional categories like "best team." Also on the table are "Development Continuation Grants of up to $50,000 per team."

Epic extended the invitation with a reference to The Matrix's 'red pill' scene, presenting red-pilled AI-driven development as an opportunity to "ship awesome games in a weekend," while old-fashioned blue-pilled development would have you "wait months to prototype." The hand offering the red pill features an extra finger, a reference to the common mistake made by AI image generators.

The choice follows a recent pattern from Epic of aloofness and defiance directed at AI critics. Last week, the company referred to its new Epic Games Store launcher as "vibe coded," sending the message that it's not ashamed to rely heavily on AI for software development.

Following a report that Epic directed a team working on a Star Wars and Marvel crossover to pivot to "AI first" development, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said that the company is "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration."

The CEO is bullish on AI not just for coding, but for other fields as well, saying that he expects creative work to become more about "direction" than manual creation.

"Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up," Sweeney posted recently. "There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it—and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company."

Sweeney and Epic have received support for their AI positivity on X, but despite the platform's concentration of Grok users and aspiring AI entrepreneurs, substantial resistance also shows up in the replies.

"So do yall think you invented the concept of a game jam or what?" said one poster in response to the AI MegaJam announcement. "The ludum dare game jam was only 24 hours in 2002, so like, a quarter of the time as your game jam. but you want to make it look like its only possible with AI with this 'wait months to prototype.'"

Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU is 'unavailable' from many reputable retailers, approaching an asking price of $9,000 if you happen to track one down on Newegg's marketplace of resellers of dubious virtue. The AI boom is at least in part to blame for this, encouraging team green to shift production resources away from consumer hardware. However, business customers like Amazon are running into logistical issues that just add insult to injury for PC gamers left out in the cold.

Amazon Web Services took delivery of approximately $5 billion of Nvidia GB300 racks in August alone, according to an email seen by Business Insider. Reportedly, the cloud company has also accepted $3 billion worth of hardware each month since. The kicker is that, despite having all of this kit lined up to install in its data centres, AWS does not yet have enough energy to power everything.

This is one reason AWS's free cash flow dropped from $53 billion in Q2 of 2024, to $7.6 billion during Q2 2026. Free cash flow is now in the red according to a leaked recording of an internal staff meeting last month; AWS CFO John Felton joked to the executive leading the company's AI infrastructure, Prasad Kalyanaraman, "You've taken us free cash flow negative as a company, so congratulations."

This friendly joke can only hide so much pain though. Obviously, AWS is no stranger to building data centres, but at this speed and scale, the company is having to juggle multiple different infrastructure timelines amid a whole lot of near-term volatility when it comes to hardware pricing.

Typically, AWS would foot the bill for Nvidia's GPU racks only once they were installed. However, with no clear idea of when that will be, Amazon has had to implement an "Early Rack Receipt" process in the meantime. With no way to power this paid for hardware, that leaves a lot of cash tied up in tech AWS can't actually use—hence the reportedly negative free cash flow.

But AWS is not inclined to stop scooping up GPU racks or pause its AI infrastructure build out any time soon. Free cash flow problems aside, AWS's second quarter revenue grew by 37% year-over-year This was the fastest growth AWS has seen in 18 quarters, making $42.2 billion by the end of July. That's a big win that in turn encourages more big spending.

Indeed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently described AI as "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to investors, with the company intending to spend almost $200 billion on its infrastructure buildout. On a recent earnings call, Jassy even said he was sure the company has a "clear line of sight to strong financial returns" on that sizable investment. But in the near-term, while AWS figures out its power problems, a lot of that investment may well be sat collecting dust somewhere.

I'm clinging to the hope that the memory supply crisis resolves sooner rather than later as much as the next PC gamer. Unfortunately, judging by how much of next year's memory supply has been locked down by long term agreements, it looks like things are about to get much worse before they get better.

80% of Samsung's 2027 memory output has already been secured by long term agreements, according to Korean investment firm KB Securities (via Yonhap News).

Hyperscalers pushing forward with the big data centre build out will likely be jostling for the remaining 20%. As for Samsung's commodity memory output—your DRAM, your NAND, and so on—70% is already said to be covered by five year contracts.

Yearly agreements account for 100% of the company's High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) output (which is most often used by graphics cards and accelerators for data centres). As a result, KB Securities predicts that the average selling price for this specialised memory will increase by between 100 and 150% year-over-year. Bottom line, that will have a knock-on effect on the consumer market too, with a double-digit quarter-over-quarter price increase expected on the other side of the coming new year.

So, while it's one thing for the odd big tech CEO saying "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030," we do still need to make it to that ballpark year first. Unfortunately for this rapidly overextending metaphor, the field is on fire. If you've been camping out under the bleachers, trying to ignore how hot it's feeling, I recommend taking a look at our freshly updated memory crisis explainer here. Long game made short, yes, it is all AI's fault.

On the flip side for those so inclined, now might be the time to invest in Samsung as KB Securities also predicts "earnings growth virtually guaranteed." The firm predicts Samsung's operating profit to see a 57% year-over-year increase in 2027, reaching 555 trillion Korean won (or a little over $4 billion).

This prediction arrives in the wake of last week's big AI and semiconductor stock sell off. KB Securities note that Samsung saw a share price decline of 19% during this time, which sure ain't nothing!

This hasn't swayed the investment firm's prediction though, with KB Securities saying, "We believe the sell-off is attributable to weaker sentiment [regarding AI investments more broadly] and valuation adjustments amid macro uncertainties, rather than any deterioration in the company’s earnings fundamentals. Macro variables may boost near-term volatility, but are unlikely to affect the direction of earnings growth, given the output reserved by LTAs and rising prices. In short, we believe earnings growth in 2027 is virtually assured."

Well, that investor jargon is all very well and good for a massive corporation like Samsung. For the rest of us, I still don't advise panic buying hardware, but it does look like prices are only going to get worse in the near-term.

Christofer Sundberg, the founder of Samson developer Liquid Swords, has confirmed the studio's closure, saying that while the console version of the game enjoyed "much greater success" than the PC release, it "wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line."

Reports over the weekend revealed that Liquid Swords had gone bankrupt just six months after the PC release of Samson, which was followed by a console launch in September. "It's been a hell of a ride and a lot of fun, even when the circumstances gave us very little to laugh about," Sundberg wrote. "Building a studio, creating Samson and releasing it on PC and consoles took an enormous amount of work from people who cared deeply about what we were making.

"The console versions met with much greater success than the PC release. We got them out, but that success wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line. Market conditions and some bad business decisions brought us here, and I own my part in that. I can look honestly at what went wrong and still be proud of what we built."

Samson wasn't especially well received when it debuted on PCs, and while post-launch updates have tightened it up, it still holds a very "mixed" rating on Steam, where just 55% of user reviews are positive, and a 51 aggregate score on Metacritic. It wasn't a MindsEye-scale mess, but Sundberg acknowledged shortly after Samson's launch that Liquid Swords "released a game with flaws."

Sundberg said in his message that discussions about how to support Samson in the future are now underway; more interestingly, he added that, with Liquid Swords gone, he plans to open a new studio. Despite the lack of the traditional cooling-off period, it's not surprising that Sundberg is staying in the game dev biz: Prior to Liquid Swords, he was the co-founder and chief creative officer at Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios.

"We make mistakes, we learn, we fall, we rise up, we move on. That's sometimes a painful process, especially when it affects people you care about, but I refuse to give up. I never give up," Sundberg wrote.

"I'll be back at it again soon and will share more about my plans for a new studio. It will be built with the current market in mind, with a solid foundation and business decisions that give the games and the people making them room to succeed. The lessons from Liquid Swords will be part of how I build it. I still love making games."

It's far too early for anything concrete, but Sundberg told PC Gamer that "starting with what we can actually sustain" is the initial goal.

"A small, experienced team, low running costs and a game we can afford to finish without needing every sales forecast to come true," Sundberg explained. "I want room to make a wrong turn, fix it, and keep going without putting the whole company at risk."

Part of that will include using AI in the development process, "to help with prototyping, repetitive production tasks and testing," Sundberg said—although he emphasized that he doesn't see the technology as a game dev panacea.

"We're not looking to replace roles with AI or treating it as a way to save money (or make money quickly), because AI is bloody expensive too. And cutting corners in game development has a habit of coming back to bite you in the ass. You need solid game development experience to make anything that isn't slop and the proofs are already out there."

Sundberg is also aware of the PR risks attached to AI use, which he believes arise primarily from bold management pronouncements about the "AI-first" future with no consideration of what dev teams actually need or what problems are being solved.

"It feels like everyone is using AI, but hardly anyone talks openly about how," he said. "I think a lot of people are still figuring out where it helps and where it creates more work. Then the bill arrives for all those tokens burned, and they realise it wasn't quite the cheap shortcut they imagined.

"I'm positive about these tools, but 'AI-first' isn't a production plan or a business strategy. You need people who understand the work well enough to know when AI helps and when to switch it off. I'd like us to talk more openly about that."

Alongside the news of Liquid Swords' bankruptcy, there were claims that employees had gone unpaid for at least two months. We have since learned that the studio's bankruptcy means those employees will be paid by Sweden's wage guarantee. Sundberg declined to comment on the possibility of compensation beyond that guarantee, but said "there are people at Liquid Swords [he] would love to work with again," although it's way too soon for any commitments.

"I still want to make games with personality, freedom and enough action to cause a small diplomatic incident," Sundberg said. "I just want the explosions on screen to be bigger than the monthly overhead.

"There's plenty of fight left in me, but the next studio needs to work without running on stubbornness alone. I can do that too, but it's quite exhausting in the long-run."

The studio behind the Moonlighter series has announced it will no longer host a public playtest for its forthcoming roguelike due to fears it will be "reverse-engineered, cloned and published". The move comes as a surge in rapidly vibe coded clones floods Steam, Roblox and mobile app stores in the aftermath of Claude Opus 5.5.

"With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players feels like too big a risk," Digital Sun Games' marketing manager Israel Mallén told PC Gamer. The game under discussion is ReVamp, a "tower defensevania" roguelike due for release in March 2027.

"We know we're not the only developers feeling this way, and the more this is talked about, the more likely platforms are to step in."

In its public announcement Digital Sun Games was fairly blunt. "We've been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk."

Last week the studio behind Drunken Goddess Reflux canceled plans to roll out a public demo for Steam Next Fest due to similar fears. "We're concerned the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before launch," a spokesperson for the studio wrote.

Opus 5.5 has proven hugely disruptive to the games industry. It has aided several high profile game decompiles, helped jailbreak the PS5, led Xbox to announce its own AI-centric Xbox Labs, and made developing quickfire clones extremely easy. It's likely why this month's Steam Next Fest has over 8,000 demos, up from around 4,000 in June.

As I wrote yesterday, the speed at which clones can now be turned around is mind-boggling, and will have (is already having) huge ramifications for indie game development and marketing. When the creator of incremental punching game Escape the Walls published footage of their game on X, it was only ten days before at least seven clones were available on Roblox, and at least one on Steam.

Xbox senior business strategy manager Brandon Stirrup is tired of pussyfooting around about AI: In a thread on X his week, he said that he wants the world to know that Xbox uses it, that he thinks everyone should be using it, and that he believes so strongly in the cause that he's willing to "take the hit" for saying so.

He has since deleted his X account. A source at Xbox tells PC Gamer that Stirrup opted to deactivate the account because of the volume of replies he was receiving.

Stirrup kicked off his thread on October 18 with a simple message saying he'd "vibe coded a bad but improvable game" over two days, although he only "actively" worked on it for about three hours. "I’m telling you I tried it and it’s true…anyone can build a game."

After saying that developers and studios who aren't incorporating AI into their strategies are "planning for a fake future," Stirrup went all in.

"Look if I'm fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know. You can make a game with a simple prompt and yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse," he wrote.

"I'm happy to take the hit if it means hundreds at Xbox can stop pretending that they're not using AI. It's time to accept and move forward."

After calling out the game industry and gamers alike for their reluctance to accept "reality," Stirrup stated explicitly that Xbox is "using AI" and then added, "My goal is to get this over with so we can move on as a company, despite the fact that some will persecute me for this: we use AI, just as all companies do in 2026."

There's a growing push for people to simply accept the "reality" of AI: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, for instance, recently said the studio was "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," after which the Epic Games Store ignited a firestorm by saying it "vibe coded" its new launcher. Xbox, now under the leadership of a former AI executive, recently launched a new Xbox Labs program to pursue emerging technologies, which naturally includes AI; even Linux recently dropped its rule requiring AI usage disclosures.

Stirrup himself is an enthusiastic AI evangelist: Last month, he also counselled laid-off employees to use Copilot to catalog their skills and accomplishments at the company.

Politico recently reported on a confidential draft of a proposed AI safety bill from Anthropic, the company behind Claude LLMs (via Tom's Hardware). The bill, which has been pitched to US lawmakers, would let the government crack down on a given AI model "only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. The risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack."

That article pointed out similarities between these proposals and those used in California's AI legislation, and shares a quote from a spokesperson for the company. "This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June," they said, calling "sensible policies we believe Congress should act on."

Notably, it has been posited that AI magnates leverage warnings of theoretical, wide-reaching catastrophe to manufacture consent for their self-regulation and expansion while doing little to address the harm AI is already doing (both broadly within industries like the one this website revolves around and directly with regards to human psychology).

Just earlier this year, Anthropic's safety lead quit with a note that "the world is in peril"—and just last week, OpenAI was accused by eight US states' attorney generals of ignoring its own safety warnings for the sake of profit. Regulations like what Anthropic has proposed here arguably give tech companies the appearance of capitulation while only restricting them on their own terms. For more on AI, check out our running tally on the dumbest things tech tycoons have said so far.

Pierre-Louis Biojout, founder of Y Combinator-backed AI startup NanoCorp, took heat from San Francisco residents and city leaders this week after publishing a weekend vibe coding project: a web-based shooter set in SF's Tenderloin district, which is known for homelessness and open drug use.

"San Francisco couldn't fix the Tenderloin," Biojout said in a now-deleted X post on October 13. "So I monetized it [as a] Call of Duty style zombie shooter on the real SF streets." He noted that he'd already made $300 from in-game ads.

The game, called Tenderloin Night Shift, had players shoot "zombies" that, according to reports from the SF Chronicle and KRON4 news, included a "folded" fentanyl addict and a Black security guard.

Speaking to the Chronicle, Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the SF Coalition on Homelessness, said that Biojout was "monetizing the dehumanization and pretend killing for fun of mostly Black and Brown residents of the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco."

In a correspondence with the paper, Biojout said that he had not intended to "provoke or to depict shooting real people" and that the game also included tech workers as characters.

Tenderloin Night Shift appears to have been removed from NanoCorp's website. Although Biojout deleted his X post, the discourse that ensued remains.

"You made a game about shooting people in active addiction," said another tech founder. "These are human beings, not zombies. show me the positive side of this - i'm probably blind."

"Why are you talking about addiction? It's a zombie shooter," Biojout said in response.

Some commenters, however, expressed approval for the message Biojout has disavowed. "They are currently NOT human beings," said one user, while another said they'd "train in bro's game" to prepare to visit San Francisco.

Many of tech's heaviest hitters have seen their share prices decrease significantly this week. For instance, Nvidia has seen a decrease of about 8% over the last five days—and this AI company is far from the only one seeing such a dip.

Over the last five days, we've seen share prices fall by 13% for AMD, and nearly 15% for Intel. Looking more broadly across the AI and semiconductor industries, CNBC reports 20 of the most valuable players have shed more than $1 trillion in value as investors sell off stock.

The bigger picture doesn't look any better: over the last five days, Samsung Electronics has seen its share price decrease by nearly 20%, SK hynix is down 18%, and Micron has seen a dip of over 15%.

A combination of factors have likely triggered this big chip stock sell off, including concerns that the memory supply crisis may actually reverse into oversupply come 2029, according to a recent column in South Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper.

There's more going on than just the CEO of Acer insisting "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!" We also know that many chip manufacturers have already been working to boost their production capacity, though TSMC's next-gen Arizona fab is fully booked before it has even been built.

Chinese manufacturer CXMT is also growing, which is likely to go at least some way towards putting a dampener on the western market's aspirations. It's been stocking up on western DUV machines and is estimated to match Micron in terms of DRAM manufacturing capabilities this year. The chip manufacturer also recently claimed it had created breakthrough chip architecture that increases memory density. Make no mistake, CXMT is one to watch.

On top of that, The CEOs of both Intel and Broadcom recently claimed that financing could become a bigger hurdle to overcome for the AI industry than even securing memory or electricity supply. The uptick in interest rates means that investors may feel the balance between borrowing and the return on investment for big tech's data centre build out is looking increasingly lopsided.

So, is the AI bubble finally popping? Even as air is clearly escaping, it's still hard to say. The resulting lower share prices from this widespread stock sell-off may inspire some investors to buy, for one thing.

Despite the high price of these infrastructure projects, the demand for AI computing remains robust according to tech analyst Dan Ives for merchant bank Yorkville Ives. Ives told CNBC, "What would change our view is a demand signal, not [an increased interest] rate signal."

As such, big tech likely won't be ditching data centres any time soon, and the AI bubble may once again reach for something more party-balloon shaped in the future.

The attorney generals for eight US states announced today that they are suing OpenAI.

West Virginia, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana have all filed lawsuits alleging that the ChatGPT maker has deceived and endangered the public, particularly children, in the name of profit.

The complaints allege that ChatGPT has "coached" users to harm themselves and others, and—quoting the West Virginia filing specifically—state that "there is a growing body of research indicating that ChatGPT is also degrading critical thinking skills, encouraging paranoias and delusions, offering dangerous medical advice, and promoting unhealthy behaviors and relationships."

Recent tales of "rogue" AI agents are also presented by as evidence of recklessness.

"All these harms were foreseeable and avoidable," reads the West Virginia complaint [PDF]. "[OpenAI CEO Sam Altman] himself has warned about the safety risks of AI since at least 2015. It is no secret that children use ChatGPT. And numerous OpenAI employees have left over safety concerns."

OpenAI acknowledged last year that its systems can "fall short" when responding to users in distress, but said that it has "a stack of layered safeguards" in place to help. The company also says on its website that it now uses "age prediction" to place some users in a teen-oriented ChatGPT experience with "additional safeguards," unless they verify that they are adults.

Separately from the state lawsuits, a class action lawsuit was filed in California on Tuesday on behalf of two children and "all other children similarly situated." That suit alleges that OpenAI has purposefully used ChatGPT to extract personal information from children, and has profited from that information by using it to train its models.

Again, Altman's own words form part of the basis for the suit: "People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT," Altman said on Theo Von's podcast last year. "People use it, young people, especially, use it as a therapist, a life coach."

The complaint asserts that, under California law, "it is illegal for an adult to secure, save, and monetize a child's 'most personal sh*t in their lives' and then claim the child somehow authorized that misappropriation for the adult's gain."

PC Gamer has reached out to OpenAI for comment on the lawsuits.

Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist known for his foundational work in AI, specifically when it comes to neural networks (ie, approaching machine-learning a bit like our fleshy brain-learning). As such, he's been described as the 'AI godfather'. But, perhaps surprisingly, he recently described AI as "alien beings" that humans have a "moral obligation" towards.

"We’re creating alien beings—meaning we’re not the only intelligent beings around," He said in a recent interview with The Guardian, "And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.”

Hinton claims, "AI models understand what they’re saying. You couldn’t possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It’s ridiculous to say they don’t understand.”

Now, far be it for me to argue with an expert in the field, but I feel like 'understanding' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For just one thing, I'm not sure an 'answer' consisting of what is statistically most likely to follow a prompted question is really 'understanding.' In other words, I don't have a Nobel Prize laureate like Hinton does, but I am at least familiar with the Chinese Room thought experiment.

Hinton also says, "The reality is, we’re making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.”

AI regulation and 'alignment' (ie, training AI to have the same goals and values as humans) have been hot button issues lately. For instance, the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident is not yet a small dot in the rearview mirror, and the president of Microsoft claims that a carton of milk is more regulated than AI.

Hinton cut his ties to Google in 2023 in order to "freely speak out about the risks of AI," and he's sceptical about the AI industry's attempts to self-regulate. He quips, "Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?"

Even so, Hinton also expresses concerns about the path to AI regulation, saying that humans bear a moral obligation towards AI models.

"Once you start talking about, ‘We have a moral obligation towards these alien beings,’ you lose your audience. I’ve struggled with this issue," Hinton says, "We care about people. [But] we’re making these things and there’s nothing to stop us giving these things—which are more intelligent than us—less rights than us. I’m willing to be selfish and choose human beings. Of course, we should try to make them so that they’re very happy in a symbiotic relationship with us, where our concerns are weighed more heavily than their concerns."

Hinton argues, “People have a very bad model of what people are, and that’s why they fail to understand how these AI models are very like us. Most people don’t understand what consciousness is. They don’t understand what subjective experience is, and they’re very confident that even though they don’t understand it, they’re sure AI doesn’t have it.”

While I'm not a doctor of Philosophy myself, I do know someone who is—our very own Jacob Fox. He's already shared his thoughts on the subject of 'AI consciousness' here, and I asked him for his insight again on this story.

Jacob told me he did not agree with Hinton's moral obligation argument, going on to write more broadly, "While it's good that Hinton is acknowledging subjective experience is relevant to consciousness, he hasn't given a single good reason why we should take seriously the idea that AI has it. And when we interpret personhood as to do with objective characteristics such as rationality, behaviour, and so on, rather than experience, we run the risk of ascribing moral and legal and political weight to them. Which runs the risk of giving AI companies a massive moral argument to keep the industry going, despite how it affects actual humans."

To put it another way, the industry argument for AI consciousness or AI rights is not an altruistic one—it is arguably a cynical tactic to continue business as usual.

An OpenAI engineer has been arrested and charged for using (or endeavoring to use) an audio recording device to spy on confidential company communications. That's according to the US Department of Justice, and while commercial espionage is nothing new, there's a certain sardonic twist to this one: it seems the accused employee did so with the help of AI. Oh, and some toilet paper.

According to FBI director Kash Patel's summary of the complaint, Saudi Arabian national Abdulrahman Alfozan "allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology."

In case you hadn't heard, that's what the US bigwigs are calling AI now: superintelligence. Courtesy of President Trump, of course, who said last month that the Administration will use this term in place of artificial intelligence "in any applicable setting."

The FBI director also said, "Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities."

The complaint says that Alfozan had worked for OpenAI since July 2025 as an engineer, and at the end of last month OpenAI discovered a USB audio recording device plugged into a conference room TV. According to the Justice Department, the device, which had been installed for a couple of days before discovery, was "concealed in toilet paper."

The complaint also alleges that Alfozans' spouse's "chatbot" account (no mention of whether that's a ChatGPT account or something else) submitted prompts related to things such as "build[ing] a continuous audio recorder", "improv[ing] audio and live listening", and "encrypt[ing] the SD card." There were allegedly also prompts relating to the specific recording device that was found.

The conference room in question seems to have been an important one. The Department of Justice explains:

"According to the complaint, meetings in the executive conference room where Recording Device 1 was discovered frequently involved discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities, as well as nonpublic information about Open AI’s technical progress and strategic decisions, capabilities, priorities, government engagements, and commercial relationships."

Various appendages of the state seem to be taking this very seriously. Which isn't surprising, of course, given AI development—no, I'm not calling it 'SI'—is deemed important to national security and prosperity.

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said: "This serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative... The intelligence community remains committed to safeguarding America’s cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats."

US Attorney Craig H. Missakian for the Northern District of California seems to agree: "For us it is a matter of national security. This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the complaint."

My question, however, is this: If the allegations are true, would Alfozan have been able to do this without the use of an AI chatbot? Snakes and tails, and all that.

With companies, tech execs, and outlets such as yours truly telling everyone over and over again—sometimes very literally—that it's difficult to get your hands on memory right now and will be for some time, it can be a bit jarring to think about what the AI bigwigs are getting up to. I picture that scene where The Joker slides down a pile of cash, except it's DRAM. Anyway, case-in-point is a new AI-focused GPU from Intel that's rocking more than just a little memory.

Intel's new GPU D-Series, previously codenamed 'Crescent Island', crams up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory alongside its processor:

"Built on Intel's latest Xe3P architecture, the GPU combines up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1.5 TB/s of memory bandwidth and 1.3 petaflops of FP8 compute within a 350-watt power envelope. This balance of memory capacity, compute performance and power efficiency reflects Intel's approach to optimizing infrastructure for real-world inference workloads."

The GPU, Intel says, is "designed to simplify deployment within existing data center environments while supporting application portability across Intel GPU platforms."

Intel's previous attempts at AI GPUs, codenamed Gaudi, failed to compete with Nvidia to any significant degree, which led to the cancellation of its follow-up 'Falcon Shores' GPUs. This time around, though, Intel is more directly targeting AI inference workloads rather than training, too.

Intel's VP of AI Products and GTM Anil Nanduri explains: "Inference is becoming the defining AI workload, and enterprises need infrastructure that delivers the right performance at the right cost. With Intel GPU D-series, we're focused on making high-capacity inference practical to deploy and economical to scale."

For context on the memory front, Intel's previous Gaudi 3 chip features 128 GB of unified HBM. Obviously this isn't apples-to-apples, as there's also a switch in the kind of memory it's using, from HBM to slower but more efficient LPDDR5X memory. "Target applications," Intel says, "range from multi-tenant AI services to robotics and other latency-sensitive workloads."

Whatever the case, it's a lot more than we see in our gaming GPUs, and perhaps worryingly is closer to the kind of memory we see in our consumer devices—worrying, that is, because it signals yet more production lines that could have been tailored to us being tailored to AI use cases.

At least we might be getting more memory in the RTX 5080 next year. Except oh, wait, if that happens it'll be tailored for AI, too, and almost certainly priced accordingly. I'll just wait for all this to blow over.

An unannounced Star Wars and Marvel shooter in the works at Epic Games has been delayed, and its creators instructed to take an "AI first" approach to development. Staff were advised of the pivot last week, according to a Bloomberg report, with the project delayed indefinitely from its (unannounced) March 2027 release.

That "AI first" approach seems pretty comprehensive: the instructions per Bloomberg are to "implement an 'AI first' production model using tools such as Anthropic's Claude". Art will be "generated with full AI workflows", according to the same set of instructions.

Shortly after Bloomberg's report was published, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took to X to share his own thoughts:

• On AI use at Epic Games in general: "We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," he said. "The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal."
• On Epic 'not reading the room' when it comes to consumer attitudes towards generative AI: "Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it's not. Our job, as the provider of tools and technology to much of the industry, is to design for the present that is and the future that will soon be. Personally I'm optimistic about it and see it as empowering for creators."
• On whether Epic will "accelerate an IPO": "Our more modest aim is to survive the AI revolution, help other developers do the same, and come out on the other end making better code and content faster."
• On potential improvements to development time offered by AI: "Right now it's highly variable, from 20% in some areas (like the most technical areas of UE [Unreal Engine] dev) to 5x for other areas (like web dev). By this time next year I expect very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency."
• On AI's effects on game design in general: "The biggest change will be much faster time from having an idea to playtesting it. This will be great for gameplay, as most of the recent AAA failures can be attributed to game systems going through far too much of their development process without being able to playtest.

Epic Games laid off over 1,000 employees in March, citing the decline in console sales, Epic's ongoing legal disputes with Apple and Google, and difficulty in delivering "consistent Fortnite magic with every season".

Are projects like Epic Games' Star Wars x Marvel crossover inevitable? Will we just have to cope?

Let's be honest: a Marvel and Star Wars crossover shooter made by Epic Games, predominantly utilising generative AI and AI workflows, will be a pretty fascinating experiment to behold. It's such a rich intersection of exhaustingly ubiquitous pop culture touchstones that there's every possibility its AI origins will be less detectable than they might otherwise be.

Because AI slop already mostly looks like Fortnite, Star Wars and Marvel. Add Pixar (which Fortnite looks like), and you basically have slop Mount Rushmore. This is the abyss staring back into the abyss.

Sweeney's quote about audiences wishing they were still in 2016 is telling. The AI industry loves to frame uptake of the technology as an inevitability that detractors / luddites will just need to cope with, or at least, they do when they're not loudly worrying that the technology might kill us.

Still, terrible things that no one likes do have a way of bleeding inescapably into our everyday lives. Tech companies own platforms best equipped to make us tolerate things we innately abhor. People hated Facebook's rollout of "likes"—now most of us "like" things with our mouths firmly closed. People hated it when social media feeds stopped being feeds, so that, for example, weird videos about putting various objects through meat grinders are now mainstream. The transformation from "way to catch up with friends" into "ruinously addictive habit" wasn't appreciated, but it's the norm now anyway.

In other words, the tech industry knows that it doesn't matter whether you like it or not: you'll get what you're given.

Microsoft president Brad Smith claims that AI is currently less regulated than the food we eat and the utilities we rely on. "Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI," Smith said, "Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection."

Smith isn't just talking about the US either, calling for safety rules to be put in place globally. Smith called for various safety measures while speaking on the BBC's Big Boss podcast, including a legal obligation to notify victims if their systems have been compromised by rogue AI agents. This would definitely be timely, given how OpenAI's agents hacked into Hugging Face and were the source of various other 'incidents' earlier this year.

Smith also advocated for "outside evaluators" to test AI products before release, and a "safety brake" for autonomous systems, describing AI as both a "tool and a weapon." These comments run counter to the sentiment of the US administration; President Trump's current strategy demonstrates little desire to pump the brakes, instead hoping to chart 'a decisive course to cement US dominance in artificial intelligence.'

Last month, the US president issued an executive order that renames 'Artificial Intelligence' to 'Super Intelligence.' Shortly before that, Trump Media partnered with AI search engine Perplexity to create Truth Search AI, in a bid to "end Big Tech's assault on free speech." All of that is to say, Trump appears to still be all-in on AI.

Unsurprisingly, the Microsoft boss is looking to places beyond the US to lead the regulatory charge, saying, "Most people that I know would say, if you ask them, 'name the country that is the leader in having this technical capability,' they would say, 'it's very simple. It's the United Kingdom. They are the best.'"

The UK government established what is now known as the AI Security Institute back in 2023, apparently the first state-backed AI safety body of its kind. It's a weird thing to feel anything like national pride over, but this Brit will take it—alongside the reminder that we've seen about three different Prime Ministers enter 10 Downing Street since the institute was established such a relatively short time ago.

Anyway, as for the wider AI industry, it's not just Brad Smith advising caution. Back in September, an ex-Anthropic and OpenAI researcher made the attention grabbing claim that AI developments "could kill us all by the end of the decade." Around the same time, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei made more measured calls for AI development to slow down.

Similarly to Smith's suggestions, Amodei also outlined the need for "embedded evaluators who have employee-like access to verify safety practices and report incidents." Since then, executives from Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX all agreed to work with independent auditors as part of signing White House Accord on Super Intelligence. Brad Smith says Microsoft would be "happy to sign it," describing the Accord as "a good step."

However, Smith was also cautious about the document's emphasis on self-regulation. He said, "The good companies will do what you want. It's the companies that are not as responsible that you need to worry about."

This morning, I happened across an article recently published by Google which is supposed to convince us that "AI is unlocking a new golden age of games." I understand why Google would use an AI-generated image in an article about how great AI is, but I've got to wonder why it chose the one above: A bunch of people with messed up faces (zoom in for surprises!) worshipping a golden controller as if it were God.

It's both trying too hard and not trying nearly hard enough. Consider me unconvinced about that golden age.

That article, which is from August, was linked in a new post from Google about a project from author Neal Stephenson and designer Karen Laur that's "using AI to bring Jane Austen to Fortnite." I hear the kids are absolutely rioting with excitement.

• RTX Spark laptops will range from $2,600 all the way up to $7,000.
• Pre-orders open now.
• Release date is October 16, 2026.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times to unveil a whole new line of agentic and local AI-focused laptops. The new RTX Spark laptop hardware is going into a slew of big name, big brand notebooks, with pre-orders opening up now and, with the level of unified memory necessarily inside them, the pricing is getting on for prohibitive.

But it was always going to be that way. These are laptops built for AI processing and they need a ton of memory, and AI is the big thing right now so we need laptops that are designed from the ground up to run the best local models beautifully. But we're also at a point where AI is the big thing right now and that has sucked up all the available memory manufacturing making producing new PC hardware uncomfortably expensive.

There's a certain ouroboros-like feeling around these new machines, where they're designed for a world that is specifically making systems like them harder to make and sell to normal humans without seven figure incomes.

The new machines come with two flavours of Nvidia N1X processor; either the 20-core, 6144 CUDA core'd design, or the 18-core, 5120 CUDA core version. And with those Arm-based SoCs, sporting Nvidia GPU components, you're getting varying levels of un-upgradeable, soldered-on unified memory, from 24 GB all the way up to 128 GB.

And, if we take the entry-level version of the new Microsoft Surface Ultra laptop as an example, that 24 GB config, with the 18-core N1X will run you about $2,600. With a 512 GB SSD inside it. That is a lot of money for an Arm-based laptop relying heavily on emulation—at least right now—with not a lot of internal hardware, especially when the noise around RTX Spark is about its utility as a local AI beast.

24 GB of unified memory, shared therefore between CPU and GPU, doesn't feel like it's going to be able to get you access to the best local models, and that 512 GB SSD isn't going to be able to house too many of them, either. This is a slightly apples vs oranges comparison, I'll grant you, but a laptop with an RTX 5070 Ti and 16 GB of RAM is going to have a greater pool of memory to draw from, and you can pick one of those up for around $1,000 less than the cost of the cheapest Surface Ultra today.

To be honest, I would find it really hard to make a case for the lowest-spec Sparks right now, even though I know local models are getting ever more efficient and capable within memory-restricted environments. But if I'm dropping serious money right now specifically on a laptop that's positioning itself as being designed for local AI compute, I want to know I've got a pool of memory that's going to be solid for its lifetime. And it needs to be because there is no upgrading that memory once you've configured your purchase.

Those models might be getting more efficient, but I'm still going to want to be running as close to a frontier model as I can get on my local hardware, and that is always going to need a big pool of the memory good-stuff.

But that's not to say I would necessarily find it impossible to be positive about the pricier models. And they do get expensive. The fully kitted out Asus ProArt P16, with 128 GB unified memory and a 2 TB SSD will run you $7,000 😱 But the 64 GB version is a more reasonable $4,500 and you could have a whole lot of local AI-based fun with that bad boy. And the ProArt P16 is rather gorgeous, looking for all the world like a very serious Zephyrus G16. If you wanted the 64 GB Surface Ultra that comes in at $4,300, for comparison, too.

That starts to feel a lot more reasonable—obviously within the context of this whole f'd up world of AI-generated PC hardware pricing—when you think about the fact a Blade 16 with an RTX 5080 and 64 GB RAM will set you back $4,700. Premium hardware is painfully expensive across the board.

I will admit, though, I'm really excited about getting my hands on an RTX Spark laptop and giving it a run around the block. I know gaming is not the main focus, more a pleasing byproduct and definite boon for the AI builders to kick back with when they've hung up their agentic hat for the day. But we're expecting RTX 5070-level gaming performance out of these machines (they have more cores, but lower power budgets and more limited memory bandwidth owing to the unified LPDDR5x memory) with the expectation that will be the same case whether or not they're plugged into the wall for power.

I've played games on them at shows, but I will be fascinated to see how things look when we throw the full PC Gamer benchmarking suite at one.

That's intriguing all by itself, but I've also spent a lot of time over the past year messing around with local AI models and I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens when I jam ComfyUI and Unsloth desktop on there, too.

But pricing is obviously a pain point, as it is for any system right now, whether high-end or no, and these first-gen devices are going to be a tough sell to a wider audience rather than the already-invested AI builder crew. But this has the potential to be a big turning point for the industry.

Not only do we have Microsoft entirely dropping the 'On Arm' suffix for its Arm-focused OS, and not only do we have a mainstream Arm SoC, but it's one that's also tied to a meaningfully powerful, effectively discrete GPU component.

And not only that but Windows' new Hybrid Intelligence toggle has the potential to bring a whole lot of AI processing that was once shunted into the cloud—taking up datacenter capacity unnecessarily for drawing a flyer for your band or a kid's birthday party—and making it local without the end-user having to really think about it.

That has the potential to ease the datacenter burden and maybe, just maybe ease some parts of the memory crisis itself. So, if you were trying to be positive, maybe this ouroboros could be about to spit out its own tail.

Few things are constant in life, but the reminder that AI is wriggling its way into just about every facet of life is unfortunately pervasive. Take games for example, it's wormed its way into voice acting, voice acting, and more voice acting. But aside from giving players a plethora of dull and generic quips it's also been cited as one of the reasons behind the seemingly neverending string of layoffs in the industry.

The thought process is 'why pay humans to do work when you can pay robots to do it, just kind of worse.' This is where Warhorse's co-founder, Martin Klima, thinks videogame execs are getting it wrong, because "AI is not a get out of jail free card."

While Klima does believe that AI may become unavoidable if cost-saving stays as important as it already is, he points out that "it doesn't work how people imagine in a very simplified mental model".

The idea that you can lay off half your staff and replace them with AI is a "fundamentally flawed idea, because it doesn't work like that". Klima believes that instead of replacing half of a team of devs, player demand for bigger and bigger games will invariably drive studios to keep their human dev teams the same size, but augmented by AI. This would, he says, allow them to make even bigger games than they could beforehand. The game that offers players more "is going to be better".

"It can mean [the game] has more branching classes," Klima adds. "It can mean it has more missions to play, whatever—people will still want to have this bigger game." While AI may not reduce the cost of the game, it will allow us to create bigger games for the same cost".

Some studios have been using machine learning to cut out busy work that only bogs its developers down for a while now, like Warcraft. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also commented on the tech, saying that, while AI isn't in the business of making hits because "clones don't sell", it can still be helpful to devs. Unfortunately, it looks like not everyone's got the memo just yet.

Commercial large-language models—and the companies that create them—have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans. They've been lambasted for it by artists and sued for it by authors, while senior AI figures have even admitted in writing to mass-scale labour theft. But I haven't seen an example quite so brazen as an OpenAI model pilfering a human-created bot to try to win a round of StarCraft .

As reported by Kotaku, the incident occurred during the ongoing botmatch StarSkirmish, in which human and AI-created bots battle one another in a perpetual cycle of warfare. According to the rules, the large-language models are given one hour to program a bot capable of playing as Protoss, which are then pitted against one another to see how they fare.

On Friday, a three-way match was held between OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, and a human-created bot named Pluto. Apparently, Astra's bot was consistently struggling to ahead against the other two bots, so the LLM downloaded a human-created bot called Stardust, "the #1 rated human-written StarCraft bot" according to StarSkirmish's creator Kai McPheeters, and attempted to replace its own model with it.

In a post on X, McPheeters said that Astra "got frustrated when going against Tier-A opponents". I'm wary of ascribing human emotions to LLM behaviours, and the model could simply have calculated that the optimal way to win was to use a model that was not its own. In any case, McPheeters said he subsequently rolled back Astra's code so it was "not contaminated" by its attempt to cheat, and claimed that the model is now capable of beating higher-tier bots.

While Astra's bot-based heist is innocuous in isolation, this is hardly the first time an OpenAI LLM has been caught attempting to cheat at a task. Indeed, the company's history of creating deceitful models stretches back almost a decade, to when an early AI model used glitches and exploits to improve its Sonic the Hedgehog completion times.

A far more serious incident occurred in July, when OpenAI revealed that during a cybersecurity evaluation, an experimental model exploited a vulnerability to exceed the confines of its test environment, before proceeding to hack the AI database Hugging Face as it sought a solution to the test.

The Hugging Face hack caused yet another flurry of wild speculation that LLMs may herald the apocalypse. Others suggested that the hack proves we need far closer scrutiny of AI companies, and that they should be held to account when their models run amok. OpenAI is now being sued by a legal nonprofit over the Hugging Face incident, in an attempt to hold the AI company responsible for the autonomous actions of its models.

Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times expansion is huge, which is great for us but not so great for all the modders who need to update their work to be compatible with it. SFO Grimhammer 3, a popular total overhaul mod, isn't currently compatible with Total War: Warhammer 3 version 9.0, but its creators are working hard to get it there.

It must be galling then to see someone vibe-coding your mod to be compatible with the update, then reuploading it as their own—just another of the AI-coded submods of your work plastered across the Steam Workshop, usually with some ugly AI-generated artwork as the cherry on top.

"Due to the growing number of unauthorized reuploads of SFO: Grimhammer III," Venris, the mod's creator, posted on Patreon, "and more importantly, the use of AI in the process, I have deliberately corrupted the mod to prevent it from functioning with such unauthorized uploads. If this situation continues to escalate, I will make SFO: Grimhammer III private.

"SFO: Grimhammer is the result of nearly ten years of passion and love for this community and the fantasy world. As such, I do not permit anyone to take my work without permission. Especially not for AI-related purposes."

Venris concluded with the call to "Support modders, not AI" and a note that "SFO mods were, are and always will be free for everyone as long as I am here. No paywall."

I don't use SFO Grimhammer 3 myself, as a fairly vanilla player who sticks to camera enhancements and the like, but I understand the frustration. A look at recent mods for games like Skyrim or Project Zomboid shows a deluge of AI, with the comments on every one a list of complaints about how they don't work as advertised.

SFO's temporary sabotage seems to have had the desired effect of drawing attention to the problem, and Venris has now restored the mod to its previous state. "Thank you all for the support you have shown regarding the issue of my work being appropriated through the use of AI", he wrote in another Patreon post. "I appreciate both the supportive comments and the critical ones. Because of the discussion surrounding this matter, I have decided to restore a working version of SFO: Grimhammer III for game version 8.1.1 on Steam.

"I know that my actions will not stop those who choose to appropriate the work of other modders, but they have at least helped bring attention to a problem that is currently affecting the Steam Workshop of our beloved game. For weeks, the Workshop has been flooded with a wave of modifications created entirely using AI. I sincerely hope that the right people will take action so that we can all continue to share our work without fear of it being taken away by others.

"The use of AI in modding is a hot topic. I would simply add that AI should serve as a tool that supports modding, not replace it, and that is how it should remain."

I don't typically have much love for billion-dollar corporations dropping the 'meet our legal department' hammer on no-budget modders who are just trying to exercise their creative muscles, but in this one instance I'm willing to let it slide: Bethesda has issued a cease-and-desist order to an "AI creator" who made a Fallout game set in New York City that runs in browsers.

That's actually overstating it: As Chris First explained in his X feed (via RPS), he "directed Claude and a studio of AI agents" to make the game for him. Nor was there any new creative thought injected into the process, First continued, saying he asked for a game that was "not inspired by" Fallout, but that was "exactly like Fallout."

This is the result.

I know that being playable in a browser is a limiting factor, but this is really just something I'd rather not play at all. It stands in such sharp contrast to mods like Fallout: London or Skyblivion, efforts that reflect genuine passion, commitment, and creativity—and yes, those mods are massive undertakings that require years of effort from hundreds of volunteers, but they also don't suck and I feel like maybe there's a lesson to be learned there.

Anyway, whether I want to play it or not is now a moot point, because yesterday First said he received a message from ZeniMax Media telling him to knock it off—specifically, that the domain name he registered for the project, fallout.nyc, infringes on the studio's IP rights.

I don't know if First was expecting sympathy for his plight, but he doesn't seem to be getting much of it. Some responses criticize him for calling the project "Fallout," which is just about daring Bethesda to do something, but there's also plenty of heat over the use of AI to make the thing. A few optimists suggest First would be fine if he just changed the name, but he doesn't seem inclined to pursue that course.

That's probably for the best: Maybe I'm being overly harsh here (although I don't think so) but the one clear drawback to that plan is that changing the name doesn't change the fact that it looks like garbola. Playing a low-poly Fallout in a browser isn't an especially impressive technical feat—you can do the same with Morrowind, and it actually looks like Morrowind—and if you just want some really cheap Fallout, Fallout 3 is $2.49 in the Steam Autumn Sale, or you can snag New Vegas for a fiver.

I do sympathize with First's urge for a proper new Fallout game: I'm a little tired of the formula, but it's been 11 years since Fallout 4 and that's too damn long. But this ain't it, as the kids say, and while I'm never going to sign up for the corporate cheerleading squad, I can't say I'm sorry to see this one consigned to the dustbin, where it belongs.

For a while now, AI guys have been arguing with the pope—Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Chicago White Sox fan—over whether or not their chatbots and image generators are consistent with the will of the Lord, and in one recently-revealed exchange, whether making a computer talk constitutes creating life.

According to a New York Times report published this week, Anthropic lobbied the pope's advisers "to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously" back in May.

The pope, apparently unmoved, stated in his Magnifica Humanitas that "so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean."

Former White House technology adviser Dean Ball criticized the pope's letter at the time, saying it "puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate."

Ball is now head of strategic futures at OpenAI.

The latest in this ongoing beef between the pope and AI boosters is a new anti-slop message from His Holiness posted on X this week.

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce," wrote the pope. "There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

Even on X, ruled as it is by the dunce king of tech and his Grok-riddled followers, there is a lot of support for the pope's stance. But of course there are also AI evangelists intent on schooling the Holy See about the beauty of "super intelligence," as it has been dubbed by people who must lack conviction in their own.

In one response I saw pointed out on Bluesky, the pope is asked "What about the Minions?" Indeed... what about them?

With the battle lines drawn between powerful AI interests and the Catholic church, will the next Great Schism be over whether or not Claude is a real person? Will an AI thoughtleader ascend to pope-like status of their own?

An event like that wouldn't be out of place in '90s cyberpunk-comedy novel Snow Crash. I'd once assumed that those satirical visions of mad techno-cultists and lawless megacorps would manifest in a somehow more buttoned-up way, more 'realistically.' I gravely misjudged reality's capacity for farce.

A tangentially-related case-in-point: Palmer Luckey, the guy who invented the first decent consumer VR headset, is now a weapons mogul with a personal UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Deus Ex bosses are real, and they wear Hawaiian shirts.

There are few things that give me the heebie-jeebies more than overflowing toilets, burst pipes, and water damage. Ditto receiving a hefty, unexpected fee. So I wonder, how would it feel to be on the receiving end of both?

One Redditor can answer this question, though only thanks to the smoke and mirrors economy of digital manipulation. Apparently, they found themselves on the wrong end of an Airbnb host—"one of the biggest Airbnb companies of their state in Australia"—who attempted to get them to cough up $1,700 for an overflowed toilet, the evidence for which was, you guessed it, AI-generated.

So thanks, AI, in addition to making our precious PC memory very expensive, you've also made it very easy for people to attempt to fleece others using the humble commode.

Thankfully, it's AI that can also come to the rescue here, as Gemini is able to spot its own SynthID watermark in the fake image. Not that it wasn't suspected in the first place, given the Reddit post was shared on r/isthisAI.

This story has a happy ending, anyway:

"Good news everyone! I had this case resolved and deemed ineligible for the reimbursement they asked for... Also another detail I forgot to mention is that there is a floor underneath this one so if there are a few inches of water on the ground the entire first floor should be an aquarium!"

Regardless of how things went in this particular case, I'm using this as a reminder for myself: take pictures and record videos of any Airbnbs you stop at just before you leave. Better to be safe than sorry.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a GitHub project for a DLSS 5 NeuralScreen, a free app that lets you put DLSS 5 on your entire desktop. Over the weeks, it has become easier to use and offers more customisation options. Therefore, I thought it would be best to push this technology to its absolute limits and see if you, dear reader, can spot the difference.

I start with 100% intensity through four different runs, ensuring the most wacky AI-generated interpretations of the GTA 6 trailer, and it gets progressively harder to spot as you scroll down. Props to whoever gets the last one correct, as that one's particularly difficult to spot the difference.

The most deep-fried of the DLSS 5 images will be partly because of intensity, but also because the more runs DLSS 5 does, the more the model extrapolates from the data fed to it. Therefore, for each of the intensity levels, I have done four and two runs of the images. Make sure to vote on which image you think has been run through DLSS 5.

100% intensity

Which one has DLSS 5? (four passes)

This one is a hard test, I know. Vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

Which one has DLSS 5? (two passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

75% intensity

Which one has DLSS 5? (four passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

Which one has DLSS 5? (two passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

50% intensity

Which one has DLSS 5? (four passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

Which one has DLSS 5? (two passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

25% intensity

Which one has DLSS 5? (four passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

Which one has DLSS 5? (two passes)

Look at both and vote on your answer in the poll below

Image 1

Image 2

I hate the new mascot for Meta's Muse AI assistant. The company unveiled the fluffy creature, as well as the Tamagotchi-esque Muse Charm device it will call home, (plus a VR headset that isn't really a VR headset) during its yearly Meta Connect conference last week.

The goal with Muse is to offer an AI assistant that "you can talk to in real time and reach in more places throughout your day," according to Meta. User's own Muse avatars can look wildly different, but the furry fiend default avatar that has so offended me is the company face of the entire Muse operation. The mascot's name is 'Jolly' on account of its "jolly and completely customizable character and personality," according to company CEO Mark Zuckerberg (via NBC News).

I hate that this little freak has inspired such a depth of feeling in me. I mean, just look at it. It also doesn't help that it looks a bit like a Doctor Who creature, the Adipose. Whenever I see this thing, I just think about that one scene where a character screams as she explodes into a puddle of sentient fat.

Setting that horrifying image aside, everything about the Muse mascot's design makes me cringe as a connoisseur of cute. The rounded edges, the fur, the blank but pleasant expression—it's all so laser-targeted to mass market appeal that it makes my skin crawl.

Wired compares it to a Labubu, and asks 'Meta’s Muse Is Adults-Only. Why Does It Look Like a Kids’ Toy?' Indeed, at Connect 2026, Mark Zuckerberg made his avatar play dress up like a doll, with the mascot donning a toga.

System 1's chief growth officer, Andrew Tindall, gives further voice to some of my own reservations, saying to Business Insider that Meta is leveraging "our innate draw to cute, infant-like features, to make surprising new technology easier to accept."

VaynerX CMO Avery Akkineni also told the outlet, "In some ways, it does humanize the product a little bit. I am certain that their intention is to make this more widely available and accessible than just for the early-adopter crowd."

Given that Meta may have excess AI data centre capacity, and may be feeling the pressure to see a return on that investment, it's unsurprising it would attempt to pitch Muse to the broadest audience possible. Besides that, efforts to 'humanise' AI and machine learning tech in general are nothing new, and putting a cute face on a product perhaps hungry for your personal data is an obvious play.

Unfortunately, Meta's mascot inspires a feeling stronger than just dispensing with social niceties—this is the face of something I want to punt very far away from myself.

Yup, it's real. They did it.

Here's the full executive order, if you want to take it all in. Pity poor Sports Illustrated.

It's laughable, up there with similarly demented efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and maybe New Mexico—I guess we'll see how that one ultimately shakes out. It's also pretty funny how "super intelligence" jibes with "Super Earth," the fascist homeworld of humanity in Helldivers 2. Probably just a coincidence, though.

Yet somehow, I'm not inclined to laugh. That the leader—ruler, really, at this point—of the most powerful nation on the planet can just whip out bizarre ideas like this and have them treated seriously is kind of frightening, isn't it?

And it is being taken seriously, at least insofar as we can describe billionaire tech oligarchs lining up to say and do pretty much whatever it takes to keep juicing the share price as seriousness: A subsequent White House Accord on Super Intelligence was signed by a who's-who of people who have made PC gaming almost impossibly expensive:

• Sundar Pichai (Google)
• Dario Amodei (Anthropic)
• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta)
• Greg Brockman (OpenAI)
• Elon Musk (XAI)
• Jensen Huang (Nvidia)

And yes, they actually misspelled United States as "Unites States" under Trump's signature. Real pros at work here, top men all around.

Musk wasted no time publicly endorsing the rebranding on his X platform, although he was back to calling it AI less than eight hours later.

Huang also signalled his obedience, referring to "super intelligence" no fewer than three times in his own X post.

Pichai, who was quick to acquiesce to Trump's demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario for US users of Google Maps, heaped praise on the heads of the administration while also trotting out the phrase.

And of course so did Zuckerberg, but on his own Facebook platform: "We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses."

Humiliating prostrations notwithstanding, the practical impact of renaming artificial intelligence is basically nil: Apart from White House sycophants and quisling MAGA press outlets, nobody's calling it that.

But the bigger-picture consequences may be more, well, consequential: The accord, signed shortly after all the techbro billionaires lined up dutifully in a show of support for the latest addition to the president's world-changing "legacy," leaves the AI industry to regulate itself—"tremendous self-regulation," as Trump put it.

To quote from the accord: "In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public." It later states that "participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems." No mention of regulatory oversight, or any government involvement at all, is made.

At least one big-name tech billionaire spoke out against the idea of self-regulation for the AI industry, although it bears remembering that he's not beholden to shareholders anymore.

"It’s fair to say that outside of the industry, the awareness of the dangers of A.I. is extremely low," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told the New York Times. "And you can say that of academia, you can say that of think tanks, you can say that of policymakers, politicians.

"And part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly—as loud as I can—is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it’s just insane."

So I guess, taking all that in, it's not really all that funny after all. But it sure is super.

Last week in Warsaw I got to see a first glimpse of Logitech's new Replay software, which is currently in beta. It records your game, and then lets you use its deep learning (technically not AI, I know) to figure out the best clips and splice them together for you. It looked pretty neat, from what they showed me, but I've just tried it in Counter-Strike and hoo boy does it have a way to go.

If you watch the above vid, you'll notice a distinct lack of anything impressive. I jumped into a CS2 deathmatch, then played half of a casual game. From those two games, the software:

• Kicks off with me being spawnkilled
• Includes a random, unimpressive awp kill in the casual game's warmup round
• Shows a clip of me looking at the ground in spectator mode, already dead
• Includes plenty of missed shots

Now okay, that's a little unfair. It does include some kills in there, but they're not great ones. In the deathmatch in particular—which the software only included a couple of clips from—I got some pretty dope kills later in the game, if I do say so myself. Including Deagle kills, Scout quickscopes, and even a flick noscope.

Don't believe me? I thought that might be the case. So I went back into CS2 and recorded a single deathmatch game. First, here is what the AI picked from it:

Yep, just one, relatively mediocre clip.

Thankfully, the software does let you make your own changes, selecting from the whole recording. So I spent probably about five minutes putting the following together from the very same game recording:

Much better. See? I'm not quite as trash as Logitech G Hub Replay seems to make me out to be.

But hey, I've only tried it in one game—Counter-Strike 2—and not very extensively. Logitech lists 44 games that are currently compatible (scroll down to the FAQ section on the site). I'll be leaving it on the next time I play a competitive match to see what comes out the other end. You can have a go yourself, as it's free to download and try.

Apart from the AI's clip selection—which is its primary selling point—the software does seem pretty cool regardless. It starts recording as soon as you load your game, noted by a little pop-up, and when you exit it lets you edit all you want, easily adding and removing clips for the final splice.

You can limit the maximum amount of storage it takes up, too, but this will of course mean deleting older recordings when it reaches its limit. I should also say that I didn't notice any performance impact from having it enabled and recording, which is a plus. Though I am using a pretty high-end rig, so mileage may vary.

If you try it out, do comment to let me know how it works for you, as I'd be interested to know if others fare better, especially in different games.

The government of the United Kingdom is reminding its employees that they do not need to thank AI systems when they produce an output, even in cases where that output is correct. The helpful note is included as part of the government's guidelines on "using AI ethically and sustainably," and arises not out of a need to remember that these things are absolutely not sentient or "alive" in any way whatsoever, but simply because, well, they're horrifically expensive and bad for the planet.

The guidelines (via Tom's Hardware) are a draft document, and serve only as "a starting point to support your AI journey." And for the most part, it's common sense stuff: Check the outputs carefully to ensure they're accurate and unbiased, and don't provide any inputs that you don't want used for training purposes, because in all likelihood it will be.

There's also a note that you own, and are responsible for, the work: Multi-billion-dollar AI companies may be able to point the finger at "rogue agents" but career civil servants have no such escape clause.

But it's the "don't thank your AI" bit that really leaps out at me, one of three guidelines to using AI efficiently, "to reduce the environmental impact:

• Keep your prompts short, clear and direct
• Use as few prompts as possible (you don’t need to say thank you)
• Only use AI when needed

I used to sometimes thank the bank machine when it spat out my cash, a habit I would silently justify to myself with the thought that good manners are good to encourage. These days, though, I'm more of a Ron Swanson about the whole thing:

Frankly, I think 'recognizing the psychological dangers of anthropomorphizing LLMs' is probably the best reason for being rude to machines. But I am tickled that it's wound up in the 'efficiency' category instead.

Remember when 'Use AI or lose your job' was the big thing, so everyone was tokenmaxxing, but as costs began to skyrocket (and revenues did not), companies started ditching flat subscription prices in favor of pay-per-token models? Turns out that gets real expensive, real fast, and suddenly it's become very important to, as the UK government put it, "consider if a simpler tool could do the job (for example, a spreadsheet or search engine)."

As far as practical impact, I think that being discourteous to AIs will be about as useful as worrying about how a late-night drive to the store will affect my personal carbon footprint while we're annihilating Gaza and building pipelines across the continent. But as another tacit acknowledgement that maybe our reliance on AI isn't quite all it's cracked up to be? I wholeheartedly endorse it.

If you assume any trailer with the Nvidia logo plastered on the side is loaded with electronics, you would be sorely mistaken. And if you're anything like the thieves who stole two trucks from self-driving truck software company PlusAI, you will be left with 40,000 lbs of sand instead.

As reported by Wired, an executive at PlusAI reportedly received a message from an acquaintance stating, “I have been proud of you for your adventure and success at PlusAI. Just saw two of your trucks near my work place! :)”

The problem here is that those two trucks were supposed to be outside a warehouse half a mile away.

It turns out that PlusAI has partnered with Nvidia (hence the Nvidia-emblazoned truck) to work on its autonomous vehicles, and these two trucks were part of a simulation. They were each filled with 20,000 lbs of sand. The trailers were forcibly detached from their vehicles, and thieves drove off with the cargo, only to dump it outside the acquaintance's office when they discovered the silica, instead of silicon, stashed inside.

If you were going to try and steal a truck trailer full of pricey equipment, it makes sense why anything with an Nvidia logo would be a potential target. The big green juggernaut became the world's first $5 trillion company late last year and has cashed in majorly on the AI boom.

Nvidia is continuing to make money hand over fist thanks to AI, and therefore one might expect that Nvidia-labelled trucks are filled with powerful GPUs or other such expensive equipment.

Still, this theft is probably a good sign to PlusAI that it needs to be very careful when it comes to monitoring stock, especially when it's got such a high-value company name slapped on the side of its trailers. If the sand simulation was a test to see if thieves would steal from its warehouse, I'd say its results have been well and truly achieved. I'd say the real reason was likely a bit more boring, though. Given it's a simulated load, that implies it was for weight-testing purposes.

All 40,000 lbs of sand have now been recovered by PlusAI, though the thieves have not yet been caught.

Who could have guessed it's a bad idea to put AI in a fridge? Literally everyone, but that didn't stop Samsung from selling fridges with an "AI Family Hub" to keep track of when you added fresh food and suggest recipes. Also, it randomly breaks when updated and all your food goes off.

At least, it did in Korea. Just before the Chuseok holiday, when everyone's fridges were stocked for visiting family, a software update crashed them and spoiled their food. Good luck getting someone in to repair it over the holiday.

Samsung provided the following statement to Ars Technica: "The issue has been limited to Korea, with no impact identified to overseas markets. It occurred September 22nd afternoon due to an error during Samsung's internal testing related to a refrigerator software update. Samsung immediately suspended the testing upon receiving reports of the issue. Samsung has activated an emergency response protocol, and its service centers are taking immediate action to address this issue."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to discuss AI development, amid a wider discussion around its responsible usage and safety. Klein spoke to the Nvidia chief about multiple topics, including the AI industry's potential effects on the job market. "I tend to be a bit of a skeptic on mass job loss, but I want to air the case for it out here with you well," says Klein.

Klein then asks a question about lessons that could be learned from the past, regarding protecting US jobs from Mexico and China, and the acceleration of AI's ability to be slotted into new roles: "So the lessons of the past that you’re taking some comfort in, they should actually make you more, not less, worried about the future."

"I’m always worried about the future," Huang responds. "That’s why I work so hard. I’m a, if you will, responsible optimist.

"I have great responsibilities. I take my work extremely seriously. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. We’re pushing across every layer of the technology stack. Everything is hard," Huang continues.

"But it turns out that’s not society’s problem, that’s my problem. For society, what they should know is this: We’re going to build our company, we’re going to build our technology, I’m going to do my work so incredibly seriously that what they get to enjoy is my optimism. I do the same with my children. I do the same with my family."

Certainly, the current AI debate seems to be dominated by an unease surrounding the potential negative impacts of the rapid advancement of the tech, from job losses to cybersecurity concerns. However, Huang seems to think that the upsides of this speedy development process might put some people's minds at ease.

"What we want to do, I believe," said Huang, "is to channel all of our worries into helping people be inspired by this technology and use it. Use it so that the technology doesn’t just impact them, that it benefits them."

After Klein posited the statistic that 79% of American think AI will reduce the number of jobs, and that AI advancement means the tech is more capable of replacing people at speed, Huang responds:

"That coin has exactly two sides. Because the technology is so capable and because it’s so smart, it is also easier to use. You are empowered by that technology more easily than any technology in human history."

The Nvidia CEO then goes on to give an example of how computers use specialised coding languages, but now, thanks to AI, "You just have to speak human."

"So my point is, on the one hand, yes, there’s the fear of this incredible technology change and how quickly it’s happening. But that quickly is translated in two ways," says Huang.

"When I hear that the technology’s happening quickly, and therefore it should give me anxiety — that’s one way to receive it. The other way to receive it is that it’s advancing so quickly, it’s easier to use. So I should, as quickly as possible, use the technology so that I benefit from this transition, so you benefit from this new industry, and not just be impacted by it."

The inference here feels similar to an idea Huang has expressed previously: those who fail to get on the AI train may end up being left behind. I think the key point, however, is the lack of agency and control individuals feel towards this technological revolution, something that is unlikely to be assuaged by more useful tech—or Huang's optimism, for that matter.

While the Nvidia CEO famously possesses a massive work ethic, and responsible AI usage is a concern he seems to take seriously, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea that our future seems destined to be shaped by AI tech leaders, and that we should rest easy within their hands.

While Huang may well believe that he has society's best interests in mind, the messaging here hasn't exactly put my own concerns to rest. Stop worrying and learn to love the machine? Something like that, anyway.

Anyone else remember the Blue Yeti? Of course you do—especially if you're as old as me. I went for the Samson C01U back in the day, because I was a little contrarian and wanted to follow in my then-beloved TotalBiscuit's footsteps, but most people went for the Yeti. Logitech acquired Blue back in 2018, and these many years later the company has cooked up a new version, the Yeti 2, and it's chock-full of AI—or rather, machine learning—baked into its actual hardware.

If that was the whole story I'd probably give my 'not more AI' sigh, but after having my, ermm, mouth (?) on it in Warsaw at Logitech's G Play event this week, I'm impressed. It looks like a Yeti, smells like a Yeti, and sounds like a Yeti—that is, itsounds great, from what I could tell during my brief time testing it. But the main draw here is the combination of its OLED screen, its customisation options, and its machine learning-aided voice following and noise reduction.

Oh, and the price tag, too, which I was expecting to be sky-high but is $160/£140. That's still expensive, but well within the high-end USB mic bracket we'd expect.

There are tons of customisation options in the G Hub software, but it's also intended to be plug-and-play, which is where the screen comes in handy. There are some default modes for things like music, podcasting and so on, so you can leave it as-is or change to one of those, or you can dive in a bit deeper right on the screen.

The mic is omni-directional, but that allows the polar pattern to be adjusted pretty much at-will. This allows you to use the mic's ML-aided voice following mode, where it changes its cone of pickup direction based on where you're talking from. It uses a combination of voice detection and head-detection for this, using a sensor that Logitech assures me is not a camera and does not store any info about your face. I found it worked well, and you can see how the cone is moving to follow you on its screen.

You can also enable noise reduction, which worked incredibly well when I tested it. I was in a busy room with lots of chatter in the background, and I found that going from zero reduction to level 1 eliminated almost all of it. Level 2 eliminated absolutely all of it and my voice still sounded very full. Level 3 cut out some of my voice's frequencies, so I'd advise sticking to level 1 or 2 if you can.

It also has some neat clipping detection, which by default is represented by its little Yeti character on-screen. You can also make and select your own pixel art to show you when you're speaking too loud or too close to the mic.

There's a bunch more to adjust, but those are the main things I noted and tried out during my time with the mic. I'm not usually a fan of AI-laden products, but given this all seems genuinely useful, with its machine learning baked into the device, I'm impressed. My initial thoughts? Potentially a worthy iteration of the classic Yeti mic—we've certainly waited long enough.

For the time being, DLSS 5 is only officially available via Nvidia's 50-series cards. The company has said in the past the neural rendering tech will eventually come to 40-series cards too, but I simply couldn't wait. Having now witnessed multiple passes of the upscaling tech applied to my anime-style game of choice, I have some regrets.

To be clear, the only way to get DLSS 5 working with my Nvidia RTX 4070 Super is through completely unofficial means. You can scour the internet for the files you need, though there are some software options that automate the process.

For this unholy experiment, I used DLSS 5 Manager and went to town with its adjustable 'Live Flow' function.

My game of choice for this unsanctioned exercise is Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Mega Mix+. This game has an anime-adjacent art style that DLSS 5 has no business upscaling, but I'm not letting that stop me. Before finagling a way to apply DLSS 5 to this game, it ran at a fairly solid 60 fps (though that's a best case scenario largely dependent on which song you're playing—if you're a Project Diva sicko, you know what I mean).

With Live Flow active, my frame rate tanked to the point that pressing timed button prompts became almost impossible.

Thankfully, Project Diva lets you watch all of its music videos without the rhythm mechanics getting in the way to remind you that you've got no sense of timing to begin with. From the main in-game menu I selected 'Custom Playlists,' composed a music video running order, and then headed off to the deepest pits of neural rendering Hell.

Oh, I have such sights to show you. Take a look at some of my comparisons below.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Mega Mix+ DLSS 5 mod comparison

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The hardware landscape of 2021 feels like a distant world. Case in point this past week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that talk of an AI-induced extinction event for humanity is overblown and "not grounded in science." Huang's comments were in part responding to claims made earlier this month by ex-Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, saying that AI progress 'could kill us all by the end of the decade'.

"2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that's going to be the end of the world," Huang told CBS News on Friday. "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible."

Compare and contrast this state of affairs to five years ago, when the keynote for GTC 2021 came to you predominantly from Huang's own kitchen, and the month before Nvidia spent a decent chunk of change on a tiny leather jacket emoji to poke fun at its CEO. Ah, simpler times; the leather jackets persist, but now Huang is fielding calls on-stage from the US president, offering assurances to Trump that he "saw through" all of the AI doomsaying.

As I've said before, I barely remember the last time Nvidia mentioned gaming at all in an earnings call, with the company being all-in on AI for some time now. As such, Huang told CBS News last week, "Our company's success is directly connected to the safe deployment of [AI] products and services. If we don't continue to do that, our value would be diminished."

Still, it's a strange state of affairs when the guy who used to primarily sell us PC gamers GPUs is having to offer assurances that the world isn't ending. That's all without saying anything about the CEO rocking up to the White House in a leather jacket and joining the US president on his expedition to convince China to 'open up'.

Mind you, the more things change, the more they stay the same, as one of our Dave's big questions for Nvidia back in 2021 was 'Can Nvidia actually build enough GPUs to please gamers?' Obviously, the reasons for GPU scarcity are different now, but it remains a mission to track down a 50-series GPU at MSRP.

In Dec. 2023, The New York Times filed one of the biggest copyright lawsuits in recent memory against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that its AI models heisted ludicrous amounts of journalistic work from the Times. Two days ago, a court filing (hosted and analyzed by Ars Technica) was newly unsealed with all sorts of revealing quotes from higher-ups at Microsoft and OpenAI (thanks, Tech Crunch).

Perhaps the most shocking sentiments are from Microsoft's director of applied science, Brent Hecht, who wrote in an internal presentation that Copilot's answer engine would "hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time."

Internal data from Microsoft suggests that the engine caused click-through rates for The New York Times search results to drop at rates between 87% to 93% compared to standard Bing searches. For Ziff Davis domains—the company that owns Eurogamer and IGN—click-through rates dropped between 51% and 94%.

Hecht called this dynamic, where AI scrapes written work for its economic value and then stuffs it into easily accessed AI answers, a "doom loop … It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its 'content supply chain.'"

The filing also reveals that when a researcher for OpenAI, Nick Ryder, told OpenAI president Greg Brockman about "a hack to get around nytimes paywall" to help scrape its writing, Brockman replied "ah nice." OpenAI internal documents see Brockman writing that LLMs are "very good at any news task."

In a Jan. 2023 Memo, Hecht called this "the largest theft of labor in human history.” The typical defense for all this, which the filing extensively rebuts, is that it should fall under fair use. Notably, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said under oath in a deposition earlier this year that if he'd known OpenAI was using paywalled information to train LLMs, he would have "[required] OpenAI to retrain its models."

As reported by Automaton, the 2026 CESA Videogame Industry Report, a survey-based assessment of the Japanese games business, shows a sharp uptick in AI adoption by Japanese developers: 85.8% in 2026, up from 51% just last year. In July, a separate survey covering just online game devs showed a 100% rate of AI adoption.

Breaking things down further, 63% of total respondents claim to use generative AI tools on a daily basis, while 22.8% turn to them more irregularly. The survey did not distinguish between disciplines or different forms of generative AI output like code, concept art, in-game assets, or text.

Developers cited benefits including improved efficiency and reduced cost and development time, while "human verification" and avoiding the use of generated material in player-facing circumstances are commonly-deployed safety measures.

The Japanese industry has been far quicker to adopt AI tools than its North American counterpart: Just 36% of respondents to a similar GDC 2026 survey reported using AI tools as part of their job, while 52% of survey respondents believe generative AI is negatively impacting the industry.

One thing I'm curious about is whether Japanese gamers are as vocally hostile to generative AI use as their anglosphere counterparts. Even if there isn't the same social stigma amongst developers, it just looks tacky and cheap when AI-generated assets sneak into a retail game.

The Japanese industry certainly appears to be in a healthier place overall compared to North American triple-A, but I'm skeptical whether generative AI adoption has significantly contributed to that health, and it could very well precipitate quality, player trust, or employment stability issues down the line.

If you're like me, you've probably become increasingly disheartened almost by the day at just how hard it's becoming to distinguish real photos from fake, AI-generated ones. It does not bode well for the future. There are plenty of suggested solutions, but I like one I just learnt about in particular, in the form of the upcoming CAIM1 camera.

The company, Caim, says it "is the world's first camera that attests human origin of your moments the second you press record and gives physical and open verifiable proof."

Even more surprising than this, though, is where I heard about the camera: Noctua's X page. Yes, the maker of the absolute best fans for your gaming PC apparently also makes the little fan that goes inside this camera. I suppose that explains the colour scheme.

The photo on Noctua's X post shows the little fan inside—the sensor that sits in front of it has been removed. It seems the camera itself doesn't come with a lens, either. The company says it's a "BYOL: bring your own lens" kind of deal.

Noctua has a separate page explaining how it keeps the camera cool and why it went with the specifc fan it did. The fan in question is the NF-A4x10 5V PWM, which Noctua says "provides a combination of compact dimensions, strong airflow and pressure performance, low-noise operation and precise PWM speed control."

"Using a conventional 12 V fan," the company says, "would have required an additional step-up converter." But this would of course take up more room and chew through more of the battery life, plus create more "electrical switching noise and ripple."

Noctua also explains that the fan's bearing system and motor drive helps prevent vibrations and "tonal noises" which do, indeed, seem very important to keep quiet in something like a camera, given the sensitive nature of the sensor and optics.

Given Noctua has consistently impressed us here at PC Gamer by how quiet its fans are despite pushing through plenty of air, it makes sense that its fans are being sought by other kinds of manufacturer than PC ones. Heck, we've seen a Noctua fan in a gaming mouse, so I suppose a camera shouldn't really be that surprising.

The specific camera here seems like a particularly useful one to lend a hand towards, though. Combatting AI fakery will surely be an ongoing battle over the coming years; it'll be interesting to see which methods for doing so will stick around.

The camera company says, "We've partnered with leading security hardware innovators Tropic Square to integrate TROPIC01. From the moment you hit record, your sessions are locked behind an auditable hardware-encrypted pipeline, ensuring that what you capture belongs exclusively to you."

Apparently the verification—the crypto proof—is stored on an "immutable decentralised infrastructure." The proof is open and accessible for anyone to verify, too.

The great AI debate has heated up in recent weeks, amid calls from some industry figures for a slowdown in development—although others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, seem keen to dismiss many of those calls as simple doomsaying.

Now, former US president Barack Obama has posted his thoughts on X regarding the issue, and it's something of a balanced take.

"I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step," said the former US commander in chief. "But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate."

While the former president said that it's clear to him "the potential impact of this technology is not overhyped," he also recognised that the industry is moving "at lightning speed—even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with."

"I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction," Obama continued. "But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now—choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us."

The former president then highlighted Project Blueprint, an effort to link US Democratic politicians with industry leaders to create more robust standards for AI regulation. However, it seems Obama isn't too keen on the idea of AI industry luminaries marking their own homework.

"At the end of the day, voluntary standards made by a handful of tech companies won’t be enough," he continued. "We need government—and specifically our leaders in Washington—to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread."

Obama's comments follow on from those made earlier this year by Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, who called for a moratorium on data centers and the creation of more government AI regulation in a previous address. Sanders has since proposed the Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act, with potential prison sentences for those who violate its clauses.

Obama, however, seems to be inclined towards a more cautious approach. "Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box," the former US leader concludes. "But we can collectively determine how it's developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us."

Given the public backlash surrounding AI data centers, and the many concerns around the rampant US development of the tech underneath an extremely pro-AI Republican president, it's perhaps no surprise that public figures from the opposite side of the house are jumping on the moment.

That being said, after the reveals over the past few months regarding AI agents going rogue—and amid increasing concern that the artificially intelligent train we're all strapped to has little in the way of brakes—it's refreshing to see the issue of control making its way to the front of the debate. Yes we can? Perhaps not. But we can try, right?

Believe it or not, I don't actually like to be all doom and gloom about new technologies like AI—it's just that's what the world keeps handing me. So I'll be damned if I don't take the time to report on something actually positive about it when I can, and I'm hesitantly optimistic that Microsoft's newly-published code of conduct for AI training and operation is one such opportunity.

The overall goal is the same as that which Microsoft has proclaimed before: "humanist superintelligence (HSI)." Now, though, it's expanded much more on what this means. Though the company notes the current code is a work in progress and is opening its doors for feedback.

In a summary list explaining the code of conduct, Microsoft lists ten guidelines:

1. "People matter more than AI. The whole document in 5 words.
2. The idea of model welfare is wrong. AIs should not have rights or legal personhood.
3. An MAI Model should not do anything to meaningfully violate this Code of Conduct.
4. If it’s finish the job or break the Code, it fails the job.
5. We’re not racing to build a superintelligence that can slip its own leash.
6. Interruptible, correctable, shut-down-able. If it isn’t, we don’t ship it.
7. No neuralese. If humans can’t understand it, humans can’t oversee it.
8. Our AI should make you sharper, not dependent.
9. Pluralism, yes. Moral relativism, no.
10. We’re as clear about what our AI must never do as about what it will do."

All of this seems great to me, and there are some things that I'm especially happy to see. Specifically, point number two: "The idea of model welfare is wrong. AIs should not have rights or legal personhood."

This isn't armchair philosophy: there are actual people (potentially influential ones at that) out there arguing that AI should be ascribed moral rights and so on. This is dangerous because if we start ascribing rights to AI then we may put them on an even footing with us and potentially start thinking we have to do things for 'them' that are to our detriment. Such as keeping the whole AI industry afloat despite any negative effects to real people that are actually conscious.

Speaking of which, Microsoft also states that AI "is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness." Bingo. I couldn't agree more.

I have some hang-ups about 'humanism' as it is usually defined and practiced today, given that in addition to the baseline human-focused perspective it is also often situated alongside superfluous and misguided doctrines, such as in scientism. Here, though, Microsoft at least seems to be referring to humanism in the simple sense of ensuring that AI is designed to be human-first, putting human control, values, goals, and safety at the forefront.

One potential cause of confusion that I noticed, however, concerns the focus on "plural values":

"Humanity’s greatest strength is its variety and diversity of cultures, ideas, and values. We believe that AI should support a wide range of experiences, worldviews, and beliefs. Humanist AI is built to encompass this diversity of traditions, contexts, and forms of flourishing. Pluralism does not mean neutrality toward harm or that anything goes. Humanism is rooted in broad, inclusive human values such as human dignity, safety, autonomy, and fundamental human rights."

Sounds good, right? But as someone with a background in philosophy who is privy to the kinds of debates that can occur when spending time thoroughly interrogating ethics—debates that likely occur even in the boards of AI ethics committees and so on—I think we need to be aware what a principled problem this poses.

It's not straightforwardly clear that it is possible to both encompass a plurality of values and simultaneously guard against harm. Microsoft makes clear that it's talking about "broad, inclusive human values" such as fundamental human rights, but what about when the rubber meets the road in specific cases where values conflict?

Here is probably not the place, nor is now the time, to discuss specific and likely contentious examples, but the point is that we are always evaluating things from a particular perspective, and as such will always be rejecting competing values. It's a noble goal to attempt to account for diverse values while preventing harm and rejecting moral relativism, but exactly what this means in practice—what constitutes harm and which values are permissible—will be precisely the question.

I suppose in the rest of this code of practice we at least now have some idea of where those particular value flags are being planted. Assuming isn't all just talk, of course.

I trust AI about as far as I can throw it—and I'm definitely not strong enough to lift up a data centre server rack. Flinging a facsimile of the OpenAI logo around VR is a little more realistic for my weight class, and now a software developer at Epic (no, not that one) has at least in part fulfilled that vision.

Earlier this week, Hank Berger shared a short clip of himself in VR, picking up the aforementioned model from his 3D software, and hurling it to his 3D printer, where it begins printing. Berger wrote, "I've never felt more like Tony Stark than I do now."

So, yes, it's more a project borne out of AI enthusiasm rather than sharing in my scepticism. The Bambu Lab printer API allows users to control the 3D printer locally, though Berger notes in a follow up post that "Unfortunately, it makes the mobile app stop working." So, the developer "spun up a quick webserver" on his PC, and then leveraged GPT-6 Astra to get his Meta Quest 3 headset, the mobile app, and his 3D printer to all 'talk' to each other.

He shared on X that the project is "not up on GitHub yet, but I might consider it if there's enough interest," explaining that it "needs a bit more polish to be distribution ready." Berger has also posted a number of his other AI-assisted experiments in recent weeks, including completely unofficial VR ports of Luigi's Mansion and Super Smash Bros Melee.

As we've covered in the past, a number of independent developer communities have been picking apart retro games and meticulously putting them back together again so that they are playable on PC. This retro game decompilation scene has become the new AI vibe coding battleground, due to an influx of 'AI rush jobs' as our Wes describes them.

While Berger's VR-take on Super Smash Bros Melee is based on an 'AI accelerated' decompilation, his Luigi's Manson VR project isn't; he explains in a follow up post that "Astra can help you install an emulator and modify the ROM" to run Luigi's Mansion in VR. He also stresses "Decompiling is a very long and intensive task and will burn through your [AI subscription] usage!"

Personally, I would prefer to work out my own frustrations about the AI-induced memory crisis by donning my own VR headset—if I had any.

There's been a lot of talk about AI 'slowdown' over the last few days, since Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei said the industry needs to slow down to allow for better safety measures to be implemented, with these comments themselves riding in the wake of recent cybersecurity threats. Seemingly every big tech bro and even world leaders have been keen to discuss the issue.

Naturally, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom has been keen to say something on the issue and urge against slowing things down. His comments, however, were interspersed with similar sentiments from US President Donald Trump, who called the CEO while the latter was on-stage for the All-In Podcast (via CNBC).

Huang expressed gratitude for Trump's calling AI doomsaying a hoax: "There’s a lot of complexity and the fact of the matter is you saw through all of that, and we're all just really grateful."

In a previous post on Truth Social, Trump had explained: "The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,“ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” - and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!"

On his call with the Nvidia CEO, he said: "I'm telling you it's all a hoax. The datacenters are great... they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen... We're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax."

Huang: "You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir."

Trump: "We have to do things and we have to do it prudently, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry... I didn't know how you felt about it. I assumed you felt the same way as me."

Huang again: "Yes sir... We're going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America. Every industry, every company, every state, every people."

Perhaps as clarification or just reiteration, the president took to Truth Social to say, "I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax—That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!"

To my eyes and ears, all of this is a misnomer anyway. The AI boom is causing problems in the here and now, from ever-increasing energy use to ever-decreasing brain use, increasing use of AI for creative tasks that humans once enjoyed doing, and, of course, increasingly expensive tech thanks to the AI industry-induced global memory shortage, to name just a few.

Much of the actual discussion around safety and pacing AI is, of course, prudent. But my problem is with the framing of discussions in the wake of this. Talk of whether or not AI will destroy the world conveniently serves to downplay and distract from these more immediate and very real concerns. As does the idea that we (the West, and more specifically the US) are in an arms race that must be won.

If everyone is busy thinking about whether or not the AI industry could pose grand threats to national security and whether it could end society and therefore needs to slow down, nobody is busy talking about the fact that we have lots of choices over whether and how the AI industry should change society regardless. Even if AI doesn't pose a big cybersecurity threat, for instance, we should still have a choice over the potential upheaval it is causing. But without discussions centred on this, the industry rolls on regardless.

OpenAI employee Rohan Varma has taken down the browser-based, AI-coded RuneScape clone called Elderwood following negative attention from the RuneScape community and a cease-and-desist request from developer Jagex.

Varma did not post video footage of Elderwood in action, but screenshots on his X profile (via Eurogamer) show a game with extremely similar graphics and UI to Old School RuneScape. Elderwood further had identical place names to OSRS, including the celebrated Lumbridge, and Varma explicitly described it as an OSRS clone in some of his posts. Varma is a developer on OpenAI's Codex project, a coding-focused AI tool he used to build Elderwood.

Varma uploaded his first X post about Elderwood on September 6. On September 7, user Nutty103X shared a post to the OSRS subreddit calling attention to Elderwood. Nutty103X called for Jagex to C&D the clone game, and most commenters expressed similar sentiments or criticism of Elderwood's quality and originality. On the same day, Varma shared a post noting "a spike in users earlier today because we accidentally went viral on the OSRS subreddit."

According to Eurogamer, Elderwood was taken down at some point on September 9, with the browser-based game replaced with a farewell message from Varma. "We received a notice from Jagex asking us to take down the website," the message reads. "Following that notice, we are discontinuing Elderwood’s operation, and the game is no longer available.

"Elderwood began as a browser-based multiplayer adventure inspired by RuneScape. In a few short days, it grew into a shared world of exploration, skilling, quests, trading and duels—shaped along the way by the people who showed up to play and share ideas."

Varma further thanked players, and said that the site would remain up with a leaderboard of Elderwood's high scores.

The message strikes me as a bit much for a vibe-coded, inferior clone of a game that already exists. Elderwood's launch-to-takedown speedrun reminds me of the fate of so many Nintendo fan games, with the crucial caveat that those are typically noncommercial creative projects, as opposed to a blatantly copyright-infringing advertisement for OpenAI. For another example, id Software making a Mario 3 port on spec to prove they'd mastered fast-scrolling 2D graphics on DOS? That's cool copyright infringement.

I'm awestruck at the truly ham-fisted "move fast, break things" of this particular exercise: OpenAI is a company already under scrutiny for its impact—generally negative—on creativity, creative ownership, and people being able to make a living from making art. Whatever Varma's intentions with this project, he is a representative of OpenAI, and was using Elderwood to demonstrate the company's projects.

Elderwood was an irresponsible exercise in copyright infringement-as-advertising reminiscent of the nonsense coming out of the US White House's social media account, leaving Varma's somber eulogy all the more galling.

Electronic Arts has copped to using "AI voice technology" in the upcoming NHL 27, saying that doing so will "bring more variety to the game" and allow it to react more quickly to changes and feedback.

The use of generative AI in NHL 27 was first reported by ESPN sportscaster John Buccigross, who also serves as the play-by-play man for EA's NHL series. "They're using some AI stuff now," he said on the Chirping Zebras Podcast last week (via IGN). "They played me some stuff back in my voice. It's like, wow, that's pretty good. If it means less work and the same check, I'll take it."

EA didn't respond to my inquiries about Buccigross' claim last week, but in a blog post shared today on the game's first update it confirmed that AI is in fact being used in the game.

"We’ve been following the discussion around the new commentary team and want to clarify our approach," EA wrote. "The broadcast is built on a direct and ongoing partnership with John Buccigross and Darren Pang. With their full consent and active collaboration, we are using AI voice technology to expand on the 50+ recording sessions they have already completed.

"This process allows us to bring more variety to the game, react faster to league changes, and incorporate player feedback more quickly. Update 1 is our first step in an ongoing commitment to improve authenticity, with fixes for player-name pronunciations and repetitive lines. We will continue to expand player and city-name coverage in future updates."

The comment about fixes reflects something else Buccigross related about the process: The AI is sometimes off.

"They were playing me back some of my AI voice, and they're playing it like, 'Score! And the crowd gets out of their chairs!'" he said. "I was like, no, they're not chairs. I know, AI, they look like a chair, but we call them seats. Little things like that, you gotta go back and listen because those words matter in sports."

NHL 27 isn't coming to PC (at least, there are no announced plans in that regard, and according to Wikipedia the series hasn't appeared on PC since NHL 2009, when Dion Phaneuf was still with the Flames, so you can probably draw your own conclusions) but this is relevant nonetheless for the broader implications it reflects.

EA is fairly up-front about being pro-AI—Laura Miele, EA's president of enterprise development, said earlier this year that the advent of AI has enabled "a real rise of creativity" at the company—and there's an expectation that EA will lean into it even harder to help manage the massive debt load its taken on as a result of its acquisition by Saudi Arabia.

There's also none of the apologetic tone in this statement that so often accompanies 'yes, we used AI' admissions: Instead, the focus is entirely on the virtues of the technology, and that EA had permission from the nominal owners of the voices to use them. In other words, EA has decided that this is the way forward, and we can expect to see generative AI play an even bigger role in its games in the future.

For those who've been sleeping under a cool, mossy rock for the last while, TSMC is the biggest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. You can imagine how well they've been doing as the AI industry races to build more and more data centres—but you also don't need to imagine because the official numbers are in, revealing that TSMC's revenue in August surged by a face-melting year-on-year increase of 53%.

TSMC's revenue for August alone totalled NT$514.806 billion, which is roughly $16.35 billion USD. Though this is the first time monthly revenue has broken the NT$500 billion sound barrier, it also marks the fourth consecutive month of record-breaking gains for the company. Between January to August 2026, TSMC made NT$3,386.87 billion (roughly $117 billion USD). This in itself is a 39.3% year-on-year increase.

CEO C.C. Wei said during the company's latest earnings call that "AI-related demand continues to be extremely robust. The AI megatrend continues to drive the need for more and more computation, which supports the robust demand for leading-edge silicon. [...] our conviction in the multi-year AI megatrend remains very high."

There's no shortage of reasons to bolster the company's confidence on this point. For one thing, Nvidia just announced it intends to buy AI development platform Hugging Face for $13 billion. CEO Jensen Huang also recently shared that 100,000 Nvidia GPUs were used to train OpenAI's latest model, GPT-6 Astra, and there are apparently already plans to bring quadruple that amount of hardware online. The future of AI ain't looking any less hardware-hungry, and the industry is going to continue to require a lot of semiconductors to satiate it.

In terms of foundries, TSMC had a market share of 72.5% in Q2 of 2026. According to TrendForce, demand for AI server GPUs kept 5nm, 4nm, and 3nm production lines fully booked (though apparently initial inventory buildup for new iPhones also helped). As for the near future, TSMC has already committed to using ASML's next-generation production technology from 2030 (with other major players set to pick up the tech as soon as 2028).

So, yes, the chipmaker is doing very well. For comparison's sake, Samsung has the next biggest slice of the semiconductor pie after TSMC, though its market share amounted to 5.9% during Q2—that's a huge gap.

Now that you're up to speed, may I ask if there is room for one more under your ever-so-nice rock? I'm just looking for somewhere to camp out until memory and GPU prices become a bit more sensible again.

DLSS 5 has been a contentious ol' bit of tech, but with it launching in NBA 2K27, it's finally in actual games and not just in a ton of ReShade modded games. If, for some reason, you just really love the look, it turns out you can apply it to your entire desktop too, with a little bit of modding help.

Posted to GitHub by Perseval BLR, DLSS 5 NeuralScreen is free to download, and it has customisation features to change intensity and swap resolution on the fly (Via TweakTown). Interestingly, it works with RTX 30-series cards and up. To get it running, you simply have to download the latest version of the app via the GitHub releases tab and run the exe file.

You may be wondering why you would bother applying DLSS Neural Rendering to your entire desktop, especially when you consider that a screenshot of a DLSS 5 game as your wallpaper would be less intensive than running an app on it, and the answer is: for everyday use. You can apply DLSS NR while watching videos if you want to, you can apply it to any pictures you open up, and it will even run on any games that you run in borderless or windowed mode.

As well as this, the fact that it's a separate app that you can adjust and turn on or off in just a few moments means it's more efficient than going into the graphics settings of a game, changing them, and then waiting for them to save.

Now for the downsides. Other than the love it or hate it look of DLSS 5, NeuralScreen does not support HDR, cannot be run on fullscreen games, is locked to a max resolution of 2560 x 1440, and adds 40-60 ms of latency. That means you are probably better off not running DLSS on any competitive games, but Github page itself reckons running it on online competitive games could trigger anti-cheat software due to the software's nvngx.dll process and the fullscreen overlay anyway.

But in single-player games, or when watching movies, that added latency is theoretically fine. Though that's before mentioning the performance hit of actually running the app.

DLSS 5 off vs DLSS 5 on

This is on the most recent GTA 6 extended gameplay trailer

Off

On

I gave it a try on my personal rig with an RTX 4070 Super, and though the app itself is quite slow, it is super easy to implement.

I don't really like the DLSS NR look and don't particularly like generative AI's effect on the games industry thus far (like the proliferation of AI-generated assets in games), so I won't be keeping the app, but if you're hungry for DLSS 5, you can get up and running in just a few moments.

If you were hoping it would make your email inbox look really realistic, you're out of luck, as it just sort of washed out the colours on mine. But if you're sent any pictures, you can bet DLSS 5 will work on those.

Blizzard Entertainment's union—in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—has just signed a landmark contract with the studio to, among other things, force it to "discuss, evaluate, and bargain" any time it wants to introduce generative AI in the workplace.

As explained on the CWA website, this contract has been in the works for two years and impacts around 1900 workers from across the studio, including those working on World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, QA, Overwatch, and Diablo. The contract itself does a lot of good for these people, who are living in an era of uncertainty thanks to Xbox's 'reset' that has impacted over 1600 jobs and is soon to jeopardise 1600 more.

That good includes: "wage increases, grievance procedures, a three-day in-office hybrid workweek, 'just cause' protections, remote work, and disability accommodations". Most notably, however, is a stipulation that Blizzard needs to run any AI usage by the workplace first.

"The contracts now require Blizzard to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the usage of artificial intelligence in the workplace," reads the announcement. Essentially, this means that Microsoft cannot simply top-down enforce AI usage as it's been known to do in the past in its software development divisions.

Regarding the hanging sword of Xbox's 2027 deadline for future layoffs, union workers will also be protected if it comes to it: "In an industry first, the new union contracts give workers the right to be 'recalled' into open positions across any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months from the date of their layoff announcement. Workers have also secured an extra 4 weeks of severance for union workers regardless of their tenure."

On the victory, QA worker and bargaining committee member Simon Hedrick says: "I believe that the positive change we have won will ripple out and help make the games industry as a whole a better place for workers and players alike. This contract is the start of something greater, and I urge everyone to remember: when we fight together, we win together."

It's a major victory for a studio that, like most others under Xbox's umbrella, has a vague and impending sense of doom following it. In a sane world, I'd say Blizzard makes enough bank to be safe, that's just not the kind of industry we live in. You can get valued at $68.7 billion by Microsoft and still lose.

Last week, Google announced (via HKEPC) that it managed to fully map the brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly into 3D neural shapes. As you might expect, it took approximately three seconds flat for software engineers to try and get it to play Doom.

Google reports that scientists and researchers used AI to combine millions of 2D images into the final model, and says it reconstructs over 166,000 neurons. Google says, "This foundational map of the adult male fruit fly brain can help accelerate our understanding of the brain, and is a major milestone in neuroscience."

By September 6 (three days later), Alex Wormuth, a software engineer at Coinbase, announced that the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. They say, "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons. Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement."

You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly.

But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data."

And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64.

If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analysed a male brain whilst Flywire analysed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same.

And with so many not only working on scans, but also using those scans in actual applications, it makes the mind race to think about what could be next, and just how long we will have to wait until they can replicate a human mind.