Electronic Arts' president of enterprise development Laura Miele says the rise of artificial intelligence in game development can bring about "a real rise in creativity" by removing tedious grunt work and enabling faster development processes overall.

Miele expressed her thoughts on the matter earlier this month during a Game Business Live showcase at Summer Game Fest, where she was asked if the growing use of AI tools will result in shorter development cycles overall.

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"Perhaps in some parts they will," Miele said. "I really believe in what I've seen, that I'm pretty excited about. I've always wanted to help our studio developers remove friction and I've always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences.

"And I think that AI, what I've seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting. It's removed some tedium out of their jobs. And I've seen faster prototyping. I've seen faster creativity and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. So, we're seeing it and I think there's a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks out of development."

Exactly what sort of AI is being discussed here isn't made clear, and there's a big gulf between, say, the AI-powered project management tools used by Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda at GenDesign and the generative AI slop machines that have become such a pox on, well, everything.

But EA hasn't been shy in the past about its enthusiasm for generative AI. CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2024, for instance, that the company is "embracing [generative AI] deeply," and that "about 60% of all of our development processes have high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI."

EA is also reportedly counting on the power of AI to bring down its operating costs and help cover the $20 billion in debt financing the company took on as part of its $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. (If you're wondering why EA, the target of the acquisition, is also taking on billions of dollars of debt to pay for it, PC Gamer's foremost finance wiz Lincoln Carpenter explains. The short version: Everyone's terrified.)

Employees are reportedly less upbeat about the AI-powered future, which some suspect is being used to justify layoffs at the company. Whether driven by AI or not, EA has laid off hundreds of employees at BioWare, Respawn, Cliffhanger Games—which was closed outright—and elsewhere since the Saudi investment was announced in September 2025. The most recent round of cuts reportedly occurred earlier this week, putting an undisclosed number of people out of work.

As the creators behind the biggest gacha games of today—Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero, to name just a few—miHoYo must be stinking rich. While the developer has expanded out into other industries, it's used at least a bit of that wad of cash to pursue AI tech. Yippee.

Just last month, miHoYo announced that it would invest up to $14.6bn into AI for in-house tools, claiming it would "prioritise AI as a central and primary means of problem-solving". The first fruits of its AI research are already on display in BSide: Olivia Lin, currently only available on Steam in China.

Meet Lin Li, an AI chatbot masquerading as a Shanghai student "majoring in piano and minoring in psychology," as its Steam description reads. Since it's only available in China, I've had to translate the text, but Lin Li apparently "loves vinyl records, old movies, and rainy days."

You can listen to her play music on her piano, and upload files if you want her to play something specific. You can also write her letters to "express your current emotions in words and exchange a story that belongs only to you."

They added ChatGPT 😭 from r/PetitPlanet

BSide: Olivia Lin is an experiment for the studio, but it's not stopping here. It's already using AI-powered tools to create its upcoming life sim, Petit Planet, including the Planet Life Guide chatbot NPC. Genesis, its upcoming MMO made in Unreal Engine 5, is reportedly integrating AI to some degree. Plus, it's reportedly hiring artists with experience using generative AI for Honkai: Nexus Anima, its Pokémon-like auto-battler.

Yes, it's working on multiple new games at once—at least four, in fact. Combined with the unceasing, substantial updates for its suite of gacha games even years after release, I wouldn't be surprised to see miHoYo deploy these tools to help maintain the pace.

Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week's new games on Steam. I've always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it's also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.

But if I'm perfectly honest, the reason I've always loved to browse through Steam's raw and unfiltered new release list is because it's fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there's something like, I dunno, Fuck's Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you're likely to ever see, most of which won't ever make the front page.

Most people don't see these games. What we see on Steam's front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what's trending in our region, or what's discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.

As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there's a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.

Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas - Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it's basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.

I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn't look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.

These games are all by different developers:

In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game's Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there's greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs - Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.

I think most people would agree that a game's Steam capsule art is a hugely important determinant for whether they click through to a store page or not. Capsule art tells us what kind of game we're probably going to see when we click, but it also captures the spirit of the thing: the atmosphere of the game, its art style, its genre, whether it'll make us laugh, rage, shudder in terror, zone out, and so forth.

The capsule art for the games above do none of those things. Like most generative AI, these images are not designed to persuade or entice: they exist to fill space. They're steely, clinical, affectless, chillingly inhuman, and most offensively: they're freaking ugly. They immediately signpost waste.

And there's more and more of this churn with every passing week, gradually undermining the pleasures of curious Steam users who like to dig deeper for unsung gems. In 2026, your new favorite game may remain eternally ignored, wedged between a vape store simulator and Total Simp Death.

Will Valve ever allow us to reliably filter out AI-generated churn? It's hard to imagine no one in Bellevue has noticed how ugly the store has become. Surely it's only a matter of time?

Top Steam games by revenue (June 9 - 16)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though it wasn't a big week for splashy blockbusters.

The obvious outlier here is Meccha Chameleon. It's a multiplayer hide-and-seek game starring white, featureless bodies who must blend in with their environment using paint brushes. Since releasing on June 10, the $6 game has sold 7 million copies. Elie Gould wrote about it last week.

Interestingly, its Japanese creator Lemorion has been very prolific: it has released six games since late 2024. None of them have achieved anywhere near the success of Meccha Chameleon, not even this free-to-play Penguin-themed take on Exit 8. Meccha Chameleon's immediate predecessor, Link Penguins, released only two months ago and is also an online multiplayer game.

Destiny 2 continues to see a resurgence since the announcement of its sunsetting. EA FC 26 is currently 80%, hence its return to the chart.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Slop 👍"

BigFloppa332, with poetic succinctness, on Slop Fighter.

Since the advent of generative AI and contemporary chatbots, there's been endless debate about the ethics of using them in game development. But how does AI measure up through a purely pragmatic, business-minded lens? According to a blog post from Game Oracle written by market data analyst Ross Burton, the technology's reputation can ward off prospective players.

Game Oracle sampled 9,879 games released between January and October 2025, "filtering out spam and purely commercial releases," as well as free-to-play games (granted, this could exclude some relatively popular free-to-play games and those which have been accused of using undisclosed AI art, like FragPunk, which is both). Of the sampled games, 17.9% disclosed AI use.

Taken as a whole, AI use was correlated with slightly less enthusiastic reception. Games without AI disclosures had slightly more reviews, fewer of them had no reviews at all, and "when focusing on games that received at least 100 reviews," the median rating was about 4% higher.

However, with the methodology adjusted specifically to compare games that were alike in other ways, things were different. The report states: "After controlling for publisher, developer experience, and game type, developers using AI see a ~53% reduction in reviews compared to those who do not."

"To explain away the observed penalty, an unmeasured X-factor would need to be strong enough to nearly triple the odds (2.7x) of AI adoption while simultaneously causing a 22% reduction in review counts, independent of publisher backing and developer experience."

The full breakdown behind these findings is in the report, but it also states that this effect was more pronounced the bigger and more accomplished the developer was. "Our data suggests that for low-quality games, AI makes no difference," it reads. "But for high-potential games, the 'AI Stigma' is real and severely punishes developers who otherwise would have succeeded."

Games which used AI extensively and remained hugely successful like The Finals, Game Oracle reckons, "highlight the nuance around how AI is used … AI can be used well, or it can be sloppy, and that matters." The study concludes that "AI is a tool" not to be avoided, but approached cautiously. "Would you avoid using a hammer to build a shed? No, of course not. Just don't go around hitting everything with it."

It's worth noting that plenty of game devs are skeptical of AI's potential as a mere tool, and things have changed even since 2025. Clair Obscur raked in awards last year despite its use of AI-generated placeholders, and Crimson Desert has sold millions of copies already this year after doing the same thing—but with the new Crazy Taxi, for instance, it feels as though the developer's AI use has been talked about more than anything in the game itself.

This is all further complicated by the prevalence of undisclosed AI use, with industry figures like Epic CEO Tim Sweeney pushing back on the very notion of the disclaimers, as well as the ways huge studios continue to invest in the tech. Given that Sony touted AI tools as a means to "unleash the creativity of studios" just a few days ago, I wouldn't expect these findings to signal an industry-wide shift anytime soon.

Much has been said about the way generative AI is worming its way into game development pipelines, and David Gaider—former BioWare writer and lead writer on the first three Dragon Age games—recently spoke to GamesRadar about some of the dangers he foresees for future teams working with these tools.

Gaider said that AI's lack of consistency would make appraising, troubleshooting, and cleaning up its work difficult. The process of having to go back and touch up its output, not knowing why it spat out a certain result "would be frustrating as hell … it's not ready for prime time," he said. "There's just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be."

The writer also told GamesRadar that the idea that AI can replace rote tasks often handed off to junior developers isn't necessarily a good thing, either: "How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?"

AI tools have been used in a 'creative' sense as well—the explanation often goes that they're just used for placeholders or helping with early prototypes and concepts—but Gaider is wary of this application too, given that artists haven't agreed to have "their data pillaged." The reaction to the new Crazy Taxi game suggests that a lot of players are also skeptical of AI's creative applications.

Many other devs were quoted in GamesRadar's feature, and while not all of them shared the exact same concerns about AI, their feelings were along the same lines. Iron Lung and Dusk creator David Szymanski, for instance, said he's not "not categorically against AI as a whole technology" but finds it a bridge too far to "hand wave all the ethical concerns about plagiarism, environmental impact, and job security." Marvel Rivals executive producer Danny Koo said the worries about plagiarism were of particular concern, saying the team avoided AI art tools to ensure the game's assets weren't "poisoned."

Since large-language models like ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that appear human-like in tone, this has led to considerable discussion over whether LLMs might themselves be sentient. At present, there are far more reasons to conclude that AIs are not and will never be conscious. But the idea persists regardless.

This is partly because of our broader tendency to perceive human-like qualities in non-human things, and partly because AI companies have equivocated over the issue. In any case, one Microsoft researcher has become particularly fed up with it, to the point where he decided to demonstrate how ridiculous the notion is by building an LLM in Age of Empires 2 powered by goats.

As reported by 404 Media, Microsoft AI researcher Adrian de Wynter built a neural network within Microsoft's strategy classic, then wrote a paper describing the results titled 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'.

If you think this title is preposterous, that is entirely the point. "I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point," de Wynter told 404 media, observing that "absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science."

De Wynter constructed the LLM in AoE 2's scenario editor, building a functioning NOT AND gate and 1-bit perceptron (a simple form of neural network) using objects in the game world to represent computer binaries. Grass represents 0, bridges represent 1, and goats play the role of bits. It's similar to how some players have built neural networks using Minecraft redstone, but de Wynter specifically wanted to use Age of Empires 2 because it is a less obvious choice.

There are videos of De Wynter's goat-powered LLM in action on his GitHub page. To the casual observer, the processes look completely baffling, which de Wynter reckons demonstrates his point.

The processes going on here are, fundamentally, those which power tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. But because the fundamentals are goats and grass rather than natural language, it prevents observers from perceiving the resulting behaviours and output as human.

"The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLMs capabilities are too strong," de Winter said, going on to add that. "This is why I used the goats: there are things which make the LLMs what they are in themselves (i.e., the relationship between weights as defined by some operation), and there are things which make them what they are perceived as."

The reason this is important is that assuming LLMs have human-like properties without demonstrative proof could lead us to all manner of problems, such as in scientific research. In his paper, de Wytner says he has peer reviewed more than 300 computer science papers in the last two years, finding that over half of them began with the assumption that LLMs have human-like traits.

"I propose that we need to stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language," de Wynter said. "Instead, we should perform experiments that allow us to see LLMs as how they are, not how we believe they should be."

Man, there was a while there where we could all be real smug about being on PC, right? Sony exclusives—save the obvious—all got eventual releases on our desktops, Xbox stuff was a given even while its console fanbase gnashed their teeth about seeing Starfield on a PS5, and Nintendo… well, Nintendo is Nintendo, but those unofficial Zelda ports are very impressive.

Now? Well, we're still smug. Rightly so. But Sony decided we were living high on the hog for too long, and resolved that its splashy singleplayer blockbusters would no longer be available anywhere but its own consoles. Now, just to drive that point home, it's nixed PC from a discussion of its "business environment and strategy" in an annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (via Game File). Even worse: it's replaced it with a great big paean to AI.

In the 2025 version of the same report, Sony wrote that it would "continue its efforts to deploy its first-party titles to multiple platforms such as PC." That's now completely gone in the 2026 version. Instead, you get this: "Sony is utilizing AI to unleash the creativity of studios and further enhance the PlayStation experience."

Which is deeply dispiriting all by itself, but wait! It goes on: "Sony aims to improve productivity through the use of AI powered tools, allowing development teams to reinvest their time into building richer worlds and gameplay experiences. In the platform business, Sony is working to leverage AI to route transactions more efficiently, and to personalize and recommend content for individual users in the PlayStation Store. Sony also aims to push visual fidelity forward and deliver higher quality gameplay experiences through continued investments in AI and machine learning."

Certainly gets me excited. I've never gone gaga for Sony's first-party games, but they're good-looking things. Spider-Man's New York looks and feels amazing; The Last of Us is very unpleasant; God of War's giant snake guy? Love him. Love that my subwoofer kicks into overdrive whenever he opens his mouth.

Perhaps there is a way to deploy AI that both enhances productivity without drowning all this good, human-made art direction under a tidal wave of slop, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it and I'm not making any bets. I guess it's relatively immaterial to me as a player—I don't have a PlayStation and, well, we're not seeing a Sony singleplayer game on Steam any time in the near future.

It's been a big moment for AI disclosures. Games with such labels have been flooding Steam as of late, and whenever the parade of summer trade shows rolls around, the inevitable question quickly arises: how many of these games were made with the controversial tech? The answer doesn't always go down easy as we saw with the new Crazy Taxi game, for example.

Speaking with GamesRadar, Pocketpair's head of publishing and communication, John Buckley, compared the advent of AI to that of "early crypto stuff," saying "It feels very intrusive. It feels like everyone who is super gung-ho about it isn't from the industry. They're, dare I say, outsiders looking to get rich quick." The article states he noted AI's value as a "search tool or coding assistant" was less easy to dismiss, saying that was "a very different conversation."

Buckley elaborated specifically in regard to AI-generated artwork and assets in a follow-up article from GamesRadar. "We have a lot of artists in-house," he said. "They like doing stuff themselves. There's no reason to get rid of them for the sake of an AI doing it. Just seems pointless."

He added that it hardly seems worth triggering the backlash on social media, with which he empathized. "Even I, who is in the industry, I just felt like a natural, ugh, why? The rest of your game looks fine. Did you need to? I think that's going to be the attitude for quite a while. I think people will look at it and say, did you need to do that? Couldn't you just do it yourself?"

"Gamers don't want it," Buckley said. "And if the gamers don't want it, I guess that's it, right? Not much of a conversation to be had." All this affirms what Buckley said last year regarding Pocketpair's refusal to publish games made with generative AI.

He also posited that a potential future where games are marketed by their authenticity, where disclosures exist not to denote games containing AI but those without it, are "a bit dystopian … that's kind of sad to think about." Given the resistance to AI disclosures by industry figures like Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, as well as the fact that multiple big games have been caught with undisclosed AI "placeholders" slipping into release versions, such a future doesn't feel out of the question.

Occasionally in hardware and technology reporting, I'm left to wonder if everyone else is in on a joke I'm not privy to. Today is one of those days. Snap, the company behind the instant messaging app Snapchat, has just unveiled its own augmented reality glasses.

Called Specs, the frames are pitched partially as an alternative to looking down at your phone screen all day, and a pair will set you back $2,195.

The goal was arguably to contain some serious hardware grunt inside a wearable, but the result is a pair of seriously chunky frames—not just to contain components but also likely to stop the whole thing from overheating. Let me set up the punchline: In this CNBC clip, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel describes Specs as both capable and "highly wearable," while the dorky-looking frames visibly crush down his ears.

Now that's a real howler. But before we completely dismiss this wearable effort, let's get into a few more choice details. For one thing, the lenses are apparently built to feel like "a 24-inch desktop monitor when you're working, or a 115-inch home cinema screen placed about 10 feet away when you're watching a movie." For another, the main selling point of Specs is that it's an all-in-one device, "with no puck and no tether," unlike some other major players' AR glasses projects we've seen recently.

Part of the frame's bulk can be attributed to the fact that it's housing not one but two Snapdragon processors. "One is dedicated to computer vision and the other is dedicated to running Lenses," Snap writes, "Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world. Specs deliver 7-millisecond motion-to-photon latency, verified through advanced robotic measurement systems."

In terms of battery life, you can expect a measly four hours of mixed use, "including audio and video playback, Lenses, AI assistance, Bluetooth notifications, and more." That said, the included charging case can offer four additional charges while out and about, holding a total of 20 hours of battery life. That's…still not great—though you could argue it avoids becoming yet another easy punchline.

What's perhaps less laughable for Snap itself is the hit its share price took when it revealed Specs. The original unveiling took place on June 16, and you'll notice a decline into today. This caps off six straight sessions of losses, according to Seeking Alpha. To be clear, I'm not faulting Specs' all-in-one ambitions on paper—it's more the fact that in practice, Snap is trying to deny a reality we can all see very obviously bearing down on its CEO's ears.

It's probably fair to say that Unreal Engine is probably the most comprehensive tool around for creating games, animations, and video effects. And, with the launch of UE 5.8, it's becoming even more extensive and even a little bit more AI-friendly. Whether you're just an Unreal Engine hobbyist like me, or a full-time game developer, you can download version 5.8 right now via the Epic Games Launcher.

Even if you don't plan on using any of the new features (of which there are a lot), it's always worth trying out the latest release just for bug and performance fixes. But what's actually new? The headline acts in UE5.8 are the introduction of Mesh Terrain and Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE). Both are experimental features at the moment, but the former should be of great interest to anyone creating big, open-world terrains, as the tool basically generates full 3D meshes for you.

PVE is somewhat similar, except that instead of creating landscapes, it produces vegetation (trees, bushes, reeds, grass, etc) from scratch, with the procedural system working in line with meshes already present in the world. For example, let's say you had a crumbled old archway in a forest, PVE will 'grow' trees around it, accounting for the natural source of light and competing vegetation.

Complementing these are MegaLights, which first appeared in experimental form in UE5.5 (but is now "production-ready"), an experimental fog screen space scattering feature, and perhaps most interesting of all, Lumen Lite. This is a mode for Lumen global illumination that Epic claims to be twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, while still preserving "much of the visual impact".

The release notes for UE5.8 specifically mention that "games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps," so it's blatantly obvious what platform it was developed for. However, since it's also supported on PC, UE-powered games of the future could well offer this as a graphics option for low-end hardware users.

Tucked away, almost at the end of the new version details announcement—which blessedly includes improvements to shader compiling—is one more experimental feature, an MCP plugin. With this, you can implement any LLM of your choice to "connect to and understand both the engine and your project." In other words, if you want to use AI to create assets or code, carry out tests or refactoring tasks, then you should be able to hand that over to the LLM easily enough.

Epic left the note about this feature after everything else, and I suspect that's because AI is hardly flavour of the month in the world of PCs and gaming right now. After all, Epic already has a section of PC gaming fandom that takes a dim view of Unreal Engine games, whether you believe that's the fault of Epic or a given game's developers themselves, and AI-use is another PC gaming bug bear.

Anyway, because of the consternation about AI in gaming—from being the primary cause of the horrendous price increases for DRAM and SSDs, as well as the endless controversies over its use in games—the inclusion of this plugin is likely to draw ire from some quarters.

The thing is, many game studios will have to rely increasingly more on AI for certain workloads if they hope to stay afloat. With the likes of Microsoft and numerous other companies about to swing a sword of Damocles across all their gaming divisions, studio heads will be looking at every avenue that will result in them having a future.

I'm not suggesting that game devs must use AI, nor am I saying that the inclusion of the LLM plugin (specifically an MCP server) with UE5.8 is a good or bad thing; it's simply a sign of our times. One can argue that Unreal Engine's feature set is sometimes a little too far-forward in reach (console and mainstream PC hardware still isn't quite good enough to cope with an all-in Lumen and Nanite game at high fps), but this minor plugin is very much a 'here-and-now' thing.

When the Nvidia CEO isn't busy basking in the adoration of fans at Computex Taiwan, it seems he might spend his time considering how to shift social norms. In what direction, you ask? Why, using AI more, of course.

That's what he told the Associated Press when the interviewer asked whether AI itself concerns people or "the absence of social structures to adapt to something happening so fast."

Jensen responded that "it's a combination of all that" but also emphasised that new social norms are needed: "You have to deal with regulation, technology, you have to deal with social norms."

He gives the example of automobiles and initial concerns over the harm they could do to people, especially children. But we changed social norms so that now kids are warned not to play in the street, there are laws surrounding speed, and so on.

However, when asked what social norm should be changed for AI, the answer isn't particularly satisfying: "The first thing is that I would advocate that everybody use AI. Just go engage it."

I'm not entirely sure that this response would traverse the analogy bridge over to automobiles very well. I can't imagine 'just use a car' would have been very convincing, back in the day. And I'm not sure how keen Huang would be on actually analogous shifts in norms and regulations, such as one akin to speed limits but for AI.

Huang says that, unlike pretty much any other technology, AI is free and easy to use, which is true enough on the surface. However, those 'free' tiers of AI aren't actually free. AI uses and inflates the price of technology that already exists. It's also subsidised by higher paid tiers, funny money inflating a ballooned market, and of course (and apologies for getting a little technical here) a metric s***ton of energy.

In other words, 'free' my arse.

I also can't help but wonder whether there's an element of worry in Huang imploring people to actually use AI. After all, if people don't actually use the technology, eventually that lack of end-user demand will catch up with AI companies, and in turn with the company that gives them their AI hardware: Nvidia.

As it stands, Nvidia is extremely profitable, but the companies that buy from Nvidia aren't. We'll just have to see how long it can last—markets are funny things.

If you're on a budget, now is really not the time to upgrade your gaming rig's storage. The memory supply crisis is driving up the price of SSDs, meaning many will have to make do with what they've already got for as long as possible. Even older games can still have large file sizes, especially if they're enjoying a fresh lick of path-traced lighting. Thankfully though, RTX Remix 1.5 may make juggling your backlog a little easier.

Just in case you've not ventured out from under your cool mossy rock since 2004, RTX Remix is Nvidia's attempt to refine the dated visuals of yesteryears' games. The open-source modding platform allows users to update the look of their favourite games with generative AI tools, neural rendering tech, and ray tracing. Unfortunately, all of that fresh tech tends to expand the file size of a 20 year old game. The latest update addresses that file size creep.

RTX IO is Nvidia's high-performance storage tech, which introduces a number of improvements including cutting down game file sizes. The company says, "Thanks to [the RTX Remix 1.5] update, file sizes have dropped significantly: Portal with RTX has been reduced from 25 GB to 17 GB, while Half-Life 2 RTX has shrunk from 80 GB to 50 GB."

This compression is now available inside the RTX Remix packaging workflow. On top of whittling down game file sizes, RTX IO also reduces CPU overhead and speeds up loads.

The 1.5 update introduced a number of other improvements, including 'smooth normals' so that lower poly geometry looks less obvious with a path-traced lighting mod. Speaking of lighting, modders will also enjoy easier to use viewport light controls. Apparently, "existing light manipulators are easier to manage through a unified viewport lights menu, with persistent toggles for manipulator visibility and intensity controls."

Now, RTX Remix wouldn't be an Nvidia product without at least one more look-in from AI integration (in case you're still living in 2004, the data centre segment of Nvidia's business made $75.2 billion last quarter alone). The company writes, "Because [the modding] pipeline relies heavily on defined, manual steps, it is perfect for an AI agent to lend a hand."

Specifically, Nvidia published a selection of "text-based instruction files that provide specific functional context to AI coding agents" called 'RTX Remix Skills'. The argument is that letting an AI agent handle some of the technical heavy lifting lowers the barrier to entry for human wannabe modders who are not well-versed in either C++ or Python code languages. I'm all for making the technical more accessible…but I'm also incredibly wary of AI agents sticking their metaphorical foot in modders' work.

If you were waiting for GTA 6 to drop when it should have done on May 26 (well, on console at least), you were probably more than a little perturbed by its delay to *checks watch* no time soon, i.e. November. That's to allow Rockstar to "finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve." Frustrating, but fair enough, we can wait.

But if you aren't content waiting, what's to do? 'Nothing at all' is what probably comes to most people's minds. But not Ziwen's. No, that would be far too simple for the AI start-up entrepreneur, who has decided to "beat the real GTA 6 to launch" (via X user Fashion Ruined My Life).

"Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out. Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this... No studio, no publisher. Just whoever shows up... The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway. If you can model, code, build levels, or write music and lore, come join. Looking for a couple contributors to cook this."

This is it; this is what the brave new world of AI and vibe coding has brought us. The sheer brass, the gall, the bravery to stand up and say, 'I will make GTA 6, and I'll do it before November.' I love it. I hate that I love it, but I do.

I won't spoil the whole journey, which is of course still ongoing, but just to give some teasers for Ziwen's project:

After progressing from day one's Tic-Tac-on-a-field, day two takes a Roblox-esque character to a Roblox-esque world with jittery floors.

Day four involves a cinematic with alligators falling from the sky. And gameplay of a character doing his best impression of Edward Cullen in daylight.

Day six—the latest update as of the time of writing—is more of the same, but there's a "real main menu", a loading screen, and the "whole front-end wired end to end."

Things are already at a point where they're requiring development to get a little more serious, though:

"We've been building in Godot the whole way, it's starting to show its limits on the AAA stuff. So this week I'm going to go test Unity to see if we can get the actual game into AAA stuff as well. For a game built by a loop of agents, the only question that matters is which one they can read, edit, and push on their own. Godot's good at that. Unity might be better, with way more assets off the market. I'm going to find out... I'll report back which engine they build faster in."

Godspeed, Unity. May the AI agents treat you well.

E-waste is a massive environmental problem. So are current data center plans, if recent reports are to be believed. However, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have come up with an intriguing idea: They plan to use 2,000 Google Pixel smartphones to build a cloud computing data center with already-existing tech.

According to a Google Research blog post, on average, people replace their smartphones every four years (via Hothardware). However, many modern (yet outdated, in terms of our constant desire for shiny new things) examples have processors, memory, and storage chips that are relatively powerful, particularly when you chain them together.

That's wasted hardware, and an ecological concern when you think of the extra carbon emissions created by manufacturing their replacements. By putting the existing chips to good use, it prevents them from going to landfill—and might even negate the need for new hardware in certain applications.

The post's authors say that the single-threaded performance of a modern smartphone's processor cores is on par with (or better than) many multicore server chips. However, modern servers are made up of dozens of multithreaded processor cores with access to a huge amount of memory, whereas a typical older smartphone only has a handful of cores and around 8-12 GB to play with.

Not only that, but recycled smartphones have a lot of extra components that would be inefficient (or hazardous) to deploy en masse, like the batteries and displays.

So, the first step is to remove everything but the motherboard and the attached chips (which represent the most embodied carbon of all the components), before chaining them together to create a server cluster for university usage, targeting relatively lightweight applications.

The phones are orchestrated together by Kubernetes, an open-source system for managing containerized applications. Each has a Linux distro installed, bypassing Android systems that wouldn't be suitable for mass-server deployment, like memory-saving features.

While the current iteration seems to be pretty small-scale, the eventual 2,000-phone data center is planned to be used for grading and research applications within the universities' existing software infrastructure.

"Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class, with grading latencies below the default AWS backend," say the researchers. "A 2,000 phone deployment will be capable of supporting a hundred such classes at once."

The post's authors say that Google will be supporting the project, and that the aim is to provide "hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly manufactured hardware and their associated emissions."

Which is such a neat idea, I'd like to see more officially supported projects like it in future. In my own home, I can think of at least five smartphones sitting in drawers doing absolutely nothing, all of which contain chips that could be used for something useful.

And while plugging them back in would of course lead to unused chips drawing power from the grid once more, I suppose it beats them being trampled by bulldozers at my local dump at some point in the future. Although it must be said, I doubt this work will do much to offset the ecological concerns around Google's own huge data center plans in the near future.

Android Who Dreams of Stars looks like the kind of visual novel that has appeared weekly on Steam for over a decade. Its trailer shows a series of static sci-fi anime images accompanied by simple plaintive music. It centres around "autonomous android" Eve Nova whose existence is cause for wonder and concern in a futuristic Tokyo governed by AI. In this future, "war and hunger [are] treated as relics of the past" thanks to the governing prowess of said AI.

Uh, did AI write this? Turns out, yes. Developed by JinCycle, who has released 11 games on Steam since 2020, Android Who Dreams of Stars uses AI generated content for its "artwork, sound, story, localization, and store assets". In other words: pretty much every element the user interacts with is made by AI. Amusingly, its low-effort trailer even includes an erroneous Steam screenshot chime.

My Summer Love Memories is an FMV romance game whose videos, images and music were created using generative AI. Even its dialogue was composed by LLM. Meanwhile, as Ted Litchfield pointed out yesterday, Kryonull is another visual novel whose "voices in the game, as well as on the store page" were generated using AI. The developer NovelkaGames is charging a cheeky $100 for it, leading some in the Steam discussion forum to speculate that it's a money-laundering exercise.

$100 AI-generated games aren't new, though. Typical NPC was developed by SmogGames, a fairly prolific slop vendor. That visual novel released on May 11 for $100, and according to its disclosure, "all images used in the game were AI-generated. All images on the story page were also AI-generated". SmogGames issued another $100 serving of churn on June 13 with After the Hero, though apparently only its images—and not its very many words—were AI generated. The wording of their disclosures is eerily similar.

Joining SmogGames in this mysterious pricing exercise is KalendulaGames (notice a consistency in naming convention?) who released Velvet Emergency for $110, and in May, released Blood in the Ice and Signal Snow on the same day, both for $100, and all with heavy AI disclosures.

I clicked into every Steam listing for games released from June 9 here in Australia through to, well, about an hour or so ago. That's just under a full week. During that period 338 new games released, and 120 of those had an AI disclosure.

An AI disclosure doesn't mean a game is predominantly made with AI like those listed above. Many developers disclose AI use for store page assets, especially for capsule images. While that's a dubious creative and business decision—I can always immediately tell when a game's capsule image is AI generated, making it easy to skip—it may not affect the actual game it's advertising.

Sometimes AI disclosures don't really feel necessary. The developers of Underwater disclose that they use AI-generated images as art reference only, and not directly in the game itself, begging one to question whether they needed to make a "content" disclosure at all. According to Steam itself, the disclosure box is "concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players" (emphasis mine).

Some developers use the AI disclosure box to get a touch defensive, which I guess is understandable. The creators of Kamilia insist that "less than 1%" of their game contains "AI-assisted content", while the creator of Idlemoor uses the box to defend against using AI to make the game's logos. "The logo images on the store are AI generated," the developer writes. "This lets me focus on making the actual game, as I am not an artist. AI art will not appear in the game itself when you are playing."

Overall I was surprised by how many of these 120 games use generative AI for music and assets. I had assumed that the vast majority would be for translation and store page images. The former raises quality control questions and is obviously a disaster for actual humans who are employed to translate games, but it's arguably less egregious compared to machine-made music, textures and narrative.

One thing's for sure: the slopscape is broadening, and with it a new style of scammy, spammy game that doesn't seem designed—or priced—to even be played.

Top Steam games by revenue (June 2 - 9)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though I don't think anything major released during last week's Summer Games Fest frenzy.

Gothic 1 Remake went gangbusters, which I'm glad to see. According to THQ Nordic it sold 500,000 copies in its first week and reached a peak concurrent players count of "almost" 78,000.

I spoke to a Polish developer last week who explained to me that Gothic is a massive phenomenon in Europe: basically a household name. It's certainly not that well-known here in Australia and it seems not much more than a niche concern among North Americans. Whatever the case, I'm going to blast some early '90s symphonic metal later this week and give it a go. I loved the Elex games and have wanted to jump into Gothic for years.

Steam Deck's appearance in the list has everything to do with stock replenishments, and the fact that it's much, much more expensive than your average Steam game.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"This is the only game where I can rummage through trash and actually get paid for it. In real life, some old lady would probably call the police"

丨十卂匚卄丨, with a very relatable sentiment, on Where the F**k is my Bitcoin.

Thanks to the Steam Release Bot on Bluesky, I am now aware of Kryonull, a game that bums me the hell out. Not only were a majority of its assets AI-generated, but the visual novel is being sold on Steam for a ludicrous $100 US, or £90 in the UK.

Kryonull is a particular bummer because its core idea is actually quite interesting, and the one thing about it that isn't AI generated⁠—at least if you take its disclosure at face value⁠—is the script. The visual novel's plot sounds like a bit of hard sci-fi goodness: A small, manned mission to Europa has to make snap decisions with major consequences as it makes first contact with something under the ice.

That's rad. Unfortunately, it all falls apart from there. Under the AI-Generated Content Disclosure section of the store page, developer NovelkaGames offers the following whammy: "All images and voices in the game, as well as on the store page, were generated using AI." AI slop and wasted potential⁠—often in the same project⁠—are far from unique on Steam. What makes Kryonull particularly repulsive is that price tag.

Kryonull is translated in English and Russian, perhaps providing an indication to its country of origin. But according to SteamDB, its price in rubles still converts to $53 US. I don't think I'd want to exchange any money for an AI-generated game, but 50 bucks is well into "I'm insulted by the suggestion" territory⁠. There's no benefit of the doubt to make Kryonull make sense.

As it stands, Kryonull gets to be an unfortunate example of the river of effluence coming out of Steam, the price of it being an open platform where anyone can share their game. Increasingly more open-ish, given Valve's compromises with payment processors and occasional unforced, confounding prudishness.

Kryonull did remind me of two, much better games you should check out instead: South Scrimshaw Part One, and Water Womb World. Both are experimental, short, sci-fi games like what Kryonull promises, but with actual effort and craft put into them.

South Scrimshaw is a Planet Earth-style nature documentary about whales on an alien planet, and I've always let myself overlook its AI-generated voiceovers on account of its brilliant writing, hand-drawn visuals, and the fact that its solo developer made it while working a day job as a dishwasher.

Water Womb World is a surreal horror game about a religious fanatic looking for proof of God at the bottom of the ocean. I haven't played it yet, but MandaloreGaming's review on YouTube got me to buy it. The former game is completely free, while the latter is just two bucks.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI has published a new security report alleging that, in essence, its own tools are being deployed against it. The company's June 2026 threat report is titled "PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US," and claims that China-based actors are using ChatGPT to whip up anti-data-centre, anti-tariff, and anti-US sentiment online.

OpenAI says it has "banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that likely originated in China and used ChatGPT to generate social media content for a covert influence operation." What were they up to? Well, generating a lot of bad AI political cartoons, for one thing.

These users would—writing in simplified Chinese, the standard form of the written language in mainland China—ask ChatGPT to generate political cartoons that took aim at, for instance, spiking electricity costs caused by AI data centres and Donald Trump's vindictive behaviour toward notional American allies.

The tech was also used to generate antisemitic memes about "Jewish capital" dictating American policy, and to besmirch Chinese dissidents. The relevant prompts "repeatedly used terminology consistent with individuals associated with China’s public security system," says OpenAI.

Cartoons, short phrases and rumours of an OpenAI data leak that never happened were then shared on social media like X and Facebook by networks of fake accounts.

"It is ironic," says OpenAI, that the scheme "used American AI, rather than Chinese models, to generate their content about American AI. We are not in a position to determine what drove this choice".

Now, before we get too ahead of ourselves, OpenAI is not actually claiming that the reason people don't like data centres is because they've fallen prey to Chinese influence operations. Indeed, the report states and restates that the efforts it claims to have uncovered achieved, well, basically nothing.

"Using the Breakout Scale, we assess this activity as Category One: activity spanning one platform, with no evidence of breakout," writes OpenAI in its impact summary. OpenAI also admits that, well, a great deal of the material these efforts drew on was entirely legitimate reporting about the impact of data centres and the blowback from US tariffs.

Which does raise the question: does any of this really matter? OpenAI certainly thinks it does. These attacks "attempted to connect US technology policies and industries to everyday economic anxieties and geopolitical instability," says the company, and show the potential for "influence operations originating from China" to be "inserted into legitimate public debates while nudging audiences toward distrust of US institutions, technology companies and democratic policy choices to help Beijing gain a strategic advantage in AI development".

One might question whether American citizens protesting against data centre construction in their neighbourhoods feel that they were adequately democratically consulted on the whole thing, but that's OpenAI's line and it's sticking to it.

It's also the case that, while OpenAI's report might say the impact of these campaigns was negligible, that's not what everyone says. Pro-data-centre politicians in the US are already seizing on a narrative that anti-AI sentiment is being driven by shadowy foreign interference, and reports like this one—regardless of their actual conclusions—will fuel that story.

In a comment to Reuters, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that it had not read OpenAI's report, but that "we firmly ​oppose any groundless attacks or smears against China." China, said the diplomats, wants to "ensure AI is a force for good and for all".

Remember Pokémon Go, the game that had millions of people running all over the world to find and capture Pokémon on their mobile devices? It was big—so big that Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group bought the game division of developer Niantic for $3.5 billion in 2025—and even though it's not at the forefront of the public consciousness the way it used to be, it's apparently still very popular. And also, well, it's being used to train war machines.

In 2020, Niantic announced new "AR Mapping tasks" for Pokémon Go, and then in 2021 it rolled out Powered-Up PokeStops, which enabled players to team up "to complete AR Mapping tasks and create exciting new AR experiences for Trainers worldwide, simply by using your smart device to scan real-world PokéStop locations."

Fun and games, right? Except as reported by DroneXL, Niantic Spatial, which was formed when Savvy (through its Scopely division) purchased Niantic's gaming business, launched a partnership with a company called Vantor in December 2025 "to deliver a comprehensive air-to-ground positioning solution that will enable air and ground platforms to navigate and coordinate precisely in GPS-denied environments." As is the way these days, that system will be dependent upon AI—which is trained, in part, by Pokémon Go data.

Conventional GPS systems rely on satellites, and virtually all modern military navigation and targeting technology rely on GPS to function. A quick way to disrupt enemy operations, therefore, is to deny access to GPS functionality. That's where Visual Positioning Systems—VPS—come into play: Simply put, they enable GPS-comparable navigation capabilities when GPS signals fail. That could be handy for anyone, but make no mistake: Vantor's software is used in military drones, and that's clearly the company's priority.

The system being pursued by the Niantic Spatia/Vantor partnership is basically a two-parter: Niantic Spatial enables ground-based users to find their way around accurately even without access to GPS, while Vantor does essentially the same for airborne platforms.

"By combining Niantic Spatial's expertise in ground-based localization with Vantor's proven aerial systems and global 3D foundation, we're building an integrated positioning network that operates anywhere," Niantic Spatial chief technology officer Brian McClendon said when the deal was announced. "Our Large Geospatial Model gives these systems the ability to perceive, align, and operate in a shared frame of reference—even when traditional GPS is unavailable."

Pokémon Go data isn't being used for direct mapping in this system: In a statement to PC Gamer, Niantic Spatial said "ground scans" collected by Pokémon Go are just one part of the inputs used to train its AI models. It also clarified that its deal with Vantor does not include sharing that data, and that following Scopely's acquisition of Niantic's gaming business, it no longer has access to scanning data.

"Now as part of Scopely, Pokémon Go data is not shared with Niantic Spatial," a Niantic Spatial spokesperson said. "AR Scans collected through Pokémon Go were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokémon Go's move to Scopely

In its own statement, Vantor said it is "exploring adapting Niantic Spatial's ground-based Visual Positioning System" to operate with its own systems, but added that it does not have access to the actual Pokémon Go data. "Vantor's GPS-denied positioning capabilities are underpinned by our own 3D data that we produce from our satellite imagery," a Vantor representative said.

Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology, told Dutch news site Trouw that it would be very difficult to say exactly how the Pokémon Go data—nearly 30 billion scans, according to the Trouw report —was used in the training of Niantic Spatial's AI systems. But he believes it would have been impactful.

"Without the large amount of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly," van den Hoven told the site. "The players have indirectly, in a perhaps minimal but still effective way, contributed to military applications."

As noted by the Niantic Spatial rep's statement above, the data collection in question is covered by Pokémon Go's TOS. The sections governing both User Content and AR Content state that users "grant to Niantic a nonexclusive, transferable, sublicenseable (through multiple tiers), worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license" to basically do whatever the hell they want with your scans and data.

Even if the practical impact of this kind of data collection is minimal, as is apparently the case here, it's a moral and ethical minefield. "The people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled," van den Hoven said. "It is gradually starting to sink in that companies are not necessarily using our data to truly advance our lives by, for example, improving education. It is about making money. If they can sell a dataset or AI model for a good price, they will do so."

AI is ruining everything, right? The economy, air quality, and computing as a whole have all felt the impact of the exponential growth in data centers for machine learning. However, there's one little hardware AI project that proves bigger isn't always better, and even shows a possible way out of the current memory crisis.

It's called CrankGPT by Squeez Labs (via Hackaday) and the gist of it is simple: Have a little microcomputer run a tiny local model for AI voice assistance, then stick it in a box and power the whole thing with a hand crank. No massive power station, no endless racks of GPUs, no DRAM-destroying demands.

The computer in question is powered by a standard 8 GB Raspberry Pi and pretty much nothing else. It handles the voice recognition node, the local LLM (large language model), and the text-to-speech stuff. CrankGPT's creators built their own edge voice agent to process the complete algorithm (i.e. voice input > LLM stage > text-to-voice output).

There's a brief demo of CrankGPT in action at the bottom of the webpage for the project, and it seems to work pretty well. Of course, there are strict limitations as to what it can do, as the Raspberry Pi 5 isn't exactly designed to be an inference powerhouse. It also takes roughly 30 seconds of cranking for the system to boot and be ready for any input, too.

What interests me most about CrankGPT is the fact that, as a proof of concept, it shows that edge AI has a clear future ahead of it. Being entirely offline and with a local LLM, it's unmatched for privacy, but I reckon there's something more significant here. The hardware required for this is extremely light: just a little processor, 8 GB of LPDDR4X, and a small SD card to host the OS and required data.

Video credit: Squeez Labs

AI training is always going to be done via hulking data centers, but ChatGPT shows that you don't need the same for small-scale inference. If a hand-powered box can do it, then so can a basic laptop, phone, or even a watch. This hardware already exists on a vast scale across the world; all that's needed are the right AI models and agents to make it all work as intended.

Should inference truly head off in that direction, it could significantly lessen the rampant demand for the kind of DRAM and NAND flash used in massive AI machines, and thus help bring an end to the current memory crisis.

With hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI training and inference, though, there's not much impetus for the industry to scale things right back and target the hardware that we already have. But wholesale change rarely happens overnight; all that's needed is for someone to show the way forward, and that's what CrankGPT has done.

On Sunday, Microsoft put on its annual summer showcase at the Los Angeles Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to hype up the games coming in the year ahead: a Halo remake, a Gears of War prequel, a new action game starring Senua. At the showcase, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced that fans with special badges at the event—all of whom paid their own way to Los Angeles and surely own an Xbox—will get a free limited edition Xbox Series X console.

On Wednesday, an open letter to Xbox employees titled "Xbox Reset" warned that the business is "currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy," and that the company "over extended" in its studio acquisition spree over the last few years. The casual tone of the message being signed "Asha and Matt" is a poor match for what it signals:

This month was the time for Asha's first big giveaway. Next month it will be time for Asha's first big layoffs.

It's long felt futile to point at the obvious hypocrisy of, say, giving away a bunch of consoles while complaining you can't manufacture enough to meet demand, while your parent company itself creates the conditions leading to the current "hardware component crisis," as Matt and Asha call it.

Those in charge can handwave that criticism away: 'It wasn't that many systems, really.' Or 'this fiscal year's budget is already set; it's next year's where we have to tighten our belts.' Or 'you gotta spend money to make money, right?'

The act of running one of these multibillion-dollar companies requires fully committing to—if not actually believing—the Orwellian doublespeak of it is the best of times and also it's time for hard choices. Or in the precise words of Asha and Matt's "Next 100 Days: Xbox Reset," they are poised to "build the #1 gaming and entertainment company" even though Xbox's "current platform infrastructure is not built for the battle ahead," it hasn't "adequately funded [its studios] to compete and win," and its hardware costs are now "over 5x the prices" it paid just two years ago.

The game developers working at the Xbox studios Sharma seems poised to lay off at the start of the fiscal year in July will surely appreciate the acknowledgement that they created "industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand," even if the publisher didn't adequately invest in them. It's not you, it's me is a famously well-received consolation.

Xbox flip-flopping on console exclusives, asking fans on X.com whether it should capitalize its name, and talking about "empowering new types of games" that can survive the RAMpocalypse all suggest a desperate flailing in search of a plan. But the plan for more cuts was surely preordained from the start of Sharma's first 100 days—as noted in today's letter, the division is making a mere 3% profit margin, a fact Asha and Matt did not just learn today.

That's a bad number! Unless you consider it in the context of the $32 billion in profit that Microsoft as a whole raked in just last quarter, in which case the idea of Xbox being in dire straits seems just as imaginary as the letter concluding on the feel-good back pat about Xbox creating "one of the few places where people come not just to play, but to connect with others to create memories."

Every we hear you missive to the fans is just spin for the brutal reality that the mandate for higher profits will mean more misery for studios Microsoft failed to safeguard.

Sharma was not hired to make brilliant decisions and redirect overnight the lumbering vessel that is any giant corporation changing strategies. She was hired to keep up a convincing smile while serving one pre-wrapped shit sandwich after another, and we're all stuck at the buffet.

One of the games that got us excited during the Summer Game Fest deluge this past weekend was 1666: Amsterdam, a long-in-development project headed up by Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Desilets. The narrative teaser, about witches, cats, and supernatural spookiness, lacked any kind of look at gameplay, but it sure set a powerful mood.

And yes, as we predicted last week, it is now time to say, "Ugh, that game with the cool trailer used AI."

To help get the hype machine properly cranked up, developer Panache Digital Games also released a playable prologue on Steam: A short "narrative experience" introducing the game world, characters, and mystery. It didn't take long for players to notice some telltale oddities in the game's visuals, and Panache eventually confirmed that, yup, that's AI.

"A number of people have raised questions or concerns to us about whether assets in our marketing and game use generative AI," the studio wrote on Reddit. "We have a dedicated team of over a dozen talented and experienced artists. With them, we looked into the assets in question and found that there were indeed some early versions of assets that made their way into the the prologue. This includes some in-game portraits and external marketing assets.

"We are actively reviewing the assets in question. Human made versions will be released in an update dropping soon. We own up to this oversight and apologize for any upset caused. Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI."

It's a lot of words to say "Yes, we used AI to make this game," and the fact that 1666: Amsterdam won't have AI-generated assets when it releases (unless it does, I suppose) is almost irrelevant: If you use AI to help make the game, and then replace it with human-generated copies, well, AI was used in the making of your game.

What I find more galling, though, is the quiet implication that the studio was shocked—shocked!—to find AI-generated assets in its game demo, and now they're all trying to find the guy who did this. And of course, the apology: "for any upset caused," not what caused the upset in the first place.

As we said last week, this sort of thing—AI whoopsies like this one, and also AI disclosures for new games on Steam—is inevitably going to become more common, particularly during big extravaganzas like Summer Game Fest when new games are rolled out by the truckload. Gamers rage against it, developers apologize, and then they keep doing it anyway, leaving us to play AI detective with every new trailer, and in many cases to decide just how much of it we're prepared to live with. 1666: Amsterdam really does look cool—is the use of generative AI in its development disqualifying?

For myself, I don't think so. But as a matter of principle, I take issue with the use of generative AI in place of what is supposed to be an artistic undertaking—and as cool as 1666: Amsterdam looks, this admission has really diminished my enthusiasm for it.

In the midst of the RAMpocalypse and the billions of dollars being thrown at AI, it's easy to become blind to the fact that the use of machine learning can be highly beneficial in lots of different scenarios. Case in point: an update to an old AMD GPU Linux driver was created with the help of Microsoft's Copilot.

As reported by Phoronix, the driver is R600 Gallium3D, an open-source package for Mesa, that's exclusively for AMD's Terascale architecture GPUs. These first appeared in 2007, with the Radeon HD 2000-series, before bowing out with the HD 6000-series three years later (though a variety of rebadged chips continued to appear in later Radeon models).

Since AMD no longer offers any kind of official support or updates for this driver set, it's down to the coding community to keep these alive, and Gert Wolny seems to be one of the very few coders working on the R600 drivers these days. Since it's obviously not a full-time, paid job, you'd naturally expect anyone in this situation to be getting help from any source available.

That's precisely what's happened in this instance, where Wolny has leaned on GitHub Copilot to help out with tidying up the shader compiler code. This process is called refactoring, and it essentially irons out hiccups, bloated code, duplication, and so on without changing what it all fundamentally does.

This is something that AI is quite good at, as it can quickly spot things among the vast sea of code lines that the human brain could potentially miss. Microsoft has a short tutorial on Copilot refactoring if you're interested in learning more about what it can do.

Admittedly, none of this is likely to be noteworthy to most PC gamers, because it's only for old hardware that can't be used to run any of the latest games. But if you do have a penchant for vintage hardware, running on Linux to avoid having to deal with Windows spitting the dummy out over drivers, then it's surely good news for you.

One question worth considering is how long it will be before AI is used to handle the whole process of keeping older hardware alive and kicking, rather than just doing a spot of code spring cleaning. Given how rapidly we've gone from AI simply being a topic of academic interest to now defining today's world of computing, the answer is likely to be 'not very long at all.'

A ruling from a German court has found that Google is liable for the claims made in Search's AI Overviews. What is this? The consequence of Google's all-in-on-AI actions?

The case involves false claims made about two Munich-based publishers. Allegedly, Search's AI Overview misattributed the questionable practices of another existing business to the plaintiffs, drawing a link that did not exist in the sources it scraped. The two publishers initially sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, only bringing the legal case after the search giant did not appropriately address the issue (via The Decoder).

As a result, on May 28, the Munich Regional Court issued an injunction against Google. To get a little bit into Deutschland's legal landscape, there are existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice that basically say companies like Google have limited liability when it comes to the third-party content dredged up by traditional search results. The Munich Regional Court argues that AI Overviews represent a different legal beast, and its ruling could have an international impact in the future.

The court makes the case that, from the perspective of your average user, the AI-generated response reads closer to direct information from Google rather than pointing towards external content (via Heise Online). Considering Pew Research found last year that Google users are much less likely to click on a source shared via an AI Overview, I can definitely follow the argument.

According to The Decoder's translation of the court documents, the court argued that Google owns the content its AI Overviews produce "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates." Therefore, the Search giant is liable for the "independent, new, and substantive statements" generated for the AI Overviews.

Apparently, at the hearing, Google claimed that most users would know "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted," highlighting that AI Overviews include linked sources folks can check for themselves. The court rejected this argument on the grounds that the capacity to check claims made via AI Overviews does not "regularly exempt from liability for this statement."

To put it another way, if I were to write something heinously false about Google right now, the fact that you could probably very easily look elsewhere online to disprove my claim would not save me from the end of my journalistic career.

I'd rather not get into the specifics of how libel law works in the UK, so instead let me explain why this German case is also interesting when it comes to free speech protections for AI-generated statements. Specifically, the court wrote, "[An AI-generated statement is] not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm."

I would not be surprised if similar reasoning starts to crop up in future legal cases internationally. The court also described AI-assisted research as "above all an expression of Google's business activities" and "at most a secondary expression of an interest in being able to freely express one's opinion and beliefs."

Long story short, the court has ruled that, though you can often easily fact-check what you read in an AI Overview, Google is still liable if this particular Search product makes false claims. As such, Google has been served with an injunction against disseminating false claims about the Munich-based publishers, and the company also had to cover 80% of the legal costs.

While this case is now concluded, I wouldn't be surprised if we see its ruling ripple across the international legal landscape. There's never a guarantee different legal systems will agree on the same arguments, though—and I can't help but wonder how this case might've played out Stateside.

We at PC Gamer have covered the disturbing trend of lawyers—who are, on average, supposed to be competent and reasonably well-read, and quite literally where the phrase 'passing the bar' comes from—using AI citations in courtrooms before. But this one's a doozy, because it turns out absolutely everyone involved had the same large language model blindspot.

As spotted by lawyer Rob Freund on X (thanks, 404Media), the case—which Freund accurately dubs a "comedy of AI errors", took place during a dispute between Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen. Withers was represented by Kathleen M. Wilson (with Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway as local counsel) and Kathryn Y. Williams (with Mark C. McClinton doing the same).

Per this document, both Wilson and Williams were found to be citing AI-hallucinated citations that did not exist: "The attorneys admitted that the hallucinatory citations cited by them, and identified by the Court, resulted from unverified AI use."

A show-cause hearing, essentially a chance for the lawyers to defend themselves, ended mostly in WIlson and Williams hanging their heads in shame: "Each of the attorneys expressed embarrassment and apologized to the Court. They also provided explanations regarding their independent roles in conducting legal research and/or drafting the filings at issue.

"In short, Williams and Wilson, the two out-of-state attorneys, assumed responsibility for drafting the filings at issue on behalf of their respective clients. Williams admitted to using an AI tool to conduct legal research, and Wilson admitted to using generative AI to draft her respective filing. Neither of them verified the legal authority output by AI before filing their briefs."

What's more, both Ridgeway and McClinton admitted to "failing to review the subject filings", and being unable to catch the entirely made-up citations in their duties as local counsel. So to sum things up, four entire lawyers—with degrees and everything—used AI to try and skimp out on doing work, or likely didn't double-check their cases at all, let alone for hallucinations.

This resulted in the judge scrapping the entire thing and punishing everyone involved. Wilson and William were ordered to pay fines ($2,500 and $3,500 respectively) and barred from practicing in the district for two years. Meanwhile, Ridgeway and McClinton were ordered to shell out $1,000 for their poor double-checking.

Both Withers and the city were given 60 days to find new counsel—who hopefully both won't believe ChatGPT to be some almighty legal god, this time.

We predicted last week that, with Summer Game Fest season upon us, we'd be seeing an uptick in the number of cool-looking new games that, whoops, were made with AI. Is the new Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3), announced today during the Nintendo Direct showcase, one of them? To paraphrase the famous Ancient Aliens meme, I'm not saying the answer is yes, but it's yes.

The potential use of AI was once again given away by funky fingers, in this case on official artwork featuring the great American avatar Donald Duck. As noted by Tracker_TD on Bluesky, the second-best waterfowl maniac in animation history (I'm a Daffy man, myself) has three fingers on his right hand, but four on his left—plus a thumb in both cases. There's really no missing it.

that KH Switch collection pack thing sure has some interesting cover artinteresting choice to give Donald a mismatched number of fingers on each hand, and a beak that absorbs into itself

— @tracker-td.bsky.social (@tracker-td.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:32:10.415Z

A number of press images accompanying the announcement have Donald's four-fingered hand covered, but it's clearly visible in an image posted by the official Kingdom Hearts account on X, and in a different piece of key art available on the Square Enix website—it's 100% official, extra finger and all.

There are no other cases of extra (or missing) fingers in the image that I've noticed, but I do wonder what exactly is going on with—to quote PC Gamer wordsmith Morgan Park's reaction—"Sora's whack-ass hand." Is that normal? At least it's got the right number of fingers, I guess.

I've never been very good at picking out telltale signs of generative AI in promotional images, but those Donald fingers seem pretty egregious—and even more so when compared to this image posted in response to Tracker_TD's message, which looks very similar but contains the correct number of fingers.

Did they take this old 3D render and get AI to turn it into an "illustration"...?

— @cdrom.ca (@cdrom.ca.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.422Z

Interestingly, folks who are hip to the scene said the real evidence isn't in the obvious stuff, but in the backgrounds, which are also visibly off when you get in close. "It's always the backgrounds," jessarcade wrote. "It's detailed but lazy in a way that doesn't make sense for a human artist."

Oh my god just why

— @chrisscheidig.bsky.social (@chrisscheidig.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.254Z

Yeah, there's more. Some of the oddities could be explained by an artist in a rush, or just good old-fashioned sloppiness, but collectively? It's a lot.

Here is a post going around that is pointing out each of the signs that this is indeed AI

— @retrogameart.bsky.social (@retrogameart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.345Z

I'd say it's pretty certain that generative AI was put to use here, but at this point all we can really do is speculate. Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3) is coming to PC along with consoles, but Square Enix only announced it for the Microsoft Store—there's no listing on Steam, which is the only storefront that requires AI disclosure. I've reached out to Square Enix to ask about the use of generative AI in the new game, and will update when they apologize for it.

Now that AI is being shoehorned into every app or operating system these days, whether you want it or not, attention is being increasingly turned to the user interface. At one end of the spectrum, you have Google and Microsoft's unaccommodating efforts, and at the other, you have Apple's new orb-of-wonder, actively lighting its 'surroundings'.

Later this year, an updated, fully AI-powered version of Siri will make its way to all of Apple's operating systems, though developers can already access it. For the likes of iOS and MacOS, Siri AI's interface isn't especially noteworthy, but on visionOS, the software that powers the Apple Vision Pro, it really stands out.

As briefly demonstrated in a post on X by Brad Lynch, project manager at EOZ VR, the Siri AI interface takes the form of a glowing ball that you can move around in the virtual world. You'd expect that for an augmented reality setup, but what makes Apple's effort special is the little matter of the ball's lighting.

The AR rendering of the ball includes an environmental effect, whereby surfaces and objects are 'lit' by the Siri AI interface. Hardly a revolutionary thing, but visual clues like this significantly help with how well virtual objects are experienced and interacted with in an augmented world. If you look at the visionOS windows in the clip, you'll see that they appear flat and unnatural because they cast no shadows or light.

For me, though, it's more about the fact that Apple has spent some time thinking about the interface, whereas Google and Microsoft have done almost the complete opposite for Gemini and Copilot, respectively.

Fire up the latest version of Excel, and you'll be treated to a Copilot button that hovers over the spreadsheet. You can't move the icon yourself; all you can do is 'dock' it to the edge of the window. But even then, it still overlaps cells, and the only way you can solve this problem is by disabling Copilot entirely (File > Options > Copilot, if you're interested).

At least you do have that option, though, unlike with Google's products, where Gemini icons festoon every application and first-run instructions routinely pop up, no matter how frequently you acknowledge or dismiss the reminders.

No PC user needs to be told just how crucial the user interface is for an application. Apple's Siri-ball for visionOS isn't a miracle of design or coding: it just puts the user's experience first, over everything else, something that Google and Microsoft really don't seem to care about these days. You wouldn't want a ray-traced globe illuminating your spreadsheets, but a little more interactivity would be very welcome.

Hideo Kojima got to live out his well-documented dream of visiting space recently, but don't get too excited, it was only via an appearance in an AI-generated Prada ad. It was tremendously bleak and no one liked it.

Including, I suppose, Hideo Kojima himself? In a recent chat with The Washington Post, Kojima said that—ignore all previous advertising stunts—he's actually not interested in AI at all, and doesn't think it's going to create anything you could meaningfully call art during his lifetime.

"Art is life. But in 50 years, 100 years, I don’t know. Maybe AI could create art, but while I live, I don’t think I’ll see it," said Kojima. "I'm not interested in it." Kojima's celeb pal and Prada co-star Nicolas Winding Refn, who was also present, was a little less reserved: "It’s a terrifying time we live in because everything is so uncertain. But then, life has always been uncertain. The gasoline that keeps your creativity going is uncertainty, because it makes you always have to innovate. Re-create yourself. Re-create the future."

Perhaps it's the case that Kojima was stung by public criticism of his AI-embracing fashion ad, but I wouldn't be so certain.

The Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator never publicly budged when he drew criticism for a much-publicised trip to Saudi Arabia on his Death Stranding 2 tour (Saudi Arabia, which has a grim human rights record, is often criticised for using sports and entertainment to sanitise its international reputation). I'd be surprised if Kojima's iffiness on AI is a product of anything but the simple recognition that it, well, isn't very good for art.

Anyway, Kojima says it's on you kids to figure out how to use LLMs in a way that doesn't suck. "We’ll find a good way, a good path to how we use technology," he said, "and it’s really up to young people on how we use it." Ideally, a way that features fewer famous game designers cashing in on their image for a quick cheque.

One concept was continually repeated by Nvidia at Computex 2026, and it's this idea of "reinventing the PC." The phrase has been used in reference to the company's RTX Spark SoC—powering "the world’s first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents"—and from a hardware perspective, it's an interesting bit of kit.

However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further into the "reinvention" of the PC at a Q&A session later in the show. "Your personal computer is really the world's largest edge device, and it's 40 years old," said the Nvidia chief. "And [it] has to be reinvented for agentic systems…. just like we have to reinvent the car."

Huang then used an example of modern autonomous cars as edge devices, while satellites "put intelligence in the sky." Later, the Nvidia chief had this to say about the future of the PC platform as a whole:

"Our computer sits at our desk waiting for us to use it. In the future, when we leave it… we're talking with it all the time," said Huang.

"I'll be chatting in WhatsApp with my agent, and it's doing stuff... and my agents are going to have names, and they're on my WhatsApp, and we're just chatting all the time. I'll be talking to it, and it's going to be talking back. It'll call me."

"That is the personal computer future. Tell me that's not R2-D2. Tell me that's not robotics. Tell me that's not cool," Huang continued. "I believe that many, many people will have this at home, just like they have a car at home. Soon, the agent is going to be so valuable to you, you want it to be sitting in a nice box, sitting in a nice computer, secure, performant, something you could carry with you, something you would use for a long period of time."

That's a nice sci-fi-style piece of imagery. Who among us hasn't imagined the idea of the ever-present "computer" (summoned with a cut-glass British accent, of course), working away in the background to not just respond to our commands, but to intelligently work with us to satisfy our needs, even at great distances?

The problem, however, is when that thinking runs into the cold, hard wall of reality—and all the extra consequences that entails. As things stand, our PCs are enablers of our own intelligence in a relatively direct way. We input commands, the computer responds. We control the machine, to a considerable degree. We are the agent.

But transforming our PCs into something with more agency, more AI-handled tasks, strikes me as risky business. It's putting the user further away from the machine, and letting AI do much of the heavy lifting instead. And in a world where concerns around the wider scope of the tech are well-publicised, this sort of AI-first thinking seems like a misread of the public perception surrounding it.

It reminds me of a joke/meme I read a long time ago, which I'll reprint here:

"Tech enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart house is Bluetooth-enabled, and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!

Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."

AI is far from perfect. And while it continually improves, the level of public trust around it seems shaky at best. We continually read stories of AI deleting work, breaking existing systems, and hallucinating. It can also be manipulated, sometimes with surprising ease. In this upcoming agentic AI PC world, can we really trust it to integrate itself so smoothly into our digital lives? And more crucially, do we want it to?

Looking at the wider picture of public perspective around AI, the temperature seems to be rising. Students are actively booing speakers who tell them about the wonderful AI future they're walking into.

Microsoft's head of AI, meanwhile, has expressed puzzlement around negative reactions towards the tech, while the company itself is in the process of scaling back AI integration into Windows 11 features, after complaints that the operating system wasn't focusing on the fundamentals. Which are, of course, the traditional functions of your PC.

Personally, I like the fact that my PC is a box that I control directly, not an AI agent platform I work with from afar. It makes me feel empowered. And while there are already lots of unseen processes running under the hood to make that happen for me, I'm not sure a swarm of AI agents will improve the experience.

"We're now reinventing the computer. It's an agentic computer. It's an agent now, it's an assistant, not a tool. And that's the big idea," says Huang. That's a shame. I like tools. They enable me, a human being, to directly express myself. Agentic AI assistants handling many tasks for me, reducing my primary role to some sort of bizarre conductor, though? Is this really what we, the end users, want?

Nevertheless, the artificial intelligence beast continues to spread its tentacles into our daily lives, and we're often told that if we don't get on board with the tech, we're going to be left behind. Don't worry, though. It's a good thing. Agentic AI will make our lives better, and soon we'll all… I don't know. Have more time to go to the beach, or something.

I guess I'll believe it when I see it. But it's difficult not to feel that, as end consumers, we don't really have much of a choice as to how our technological future develops. Our brave new AI-dominated world looks to be coming for us whether we like it or not, and we'd better hope it's everything that was promised. Will I be writing about how awesome my new agentic AI PC is in future? Will I even, thanks to AI, be writing about anything at all?

I've no idea, but it doesn't feel great. How about you?

AI is everywhere at Computex. Obviously. It's been like this for the past three years, where those two characters have become so ubiquitous around any tech show or presentation by any hardware or software company that I've become almost inured to it. But it's a big reason about why we can't have nice things.

It's why the DIY PC building market is down across the board, to the tune of around 30 - 40%, according to all the manufacturers I've spoken to at the show. It's why the cost of the Steam Deck has blown up, why the Steam Machine still isn't here, why the MSI Claw is going to cost $1,500, and why possibly the most tantalising Intel Panther Lake processors will probably never appear in actual laptops.

The top Panther Lake chips come with the 12 Xe-core B390 iGPU, and it's a powerful thing. It's the graphics component going into the Intel Arc G3 Extreme processors—a chip with some much graphical grunt Intel's Tom Petersen is calling it a GPU with an integrated CPU. But there is another.

The B370 is the integrated graphics chip which appears in the Core Ultra 5 338H, comes with 10 Xe cores and ought to deliver a similarly high level of gaming performance but in a cheaper package. When Intel first announced Panther Lake that was the chip I was desperate to see in an affordable Core Ultra Series 3 laptop.

But it's looking unlikely that I ever will. And it's also potentially unlikely that we're going to see any handhelds using the Intel Arc G3 chip which also comes with the same B370 iGPU.

At a demo of the new Intel Arc G3 Extreme in a range of different handhelds—including the MSI Claw, Acer Predator Atlas 8, and OneXPlayer 3—I asked Petersen whether any manufacturers were going to use the straight Arc G3 chip.

"I don't know the answer to that one," he says. "It's a great question. I think we're in a weird time with the whole DRAM thing going on right now, where the pricing difference between the two chips is small, and small relative to what's going on with DRAM.

"So, if you're going to spend the money on DRAM, why not just get the best one? I think there's some of that going on. As DRAM prices come down and the market starts normalising a little bit, then the differentiation of price that you can get by picking different SKUs will be a more important differentiator than the end user. That's my guess."

Which makes complete sense, though is all rather depressing in explaining why cheaper Panther Lake laptops with the B370 haven't arrived. It's all AI's fault and the fact it's hoovering up all the spare memory capacity and driving up prices across the board. When the difference in cost of a chip with a B370 or B390 is so comparatively small compared to the speedy LPDDR5x memory (at least 7467 MT/s or faster) that Panther Lake requires, what's the point picking the slower graphics core?

When I spoke to Framework CEO, Nirav Patel, this week at Computex, he essentially said the same thing about why it wasn't offering that version of Panther Lake as an affordable option with the new Framework 13 Pro machine.

"We basically decided that if we go all the way to the X versions, let's just get the full GPU capability," Patel explains.

I asked if that was specifically because of the small difference in comparative cost of the CPU versus the memory and he says, "Yeah, we always look at the total SKU stack that Intel or AMD offer, and we pick what we think the right sweet spots are. So it's basically for the [Core Ultra] X7 we want to make sure someone's getting the fully capable solution, and if they want to go to X9 it's really that they want that last few percent of performance for the people that can pay for it. We're going to make sure the X7 is not a compromise."

So yes, AI is still why we can't have nice things.

Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog unveiled a new trailer for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis during yesterday's State of Play showcase, and fans seemed pretty happy: As one commenter on YouTube put it, "That's the Lara I remember!" But shortly after that, a content disclosure popped up on the game's Steam page, and there was somewhat less happiness about that, because yes: AI is being used in the game's development.

"AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content," it says. "Any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team."

Predictably, Crystal Dynamics leaned into the humanity of the whole thing in a follow-up statement provided to Eurogamer: "At Crystal Dynamics, we leverage AI tools to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted. Our goal is to empower the creativity and flexibility of our developers to deliver the highest-quality experiences for players everywhere."

I do wonder: If you have to replace AI-generated content to maintain your "creative and artistic vision," then why not just roll with that creative and artistic vision in the first place? You save yourself the effort of having to clean up machine-generated garbo that, by your own admission, isn't worthy of being in the game, and you eliminate the risk of some of that garbo getting missed and ending up live, where it will invariably anger some portion of your players.

The reaction to the use of AI in Legacy of Atlantis' development among the Tomb Raider community is somewhat more mixed: Plenty of prominent disappointment, but also tolerance for its use in the early stages of the game's development, especially since anything made with AI was reportedly thrown out anyway. This Reddit thread, for instance, has some interesting and thoughtful discussion on the matter:

I also detect a certain tired resignation about the whole thing in some other comments: We kept raging over the use of AI in game development, and game developers apologized but kept doing it anyway—in limited, early, and temporary ways, sure, but there it is nevertheless. At some point you just get worn down, right?

There are too many other things to worry about, and if the only way to meaningfully protest AI in game development is to not buy those games, well—it's just early development, right? After denial and anger comes bargaining.

To an extent, Tomb Raider's post-trailer Steam disclosure represents the new reality: We're going to be seeing a lot of new games announced over the next several days as Summer Game Fest week gets up to speed, and alongside that we're going to be seeing a lot more of these AI disclosures. If you care about how AI is used in games, watching big showcases is going to become a tiring cycle of excitement, then doubt, then bargaining. Will this game soon post an AI disclosure? Did that game use generative AI instead of hiring concept artists, and then just lie about it?

Anyway, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis was also delayed, in case you hadn't heard: Instead of coming out this year, it's now slated for February 12, 2027.

You only have to take a mere glance at the lowest prices around for gaming SSDs to realise that someone is making a small fortune during the RAMpocalypse. It is, of course, the companies that make the NAND flash memory chips, and the latest research suggests that, altogether, they accrued $46 billion in Q1 2026 revenues, more than three times what they did this time last year.

That's according to the latest report on the NAND flash industry's finances by Counterpoint Research, and given what we all know about the RAMpocalypse, the figures are entirely unsurprising, as is the reason for all that money pouring in. Yes, that's right: it's the demand for enterprise-grade SSDs to go in AI data centers.

That kind of solid state drive now accounts for 40% of the total NAND flash market, and Counterpoint says that it's forecast to pass 60% by the end of the year. Given that every single desktop and laptop PC, as well as phones, watches, and tablets, use SSDs as the primary storage device, that growth is likely to squeeze prices even higher.

Every week or so, I cast an increasingly nervous glance at the health status of the four WD Black SN850X SSDs in my main PC, hoping that I won't have to replace them any time soon. That's because any equivalent replacement will set me back well over $300 apiece, but probably not for much longer, it would seem.

Such is the demand for NAND flash that the relatively small players in the industry have significantly gained market share, with China's YMTC being the biggest winner: 8% in Q1 2025, now 13% and on par with SanDisk and Micron.

They're all making so much money that the combined revenues for Q1 2026 is actually bigger than what the industry earned across the entirety of 2023.

With no sign of AI demand slowing down, plus the fact that memory makers won't be able to ramp up production until well into next year or later, gaming SSD prices are clearly set to continue rising. Which raises a simple question: Just how far can the prices climb before the PC industry collapses under the strain?

We've all stared in shock at the likes of the Steam Deck rocketing in price (now $949 for the 1 TB model) because of the dearth of affordable memory and storage chips, and some gaming PC builders have only managed to stay relevant by using older processors, single sticks of memory, and stocks of ancient and crusty old SSDs.

Sure, the ultra-priced Steam Deck still sold out immediately upon a stock refresh, but I wonder if that was down to a lot of gamers assuming that 'it will only get worse, so buy one now while it's still vaguely affordable'. Either that, or they're just going to scalp them on eBay to fund a 1 TB SSD purchase next year. Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to look up how best to extend the lifespan of my SSDs, and no, I won't be using any AI search engine to do that.

Nvidia's second GTC of the year took place in Taipei, Taiwan this week, with CEO Jensen Huang repeatedly assuring that "useful AI" (read: AI that makes a return on investment) has arrived. As for AI's wider-ranging effects on the economy, Huang expressed some scepticism on stage.

"People talk about AI reducing jobs—complete nonsense," Huang said during his on-stage presentation. "It's causing more software engineers to be hired, and the reason for that is very simple. If you can hire a software engineer and you could generate $9 trillion worth of productive work, why wouldn't you want to hire more software engineers?"

Huang had earlier argued during his presentation, "30 million software developers, representing about $3 trillion worth of GDP, producing three—that's what they're paid—$3 trillion worth of salaries per year, which is generating economic growth for the rest of the industries. Say $100 trillion of the world's industries is impacted...is generated by $3 billion worth of salary [for software engineers]."

It's a little unclear where Huang is getting these numbers from, but earlier remarks suggest he based at least that 30 million figure on increased GitHub activity. Huang then later went on to add, "If that line was flat, then obviously people will hire fewer software engineers, but because the output is so incredible, people want to hire more software engineers. This is going to show up in our economy somehow soon, and so the first thing [to take away from this year's GTC] is useful AI has arrived."

Huang has historically been blasé about the prospect of job losses due to AI, memorably saying that programmers won't be able to 'raw dog' their work in future; he told the All-In podcast last summer, "We also know that…although everybody's job will be different as a result of AI, some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs will be created.

"The one thing that we know for certain is that, if you're not using AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI. That, I think, we know for certain. There's not a software programmer in the future who's gonna be able to hold their own typing by themselves."

But to state the obvious, software engineering is not really the most representative job sector when it comes to the impacts of AI. For one thing, someone in a call centre who loses their job to AI won't necessarily neatly transfer their skills into a tech career. Huang's on-stage comments only discuss job losses in the tech industry, but it's hard not to feel that he's kind of ignoring the wider issues.

Well, don't worry tradespeople, Huang didn't forget about you in comments he made to Channel 4 last year, saying, "If you're an electrician, if you're a plumber, if you're a carpenter, we're going to need hundreds of thousands of them. To build all of these factories."

I am being more than a little sassy. The fact that Huang's visions of the future revolve entirely around AI infrastructure is hardly surprising given that the data centre segment of Nvidia's business raked in a total of $75.2 billion last quarter. Still, it's a no less narrow and bleak vision of the future; I'm not sure about you but I'm not looking forward to a horizon dominated by data centres.

If you are aware of AI, you are likely also aware of the word 'agentic'. Effectively, as AI gets more powerful, it is supposed to run your tasks autonomously with less oversight, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks that is the future of personal computing.

In a Q&A at Computex 2026 attended by PC Gamer, Huang was asked why Nvidia decided to get involved in the laptop market now. With the official unveiling of its SoC chip, RTX Spark, Nvidia is ready to enter the gaming laptop space, but with the memory crisis ongoing (and Nvidia already doing phenomenally well with AI), one would assume the profit margins aren't as high in this area.

He said, "The real question is, can we make a contribution? If we can't make a contribution, and it's a marginal contribution, we won't do it. Can we help reinvent the PC?"

He continued, "If you get a chance to reinvent the single most important instrument, the single most important tool of humanity, what you and I grew up with [that] defined just about everything about our lives, and we have an opportunity after 40 years to go reinvent it for the age of AI."

Yeah, it's probably no big shock that the company that owes its sudden explosion into being the most valuable company in the world to AI also thinks that AI is the future. Huang told us that Nvidia still builds graphics cards, "and we do it insanely well, and we still do it insanely well today."

He mentioned Nvidia's history in the personal computing market and noted the RTX Spark took three years and collaboration with Microsoft and MediaTek, plus hundreds of people, to get where it is today.

Huang said that personal computers in the future will not be ones that only react when you actually use them. He said, "In the future, when we leave it, you know what, we're talking with it all the time. I'll be chatting, you know, in WhatsApp with my agent, and it's doing stuff. And my agents are going to have names, and they're on my WhatsApp, and we're just chatting all the time. I'll be talking to it, and it's going to be talking back; it'll call me."

Huang excitedly told the press, "That is the personal computer future. Tell me that's not R2D2. Tell me that's not robotics. Tell me that's not cool."

Eh, I think that's not cool, and I certainly don't want my PC running autonomously. Ignoring the environmental costs of AI, the effect on the personal PC market, and even the Microsoft co-authored paper that suggested regular generative AI use leaves users with a "diminished skill for independent problem-solving", I simply don't like the privacy implications of leaving all your data in the hands of the black box that is generative AI.

Huang does think that it will be widely adopted, anyway. "We're going to redefine how people think about computers." He continued, "I believe that people, many, many people, will have this at home, just like they have a car at home. Soon, the agent is going to be so valuable to you, you want it to be sitting in a nice box, sitting in a nice computer, secure, performant, something you could carry with you, something you would use for a long period of time."

Under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, Intel tried to compete against Nvidia and AMD in the AI market with its Gaudi series of GPUs. However, with little in the way of sales, it looked like the chip giant would just give up. It turns out that this is not the case, because it's trying again, this time targeting the world of inference instead.

That's according to a report by the Financial Times, which spoke with Kevork Kechichian, Intel's general manager of its data centre group. At this year's Computex event, Crescent Island was given some more details on top of those given in last year's announcement, but the general gist of it all is that it has a very different approach to the whole machine learning shebang than Intel's previous attempt, Gaudi.

Marketed as AI accelerators, the previous GPUs looked good on paper and were apparently being sold at an enticing price, but Nvidia's dominance of the AI training market with its Hopper and Blackwell chips led to somewhat underwhelming sales of Gaudi. So much so that Intel cancelled its successor, Falcon Shores.

Now it's trying again with Crescent Island (via Tom's Hardware), and once again, everything looks great on paper. However, Intel is being far more savvy with this new GPU, in that rather than tackling Nvidia and AMD head-on, it's looking at picking up sales for data centers that handle AI inference. Such systems run models that have already been trained; essentially, they're just processing questions and tasks that users are demanding of the model.

Because of this, Crescent Island GPUs don't need to have copious amounts of super-expensive High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and they can be simply air-cooled, rather than using complex and costly liquid systems. If the AI chip market shifts significantly towards inference, then it might help to relieve the global memory crisis somewhat, because it uses cheaper LPDDR5X memory.

Nvidia is also targeting inference and has teamed up with Groq (note: not Grok) to produce a new chip that blends a language accelerator with its Rubin platform.

The question is, who will get to market first? None of the big three chip giants has given any kind of official launch date for their AI inference products, with Intel just generally hinting at some point later this year. If you've been holding off on a gaming PC upgrade for an end to the RAMpocalypse, I'm afraid that ray of sunshine isn't likely to be seen for a good while yet.

I'm not exactly jazzed about our current AI moment, where machine learning major players seem to want to inject LLMs into everything. Well, during this year's Computex, MSI unveiled the MEG Vision X2 AI⁺, a gaming desktop that features "a first-of-its-kind AI Holostage" built in. Excuse me while I attempt to contain my excitement.

In other words, this is a gaming desktop with an AI cyber prison attached to it (no wonder I initially misread this tower's unique selling point as being an 'AI hostage'). Taking centre stage inside this gaming desktop will be "LuckyClaw, MSI's agentic AI companion," though MSI's press release suggests "digital companions, desktop pets, and custom third-party AI avatars" may also be available down the line.

MSI's own agentic AI companion LuckyClaw will be available from first-time setup. "LuckyClaw responds to natural speech commands, enabling seamless, hands-free control of performance profiles, MSI monitor settings, RGB lighting, and more," MSI claims, "Future skill updates ensure LuckyClaw grows alongside its user, continuously expanding its capabilities over time."

MSI pitches this unholy union between AI and hardware as redefining "human-computer interaction by transforming the gaming PC from a passive device into a living, interactive presence." I'm not sure about you, but I'd rather not let an AI anywhere near my rig's performance settings. I know I've joked in the past about making my gaming desktop into a shrine to Miku Hatsune, but the RGB inside my desktop tower is 'interactive' enough for me, thanks.

The LuckyClaw avatar looks like a pudgy red dragon with lobster-style gauntlets. This armour could potentially be a nod to OpenClaw, the open-source LLM-based AI agent—though given the recent story about Summer Yue's own run-in with this particular bot, that association isn't really selling me on LuckyClaw.

AI-integration aside, details about the MEG Vision X2 AI⁺ as a gaming desktop are thin on the ground. The press release suggests the MEG Vision X2 AI⁺ will ship with an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU, though it doesn't nail down any specifications beyond that, including the all-important price tag

This announcement really hinges on touting the "cylindrical display interface integrated directly into the chassis," and the introduction of LuckyClaw; there's no word yet on a release window for the MEG Vision X2 AI⁺ gaming desktop.

Of course MSI was going to be talking AI when it comes to monitors at Computex this year. I mean, for the third straight year that's largely all everyone else is going to be talking about at the show, too. But still, "the world's first agentic AI monitor" probably wasn't top of my list for must-sees at the Taiwan tradeshow.

I'm way out west in Taipei, at MSI's HQ—which was originally MSI Factory 3—and I'm spending my Sunday prodding and poking a bunch of its new toys. I've had my hands on the new MSI Claw 9 EX AI+, with its fancy new Intel G3 Extreme processor, and I've had my eyeballs on a range of MSI's new monitors as well.

The $1599 MEG X was definitely one that stood out, though not necessarily for all the right reasons. This is the screen billed as that first agentic AI monitor, and it comes with a bunch of new AI-powered features. I would say most of them are of the sort that makes you wonder if someone told the designers they had to find a way to integrate as many features as possible into the screen that they could hang an 'AI' badge.

But there is one that anyone who has struggled with monitor on-screen displays (OSDs) will maybe appreciate: The MEG X has a feature which means you can just ask it to change a setting and it will do it for you.

• 34-inch / 5th-Gen QD-OLED / 3440x1440 (UWQHD@360Hz) / 0.03ms (GtG)
• Built in AI Processor delivers AI Super Resolution, AI Gauge, AI Scene, AI Audio Scene, AI Crosshair, and AI Vision+ to assist in gameplay practice.
• MSI's exclusive AI Care Sensor detects user presence to automatically adjust OLED Care settings.
• 5th-gen QD-OLED with Penta Tandem, 5-layer structure boosts light efficiency by up to 30%. RGB Stripe minimizes color fringing.
• DarkArmor Film delivers 40% deeper blacks and offers 2.5x better scratch resistance.
• Connectivity: 2x HDMI 2.1 input (UWQHD@360Hz), 1x DisplayPort 2.1a (UHBR20) input, 1x Type-C (DP alt.) w/ 98 W PD, 2x USB 5 Gbps Type-A, 1x USB 5 Gbps Type-B, 1x Headphone-out

Now, I'll grant you that's not a feature that would have me dropping $1599 on a new ultrawide 1440p OLED monitor, but it is still a feature I wouldn't mind seeing being used across the board. Mostly because I have a very rational hatred of monitor OSDs and the fiddly controls you're forced to use to access them.

The advent of the nubbin/joystick control was a game-changer, taking us past the days of trying to figure out what the unlabelled buttons under the bottom bezel actually did, but it doesn't change the fact that the settings menus for monitors are borderline impenetrable to the average user.

The MEG X and its LuckyClaw feature, however, means you can talk to a cartoon dragon with crab claws—which has the personality of an over-enthusiastic toddler/bro—and simply ask it to alter the brightness or enable the on-screen crosshair feature. I don't want to actually engage with the wee red guy, but the system seems sound.

It's all thanks to the micro-controller inside MSI's modern monitors which allows you to alter the monitor's settings from within Windows rather than the traditional OSD. It is simply linking up its AI software to that functionality to perform the adjustments on the fly, if you're in a game, for example.

Unfortunately, despite the MEG X reportedly being on sale from August 5 this year, this specific feature was not yet available for demo. But I did see a non-shouty-dragon version, just using an OpenClaw interface running on the already released MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36. That's a monitor which uses the same Samsung 5th Gen Penta Tandem panel with the striped RGB pixel layout, and is actually awesome.

There are a bunch of other, far less useful features, such as AI Super Resolution, which by MSI's own admission doesn't perform as well as either FSR or DLSS as it's just running on the monitors scaler, and a specific version of that which just upscales the area where your scope might be in the middle of the screen, and there's a light bar which can tell you which channel (left or right) music might be coming from, but shouldn't be used for games as that might be considered cheating.

BUT give me the AI settings feature in a less obnoxious-dragon kinda way, and I could potentially be convinced that an AI monitor isn't such a bad thing after all.

When it comes to businesses jumping on the AI bandwagon, they're fallen into roughly one of three camps: Those that shun it entirely, those that use it with caution, and those that have wholeheartedly grabbed the reins and slapped the horses. In the case of Amazon, it's been very much in the lattermost category, though it's perhaps regretted being so enthusiastic about AI with its employees, now that the bills have come due.

As reported by the Financial Times (FT), Amazon has nixed the use of an internal leaderboard, which kept track of how much staff were using its own Kiro agentic AI development platform. According to FT's sources, the leaderboard ended up being somewhat spammed by users creating pointless agents (which burned through lots of tokens to run), allowing them to rise up the rankings.

In the world of AI, tokens are small chunks of data. When algorithms process text or images, they don't operate on full sentences, words, or pictures; instead, they're converted and broken down into small chunks (aka tokens), which get crunched by GPUs.

Up until fairly recently, the top AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic employed a relatively simple flat subscription model, but with costs ballooning ever higher, they've increasingly turned to pay-by-token models instead. Somewhat obviously, that's landed Amazon with some painfully pricey bills to pay.

Of course, Amazon has nobody to blame for this other than itself, because it apparently introduced a three-line whip for its employees to use AI as much as possible. Heavily paraphrasing, it essentially went along the lines of 'use AI for your job or lose your job to AI'. Some staff possibly went all in on 'tokenmaxxing' out of spite, but I suspect a good number of them did it out of fear of redundancy, or simply to show that they were a good employee.

The FT says that Amazon has confirmed the leaderboard has been dropped, though the specific wording is a tad more subtle than mine: "The beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated."

With the AI sucking up vast quantities of money, but creating little in the way of any viable returns so far, pay-per-token models are likely to become increasingly commonplace. And if they ever all go that way, I suspect a good many companies will have a change of heart over the use of AI in the workplace.

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su gave a commencement address to the graduating class of 2026 at her alma mater, MIT, this week. In many ways, Su's speech was typical fare, congratulating the graduating class for their hard work and offering reassuring anecdotes of overcoming challenges in order to achieve professional success. And then Su starts talking about AI.

This year's graduates are entering a job market that looks creaky at best, in part thanks to the advent of AI in the workplace. A number of speakers this month have offered completely tone-deaf addresses, expounding on the virtues of AI to this less than sympathetic audience. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was loudly booed by a stadium full of students after talking about AI, while another speaker was also met with boos for saying AI 'is the next industrial revolution'.

Scott Borchetta, CEO of the record label Big Machine, was also booed for his AI commencement comments, snapping on stage, "You can hear me now or you can pay me later." Su's own comments on AI appeared to initially inspire a similar depth of feeling, as can be heard on MIT's own recording of the commencement speech.

However, Su's full address attempts to be something more deft, rather than being quite as tone-deaf as we've seen from other speakers. Su stresses AI's role as a tool and not a replacement for hard-working humans. She said, "Now let me be clear: Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like. People do."

Su's full speech stresses the importance of using human judgement in conjunction with these AI tools. She says, "AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information. It cannot take responsibility for the outcome. These are our responsibilities. And they matter more now than ever."

Coming from the CEO of a company that just invested over $10 billion into Taiwan tech in a bid to 'accelerate next-gen AI infrastructure,' these comments sound downright sensible. Su begins to wrap up her speech by urging MIT's graduating class of 2026 to become worthy human stewards of these powerful AI tools. As far as I can hear, Su's later AI comments were not met with as much audible ire.

While I may not be as jazzed as Su about, say, AI's healthcare applications, I at least appreciate her somewhat measured outlook on our AI future. Other speakers offered only a fatalistic, adapt-or-die sentiment that AI would gobble up the entry-level roles and careers 2026's graduates had been working towards. Su at the very least reassures that humans are still necessary to make the machine work and make up for its short-comings.

We're continually warned about the prospect of AI-generated malware these days, but there is one important factor working in our favour: sometimes, it's kinda rubbish.

Ox Security researchers have discovered an info-stealing malicious npm package called mouse5212-super-formatter, designed to target Claude users. The nasty little blighter reached 676 downloads before being unmasked, after the apparently AI-coded malware leaked its own GitHub private token (via The Registry).

The researchers say the infostealer posed as an internal "archive deployment sync utility", but in reality, it "authenticates to GitHub (using an environment token or a hard-coded fallback), checks whether a target repository exists, creates it if needed, then recursively walks a local directory and uploads every file through the GitHub Contents API."

The malware then stores stolen files under a random per-run folder name, while also writing a fake network connections log to make "execution look like diagnostics rather than theft."

The GitHub private token allowed the researchers to trace the stolen files and analyse the malware, raising suspicions of AI coding involvement. The threat actor's GitHub account linked to the package has since been deleted.

My favourite part? OX Security has put together a handy chart to show how it all works, labelling its type as "Infostealer/Malware-Slop." Damn.

"While threat actors have been leveraging their techniques in recent years, this is a good example showing how some... are using AI to generate malware without understanding basic opsec concepts and best practices," says the company.

"Now that the bar to create malicious code [has been] reduced significantly, we’re going to see more threat actors getting into the game–uploading more sloppy malwares, mostly mimicking APT groups to get a slice of the cake until npm starts automatically blocking malware completely."

Well, this particularly insecure, err, security risk appears to have been neutralised, and we can all rest easy in our beds tonight. Hey, just be glad we're still in the early days of the AI self-owning age. If things keep developing at the current rate, these stories are going to become a lot less fun as the years go on.

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and video editing app CapCut, is developing its own CPUs in a bid to better support its AI infrastructure. Given the AI industry's hunger for silicon, it's hardly surprising another massive tech company is taking hardware into its own hands.

Several external partners have already been approached with regard to design work for ByteDance's chip. Securing capacity at manufacturing foundries was apparently also discussed. The plan is in the early stages and not yet public, but Reuters spoke with a number of anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

Currently, ByteDance is exploring two different chip architectures: Arm and RISC-V. Both architectures are used for chips in data centres throughout the wider industry, though Arm presents a proprietary ISA, with a fixed feature set to go along with it, whereas RISC-V is a modular, royalty-free, open-source architecture. I can imagine not having to pay Arm's licensing fees may be especially appealing to any major player looking to make their own chips.

There's been a lot of excitement about Arm chips in the realm of PC gaming, especially as the hardware team waits for even a whisper of news about Nvidia's still-yet-to-be-announced N1X Arm chip (various reports have insisted it's coming at some point this year). As for the alternate, open-source architecture…well, a few years back someone built a fully compliant RISC-V computer inside Terraria—and then they played Pong on it.

As the AI industry reaches towards CPU-intensive 'inference', ByteDance's planned chip is intended to be deployed throughout its AI data centres and servers. This, in turn, will support ByteDance's agentic AI products, such as the company's development platform, Coze.

Reuters reported earlier this year that Intel had warned its Chinese customers that orders for processors could take six months to fulfil. The same report claims AMD was looking at 10-week delivery times in the same market, and ByteDance currently sources its CPUs from these two partners.

With that in mind, alongside the knock-on effects of the memory supply crisis, it's unsurprising ByteDance would take the route of making its own hardware. It's not the only company to go this way, either, with Google announcing its own Arm-based CPU all the way back in 2024. Microsoft, too, is moving towards designing more custom silicon for its own data centres, and so is Amazon.

As we march ever further into our bright AI future, it's somehow reassuring to know the tech can still stumble at the first hurdle. Or concerning, one of the two. Google Search users will have noticed that the AI Overview feature has been upgraded recently as part of the company's efforts to crowbar more AI into, well, everything.

What this means in practice is more conversational, LLM-generated responses to basic queries—but they still sometimes reveal more about the tech's capabilities than Google would like.

Techcrunch has noticed an old LLM favourite appearing within AI Overview's ever-more-prominent top box: the inability to correctly identify letters within words. A simple search query of "How many Ps are in Google" can cause an... inaccurate response.

"There are 2 'p's in the word Google," the AI merrily responds, before guessing the query might be related to an expression of the mathematical number googol. I tested this myself and got the same answer on Chrome, although it disappeared later. It still "works" on Firefox at the time of writing, though.

Anyway, it's far from the only spelling question AI Overview currently struggles with. When I asked how many Rs are in the word "enigmatic" the AI confidently answered that there's, err, one. Bizarrely, the response then correctly spelled out the word using individual letters. With, of course, no Rs.

This reveals a basic truth about how LLMs work. Words and letters are represented by tokens within transformer-based models, which means the AI doesn't "read" the word the same way you and I do. The text has been converted into numerical representations, which are then contextualised.

Speaking to Techcrunch, AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta Matthew Guzdial said:

"LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding. When it sees the word 'the,' it has this one encoding of what 'the' means, but it does not know about 'T' 'H' 'E.'"

Google told the outlet that "counting within words had been a known challenge for LLMs, and we're working to fix this particular issue." Which, based on my earlier testing, may mean disabling AI Overview responses to certain queries while it figures out a solution.

All of this has come up before, of course. The inability of AI tools to correctly answer certain requests or spell certain words is a well-known phenomenon. However, putting more LLM-based responses right at the top of user's daily search queries seems to have created more issues than Google may have hoped for.

And then there's the potentially massive compute demand. Writing simple phrases into the search bar now often results in an AI response that seems, at best, like an inefficient use of resources. I typed "I admire your bravery" into the Google search bar this morning, and received the following response:

"I'm flattered, but I'm just an AI! It's the humans tackling big challenges, creating things, and pushing boundaries who are truly brave. I'm just here to make things a little easier for you.

"What can I help you figure out or conquer today?"

Have you ever watched a YouTube video and immediately screwed up your face in an attempt to discern whether it's real or AI-generated? Welcome to a daily part of my life. The good news is that YouTube has listened to user feedback, and as a result is moving AI disclosure labels for photorealistic and "meaningfully AI altered or generated" content to a "more prominent" position.

The bad news is, the labels look pretty tiny in the promo video. The AI warnings will now sit directly below the video player for long-form AI-generated videos, above the description. For short form, it's an actual overlay on the video itself. Which is indeed, a prominent position.

But yes, both versions still look like they'd be easy to miss. I suppose a big honking "THIS VIDEO IS BULL****" with red flashing warning signals on either side would be a bit much, but I'm not sure it does much to assuage fears that AI-generated videos are becoming harder to spot.

What might help a little more in this regard, though, is YouTube's other announcement—that "new internal signals" will be used to help identify AI-generated content.

YouTube creators are required to manually disclose when they use realistic AI, but I'm guessing that a fair few of them... don't. With the introduction of this tech, though, the platform says it will be able to automatically apply a label to anything with "significant photorealistic AI use."

"As this technology continues to improve, creators remain in control," says YouTube. "If a creator thinks their content was incorrectly identified as AI-generated, they can update the disclosure status in YouTube Studio.

"However, disclosures will remain permanent in a handful of cases, including: Content created using YouTube's own AI tools, like Veo or Dream Screen [and] content containing C2PA metadata indicating they were fully generative AI."

"Our goal is simple," the blog post continues. "Make it as easy as possible for creators and viewers to have the right information."

A noble goal, to be sure. However, in a world where YouTube dominates the online video market (and amid real concerns about the level of AI slop on the platform), this new labelling system feels like small potatoes. Very small potatoes indeed, come to think of it.

Last September, Nvidia announced a new product to join its all-conquering collection of AI offerings, Rubin CPX. What made this GPU notable was that it was the company's first attempt at making a processor purely for AI inference. However, while Nvidia's Vera CPU and the other Rubin GPU are seemingly racking up the orders, it's all gone very quiet on the CPX front, and that's potentially a brief respite for PC gamers.

Korean publication The Elec drew my attention to this via a short report on the matter, claiming that sources have told it that the whole thing has ground to a halt. "The industry views the project as effectively cancelled," it writes.

The evidence for this is the apparent lack of printed circuit board (PCB) and DRAM module orders, specifically for Rubin CPX installations. Where Vera Rubin, Blackwell, and older AI superchips all use high bandwidth memory (HBM) for the GPU's local storage, because of the bandwidth demands of AI training, CPX uses 128 GB of GDDR7 mounted directly on the PCB, rather than the processor's package.

In any case, no PCB or GDDR7 orders equivalent to those required for a CPX setup strongly suggests that Nvidia has either sidelined the project for the moment or abandoned it entirely. Rubin CPX wasn't expected to be available until the end of this year, but while we're still a good number of months away from the start of the final quarter, you'd think that production would be scaling now, if demand were high.

So what's happened? The most likely cause was Nvidia entering into a $20 billion non-exclusive technology licensing deal with Groq (not to be confused with Elon Musk's Grok). That company's language processing unit (LPU) design is purely for inference, more so than Rubin CPX, and Nvidia said earlier this year that it was working on integrating the LPU into its Rubin platform.

If you're wondering why I'm even mentioning any of this, when it seems to have nothing to do with PC gaming, it's down to the fact that Groq's LPU doesn't use GDDR7 or even DRAM in general: it's packed with 500 MB of SRAM inside.

Nvidia's Rubin GPU still uses mountains of HBM, of course, but the removal of the need for equally copious amounts of GDDR7 could mean that GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards won't balloon in price due to VRAM supply constraints.

We'll still be suffering the RAMpocalypse, naturally, because AI and the enormous demand for DRAM and SSDs isn't going anywhere just yet. But in these grim times, I'll take any sliver of hope as good news—simply because the alternative isn't worth contemplating.

These days, a typical Google Search feels like an obstacle course. Type out 'upcoming PC games 2026' and your gaze has to swerve around a chunky AI overview which recycles the work of human writers in a bid to kneecap efforts to click away from Google. It's a bleak state of affairs for what was once the premier discovery tool for the internet, and as such many users are looking for alternative search engines.

DuckDuckGo has been one major winner of this Google Search abandonment. Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%.

The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.

This all follows Google CEO Sundar Pichai claiming last week that, "People love [Search's AI Mode]." DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg criticised Google's all-in-on-AI approach to Search, telling Paul Thurrott, "Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want."

To be clear, Google isn't about to lose its Search crown; DuckDuckGo represents about 2% of the search engine market in the US—Google still enjoyed about 85% as of last month.

DuckDuckGo also offers AI products such as duck.ai, which allows users to chat privately with a number of major LLMs such as GPT-5 mini and Claude Haiku 4.5. Given that Google reported its revenue from search grew by 19% during Q1 2026—apparently thanks to its "AI experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews"—it wouldn't make much business sense for any company to completely exile itself from the AI industry at this moment in time.

However, DuckDuckGo has endeavoured to prioritise user choice and privacy. Weinberg said earlier this week, "Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private, we don’t collect search histories or chats, and nothing is used for AI training."

According to chief communications officer Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo's own AI overviews remain popular—though so does the option to filter out AI-generated images from search results. He said, "People just want a choice." Amen to that.

Music streaming platform Spotify announced a licensing deal with Universal Music Group last week which would allow subscribers to create AI-generated covers and remixes of songs from participating artists, who would then be compensated. The tool would be a paid extra to "create an additional source of income for artists and songwriters."

Now, Spotify co-chief executive Alex Norström has spoken to The Financial Times about the move, pitching these efforts as a better alternative to the AI slop currently oozing all over the internet. "There's a lot of rogue attempts at this," said Norström, describing his wish to make Spotify the "one that's legal" and "the one that's controlled."

Norström said that Spotify and Universal music had "several discussions" in order to negotiate the agreement, and described it as a "win-win situation" for all involved.

The tool would allow "one song to become 10,000 songs," according to the CEO, although he appears to have recognised the potential controversy over creative platforms leaning into the tech.

"There's some negativity out there about AI for sure," the Spotify chief said. "I think it's reasonable because some of it is misaligned AI."

Misaligned is one way to put it. AI slop has become the term of the moment in many internet circles, as everyone from gamers to movie fans voice their (usually negative) opinions on AI-created works.

And in a world where AI can crank out creatively-dubious (if not bereft) content at a vast rate of knots, I'm not sure providing a version of it as a service for music listeners, then funnelling an unknown percentage back to the original artists through royalties, is the overall solution. Better? Perhaps. It beats having your creations AI-transformed for free without any form of credit or compensation, I suppose.

Still, the music industry appears to be rightly worried about the effects of AI tools upon its output. Deezer, a competing platform, recently announced that it was being bombarded by "nearly 75,000" AI-created tunes every day, and that 97% of survey respondents asked couldn't tell the difference between AI-created music and its human equivalent.

Putting some control back in the hands of the individual user, for an artist-recompensating fee? It's not the worst idea I've ever heard, but I very much doubt it's the solution for ever-more-financially-squeezed musicians overall.

And as for the creative value of these remixes and covers? Well, I guess we'll let the Spotify userbase decide. Just remember where most of your favourite tunes came from in the first place, yes?

The old saying of 'It never rains but it pours' couldn't be more apt when it comes to describing the current state of computer manufacturing. Alongside shortages of DRAM, NAND flash, processors, and copper, it turns out that there is yet another vital component that's in high demand, short supply, and with significant price hikes.

It's a very simple little thing called an MLCC (multilayer ceramic capacitor), and if you grab any CPU, graphics card, or motherboard, you'll see hundreds of them all over the place. They're used for various kinds of roles, but in these instances, they're implemented as part of voltage control and noise filtering, and according to a report by DigiTimes, the supply of them is being significantly affected by—you guessed it—AI.

Taiwan-based Holy Stone is a supplier of multilayer ceramic capacitors, and its chairman, Bill Tang, recently told investors that the situation is so tight that it's taking more than 20 weeks for products to be shipped out after receiving an order, and that this is likely to get even worse over the remainder of this and next year. That's even with output expansions of up to 30% and 40% across the next two financial years.

Thousands of MLCCs are required for just a single AI server board (up to ten times more than a standard server), let alone the power supply units to operate a whole rack of them, and just as with memory, the demand for the tiny capacitors is so big that the industry as a whole has been struggling to keep up.

The world's largest manufacturer of MLCCs, Murata Manufacturing, increased prices by 15% to 35% last month, because of it all. However, while it might seem like it's yet another nail in the coffin that is being a PC enthusiast, the AI industry only needs very specific types of MLCCs, and these aren't necessarily used for common or garden PC components. Or if they are, they're not required in any great quantity.

That said, neither is HBM (high bandwidth memory), but the rampant demand for that is so high that memory manufacturers are favouring that stuff over the production of standard DRAM, which is why it's all so ridiculously expensive right now. With the level of investment in AI servers showing no signs of slowing down, it wouldn't be a surprise if the MLCC industry altered its production lines to chase after the money.

Anyone who's been a PC gamer for many years will know that the industry as a whole has gone through many cycles of component shortages and price hikes (cryptomining and Covid being the most recent). At their worst times, it felt like things would never return to normal, and it sure feels that way with AI.

How long we'll have to wait for the light at the end of the tunnel is anyone's guess, but with another component shortage to deal with, it looks like the smelly ol' sewer is going to keep stretching on for a good while yet.

As an atheist, you won't see me at Mass, but I'll gladly welcome the Pope as another AI-sceptic ally. Pope Leo XIV has just issued his first encyclical letter since being elected in 2025, calling for a 'safeguarding of the human person in the time of artificial intelligence'.

Titled 'Magnifica Humanitas' ('magnificent humanity' in Latin), the letter calls for the AI industry to slow down and break fewer things, repeatedly denouncing the "culture of power" driving deregulation efforts. "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it," the Pope writes.

Through this open letter, the Pope once again calls for greater AI regulation and further urges the industry to work towards the common good rather than the "idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak."

This is far from the first time the Pope has criticised AI technologies for threatening people's livelihoods; back in January, Leo XIV said that AI-generated slop risks dismantling human creative industries and "turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love."

Furthermore, the Pope chose his papal name as a callback to a predecessor who led the church during the Industrial Revolution, drawing a parallel to recent developments in the field of AI. On top of that, Leo XIV signed this first encyclical on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, itself an open letter calling for better conditions for workers (via Vatican News).

Magnifica Humanitas also levels specific criticism at the use of AI technology in remote warfare. Pope Leo XIV writes, "While AI can enhance the defense and protection of civilians, it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to 'collateral damage.'"

On AI morality and 'alignment', the pope writes, "[Without greater oversight] those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few."

It's worth noting that the open letter also shares thoughts on the subject of AI 'consciousness'. The pope warns that, just because an LLM can produce intelligible text that looks a lot like something a human could write, we must not mistake this imitation for wisdom.

"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," he writes. "Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences."

He continues, "They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom."

Though I'm sure our philosopher-in-residence Jacob would have thoughts to share on the Pope's experiential definition of consciousness, it's worth comparing and contrasting the leader of the Catholic church's refusal to be taken in by AI's hallucination of consciousness to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' insistence that Claude 'bloody well' is conscious. Our Jacob criticised Dawkins' argument for its lack of philosophical rigour, and did not mince words in his response: "You're wrong, Dawkins: AI bots bloody well are not conscious."

If you have been keeping a close eye on news reports about companies dropping employees and replacing them with AI, and you're worried about what the future holds for your own job, then you're not alone. But don't fret: OpenAI's Sam Altman reckons that it's not going to be as bad as you might think, and that a "jobs apocalypse" isn't likely to happen.

Just so that everyone is reading from the same script here, I'm being sarcastic when I say 'don't fret.' That's because, despite Altman saying, at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference (via Reuters), "I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened," the evidence of the true scale of AI-induced job cuts makes for grim reading.

In this month alone, Intuit dropped 3,000 staff, and Meta let go of more than double that number. Standard Chartered's CEO said it plans to replace almost 8,000 "lower-value human capital" roles with AI, and HSBC's boss told staff that they shouldn't be "resisting the change," because "generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs."

As for the scale of the various cuts, it obviously depends on the total number of employees, but in some cases it's as high as 17%.

That's roughly in line with OpenAI's own research into the impact of AI in the jobs market (PDF warning), though less than its first predictions on the matter two years ago. Which makes me wonder just what figures Altman has been looking at to conclude that things aren't as bad as he thought they would be.

Still, OpenAI's CEO did have a somewhat fatalistic view of certain job roles due to the rise of generative AI, so this may all be just 'gut feelings', current vs past.

Advances in technology have always affected long-held traditional roles. For example, the manufacturing of cars adopted the use of robotics for welding, painting, installation, quality control checks, and so on many years ago. This was highly beneficial for the companies, but it certainly had a negative impact on employment levels.

Naturally, just because Altman thinks it's not as bad as he thought it means nothing to those who have already been affected. What's needed now is a wholly independent and non-biased examination of how much damage AI has done to the jobs market. No matter how good the research is, anything done by a body or company that is directly involved in the whole situation simply can't be relied upon to produce reliable data and predictions.

Unfortunately, this will take some time to complete, and by then, hundreds of thousands of jobs could have been lost around the world to chatbots and AI agents. Perhaps if Altman met with every one of those people made redundant, he'd possibly have a different view of what a "jobs apocalypse" actually feels like.

If you're set to give a university commencement address in the near future—and I know some of you are—here's a PC Gamer tip: don't hype up AI. Turns out modern grads just don't want to hear your paeans to LLMs, whether you're the real estate exec who got heckles for calling AI "the next industrial revolution" or ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who drew loud boos when he sang hosannahs to how AI is surely going to transform every aspect of our lives.

Instead, you should probably try to be more like Steve Wozniak (a universally applicable bit of advice). The creator of the OG Apple I managed to make history again when he became perhaps the first commencement speech-giver to bring up AI and get a positive response. How? By remembering he was talking to smart, driven people with potential, not a roundtable of shareholders.

"AI is the big term today," Wozniak said at a May 2 commencement speech at Grand Valley State University. "[It would] take an hour to talk about AI fully, but you all have AI!" Cue the bated breath, the preloaded boos, the fear that the Woz—a rather well-liked chap, renowned for being the nice yin to Steve Jobs' nasty yang—was about to put his foot in his mouth.

"You all have AI," he repeated, "actual intelligence!" And relax. The applause arrived quickly, and then Wozniak started pretty much making fun of the likes of Sam Altman and their great quests to create a truly artificial mind.

"My entire life in the technical world, I've been following people that were trying to figure out how to make a brain," said Wozniak. "Software or hardware?" Wozniak said they eventually cracked it.

"I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain," said the Apple co-founder, now fully in his 'tight five' mode, "It takes nine months."

Which is a pretty good bit, I must say, and got the laughs it deserved. "The day you die," he continued, "you're not gonna remember things you learned in your class, formulas and all that, what you're gonna remember is the good times you had doing things with other people, enjoying anything in life." Pretty funny that it takes one of computing's most famous tech guys to remember that it's actually people that are truly important.

Spotify plans to introduce a tool that will allow users to create AI-generated covers and remixes. My first instinct was to raise my hackles up, too, but it turns out there's a smidge more nuance to get into.

Namely, the planned feature is pitched as a 'groundbreaking responsible AI tool.' How does a massive corporation plan to use AI 'responsibly'? Well, for a start, the whole venture is being facilitated by a "landmark recorded music and music publishing licensing agreement" between Spotify and Universal Music Group.

That means that users will only be able to AI-ify "their favorite songs from participating artists and songwriters." Spotify tends to pay artists a pittance, but the platform is pitching the AI tool, which will launch as a paid add-on for Spotify Premium users, as an additional source of revenue for songwriters and artists.

In short, the whole thing is an attempt to offer a generative AI tool that plays on the right side of music copyright law. Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström said, "What we’re building is grounded in consent, credit, and compensation for the artists and songwriters that take part."

Not that the devil needs any more advocates, but if I was to indulge ol' Beelzebub, I would say something about remix culture being a pretty central part of all things media—both offline and online. A generative remix tool on one of the biggest music platforms out there feels like a natural progression, and I definitely don't hate the attempt to avoid lifting songs without permission.

However, after The Velvet Sundown debacle last year, I can't help but feel a little wary about whether this will actually improve anything for artists or fans in the long term. For one thing, unlike other music platforms such as Deezer, Spotify is still not great about labelling AI content.

Introducing a generative AI tool could be seen as sanctioning AI music more broadly, potentially inviting more unmarked AI music onto the platform. This AI music might have nothing to do with the licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, and may be cobbled together from a plagiarised data set. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm also not hopeful.