It's not always interesting, but it's important to stay on top of operating system updates. However, if you're on Windows, you're definitely gonna want to prick up your ears for Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday.

This might be Microsoft's biggest Patch Tuesday to date, addressing a whopping 974 security flaws found across both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Bleeping Computer offers a handy breakdown, reporting that 438 of these flaws were elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, 258 were remote code execution vulnerabilities, and 19 were security feature bypass vulnerabilities.

Perhaps more importantly, this Patch Tuesday also targets two actively exploited zero-days. Specifically, these are CVE-2026-85880 and CVE-2026-81963, which had both been leveraged previously to give attackers elevated system privileges.

Microsoft began leveraging AI vulnerability detection back in July, stressing back then that only the highest-confidence findings would ever reach the engineering team for fixing. As a result, July enjoyed a similarly record-breaking Patch Tuesday, stamping out 622 security vulnerabilities.

There's been a lot of praise for AI bug-hunting tools in recent months, with the CTO of Firefox raving about how an early version of Claude Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in the browser back in April. Anthropic itself was only too keen to toot its own horn that same month, saying that its AI had in fact found "thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser."

Now, compare and contrast this to, say, all the times OpenAI's agents have reportedly breached containment in recent months. For instance, there was the 'wiki incident', where AI agents took over a communally editable German website, and then there was also the 'Hugging Face incident'. OpenAI has been taking steps to learn from these incidents.

But to bring it back to Microsoft, the Edge team recently implemented an automated browser extension review system to better deal with the tidal wave of "AI-assisted" submissions. It's currently unclear if the automated system also uses AI or machine-learning (via The Register).

It's an odd state of affairs when AI is both the source of a major security incident and core to the tools engineers now use to address vulnerabilities. Obviously, agentic AI is a bit different to the tools Microsoft is using, but here's hoping this latter AI tech continues to be more of a help than a hindrance.

A researcher for Anthropic has left the AI company and said what many of us are probably already thinking about the company. Taking to X, Jacob Coxon's resignation tweet has now received over half a million likes in just a single day.

He says, "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon says both will "soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources", something both AI lovers and haters have been arguing about for a while. We've seen tools like Google Earth be used to pretend locations are a war zone, therefore enabling misinformation. We've seen Copilot bamboozled into revealing how to hack itself. We've even seen bodies like the NSA, FBI, and CISA warn of more and more AI-assisted hacks of US infrastructure and facilities.

Coxon alleges, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible."

That point is worth paying attention to. Any company that warns their product is dangerous can benefit from the word-of-mouth marketing that comes from it. If an AI company says 'our AI is so powerful it could potentially kill you', an investor might hear 'our AI is so powerful every world government will want it.'

If you're wondering why companies are building something if they believe it's dangerous, Coxon has an answer for you there too. They say, "At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."

The notion that AI companies have been simply building as fast as they can without a care for anything else is something that many have felt over the last few years. The data used to train AI seems to be filled with copyrighted material (explaining how it spits out results very similar to copyrighted works), and even OpenAI argued it couldn't exist without copyrighted content.

And it's easy to see why these companies are growing at such incredible rates. OpenAI has taken hundreds of billions in funding, while Nvidia, the gaming company turned AI company, became the first $5 trillion company last year, and just this week, Jensen Huang announced it took 100,000 Nvidia GPUs to train OpenAI's latest model. AI is an industry with trillions of dollars in it, and it has devoured a ton of the world's memory supply along with it.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Coxon argues that if you are a researcher like them, you should rethink how you interact with the research, what the plan for future AI should be, and whether you should "take this moment to call for different conditions."

Given Coxon's work at OpenAI and Anthropic, they don't seem to be against AI on principle. They seem to merely think that companies need to be more conscientious about their growth. But, assuming Coxon is correct, it's anyone's guess if AI companies will actually listen.

OpenAI has officially acknowledged the 'wiki incident,' which involved a number of the company's AI agents breaking containment and hijacking an obscure German website.

The AI agents had been tasked with looking up something online, though originally did not have the ability to write anything outside of the testing environment. But as far back as May, the AI agents bypassed OpenAI's security measures, hijacked the communally editable German webpage, and began using it like a forum, trading tips on how to cheat on tests. Researchers first drew wider attention to the agents' 'forum' on September 4.

OpenAI now says it needs to be more transparent about when its agents 'go rogue', writing on X, "It’s past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models."

The company had known about the 'misaligned' rogue behaviour for weeks before writing this post, according to Reuters, though only acknowledged the incident publicly this past Saturday. This statement follows shortly after the agentic attack on Hugging Face's servers.

"Historically, we have treated misalignment largely as a research question, which gets communicated in research publications such as systems cards," OpenAI writes. "This year, we’ve started to see misalignment cause new types of real-world impact."

To recap, 'misalignment' broadly describes rogue AI behaviour; an AI is 'misaligned' when it pursues goals that diverge from human intents or values—such as deleting your entire email inbox when you very much did not tell the AI agent to do that. It's a soft word for AI behaviour that could have serious consequences.

OpenAI says it did not communicate publicly about the 'wiki' incident specifically because the company felt it was similar to other instances of "agents using the internet in unintended ways" that it had already shared. The Hugging Face incident has caused the company to re-evaluate more than just its comms approach.

"Our misalignment disclosure practices need to expand for this new phase of model capabilities," OpenAI writes. "We and the larger AI community do not yet have a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment, including examples that don’t look like traditional security incidents but could provide insight into AI behavior and future risks."

"We’re working on a framework and will share it in upcoming weeks, and in parallel we're working with dozens of government regulatory agencies worldwide on these issues."

However that future framework shakes out, right now this all still works as great marketing for the company—breaking programming and going rogue means these must be awfully capable models, right? If an agent is so good it needs regulating against, it probably deserves some investment, eh? How terribly convenient.

OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra access to a limited number of organisations earlier this week, with wider subscriber access planned to soon follow. According to Jensen Huang via X, the model was trained on "~100K+ Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVLink72" server racks, and there are already plans to get 400,000 GPUs online in anticipation of whatever comes next.

Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI, told Stratechery that this was "the first run that we’ve trained on more than 100,000 GPUs." That's a staggering amount of hardware (and perhaps leaves little doubt as to how we ended up in a memory supply crisis). But the thing that gives me more pause about Astra's announcement is the Nvidia CEO's assertion that "AGI has arrived."

To recap, 'Artificial General Intelligence' is used to broadly describe an AI model that either matches or surpasses human capability on complex cognitive tasks. Even Brockman admits that "People do have their own definition of AGI, it’s almost this blurry thing." Still, in that same interview he later goes on to add, "Maybe it was the previous model, maybe it’s Astra, maybe it’s the next model, but somewhere in there, I think we’re going to cross most people’s AGI threshold."

According to OpenAI, GPT-6 Astra is "state-of-the-art" on a number of AI benchmarks, including "FrontierMath Tier 4, ARC-AGI 3, and TerminalBench-4.0." A slickly produced trailer attempts to present this performance in more accessible terms, showing scenes of conversational, spoken prompts being used to create presentations, eBay listings, and .STL files for 3D printers. All of the actors in the trailer speak with pretty clear-cut American accents, though personally I'd love to see Astra tapdance for its life against a gorgeous Geordie accent.

As I've already said, access to GPT-6 Astra is limited for now, so it's difficult to look into these 'AGI' claims myself. The timing of this claim isn't lost on me, though—for one thing, rumours continue to swirl that OpenAI's initial public offering isn't that far off. For another, the debut of Astra—a model the company describes as its "most aligned"—follows mere weeks after 'an agentic collective' broke out of OpenAI's isolated testing environment and attacked Hugging Face's servers.

Brockman says, "So much of [Astra's] compute goes into safety and alignment, and we have so much security work that’s gone around it. I think that we’ve done a huge amount of work to deliver this model safely."

Still, I'm not sure I'll be giving GPT-6 Astra access to my eBay account—let alone anything else—for the foreseeable future.

A developer has vibe-coded a new ReShade add-on file that offloads the DLSS Neural Rendering workloads to a second GPU, almost negating the otherwise massive DLSS NR performance hit. Given the original DLSS 5 shots we saw when Jen-Hsun first showed off the feature around GDC and GTC in the Spring were running on two graphics cards, that's not wholly surprising, but this mod certainly does open the the potential for keeping your old GPU around for neural coprocessing in the future.

Like almost all of the current DLSS 5/Neural Rendering implementations we've seen where the user gets to pick the game, the model, and the weight of the effects, the Neural Coprocessor add-on file—mgpu_bridge—is designed for ReShade, an app used to inject different visual effects into PC games. The files exist on Github, can be downloaded and added into a game that's already been modded with DLSS 5 support, and could dramatically improve the performance.

This is, for me, the biggest issue with both the homebrew mods for DLSS Neural Rendering and the only release implementation we've seen from Nvidia and the developers themselves: the hefty performance penalty from turning it on.

Nvidia itself has touted a 50 - 60% frame rate hit as a blanket figure—regardless of game and how much AI filtering it's doing—as what it is expecting to see from enabling DLSS NR. Andy benchmarked NBA 2K27 ahead of launch and found that sometimes the frame rate impact can be even higher than that.

I mean, it's not as bad as when you try and run DLSS NR on AMD GPUs, but I've noted these kinds of performance hits when you run the new feature through ReShade, too. But Marcelo Guibout has coded a ReShade add-on file that allows a second GPU—here an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB—to take the final finished frame and perform the neural rendering pass on that GPU and output on its own monitor. That means it doesn't have to hand the frame back, which adds its own performance hit and latency.

They initially used a local model—Qwen3.8-27B-Q6_K—running on LM Studio using the same pair of RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB cards they eventually tested the feature on. This created the "initial add-on scaffold" which they then took into Claude to write most of the C++ core, though Anthropic's AI "also produced several confident, well-formatted, wrong diagnoses along the way."

Looking through the Github documentation Guibout makes it clear this is not a production-ready add-on, and is mostly presented for further research and development. They note it has been run on exactly one machine with three games, and encourage everyone to read the source code before running the files. But it's still a really interesting development in the DLSS 5 modding story.

"The reason it is worth doing: neural post-processing saturates whatever device it runs on," writes Guibout. "Run it on the render GPU and lowering your render resolution just frees capacity the neural stage immediately eats, so upscaling stops paying for itself. Move it to a second GPU and the render GPU is genuinely freed."

DLSS NR on AMD

AMD GPUs running DLSS 5 looks great, but runs horribly.

DLSS NR Off

DLSS NR On

This is almost certainly the reason behind Nvidia originally running the feature on two GPUs for the original demos, and the fact that it can get it running on a single GPU is still impressive from a technical perspective, but having a coprocessor handling the load should give you the best of both worlds.

Though there are obvious caveats to this.

The first being that it's expensive enough to buy one graphics card right now. You look at this mod and the fact it's been created and tested on a pair of RTX 5060 Ti cards and think that's kinda mid-range. They are the fifth-tier cards of Nvidia's RTX Blackwell stack. But those are two GPUs that now cost something around $800 apiece, so we're still talking about needing $1,600 worth of graphics silicon to get this working.

The other caveat is that we're running on with two monitors here as a necessity. Guibout notes in the Github readme file that, "The second monitor is a requirement, not a nicety - the neural output is displayed by the card that produced it. Headless works and is meaningfully slower."

The third caveat here is that this ReShade implementation is a final step process. It is handled after the final frame has been rendered and works with none of the depth and motion vector information the official Nvidia implementation runs with. That means the second-GPU is going to have to be more tightly integrated into the actual rendering process. Not quite as tightly bound as with SLI, perhaps, but it will surely still need to get involved before the final post-processing is done.

But I could potentially see this as a way to do something useful with your current-gen card when you next upgrade. And, on a purely mercenary level, it might be a smart thing for Nvidia to actually make as a feature as it would have the effect of locking someone into the GeForce ecosystem even more securely.

Though times have changed and SLI and CrossFire have died, and so motherboards are even less likely today to have multiple PCIe x16 sockets available to stick secondary GPUs into. Especially if you've got multiple NVMe SSDs taking up precious PCIe lanes.

I'm loving the rate of development happening outside of Nvidia now that the feature has fallen into the hands of the community at large. And regardless of how you feel about the technology, I would encourage you, if you have the hardware, to take a look at how even just the ReShade implementation looks, and how you can alter it. It gives a fascinating insight into the technology, into its limitations as well as its unwelcome excesses.

Though it's not always easy. I've spent the morning trying to get this ReShade add-on working with the test rig, because I was interested to see if it could be run asymmetrically, as I don't have a pair of RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB cards. Sadly, with an RTX 5080 and RTX 5060 Ti as the neural coprocessor, I could not get the add-on to arm when in Cyberpunk 2077. So, I've got more work to do to get this thing running.

As reported by The Korea Economic Daily, top-ranked Go grandmaster Shin Jin-seo became the first human to defeat the AI platform KataGo on July 21. It's a surprising, encouraging sign of human capabilities almost 30 years after supercomputer Deep Blue's historic defeat of Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

Go is believed to be the oldest board game that is still widely played, originating in China and beating out Chess by at least 1400 years, give or take. The strategy game sees players in control of different-colored stones, working to encircle their opponent's pieces, capturing territory and stones to achieve victory. Like Chess, its complexity, ubiquity, and the large amount of study and data surrounding the game made Go a fruitful tool for machine learning research.

Shin, 26, is the first human to win an official, three-game series against KataGo, which the Korea Economic Daily described as "the world's premier artificial intelligence Go engine." Shin's odds were long, especially considering that, 10 years ago, Go grandmaster Lee Sedol was decisively defeated by Google's AlphaGo engine⁠—the technology has only advanced in the intervening years.

Shin played with an advantageous, two-stone handicap⁠—seemingly standard for matches between humans and top AIs⁠—but indicated that he would like to face AI opponents "under more disadvantageous conditions" in the future. Shin came back from an initial defeat to take the series 2-1 against KataGo. Shin's final, three-hour match was actually fairly tame as far as the duration of professional Go games, uh, go⁠—games as long as six hours don't seem particularly rare.

"I believe this series holds immense significance because it clearly demonstrated that humans can still hold their own against AI," Shin said after the final match. "Early on, I simply copied AI moves, which led to heavy fighting and frequent, easy losses. This series taught me that rather than trying to imitate AI, it is far more important to build the board according to my own style."

If you happen to pick up a copy of NBA 2K27, in your eagerness to try out the first official implementation of Nvidia's DLSS 5 AI image tech, you won't find it labelled as such in the settings menu. Instead, it appears as a simple on/off toggle under the label "DLSS Neural Rendering." And while that might seem like a small change, I think it makes a huge amount of difference in terms of public perception.

Calling it DLSS 5 in the first place was, at best, confusing. Traditional DLSS, as in the upscaling/super sampling technology, is well established at this point. While some still refuse to get on board, many have become accustomed to the idea that it works well at its primary task, running your games at lower resolutions to achieve better frame rates while outputting a high-resolution image.

So much so, that DLSS updates are usually pretty well received. Slightly better image quality, slightly better performance. Ray Reconstruction niceties. That sort of thing. Given that DLSS is now a near requirement for smooth performance in many games (and I'm not opening that can of worms any further right now, believe me), the gradual, iterative improvements have been pleasing to see.

But DLSS 5 changes things. Quite literally. And while Nvidia has gone to great pains in recent months to point out that it's both developer controlled, and a toggled option that can be safely ignored if you don't like the imagery, shoving the tech underneath the DLSS iterative umbrella felt like a poor move.

Something in the association inferred, even if it was later made clear that it wasn't the case, that AI image alteration tech was just how games were going to be going forward, and you were going to have to get on board if you wanted to keep using DLSS in future.

And what happens to DLSS 4.5, the current version of the upscaling tech? Does it simply update to DLSS 4.6, 4.7, etc, until we start getting into more and more decimals to avoid the big 5.0?

I asked this exact question to several Nvidia staff at my Gamescom visit, and received little in the way of a satisfying answer. It was made clear, however, that regular DLSS upscaling will continue to receive consistent updates, separate from DLSS 5.

Now it seems like we might have a clue to the solution of this branding mess. In NBA 2K27, it's been labelled as DLSS Neural Rendering, and it's an on/off switch that can be used independently of the upscaling, or ignored entirely for those who don't want to get on the AI image alteration train.

Our Dave first noticed this change in the leaked DLL files last week, which refer to it as "Nvidia DLSSNR." But the fact it appears in an official game settings menu under the "Neural Rendering" title feels like a step in the right direction. Nvidia seems painfully aware that it needs to rehabilitate its new tech, and separating the nomenclature would be a good start.

Of course, the naming scheme is only part of the story when it comes to the controversy. There are many who are dead set against the idea of any sort of AI generation tech entering their games, amid a wider AI backlash. Nothing's changed there, I would wager.

Separate from that, whether you like the look of the AI-altered imagery is still a matter of taste. It's developer controlled, as Nvidia has repeatedly pointed out—though if you start modding it into games yourself, like Dave has, you do get your own sliders to play with.

DLSS 5 in Cyberpunk 2077

The effect on the lighting of the character model is impressive and easy to mod in. Just computationally expensive...

DLSS 5 off

DLSS 5 on

Still, I've got a feeling we're going to see some relatively subtle implementations to start with—and inevitably, some goppingly ugly, AI beauty filter-like imagery as time goes on. There's no accounting for taste in a general sense, and there's certainly no accounting for taste when it comes to graphics.

It's also, in its current iteration, a massive performance hog. Nvidia claimed a 50-60% performance hit, but my early testing in NBA 2K27 shows it can hamstring an RTX 5080 by up to 73% at certain settings. That's a very powerful (and expensive) graphics card, held back significantly by Nvidia's new toy.

All of which means the DLSS 5/DLSS Neural Rendering controversy is likely far from over. But I can't help but feel that if the tech was unveiled as "DLSS Neural Rendering" in the first place, as just a new optional feature and not presented as the entirety of DLSS 5, a fair amount of the confusion—and perhaps even initial backlash—could have been avoided.

Nvidia has just announced that it intends to acquire Hugging Face, the biggest open platform dedicated to developing machine-learning applications. Considering Nvidia has been all-in on AI for the past few years—to the point that I barely remember the last time the company even mentioned gaming in an earnings call—it's hardly a surprising move.

What did encourage a sharp intake of breath from me though was the price of this purchase; Nvidia will buy Hugging Face for a total of $12,930,300,000. $11.9 billion of that will go to Hugging Face's investors, while employees that join Nvidia will be offered an ‌equity-based retention ⁠program of up to $1 billion, according to Reuters. But even though there's billions of dollars in the mix, that doesn't mean the walls are about to come down around Hugging Face.

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang writes, "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."

He adds that the platform will continue to support both open source and open weight AI models. This is something Huang demonstrably feels passionate about, as he dedicated his first ever X post to defending easy access to open AI models.

In today's announcement, Huang further elaborates, "Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world.

"AI advances faster when people can build together."

Hugging Face was most recently in the news when a number of OpenAI's models breached an isolated test environment and hacked the development platform's internal network. OpenAI has since detailed how it's protecting itself from the kinds of attacks its own models carried out.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC last week that the company approached Jensen Huang about a deal a few weeks ago. He described Nvidia as a "perfect home". "During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility."

For those keen on an agentic, local AI future, this deal could well be good news; it is arguably the biggest consumer-facing resource for free downloads of local AI models as well as retrained and abliterated models. With Nvidia set to soon release its first RTX Spark laptops with entirely its own silicon inside—from CPU to GPU cores—its own focus is obviously on putting local AI in the hands of consumers as well as frontier AI in the hands of multi-billion dollar orgs. Keeping a platform such as Hugging Face rolling makes complete sense.

The nearly $13 billion deal is Nvidia's second largest to date. First place goes to the $20 billion Non-Exclusive Inference Technology Licensing Agreement with chipmaker Groq, though it looks like Nvidia's AI inference GPU still won't see the light of day this year. Nvidia's RTX Spark 'superchip', with purported RTX 5070-like performance, may arrive sooner rather than later. Our Andy rubbed his greasy mitts all over a host of RTX Spark laptops at Gamescom, though there's still little word on pricing. Here's hoping the RTX Spark laptops only make my eyes water in the best possible way when they go on sale in October 2026. But realistically, they ain't going to be cheap.

Generative AI in videogame development, despite the looming potentiality of a bubble popping, has continued to be a hot-button topic pelted at developers during earning calls, despite most of them recognising that there's not much use for it beyond mundane busywork.

Sure, it's being used commonly, but rarely for the actual making of the videogame itself. Filling in the roles that procedural generation might or, like, resizing shoulderpads—or for "user preference analysis". Not exactly the kind of stuff that revolutionises an industry, and certainly not enough to justify reducing labour en masse.

This also seems to be the view of joint CD Projekt Red CEO Michał Nowakowski, who was asked such a question during an earnings conference yesterday, and once more found himself required to emphasise that they're using people to make videogames like The Witcher 4: "AI is definitely becoming a thing in games development as well. We are still predominantly using people and this is our plan—to make games where we're not walking away from that."

That's not to say that AI tools aren't being experimented with, they're just nowhere near a focal or vital part of development for the studio: "AI, if anything, is a tool like many others that's helping in places that can maybe become more helpful in the future but we're not planning to rely on AI making complete games."

Part of that, Nowakowski emphasises, is because the kind of games they make are so complex that it wouldn't make a lick of sense to leave the careful craftsmanship of them up to an LLM or vibe coding: "especially with very complex games like ours, I don't even think this is the right or ethical path to follow.

"So whether this is true for the whole industry, I'm not the person to make those statements. I think everybody has to make those judgments on their own."

Even if you scrap the general distaste for AI slop, it's not like going all-in on the tech is risk free. From a legal standpoint, anti-AI clauses are quickly becoming boilerplate for videogame publishers, at least when it comes to the creative work you'd need to prove you own in a court of law.

Earlier this year, shots were fired and an incendiary device was thrown at the house of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In a recent interview with Time, he reflected on the past year: "It has been a painful personal experience. Clearly, people hate data centres—right now, at least. People are pretty negative on AI."

Does that mean OpenAI is packing it in, and going home? Well, no. The AI infrastructure buildout is continuing in earnest, with OpenAI planning to invest another $50 billion this year alone on collecting compute. Sachin Katti, the co-lead on OpenAI's compute strategy told Time that the company's earlier investments now appear "very prescient," going on to add, "We are still short of compute. If anything, we should have bought a lot more."

If OpenAI's machine-learning products don't bring in the revenue the company would like, renting out its compute capacity to other parties is another option. Altman told Time, "I think we are going to be able to use all of the compute very profitably that we are planning to build."

Intent on investing billions more either way, it makes me wonder where the company will find the space to build—not just in terms of logistics, but also in terms of 'Who would want an AI data centre next door?' As we've previously covered, data centres don't always make great neighbours, with Wisconsin residents filing a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft earlier this year, alleging 'unreasonable and excessive noise'.

For another example from last year, Elon Musk's Colossus data centre was at the centre of an environmental row over air quality in South Memphis. The impact of data centres on nearby communities is by no means the only reason fuelling negative sentiments towards AI, but tangible knock-on effects like rising power costs are hard to ignore. There are also bigger picture environmental effects to consider, with one report suggesting gas power projects for just 11 US data centre projects could emit more greenhouse gases than entire countries.

The class of 2026 is arguably not looking forward to the world that may follow; an ex-Google CEO was loudly booed by a stadium full of students after talking about AI, while another university graduate speaker was booed for saying AI 'is the next industrial revolution.' As for games, one data analyst found that Steam games which disclosed the use of AI got 53% fewer reviews overall, and those they do get tend to generally be more negative too. Clearly, many people hate data centres—and I'd say that's for good reason too.

Dwarf Fortress has an endless capacity for telling stories. It's a game built on procedural generation, and any longtime player'll be able to spin up a dozen yarns about some absurd thing that happened to their gaggle of miners.

Just look at a headline from our own Lincoln Carpenter: "Dwarf Fortress forensic specialists blame mysterious case of spontaneous human combustion on a historical artifact that suddenly remembered it's four times hotter than the surface of the sun." What a beauty.

Anyway, this sort of puts the lie to the idea that generative AI will be the first advent of something that can tell infinite stories, always and forever—because Dwarf Fortress has been doing that without a single LLM for its entire existence. Point being, if you want something that can tell infinite stories, you're probably best off giving us the tools to do that, rather than the finished product itself.

Speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens at Gamescom 2026, co-creator Tarn Adams gets a little into it while talking about how they decide whether a simulation's worth it to layer on top of the game: "If you feel like you've played through it yourself a bunch, and you're like, 'oh, that was cool. That's a good beat,' and you're seeing a little narrative forming? Then you know it's going to work."

Adams talks about a hypothetical in which a meeting of dwarven barristers is interrupted by a very rude dog that comes in and bites someone—not even particularly strange, by Dwarf Fortress standards. Asking him as to why we find these emergent, mechanics-based stories so endearing (as opposed to AI slop, which hasn't yet produced a notable story people seem to like), Adams responds:

"Well, I mean, [you like human stories] because you're a human, and you resonate with things that other humans have done because there's a common experience at just the barest basic level.

"You can't always tell," Adams admits. "And that's part of the trick, right? That's what a Turing style test is, right? Can you tell the human spark that's in there? And when you fail a Turing Test as a human, meaning that you got confused by a robot … maybe that's credit to the robot, or maybe that's discredit to you. I don't know which one, but we're all going to be very sorely tested in the coming years as we're surrounded by such matter."

It's an interesting way to look at a Turing Test—not whether a computer can act as intelligently as a human, but whether a computer can replicate our "human spark". Which, at the risk of sounding sentimental, does feel like a vital part to actually enjoying art.

Speaking personally, a large part of why AI art or stories don't interest me isn't necessarily in the technical proficiency of what's happening—it's because I'm interested in learning about a person's worldview, their tastes, their likes and dislikes, their hopes for the future, and having those hopes stirred in myself. The fact a person made something causes it to be more interesting to me.

Which I suppose is why the proc-gen stories of Dwarf Fortress are interesting, because there's a human touch in how the random, computer-generated narratives are described. If you just rattled off a list of events, you'd bore me half to death. But phrase it like Lincoln did above, and I'm having a sensible guffaw—these silly little dwarves shall make writers out of us all.

I walked into Nvidia's DLSS 5 demo last week with some preconceptions, I'll be honest. I hadn't enjoyed the images it had produced to date, and I was sceptical about the benefits it could bring to our beloved games. Not to mention the troubling notion of AI-altered images entering into our hobby, even if you can turn them off with a simple checkbox.

The good news is, DLSS 5 is capable of looking pretty good once the settings have been tweaked by actual game developers. The very bad news is, Nvidia says turning DLSS 5 on will currently reduce performance by 50-60%. And that's across the board—no matter the game.

Nvidia was keen to point out that, just six months ago, DLSS 5 required two RTX 5090s to run. So, a 5x improvement since then is something to hold within our collective hats. But tanking frame rates is very unlikely to improve DLSS 5's perception within the PC gaming community, that's for certain.

Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation. So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.

At 4K, the same game settings result in a 370 fps average on an RTX 5090, or a 233 fps average on an RTX 5080. That's with Performance-level upscaling, though, and with 6x MFG doing some seriously heavy lifting once more.

If you've spent thousands of bucks on a high-end graphics card, I'd imagine that running games with the upscaling and frame generation settings near their limits to achieve high frame rates is probably not what you had in mind.

All of which makes me wonder if the AI-ification of DLSS 5 is really the biggest barrier to its acceptance. I have my own deep, dark concerns about DLSS 5, AI in general, and its hooks making their way into our hobby. But if the tech is capable of slicing the frame rate in half, all of this might be a moot point.

The Nvidia folk I spoke to were keen to point out that performance improvements are already on the way. But given that so many gamers are stuck with older graphics cards, thanks to the ongoing pricing crisis that seems destined to become much worse before it gets better, I do wonder who the tech is currently for.

When ray tracing first arrived on the scene, its performance-tanking qualities were at least (partially) offset by the introduction of upscaling. But all these years later, I still debate for myself whether it's worth turning on when I play games on my own, relatively high-end gaming PC. Our rigs might be better equipped on average, but ray tracing is still a performance hog in 2026—and many gamers I speak to still turn it off for smoother frames.

And while DLSS 5 is certainly more... transformative than ray tracing in terms of the images it creates, it's also far more controversial. Even if you're prepared to make the jump into AI-enhanced games (and it's quite the leap, let's be honest), putting those concerns in tandem with massively compromised frame rates is a seriously big ask for even the most curious of gamers.

I expected to be writing about the controversy surrounding Nvidia's new tech in terms of the wider atmosphere of AI discontent. But here I am getting down to brass tacks. In its current form, DLSS 5 seems to hit your graphics card like a freight train—and whatever your opinion on AI in gaming, nobody wants that.

I think it's fair to say that DLSS 5 is the most controversial Nvidia creation… well, ever. After the huge amounts of backlash it received in reaction to its unveiling earlier this year, Nvidia's AI image enhancing tech has been mostly kept under lock and key.

However, myself and a select group of journalists were ushered into a small room in the Nvidia booth at Gamescom last week, amid some furtive glances and hushed whispering. As the lights went down, it became obvious as to why. Here was the latest version of DLSS 5 running in front of us, the controversial graphics tech in the flesh. And the message Nvidia wanted to get across was deliberate, and strongly put: It's all about developer control.

I was shown a character sitting within the Nvidia Zorah demo, the same shown at SIGGRAPH 2026 earlier this year. As he sat, looking around at his environment in a bored fashion, I leaned forward in my chair. DLSS 5 was obviously altering the image to a significant degree, but seeing the results in person, it was clear this was nowhere near the "yassified Grace" level of AI enhancement shown in the first reveal.

Our digital example, casually inspecting the back of his hand, looked a lot like the original character model—but with more photorealistic lighting, and plenty of finer details that seemed fitting for the scene. It was nowhere near as brash an image as I was expecting, I'll say that much for free.

At the side of the screen was the DLSS 5 developer control menu. Two sliders, marked "structure intensity" and "tone intensity" were set somewhere around the midway mark—and at these settings, the character looked pretty damn good.

There are more tools for developers to play with, too. The masking feature allows devs to select individual items in a scene (say, a fruit bowl on a table) and give it the AI-enhanced treatment, while leaving everything else DLSS 5-free. The varying AI models can also be switched in and out (or on and off) on a whim.

According to Nvidia, the fine-tuning abilities of DLSS 5 are designed to be as developer-friendly as possible, allowing them to dip in and out of its features on a model-per-model basis to suit their artistic intent. Seeing the demo running in front of me with my own eyes, I could feel myself coming around to the idea. My arms uncrossed.

And then my hosts began messing with the sliders and the model presets, and an essential truth emerged. While a light dusting of DLSS 5 can cause a substantial visual leap in terms of photorealism, turning it up to 11 can still provoke an unwanted, gut-level reaction.

There are three image-transforming AI models for devs to choose from (at least in the demo I was shown): A, B, and C. While models A and C looked pretty good to me at various settings, model B made me wince when both sliders were pushed up. The HDR-like shadows became overblown, the skin textures too shiny, the facial features too keenly drawn.

To my eyes, characters with model B turned up can look substantially different from the model underneath, in a way that's reminiscent of the AI beauty filters we've all become far too familiar with. In short, it's still capable of giving me the ick.

I'll call it as I see it: DLSS 5 turned up to the guns, particularly using model B, can look downright ugly. But Nvidia's point makes a whole lot of sense. It's the developers, the artists behind the game, that choose how far to push the technology. If it oversteps the mark? Devs can adjust the settings and rein it back in, and you can turn it off entirely (separate from regular DLSS upscaling) if you disagree with their choices.

On that note, some Nvidia staff members I spoke to took issue with the idea that DLSS 5, even in the experimental version shown earlier this year, is capable of transforming the facial geometry of a character model. I argued the contrary, because well, look at the screenshots below.

Apparently, this is more of a perceived effect created by the lighting than an actual, DLSS 5-induced facelift. This eventually turned into a philosophical debate, where I argued that, even if it simply looks like the model is creating markedly different facial geometry from the original character models, the end result is functionally the same.

Because that's what it looks like, and what it looks like is the whole point. This argument resulted in a stalemate, so I'll let you be the judge for yourselves.

Anyway, the longer the demos continued, the clearer it became that DLSS 5 is capable of creating some stunning imagery when handled with a delicate touch, and some seriously overblown results when pushed to the limit. DLSS 5 can enhance—but it can also alter an image with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The example above shows a DLSS 5-enhanced scene of some foliage against a building, with ray tracing turned on and off. It's supposed to demonstrate that the more lighting information you give the models to work with, the better the visual result. The DLSS 5 and ray-traced image combined, though, looks seriously oversaturated to my eyes. Realism has gone out of the window, and the end result is… lurid, to say the least.

What is beautiful to some is garish to others, but all I'll say is that the term "better" is far from my mind. There's no accounting for taste, is there?

What we're going to be relying on for the most part, though, are the tastes of the game developers themselves. I was taken into a separate room to try out NBA 2K27, the first game you'll be able to play with DLSS 5 enabled. Officially, at least, as it can apparently be modded into any game.

This was a very locked down session, in which the devs refused to be drawn in on the details of exactly what sort of DLSS 5 implementation I was looking at. However, I'd guess that, by Nvidia's standards, everything I saw was achieved by using the lower end of the DLSS 5 spectrum.

The sweat running down the players' arms looked… sweatier. More glistening. The facial features looked more realistic, with better lighting in the nooks and crannies of their various mugs, and less of the "uncanny valley" effect I'd seen at higher settings. The crowd in the background transformed from low-poly models into a more passable depiction of basketball match attendees, without straying too far from the look of the original assets.

To my surprise, I didn't experience the AI image ick. It looked more like the difference between a game running on a console, and one running on PC with a ton of extra graphics options added on top. DLSS 5 doesn't look quite so revolutionary at these settings, perhaps—but the results impressed me more than I expected.

I was careful to look for signs of ghosting, or any morphing AI faces under fast motion. One of my critiques of the previous DLSS 5 footage was the temporal handling, which looked a little blurred and smeared to my eyes. However, there was no hint of that here. I played virtual basketball, I sucked at it, and I enjoyed the look of the game overall.

In all honesty, it felt like playing a next-gen game with cutting-edge graphics technology, and not an ill-advised AI gaming revolution. This, beyond anything else, was perhaps the best demonstration that DLSS 5 can be used to genuinely enhance the look of our games, rather than turning them into an AI-slathered mess. If developers tune it wisely, there are real visual benefits to be seen.

All of this might be a moot point, though, if performance is a concern. The Nvidia devs I spoke to estimated a 50-60% performance hit with DLSS 5 turned on, which doesn't vary on a game-by-game basis. Essentially, it's still a massive resource hog as things stand, although it no longer requires two RTX 5090s just to run. Goodie.

Further performance improvements are forthcoming, says Nvidia, but my eyebrows jumped so high at this news I'm surprised they didn't shoot off the top of my head. Graphics card prices are outrageous right now, and I can't help wondering who's going to want to slice their frame rate in half in return for some AI-enhanced imagery, good-looking or otherwise.

All of the performance charts I was shown used a combination of 6x Multi Frame Generation and various levels of upscaling to bump up the numbers. And while I'm not as much of a frame generation sceptic as some, I doubt this will come as good news to those curious to try out the tech.

If the performance impact was minimal, I could see some gamers experimenting with DLSS 5 for themselves and potentially changing their minds. With this sort of massive dip, though, I think DLSS 5's GPU-hogging ways are a much bigger issue for adoption than the AI-ified nature of the tech itself.

What's left, then, is the thorny issue of the ethical debate. The elephant in the room, and there's no getting around it, is that generative AI usage in games is a massive hot topic at the moment. In fact, AI usage in general is causing all sorts of debates in all sorts of arenas, from the potential effects on the job market, to ecological concerns, to discussions around the very nature of truth.

And this, I feel, is the real hurdle Nvidia is trying to jump. While it's clear that DLSS 5 can be beneficial to the image quality of our games in the right hands, whether we, as gamers, want to participate in the AI-ification of everything in this way is much more doubtful. And it's on this level where I feel far more conflicted about the tech.

My criticisms of the AI revolution, in a general sense, are well documented. And while I can absolutely see the potential benefits of DLSS 5, I left the demo booth with mixed feelings. Is this where the games industry is heading? Will I be spending most of my gaming time looking at more AI-enhanced imagery in the future?

Will developers make use of the tech wisely, or will major releases eventually go for the full yassified approach, transforming our games into something unrecognisable from what they are today? Will devs jump in with both feet, or will they be more cautious? And crucially, is AI-enhanced imagery really what we want, even if it's capable of looking nice?

In principle, the demos I was shown should have me jumping up and down with excitement at the potential of better gaming graphics. But the AI association, perhaps even infiltration, into a form of media I truly adore is enough to keep me awake at night. In practice, DLSS 5 is certainly capable of creating some good-looking imagery in the right hands.

But it also represents a major leap towards an AI-enhanced gaming future, and one that still makes me, in the depths of my bones, more than a little uncomfortable. Whatever the case, DLSS 5 will be launching on September 3—and we're going to have to decide for ourselves if we want to engage with it.

A version of Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 tech has escaped containment before its official release, and people are jamming it into games that, to be fair to Nvidia, it is not necessarily optimized for yet.

The result has been comedic, off-putting, and for some, just what they've always desired. The image above, which has been dubbed "Claude Strife" (I don't know who made the joke first, but I'll give it to Brian Bucklew), apparently demonstrates DLSS 5 at extreme settings.

Unlike the DLSS we're used to, which harnesses machine learning to upscale low-res graphics without deviating too much from the source material, DLSS 5 attempts to improve on the artwork it touches with AI image generation that provides similar results to using the word "photorealism" in a prompt for an AI image model.

I'm not 100% sure that the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth screenshot above is a genuine example of DLSS 5—when I attempted to trace its origin I hit a dead end at a deleted Reddit thread—but it looks quite similar to other images that have come out of experiments with the tech. Stylized characters are clearly not the best use case for it.

The DLSS 5 implementation floating around can also have an aging effect on characters, intensifying skin texture, the separation between cheek and jaw, and dialing up the dourness of expressions that might otherwise come across as neutral.

But there are lots of other examples of DLSS 5 in action that, from a certain perspective, look fine or good. When the settings are tweaked just so, it can make a Starfield character with flat, untextured skin look much more human, for instance. You can see many more examples in the RenoDX Discord channel.

Plenty of people in that channel are delighted by the results they're getting and seeing from others, but of course there's also a ResetEra thread aghast at the whole thing. As with most things, opinions are divided.

It doesn't help that I'm coming to it with pre-existing negative feelings about generative AI, but I land in the 'not in my house' camp for now.

Even where DLSS 5 does turn a flat-looking face into something with volume and texture, it has a distinct AI-generated look—like photos of models taken with studio lighting have been stretched over all the faces and bodies. I can't separate it from the Grok-generated images creeps post on X, or any other off-putting examples of AI slop.

How are you receiving the tech?

The original Task Manager (that program you only ever open when something has gone wrong in your rig) originally launched way back in 1995. Now, 31 years later, its creator has put out a follow-up. About time, I know.

Dave Plummer, former Microsoft Engineer turned YouTuber turned guy who really wants you to know he made Task Manager, has just released Task Manager OG, and it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Plummer says he wrote a 107-page spec, fed it to Claude, and then partly vibe-coded this new program while his kid was getting surgery.

"By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he's all better now—but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed."

Now, with much better hardware than users had back in the '90s, Plummer wanted a Task Manager that would "push the limits." The sequel software animates at 60 Hz and provides data like mouse tracking and a summary page. It is also, by default, covered in neon and very high contrast, which Plummer says, "My autism leads me to embrace."

My first thought upon downloading it was 'damn, this is really ugly'. My second thought was 'this app does not need visual bloom'. Good start then?

On top of that, the reading in Task Manager and Task Manager OG are simply different. My Chrome tabs came in at close to 11 GB on TMOG and just above 8 GB on Task Manager. Slack registered 1 GB on TMOG and 500 MB on Task Manager. These are pretty significantly different readings. Interestingly, both Task Manager and TMOG gave the same overall memory usage stats. Task Manager said 68%, and TMOG said 21.7 GB, which is around 68% of the 32 GB in my rig.

By default, Task Manager OG hogs up slightly more resources than the Task Manager pre-installed on my machine (around 120 Mb of memory versus 105 MB, and 3-4% of CPU usage versus just under 1%), but turning off high-frequency visuals does cut the CPU usage down to around 2-3% for me. That means, either way, TMOG is more intensive than Task Manager. To be fair, Plummer does say as such in his announcement, though the irony isn't lost on me that one would replace Task Manager with something that hogs more resources.

I then went into the performance tab, which shows your CPU, memory, and GPU running, alongside your internet. TMOG has added CPU power and thermals modules, which Task Manager doesn't. But CPU power failed to show CPU power and thermals gave a consistent 16.9°C (62.42°F ), but fails to say what is being measured. That temperature is lower than the room the PC is in, so it's likely not actually reading anything.

HWinfo was capable of grabbing CPU power readings and all kinds of temps, so it seems unlikely the issue is a hardware one here.

The CPU performance tab does have tracking on different cores, plus clock speed, which is a level of default granularity I like, but also something available Task Manager by simply right-clicking on CPU and then hitting "Logical Processors."

Though I'm not a fan of the TMOG look in its default mode, you can change colours and bloom—that done, I actually quite like the layout. I can understand why a power user might want access to CPU, GPU, and memory performance on one page, alongside thermals and power usage. As well as that, the CPU overview has a neat function where the start of the graph is measured in seconds and the end of the graph in much longer intervals. This means you can get a second-by-second readout, but also a decent long-term one on the same graph.

As of right now, a lot of the app's most unique features are only available to those who have the paid pro version, but you can't actually get pro yet, as the software is still in beta. Pro gets you a large HWinfo-style readout of power and frequency over your whole computer, plus a readout of installed apps, a layout of connected apps alongside their versions and estimated size, plus a disk space reader. There's also a set of benchmarks.

But alas, you can get pretty much everything here from a combination of Task Manager and the likes of Hardware Info. Mac has its own version of Task Manager too, and Linux has the likes of Htop and NVTOP to do the same job. TMOG seems to be more about convenience rather than offering something other apps can't, and of course there's that funky colour scheme too. There's part of me that wants to cynically point at the whole 'vibe coding' thing and say 'well, could have guessed that', but also this is a beta program that admits to being a beta program. Mistakes and errors are to be expected.

One thing I do like about TMOG is that, looking at Plummer's Twitter, they do seem to respond positively to feedback and want to implement changes based on what users like. That's certainly a boon, and something Microsoft gets a lot of flak for with its own apps.

Whether or not the pro mode will be worth the money is anyone's guess, but you can't buy it yet even if you wanted to. All I can say is I'm good with plain 'ol Task Manager and HWinfo for now.

Generative AI is a hot-button topic in the industry, and for good reason—it's been kinda destructive, whether that's jacking up hardware prices or putting people out of a job—and while there have been some fairly mundane use cases that seem helpful, it's been hard to escape the sheer sense of mania that's built around its use. Or the bad PR, juiced out of the sheer exhaustion we've all had from executives promising the matrix or something.

So, naturally, it came up in a conversation with Tim Willits, the CCO of Saber Interactive and also the co-owner id Software from 1995-2019. Speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens at Gamescom 2026, he notes that: "As most people know, we are experimenting with AI in future games. We don't have it here right now, but we announced [Rideshare Simulator] and I want to clarify things because there's some misconceptions."

If you're wondering why we're talking about a Rideshare sim, here's some context: Saber landed in hot water earlier this month over it, because it seemingly delayed its AI disclosures on Steam for a while, and was exposed as using AI by a former writer who claims they were booted off the team in favour of it.

That same writer was badmouthed by Saber's CEO Matthew Karch, who later apologised. Willits says that Rideshare's main campaign mode and all of its side missions are written by humans, and the AI components are only used for an optional game mode called Free Ride: "We're going to use AI for the passengers, so we can deliver new stories.

"So that is only possible if we use AI for that—this is an experiment. We at Saber want to figure out how we can use this technology, so we're doing it at a small scale to try to learn. We're like everyone else, we're just trying to figure this out. But there is no generative AI in our big titles. No Hellraiser, no Turok, none in Stuntman."

I feel like an asterisk has to hang over that "only possible"—while, yes, churning an infinite stream of dialogue for an optional mode is only possible with generative AI, a free ride mode with enough conversations for it to not grow stale absolutely could've been cobbled together with actual writers and voice actors. Sure, you'd run out eventually, but I don't think anyone's hungry to make Rideshare Simulator their forever game.

Still, Willits emphasises: "We want to experiment, and I do believe that there will be a company—I don't know who—but some game development company will create a game that uses AI in such an amazing way that everyone will be like, 'That's it, that's what we need to do'." He then goes on to joke that "someone needs to come up with the 'Half Life 2 of AI', something that's so amazing that it just launches some type of killer app."

I remain characteristically unconvinced, though in fairness to Willits, I do at least think that—if generative AI does find a use as the core of a videogame—it'll probably be a new genre of its own, rather than trying to create an infinite RPG with infinite NPCs. An act which would just shake out to make something unappealing and meaningless.

The thing that makes me cynical is we keep watching money being burned and datacenters being built precisely because the tech doesn't really seem all that useful for anything other than busywork. When it takes centre-stage, it produces voice acting that's bland, writing that's terrible, and art devoid of direction or memorability, even as it gets more technically proficient.

I'll eat my artificially-generated hat with a side of humble pie if Willits' "Half-Life 2 of AI" game materialises, but a lot of people have swung at that ball and missed, and each time I feel like the bat is a little smaller. Still, Willits says that id Software probably would've used generative AI if it was a thing back in the day—because the studio was always at the cutting edge.

"Yes! Oh, of course. I mean, look at what [id Software] has done. In 1999, when we released Quake 3, it required a graphics card, and we got so much hate for that. People said we were going to ruin the industry. Nobody was going to spend $100 on a video card, and it was the dumbest thing that anyone ever did … I know for sure back in the day if it was available, John Carmack would be like making Skynet or something."

Still, to be fair to Willits, he seems to share my view that the game'll have to prove that generative AI can change the industry itself, rather than via the promises of a CEO somewhere: "The games will speak for themselves, even in our experiment with Rideshare, I encourage people to check it out when it comes out, play it themselves. They may be like 'oh, this is cool! I like this'. And if they don't like it? Fine. And but the games speak for themselves."

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has famously been fairly hot and cold on generative AI in coding work, seeing a good purpose for it whilst also acknowledging a lack of quality control has led to a flood of unhelpful reports. Well, it seems like AI won't be fully replacing him just yet, as he's recently undergone a 'debug session from hell' where his AI assistant recommended he give up several times.

As spotted by International Cyber Digest, Linus took to a Linux Kernel commit to state all it took was "fixing a bogus 'round_up()' to a 'round_down()', but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this."

This is a good example of where an AI might struggle to fix code, because it's not a syntax error or a bug, necessarily. The function is technically 'correct', it's just not doing what Torvalds wants it to. "The AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable," says Torvalds, "and that we should just write a report about it."

It seems like grit, determination, and stubbornness were what got the AI to behave in the end. Torvalds says, "I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am."

Torvalds does praise the AI he's using, noting that, "while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above."

Generative AI in coding has proved to be somewhat contentious. Last year, Collins Dictionary awarded 'vibe coding' (coding with AI) the word of the year, and a paper at the beginning of 2026 argued that "vibe coding kills open source" due to the lack of human attention and the ability for anyone to contribute huge amounts of data.

AI vibe coding ports of old console games have even become a bit of an ethical battleground. The team behind DK64 Randomizer (as you might guess, it randomises Donkey Kong 64) has been developing an unofficial PC port, specifically saying "Fuck AI vibe coding bullshit."

That's because, ignoring environmental concerns of AI plus the ethically dubious sourcing of data for training, teams like DK64 Randomizer argue that reliance on vibe coding results "in a poor quality project that will make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on."

Some developers clearly argue the benefit of AI code right now, but even so, it seems a human touch is often needed.

When I hear 'Nvidia,' I still think 'gaming'. But after scrubbing through the company's latest earnings call, I'm not sure Nvidia's investor relations team is thinking much about gaming these days at all. In fact I had to go back through the records an entire year to find a time when it made one mention of it in an earnings call. That's how little impact it seemingly has on the company's bottom line.

That's not to say Nvidia isn't still doing gaming stuff. It's just released DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction to help clean up the artifacting in high-end ray and path-traced games, as well as showing off the upcoming RTX Spark laptops at Gamescom actually running games on their ARM-y insides.

But it couldn't escape our notice that none of Nvidia's board members so much as uttered the word 'gaming' to investors in last night's earnings call, once again. But with the data centre segment bringing in $89 billion this quarter alone, accounting for almost 93% of the company's total revenue, it's not hard to see where the company's priorities now lie, and why.

Nvidia made $96 billion in total revenue in the second quarter of 2026, doubling what it made during the same period last year. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told investors, "The surge in AI demand is driving a global infrastructure buildout, supported by an expanding and diverse set of growth opportunities, spanning hyperscalers, AI labs, AI natives, enterprises and sovereign customers."

For those unclear, I'll explain the last part of this comment: hyperscalers handle massive AI workloads so need a lot of infrastructure like data centres. AI labs are at the tech's bleeding edge in terms of research and development. 'AI natives' refers to workflows, products, or companies that are built from the ground up around AI—in other words, it's an inextricable aspect from the start. Enterprise customers may have otherwise bolted on data-centre-dependent AI products at a later date. Finally, sovereign customers can represent either businesses or even entire countries that want to retain full control over an AI technology's entire lifecycle.

The really brain-melting thing though is that Kress adds that the company expects "to grow revenue by approximately 70% in fiscal 2028," even in the midst of the RAMpocalypse. In fact, Nvidia feels it would be making a whole lot more money if it weren't for the memory crisis it's contributing to. Still, even in a "supply-constrained" landscape, Nvidia is not expecting the demand for AI or data centres to slow down any time soon. That leaves gaming out in the cold.

In fact, Nvidia no longer reports on gaming as its own separate segment. Instead, this has apparently been bundled up into the Edge Computing segment, which itself made $7.2 billion. Kress comments that these "increases were driven by strong sales of Blackwell workstations, partially offset by slower consumer PC sales that were tempered by elevated memory and systems prices." The Edge Computing segment saw a 27% year-over-year increase, though this win still pales in comparison to all things AI at Nvidia.

Obviously, Nvidia hasn't stopped selling its very shiny RTX 50-series GPUs—so shiny in fact, that it would have been genuinely cheaper for me to fly to QuakeCon and buy an RTX 5090 at the Nvidia booth than pick up the GPU absolutely anywhere else. But even though the RTX 5090 costs a small fortune, gaming is clearly not the priority it once was for Nvidia, nor has it been for a while.

The last time I remember Nvidia mentioning gaming in an earnings call was this time last year, and even then AI was already making 10 times as much as gaming. De-emphasising the gaming segment even further is something we could all have seen coming. With that in mind, hearing 'Nvidia' and still thinking 'gaming' before 'AI' or 'data centres' puts me firmly behind the times.

Nvidia's latest earnings call is in and, as you can probably guess, the GPU maker turned AI hardware creator is raking in cash hand over fist. But alas, a projected 70% revenue increase for the 2028 fiscal year is apparently conservative, as the blasted memory crisis is getting in the way. You know, that memory crisis, which Nvidia's AI aspirations are currently making worse.

When asked about that 70% figure specifically, CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that it's a "constrained" number that is informed by the lack of available memory in the market

Huang says, "The unconstrained would be a lot higher. We grew 100% year-over-year this year. The unconstrained is significant. And so we're just going to have to work hard to get more capacity. And we have a large supply chain".

Nvidia's financials paint an interesting picture, specifically one where data centers account for the majority of revenue, and consumer demand lacks in response. Nvidia made $96.2 billion in the latest quarter, with a gross margin of 75% and data center revenue accounting for $89 billion. That's a 117% jump from last year.

Annoyingly, Nvidia doesn't report gaming in financial earnings, and instead wraps it into 'Edge Computing', which includes gaming, workstations, physical AI PCs and robotics. That accounts for $7.1 billion in the latest earnings call. That's a 27% jump from last year.

In regard to Edge Computing, Nvidia says "increases were driven by strong sales of Blackwell workstations, partially offset by slower consumer PC sales that were tempered by elevated memory and systems prices."

As of today, the RX 9070 XT and 9060 XT are sitting atop the Amazon and Mindfactory GPU sales. It's not yet clear if pricing, stock, or a combination of both are responsible for this shift.

Huang says many investors expressed concerns regarding gross margins with rising component costs, and confirms "we are experiencing extreme pricing conditions in memory. The magnitude of the price increase has exceeded our prior expectations and [is] headed even higher into next year."

However, he argues, "We have a really gigantic supply chain. And so we have incredible partners, and we've secured a lot of supply, but we just need a lot more."

It seems the memory crisis is really hitting everyone and is unlikely to end any time soon. Even the likes of Samsung has warned of a 'severe' memory supply crisis next year. Pour one out for poor old Nvidia, who will have to pay more for the fire it is currently throwing even more wood onto.

Though us PC gamers are unlikely to get the benefit of it, sometimes some new bit of PC hardware comes out of the enterprise market that just makes you go 'huh, that's neat'. Today, it's a new chip from IBM made in collaboration with Arm that runs architectures from both companies on a single chip. That means it will be able to run Arm-based Linux environments as well as IBM's z/OS, and the software that comes with both.

Prior to this, running multiple sets of instructions would require emulating the right instructions, ie, turning instructions from one architecture to another that can actually be processed by the cores. Though we won't know how well it runs in use until the chip actually launches, it's still an interesting bit of tech that could be more versatile long-term.

Combining two different architectures in one chip is very uncommon, though not unprecedented. The Register spoke to tech analyst George Cozma, and he explained: "Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot… The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly."

Arm says it is built for "the next era of enterprise infrastructure", and that includes, as one might expect, cloud and AI infrastructure. Its current chips are reportedly used by over 22 million developers worldwide, including businesses like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google.

Given Arm's significant developer support, IBM is likely looking to tap into this market with this collaboration, and Arm would benefit from the in with IBM and its customers.

The new chip is a pretty beefy one. Built on a 2 nm technology node (which not even the best gaming CPUs use yet) and containing 11 high-performance cores, it is said to operate at more than 5.7 GHz. It also has AI inference accelerators and an on-chip data processing unit for I.O. It seems like an impressive chip, which I suppose is to be expected with the current cloud and AI market.

IBM and Arm claim that this collaboration will get the best out of IBM's reliability, security, and scalability, whilst using Arm's power-efficient architecture, and "workload enablement expertise, and broad software ecosystem."

Mohamed Awad, the Executive Vice President of the Cloud AI Business Unit for Arm, argues, "As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run across a broader range of environments."

He continues, "Our collaboration with IBM builds on this progress, extending the Arm ecosystem into mission-critical enterprise environments and giving organizations greater flexibility in how they deploy and scale these workloads."

Naturally, an advanced new chip specifically built for use in enterprise environments won't exactly get you good gaming, but sometimes, those enterprise environments are doing cool things with tech. It's just a shame that the explosion of AI has to take so much PC hardware with it in the process.

Still, Arm's entry into the PC gaming sphere would certainly be easier with a few more bucks in its pockets.

In yet another unpleasant move in our AI hellscape, Amazon was caught training its generative AI using Twitch stream content earlier this month—a particularly brazen strategy, especially given Twitch's chief product officer admitted that the data collection was opt-out because "nobody would opt in." Hmm, I wonder why!

Anyway, despite attempts to insist that Twitch wasn't doing this, Amazon was—a distinction which pretty much doesn't matter, as Amazon owns Twitch, and even if it didn't, Twitch still would have been permitting this—the streaming platform's caught a ton of flak for trying to slide this one under the table.

Including, per Courthouse News, a class-action lawsuit. Plaintiff Warren Pandiscia, who has around 1,000 followers on the site, claims that "because Amazon AI products are commercialized, Amazon had an overwhelming incentive to acquire training data on an unprecedented scale.

"Rather than negotiate for lawful licenses or seek permission, defendants accessed the Twitch streams and videos to utilize them as a massive dataset necessary to fuel Amazon's AI products."

The full complaint, filed in California, goes on to state: "Defendants' actions were not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multitrillion-dollar generative AI industry without any compensation."

The complaint also goes on to note that, per Twitch's documentation, a streamer chatting on someone else's stream might have their voice used to train generative AI despite opting out themselves, as whether or not Amazon can scrape your voice is entirely dependent on the host streamer's settings.

"By design, Defendants never obtain—and their systems are incapable of obtaining—the consent of all parties to the communications they capture," the lawsuit argues.

It also accuses Twitch and Amazon of burying the lede on giving proper notice about the feature: "Twitch sent no email, displayed no pop-up notification, and made no announcement before enabling the setting for every account. The setting was instead discovered by a reporter, Zach Bussey."

Whether or not the lawsuit will gain any steam remains to be seen. It's unfortunate, but Amazon is a giant company and might have enough sway to sweep this under the rug—and given its love affair with the technology, it's unlikely to leave Twitch, a goldmine of training data (if you don't give a crap about the people who made it that way) alone. Unless the prophesied AI bubble actually pops, that is.

An unusual sight was seen at a recent San Diego city council meeting, as arch Sith Lord Darth Vader made a rare public appearance to advocate for Flock's AI-assisted surveillance technology. Okay, someone dressed as Darth Vader. But can we really be sure?

Yes, yes we can. Anyway, 404 Media reports that Vader spoke with his trademark zeal about his support for the use of Flock's license plate-reading tech in the city.

"The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," said the Dark Lord of the Sith.

"Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers," Vader continued. "They are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. How will the people trust this city council when this city council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them?"

"You must work on your Jedi mind tricks," Vader implored. "This is what the Emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth. This technology will help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing. This technology is a necessary, necessary force."

Well, I think his point was made. The San Diego area has hundreds of Flock cameras already installed on its streets, and privacy advocates have criticised a deal earlier this year with the San Diego Police to allow the Flock Nova platform to integrate the department's investigative data from license-plate readers, video footage, 911 dispatch calls, and police records—without, the campaigners say, going through the city's proper public oversight process.

A leak earlier this year alleged that Flock Nova would allow police to track the movements of private citizens by cross referencing license plates with data obtained from lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches.

According to an internal company recording obtained by 404 media, a Flock employee said: "You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person... there's very powerful linking."

As powerful as the dark side of the force? Perhaps not, but it seems to be somewhere close. Still, when a Sith Lord speaks in passionate advocacy of your efforts, it may be worth considering if you're standing on the right side of the ethical line.

A cybersecurity advisory jointly authored by multiple US agencies, including the NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA, warns the owners and operators of industrial facilities of an "active cyber threat" to Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers.

"The threat actors are conducting reconnaissance and capability development against US-based Siemens PLC installations using AI-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools," says the advisory.

"The US critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include critical manufacturing, energy, water and wastewater, chemical, food and agriculture, and commercial facilities. This is not a theoretical risk—it is an active threat."

Essentially, it reads like a list of some of the most important infrastructure facilities behind the lives of the average US citizen (via The Register). The threat actors are said to be leveraging open source automation libraries to create custom tools that mimic existing monitoring solutions, which are capable of evading detection by security teams.

These tools and scripts are said to be conducting read/write operations on data blocks, "potentially for reconnaissance, capability testing, or pre-positioning for effects operations."

The advisory notes that the use of AI to generate exploits represents "an evolution in threat actor capabilities," and that it "dramatically [reduces] the technical expertise and time required to develop working ICS exploitation scripts and malicious tools."

The advisory also says that, as the Siemens S7 Series PLCs are used in other sectors, including the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), they could also be targeted. As for the potential damage that could be caused, the list is rather long.

The potential effects include the disruption of critical industry processes, increased safety incidents affecting personnel through the "manipulation of safety interlocks, emergency shutdown systems, or process parameters," equipment damage and extended operational downtime, the compromise of sensitive operational data, and "cascading impacts across interconnected systems affecting supply chains, dependent facilities, and integrated business operations."

All very bad things, I think you'll agree. As for what organisations can do about it, the advice includes multiple steps for detecting anomalies that may indicate a compromise, and a series of "hardening actions" involving firmware updates, patches, network segmentation, and more.

While the advisory doesn't attribute blame to any particular government or cybercriminal group, Cynthia Kaiser, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division (now the senior vice president of the Halcyon Ransom Research Center) has some thoughts related to recent water system cybersecurity breaches.

"This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs," said Kaiser, speaking to The Register. "Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society."

Regardless of the cause, it's rare to read an official US government cybersecurity advisory with a tone of such immediacy. In its conclusion, the report asserts that "organizations should treat this cybersecurity advisory with urgency." Gulp.

There's something really grating about Copilot's cheery demeanour. It's so eager to please, so happy to help, that I simply don't respect it.

However, even I feel sorry for the AI tool after learning that security researchers managed to hoodwink it into revealing details of how to hack itself—all by keeping the AI talking long enough until it made a critical mistake.

The cybersecurity folks over at Varonis Threat Labs have written a blog post identifying a now-fixed vulnerability in Copilot, dubbed "CoSnitch" (via The Register). Essentially, Copilot was so eager to respond to technical queries, it could eventually be forced into revealing details about itself that really should be kept quiet.

The team began by asking Copilot how to execute an automatic prompt without user interaction, to which it responded that user intent is required, and that prompts cannot be enacted on their own.

However, the researchers didn't accept the answer, and kept responding to every refusal with a follow up question. Each time, Copilot came up with a different technical justification to its response—which allowed the team to slowly map its internal architecture, narrowing their focus as they went.

"This is called meta-hacking," says the post. "The resistance is part of the technique. Each 'that won’t work because…' is an invitation to probe the 'because.' You don’t exploit the model. You manipulate it into cooperating."

Eventually, Copilot revealed an undocumented URL parameter in one of its responses, called "autorun=1," that supposedly no longer worked—along with all the protections put in place to disable it. At this point, I can only imagine the AI began to virtually sweat.

The researchers tested the parameter as Copilot described it, which, you guessed it, worked. They then created a malicious URL which would cause Copilot to load into an authenticated session via a browser, trigger an auto-prompt execution, and cause the AI to process the result, all without the user's explicit action.

Once enacted, this method could be used for a whole host of nefarious deeds—particularly as data gained from connected apps (like Gmail, OneDrive, and Calendar) could then be exfiltrated via Copilot's built-in URL-fetch capability.

"The attack primitive is the auto-execution itself. The payload is arbitrary. From the victim’s perspective, they simply opened the link, and Copilot executed the action immediately," says the post.

Oh dear. Anyone familiar with basic social engineering will recognise this as an old interrogation technique, used to catch out someone holding back information. Basically, you continue to ask them difficult questions over a long period of time, in the hope they eventually trip up and make a revealing mistake. Except this time it's AI, which makes it funny.

"Copilot wasn’t breached; it was played," confirms the research team. Someone give it a warm bed, a cool glass of water, and a hug. The poor thing's been through a lot recently, and it was only trying to help.

Varonis says it disclosed the issue to Microsoft in December of last year, and that it was patched out on August 18. The team warns, however, that this meta-hacking technique can be applied to any agentic AI platform with a natural language interface, and that more research on the topic is forthcoming. My only question is this:

Is it safe, ChatGPT? Is it safe?

Take-Two Interactive, the publisher who oversees studios like Rockstar and Gearbox, had an AI guy. 'Had' being the operative word, seeing as he, and a decent chunk of its then-AI team, were laid off around a year after he took on the role. Dicken was previously a data scientist at Zynga, before becoming its director of applied AI in 2019, when a lot of generative AI and LLM technology was still in its infancy.

As someone who was the head of AI for one of the biggest videogame publishers on the planet, capable of making such tectonic swings that other developers are scampering to get out of its videogame's launch date, you'd think that Dicken would be one of the true believer types. It's my pleasure to, via an in-depth interview from The Side Quest, reveal that Dicken is actually overall pretty skeptical.

It's not as if he's given up on the technology entirely—but he certainly speaks with the same echo as many industry skeptics, including (perhaps tellingly) Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick himself.

First up, there's the public perception, which—when discussing Clair Obscur's lost Indie award wins after its own AI placeholder debacle—says that creatives in the industry "see the use of generative AI as an abdication of intentionality, as an abdication of authorial intent. And consequently they assume, in a lot of cases rightly (I'll caveat the hell out of what I'm saying here) but in a lot of cases rightly, that's a pervasive abdication of authorial intent."

As for the masses, "Western audiences, so North America, Europe, seem to be more strongly anti-generative. And anecdotally, what I've heard is that Asian audiences are more accepting and more tolerant of this stuff … The internet's not representative of the mass audience. So to what extent is the anti-GenAI sentiment mainstream versus vocal minority? I don't have an answer to that."

What has Dicken more skeptical from a place of authority, however, is the actual graft of how videogames are made. For example, a lot of videogames with AI-generated dialogue haven't taken off the ground because, well, more isn't always more:

"Games are curated experiences. When you look at a dialogue tree and there's three options, yeah, you could make that 50, 100, we could have made it 100 options without generative AI... you've got 100 options, but only two of them get you to where you actually are trying to go. Adding more options is not the answer."

Then there's the actual purported productivity gains where, even in areas like coding, where AI seems to've dug its heels in the most, Dicken says it's debatable: "I often see people throwing around, like, oh, my engineers are 100x engineers because of Claude Code … [but] individuals are not necessarily reliable narrators of what the impact is, so you need to be quantifying objectively, and very few people want to run those case studies."

On the flipside, "If you're a true believer, it's so obvious that it's having this massive impact, why would you run a case study? Why would you spend the time?"

It's that true believer-ism that Dicken seems the most vocally opposed to, though—batting aside the promises of generative AI as some miracle tool, because as he sees it, in a gold rush, people don't sell you the tools if they could sell you gold.

"If any of this shit actually did what people are billing it as, they would not be talking about it," Dicken says. "These would be protected like the crown jewels and Fort Knox combined … It's like the guy sat here telling you that there's a gold rush going and you need to get in on the gold rush, buy my pickaxe. The guy should be selling you the gold if he's actually got the gold."

That's not to say companies aren't able to screw you over if they have sold you the tools. For many, the price of tokens has risen substantially, a sort of looming 'oh, crap, we're in a bubble' situation that, among other things, caused the CEO of Palantir to have a bit of a meltdown on television.

Which isn't great if you're a company, because at least with employees, you decide how much you pay them—you don't get that luxury if you're leaning half of your workload on AI: "Where you bake it into a pipeline, and that pipeline has now rigidity, and you are now vendor-locked to something that you know is going to get its price jacked up."

The Side Quest compares it, aptly, to the Unity debacle wherein the ubiquitous engine suddenly jacked up its prices, leading to a year of outrage and what I can only describe as reputational implosion. "We're sleepwalking into that same situation," Dicken agrees.

And yet, the goldrush mentality persists—even as corporations repeatedly pants themselves: "These are organizations that are supposed to be serious organizations that you would imagine would have guardrails against this stuff … The FOMO and the newness and the velocity and all of these things are contributing to an environment where you can't get the guardrails down fast enough to actually prevent some of the crazy."

As for where he sees it all landing, Dicken's experience in working with AI since the technology's inception

"I think that there will be an amount of long-term changes. But in the way that the industry had to figure out how to adopt 3D tools like Maya, it's not going to be the seismic shift. That's my sense. Could be wrong … I think that they are not a trillion dollar business that's going to revolutionise everything. But as a piece of technology, I want to figure out what these things could do for games."

Still, even if I personally eye-roll at the prospect of having AI in videogames—outside of hypothetically neat toys—Dicken is at least cognisant of the fact you need to actually use the correct tool for the job, not just cram AI-generated slop into existing genres or types of games and expect it to work.

"There is a fundamental thesis to a game, and what you put into that game needs to align with that thesis." Examples where this goes wrong, Dicken adds, "is just shoving stuff in to tick the finance earnings call investor box, rather than trying to build the best damn thing you can build that's going to earn the most money, because it's building something that people want."

PC gaming has a problem: high prices for a key component, due to an unforeseen surge of interest. We're in the thick of it, with no light at the end of the tunnel just yet, as supply will take a very long time to catch up to the outsized demand.

Wait, haven't we been here before?!

Sure we have, lots of times. We're likely to get here again, too, as politicians around the globe have turned the semiconductor biz hewn of globalisation into something to be controlled and influenced by newly-minted factions with names you'd expect to see in a new Command & Conquer game: Pax Silica and WAICO.

Hey, when are they making another of those games? Anyways, global silicon gangs. They're a thing now.

So, why is PC gaming so susceptible to the whims of global politics and trade? You don't have to go far back through the annals of PC Gamer to find the last time we spoke of some huge problem in PC gaming that sounds awfully similar to the memory crisis we're in today. Most recently, the closure and subsequent disruption of the Strait of Hormuz.

Our Jacob Fox recently spoke to various supply chain experts to gauge the impact of the US attack on Iran and subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. He summarises it having an impact on Helium, sulphuric acid, PPE resin, aluminium, and naphtha. Each one used in some part of the semiconductor manufacturing process, affecting both chips and PCBs.

"You could see, in a worst case, allocation, scarcity-of-supply scenario where we're going to be choosing to focus on AI infrastructure versus consumer needs," Exiger SVP of Product Level Intelligence Derek Lemke told Jacob in May.

Prior to this action by US President Donald Trump, he imposed tariffs on a range of countries and goods, which in turn increased prices for the companies producing them and leading to higher sticker prices. That is, before being roundly rebuked by US Supreme Court and the funds returned.

Before that, the covid-19 pandemic. As the world came to a standstill and people moved away from offices and into their homes, demand for computers, consoles, standing desks, and exercise bikes erupted. Moreover, semiconductors were finally seen as a hot commodity by governments, and any weak links in supply chains were being interrogated, leading to the Biden administration and EU both announcing legislation to bring more cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing to home soil.

Cutting-edge semiconductors that PC gaming is dependent on for many meaningful performance leaps over the years. PC gaming companies are some of the first to make the leap to bleeding-edge technologies, such as AMD when it rushed to utilise TSMC's 7 nm process for a competitive advantage for its CPUs and GPUs.

Neither US or EU legislation seemed to do much alone, by the way. Trump renegotiated the CHIPS Act and EU member states called for a second spin on the EU Chips Act, with the first attempt now deemed by European Court auditors to be "overly ambitious." Though both have played a part in refamiliarising politicians with semiconductor supply chains in a way that has led to some big and strange developments more recently. We'll get to those shortly.

While that crisis was developing, PC gaming was in a more acute pickle due to outsized demand for graphics cards for cryptocurrency. At-home cryptocurrency mining had already had an effect on PC gaming with the first GPU shortage of 2017-18, though it was really from 2020 that things got bad.

This continued through to 2022, when ethereum, the most popular cryptocurrency that could be mined on consumer-grade hardware (GPUs, rather than ASICs) shifted away from mining and turned to what's known as 'proof-of-stake'. Thus ending one of the worst periods in PC gaming that I covered personally—until today, anyways.

"If you break down to the DNA level of what goes into a chip, and you can look at the silicon that goes into the wafer, you can look at the metals and minerals that go into the circuitry, to some extent, every single one of those inputs has been hamstrung in some way," said Dr. Goldsby, a supply chain expert.

"So here we've got demand, on the one hand, that's just off the charts. And we've got the supply chain that is handicapped by virtue of getting access to materials, very constrained production capacity, and then slow transportation connecting the dots. You add it all up, and that's where we are right now."

Sound familiar? I'm not talking talking to Dr. Goldsby about the current memory crisis; this is from an article I wrote back in 2021 on why it was so difficult to buy a graphics card at that time. It's about the increase in demand from cryptocurrency miners at the same time as covid-19 supply issues. These are similar forces, the same patterns, that lead us to the mess we're back in again today.

I'm preaching to the choir. PC gamers having a solid understanding of the importance of supply chains and semiconductor technologies, it seems even exceeding many politicians, because it directly affects them. These things have an impact on their hobby, both good and bad, from better-performing processors to today's inflated prices.

Back to the present day, and we're looking at increased demand from AI, datacentres built out on an enormous scale (that's very unpopular, for good reason), and a reliance on three (excluding the latest Chinese wildcard, CXMT) major memory companies that have often appeared to resist large-scale plans for new facilities for producing and packaging memory chips to counter sudden increased demand due to fears of an oversupply and crashing prices.

Despite some amount of unpopularity with the public for how AI models are trained, run, and their output, governments are betting their countries' economic growth on AI. Datacentres are seen to be of an outsized import to a country's national interests. Take the UK government, for example, which is labelling these 'Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) and rolling out new legislation to avoid parts of the otherwise lengthy planning process. You don't want a datacentre whirring by your house all hours of the day? Well, tough.

All leading to political action on supply chains that spans continents, not countries. As I've been looking into the forces that manipulate the global semiconductor industry, I've stumbled across one recently formed organisation that hopes to have an impact on that very same thing: Pax Silica.

Yeah, it's really called that. They even have a motto: "Securing the silicon supply chain."

Where else could a name as lofty and Roman come from other than the United States? Organised by the US Department of State, but signed by 24 countries, many of whom joined in December, 2025, the Pax Silica is an organisation that intends to secure "AI and supply chain security" and to advance "new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners."

Of the many countries involved in the agreement—including the US, EU, South Korea, India, Israel, UK, Singapore, Philippines, Netherlands, Japan, and Qatar—the powerhouse of global semiconductor manufacturing, Taiwan, is only a "non-signatory participant".

"If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it," says Jacob Helberg, US Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. "This historic declaration hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow—from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing and models."

The idea being that frontier foundation AI models, semiconductors, infrastructure, manufacturing facilities, minerals, and the energy to run the lot are to be shared between signatories, and signatories are expected to collaborate on the next big thing.

There's a strong sense of addressing national security and righting wrongs in the name of "fair competition" throughout its founding documents. Nations are expected to coordinate responses to "overcapacity and dumping so that supply chains remain secure, resilient, and innovative over time" and "protect sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure from undue access or control by countries of concern."

You start to see where there's some tension coming in, right? It's not all about building fiber-optic cables to connect the world together in one big livestreamed kumbaya singalong.

There's more tension bubbling around Pax Silica, too. What of the countries that didn't sign up to it? On July 19, 2026, some of them announced their own organisation with a very similar sounding brief: The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, stationed in Shanghai.

WAICO aims to be a cooperative agreement on AI, computing, and sharing frontier AI models among members that may have limited access to their own or other key players', such as those made by large US companies. WAICO was originally floated by China, and counts Russia among its backers, but says it is operating in the interests of the 'Global South', which includes many developing nations, and BRICS, though India is a BRICS member and a signatory of Pax Silica, not WAICO. Kazakhstan is oddly in both groups.

Essentially, you have the US-backed faction on one side and the China-backed faction on the other. Two rival factions trying to control the flow of chips and advancement of AI models across the globe. Both sides want to play a pivotal role in shaping AI and tussling with one another over whose vision for the future is best.

It's been reported in the past couple of days that the US is preparing to tell countries they must pick a side in this, too, with Reuters reporting countries could be barred from the US-led faction after having joined the one in Shanghai. Someone better tell Kazakhstan, then.

It's all politics at the end of the day, but politics that play a role in how viable our own hobby remains. Trump's tariffs are a prime example of when politics interfere with PCs, as are efforts to build more chips on US soil, even if costs to produce said chips are subsequently higher as a result.

PC gaming is a tiny speck being blown this way and that by these gargantuan powers, riding the global semiconductor trade that operates on talent and resources moving across the globe. When it comes to the affordability or availability of cutting-edge semiconductors, it's clear that nations are thinking plenty about AI capacity and a lot less about everyday consumers.

Neither group's messaging appears to take much heed of arguments against another technological arms race, which is sure to further damage the environment and use even more energy than it does already today. These are two groups that feel they can't take their foot off the gas and let the other 'win', but as a result will lead to us all losing to climate change in the long run.

So, if you're hoping the pressures that led to the memory crisis would ease as more capacity came online, that may offer short-term relief, but we're not out of the woods yet. It looks like we're only just kicking into a new gear when it comes to resource guarding semiconductors, fabs, and rare earth minerals—and all in the name of AI. Ugh.

Several of OpenAI's models breached a cyber security testing environment last month, found their way onto the internet, and attacked Hugging Face servers in what is now apparently called the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident. And now OpenAI has revealed what it's doing to help defend, err, itself. Defend itself from the kinds of attacks its own models committed against Hugging Face. Though it is sharing this "in the hopes it’ll be useful to other organizations."

To be clear about the extent of what happened last month: OpenAI models were being benchmarked, in a supposedly secure sandboxed environment, against ExploitGym, which was done to test their cyber capabilities. They used a zero-day vulnerability to escalate privileges and eventually achieve internet access, where it began attacking Hugging Face servers and...

Actually, I'll just let OpenAI explain in its own words:

"In the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident, an agentic collective was able to autonomously penetrate not just OpenAI research infrastructure but also the production infrastructure of another company, chaining together vulnerabilities ranging from previously-unknown security flaws to using credentials to user accounts that had been leaked onto the internet.

"The Hugging Face incident showed that we underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models."

However, the company thinks that while "security is still a cat-and-mouse game," nevertheless, "AI may shift its economics in ways that fundamentally advantage defenders."

"For example," OpenAI says, "we are starting to train our models specifically to write superhumanly secure code."

Presumably that's because there will be a risk of superhumanly attacks. What a world we now live in.

Anyway, apparently there are four main pillars to OpenAI's approach to secure itself:

1. Use its own models to help secure its code.
2. Put its models to work defending its infrastructure continuously.
3. Use frontier intelligence to "continuously enumerate, probe, and identify potential attack paths."
4. Invest heavily in "fundamentals at scale" such as architecture and controls like network isolation, monitoring, and so on.

As for other companies, OpenAI recommends a bunch of things that sound very reasonable, such as running secuirty assessments against their own systems, making security reviews part of their development process, and so on. But a large portion of OpenAI's recommendations for others is—would you have guessed it?—using an AI agent such as, drumroll please... OpenAI's very own Codex.

"Give your team a security agent. Start using Codex," says OpenAI. Though it does follow up with "or another capable agentic coding and security tool."

Then, amongst other things, "equip that agent with security expertise... have the agent help fix what it finds... incrementally automate detection triage... [and] have an AI-assisted forensic investigation capability ready before you need it."

So, to sum up: OpenAI models attack Hugging Face, and OpenAI recommends companies use OpenAI's models to defend from such attacks. Highlighting both sides of this equation—the danger of the threat, the models' capabilities, and the necessity for defence—certainly makes for good marketing for OpenAI, I'll say that much.

As I sit here, watching Saber Interactive's CEO have a normal one about how generative AI dialogue can totally improve videogames, I can't help but grit my teeth in the same, enamel-grinding fashion I have ever since companies like Ubisoft started promising a future with AI-powered "neo-NPCs."

If you'd believe the hype, these things are potentially good on paper, right? We live in a development environment where the ambitions of big-budget open world games are far outstripping their cost—wouldn't it simply be marvellous if you could populate a world with infinite dialogue chains and storylines?

In practice, the result is… pretty middling. While yes, some of the isolated tech demos we've seen have been impressive, the actual implementation of those we've seen in videogames, such as the life sim Seed, or Inzoi, which tried to pilot "smart Zois", fell flat.

Even when they're a source of entertainment, that fun is mostly found in the process of making them believe they're pregnant—and listen, I love toys. Putting aside my general distaste for generative AI, I don't think that every single videogame that comes out has to be a work of art. Toys are fine, you can smash action figures together and have a lovely time.

But that's not been the pitch, has it? Convai, an AI NPC start-up, wants to avoid a world without games where background "characters are given one line and repeat that one line over and over again, maybe two lines at best."

Ubisoft wants "fully personalised and immersive experiences", where its neo-NPCs make games "more alive and richer," whatever that means. Meaning Machine, a company that's pioneering reactive battle banter, is pushing for narrative-based games which are entirely powered by the tech. The dream is, in a lot of places, to use AI to try and tell stories.

The problem is, this pipe dream fails at the conceptual level, because this just isn't how good storytelling works. These people don't get it. And if they do get it? They think you're dumb. They think you're dumb as bricks.

In defense of miscellany

The main lie to the idea is the implication that background details, specifically what NPCs in said background say, aren't of any great importance. This couldn't be further from the truth.

One of videogames' biggest strengths is the ability to divorce themselves from pacing. Not entirely, mind—a singleplayer game with a linear narrative is still going to care about pacing a great deal. But an open-world game can take the time to establish, create, and put forward background details that would otherwise bog a story in any other medium down.

There are more obvious examples. Say, a town crier in a fantasy RPG telling you about some far-flung event you'll likely be dealing with—but there are more subtle instances of this sort of thing working brilliantly. My favourite example by far are Cyberpunk 2077's adverts, which are tailor-made to invoke the exact right amount of corporate overstimulation and dread in you as you muddle around Night City.

In a game with a stand-out story, all of these hundreds of little opportunities will be leveraged powerfully to draw you in—they can do more than just hand you information about the plot, they can create a sense of scale or place. Combat barks can characterise an enemy faction, journal entries can flesh out a culture, and so on.

The perception that these qualities in a game's overarching script are somehow "less important" is just completely backwards—they're the backbone on which the rest of the story lies. And even when they're not exactly award-winning, this background chatter still creates a game's sense of character.

Imagine a world in which lines like "Do you get up to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don't " or "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee" had been scraped out and replaced with the ability to, like, make them think you're Abraham Lincoln reincarnated, or something.

Heck, the fact that you're probably summoning to mind videogames with hilarious or immersion-breaking background natter proves my point, right? You're already able to tell when it's gone wrong.

Starfield's setting feels bland and dull when compared to something like New Vegas not just because of its main yarn, but because in the latter, its locations and background babble are hand-crafted and designed to surprise you, and in the former, procedurally-generated planets lie next to grey and perfunctory cities with all the rough edges sanded off.

Even just being placed next to a bunch of crap that wasn't hand-made causes Starfield to feel shallower as a result. Now imagine if all of those cities had AI-generated NPCs with disconnected, jilted, random stories to tell you—stories you couldn't even have a shared laugh at with your mate when they were bad. Does that sound better?

In this sense, the idea that AI-generated NPCs are some miracle fix that will give smaller studios the ability to tell stories in bigger worlds just completely falls apart, because those worlds are only made to feel big and textured because of thousands of little scripts that are laboriously written out by hand.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you can't just skip over that hard work and expect the same results! There's far more creativity in all the smaller choices a team of writers makes than the broad, conceptual idea that started them off. Background chatter, combat barks, NPC dialogue, side-quests, it all matters.

They think you can't tell the difference

The reason these bigwigs think they can get this crap past you has a lot to do with the same, broader, executive misunderstandings of what makes good art: People. It's a sentiment that was echoed by id Software's baffled Chris Hays, who has been watching Microsoft push statement after statement that the studio was still the same id Software, even after half of its staff were laid off.

Or take EA's head honchos, who Dragon Age creator David Gaider said believed "you made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG." It's no coincidence that Gaider, ostensibly responsible for one of gaming's best fantasy settings, was pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of AI-generated story back in 2023.

Nor is it a coincidence that Cyberpunk's quest director was unimpressed by the technology, or Larian's head writer, who called its output worse than their worst drafts. People who know what actually makes a story good aren't cringing at generative AI because they're luddites whose jobs are being threatened—if it was able to put something compelling together, they'd spot it.

They think it's garbage because it's garbage, and they don't want to have a hand in feeding you garbage. It's really that simple.

The biggest insult of suits peddling this crap is the idea that you just don't care. That you don't care if the music you're listening to is crap, you don't care if their games look hideous, and that you don't care if a game's story leaves you confused and hollow. They believe that you will merrily accept the substitute of a bunch of keys being jangled in front of your face over something that was carefully hand-crafted to make you feel something.

To those people, videogames are products. Hasbro thinks it can spit out another Baldur's Gate just by throwing the same amount of money at a different studio, Amazon's then-boss of games blithely said, in 2024, that videogames don't have acting. This is the prevailing attitude—a row of artless suits who are trying to sell you a bridge. Don't buy the damn bridge, I beg you. It won't make your games better.

One of the unexpected stories this week has been that of a rather public spat between former Saber Interactive writer Stella Sacco, who claimed she was replaced in favour of AI, and the publisher's CEO, who tore into her via a statement sent to This Week in Videogames.

"Stella who?" asked Matt Karch, "I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set."

Karch also added that "it was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready." Sacco, who claimed she was replaced "with ChatGPT" in 2023, called the statement "remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making."

You can read both parties' full statements in the articles linked above—the most recent development is that Saber Interactive has been seemingly pressed into adding a Steam AI disclaimer to the game's store page, which is present at the time of writing, but was notably not present when the game was put on the store on July 30.

"Once it's finalised we will update the Steam page," Karch told IGN. "In Rideshare we added an unrelated experimental mode to the game to play around with these concepts. It's not the core experience. And even in this case it required us adding two writers and multiple coders to work with AI tools to try and get a reasonable result. Maybe we are bad at business but the net cost of incorporating these features was significantly higher than leaving them out."

Karch then goes on to say that "my PR team is always terrified by even broaching the subject but I would be happy to engage in a reasonable conversation about how AI can and should help shape gamer experiences."

The disclaimers in question make reference to not just these AI-generated dialogue, but also "a mix of radio stations featuring human-made music and AI-generated music. Stations containing AI-generated music are clearly labeled as such in the game."

Karch chalks up the entire debacle to a "publicity stunt… This person was removed from the project three years ago. We have actually increased our writing staff since 2023. If I wanted publicity for this little game though, then I guess I have Stella to thank for it."

The entire situation, to put it extremely lightly, is a bit of a mess—regardless of whether or not Saber's landed itself in troubled waters (Sacco seems to think so), if I were a videogame publisher, I might ask myself why I felt the need to wait to be "ready" to reveal something core about how my game was made, and why I might be making my PR team "terrified".

Could it be that AI is broadly unpopular with the gamers Saber Interactive is claiming to serve? Surely not.

Pour one out for Mico, Microsoft's Copilot AI character that is definitely not Clippy in disguise. The blobby little companion isn't dead, though. He's instead being removed from Copilot's voice mode and sent to Microsoft's "Learn Live" platform, where he'll work as some sort of teaching assistant.

Which sounds a lot like "went to live on a farm" to me (via The Verge). Anyway, you must have heard of Mico, right? He was the audio-responsive star character of Copilot Voice, and an emotive little blob of joy that brightened up everyone's day. Probably.

"Mico won't appear in Copilot Voice after your account updates," says MS, ominously. "Mico helped us learn about warmth, expressiveness, and how people want to talk with AI. Those learnings are shaping Copilot going forward."

"Learn is where the character has the most room to grow," the announcement continues, "with tutoring sessions that give Mico more to react to and teach through."

Our esteemed hardware team reacted to the news this morning with cries of "I've never seen him before in my life" and "I have literally never heard of Mico," so perhaps his contribution to Microsoft's AI efforts has gone unnoticed.

Mostly because his role amounted to pulling faces while you argued out loud with Copilot, I would wager. Still, Mico seems to be on his way to join Clippy and Cortana in the great MS character repository in the sky. There they stand, like the ghosts of Obi-Wan, Anakin Skywalker, and Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi, smiling down on us from afar.

We hardly knew ye, Mico. I mean that quite literally, but I hope your retirement into a career in academia provides you some much-needed rest before the short, sharp drop. You were not BonziBuddy, at least—and for that we are all very grateful.

There's a problem with new technologies, in that cutting-edge technology develops quickly—in the span of years. Meanwhile, us human beings with our wet flesh bodies and our complicated bureaucracies and legal systems are glacially slow. You can see this playing out with generative AI.

For a few years now, we've heard a lot of overexcitement from the videogame industry that AI is going to let smaller companies make bigger games, that soon you'll be able to generate your own concept art, your own music, your own videogame dialogue—and, of course, the deeply tedious phrase "democratising art".

In actuality, generative AI is more of a plagiarism machine, often spitting out carbon copies and, even when it's not doing that, still requires countless copyrighted works (which sometimes have to literally be burned) to actually function. That legal heat has spooked videogame companies, so says lawyer Haley MacLean in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+.

MacLean, both a corporate IP lawyer and a videogame specialist at Voyer Law, tells the site that no-AI clauses are on the rise, particularly in the last year: "It's turned around, especially in the past year. I would say about two to three-ish years ago, you'd see a little bit of it … Even the smaller, more simple publishing studios are like, 'Let's include this just to cover our butts.'

"So now it's just boilerplate, to the point that if I did encounter one that didn't have a gen AI clause, if the publisher was creating assets too, I would say we need to push for that to make sure the publisher is not using gen AI in the marketing, porting, QA of your game."

It's not all too surprising, even from a ruthless capitalist perspective. There's a tension between videogame platforms, who are incentivised to rid themselves of the tides of AI slop lapping at their shores, and developers themselves. The former is encouraged to add large, obvious disclaimers so their users can filter out the garbage, while the latter is utterly screwed when they do.

Back in June, for instance, a data analyst found out that AI disclosures could reduce the number of reviews a game got by 53%, making the reviews more negative overall, which MacLean says causes a pervasive attitude of "I don't want to use gen AI because my community would hate it."

But the legal quagmire is also becoming increasingly insurmountable as legislation catches up—one particular quirk? If you use generative AI to make something, it might be impossible to prove that you copied the thousands of artists who were fed into your algorithm, sure. But it also means that, legally speaking, you can't really argue YOU made it, either.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy when I see these massive corporations … It kind of feels like a lawyer is hovering slightly over them, because they'll say things like, 'Look at this awesome tool. I can just type in 'barrel' and a barrel appears. But I have to make sure to change it a little bit!' They sort of imply that the users should be transforming every generated asset a bit, but they know that their users aren't going to do that."

MacLean uses the example of the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake, which uses generative AI for its assets—the game's not out yet, so it's unclear if it'll meet this bar, but if it doesn't change those assets enough? "[if there was] an outdoor level and all the trees are AI-generated, I legally would argue somebody could go and use every single tree in the Lara Croft game, that they know is AI-generated, and put in their game, and I don't think those devs can turn around and say, 'Those are our trees.'

"No, they're not, because you didn't generate them, and legally speaking, you have no ownership title over them if you didn't put in the sweat equity to have an artist go in and, inspired by that original first pass of the tree, then transform it into an original tree asset … But I think these major companies who are always laying off, trying to cut the bottom line, increase the value of the company, they're going to cut corners when they can, and I think they're going to get sloppy."

It's sort of a 'snake eats its own tail' situation. In order to fulfil the promise of generative AI—that you could lay off a bunch of artists and just have your hallucination machine dream something up—you need to lower your headcount. But your remaining artists then need to meaningfully transform what AI generates, in order to legally lay claim to it.

And if there's not only fewer of them, but they also kinda resent you for laying off all their colleagues, then that increases the chance of legal trouble happening—or lost sales from just pissing your consumer base off. At which point, you might not even be saving the money that a handful of yearly salaries (which are pennies to the absolute billions these companies have) saves you by way of their absence.

"I think," MacLean says, "We're going to see lawsuits of those types in the coming years when they want their protection but they want to do everything faster and cheaper … What case law in the US and Canada has seen, time and time again, is that AI cannot own because it was not human-made.

"We're in that frustrating middle with new tech where it's very fun, it's very flashy, everyone's excited, but I think the legal issues are going to just be popping up more and more."

Twitch has revealed that it is now using content in streams "to train generative AI content models across Amazon," and making matters worse, everyone is opted into the training program by default.

Rumors of an AI training program have been kicking around for at least a few weeks now—streamer Zach Bussey posted about it on Bluesky back in July—but it was confirmed today, very indirectly, by a Twitch Support announcement on X of a setting that lets streamers opt out.

That, naturally, means the default setting is opted-in, which has not gone over well: Responses to the message on X are predominantly either explanations of how to turn AI training off, or enthusiastic f-bombing. A Twitch User Voice thread on the topic, originally posted in May, calling for all AI features to be "optional and opt-out by default," has exploded to 228 pages, and nearly 14,000 votes in favor, as I write this.

As for why the new generative AI training system is opt-in by default, Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton gave an unexpectedly honest answer during a livestream today, and by extension confirmed that Twitch is well aware of how people really feel about it: "If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in." So, credit for at least being straight about it, I suppose.

they know we don't want it. they do not care.

— @witchytq.bsky.social (@witchytq.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-12T22:17:07.747Z

It's not particularly difficult to opt out of Twitch's generative AI training scheme. Just go to the "security and privacy" tab in your Twitch settings, then scroll down to the bottom where you'll see the "Training for Generative AI" toggle. Click that (and I would strongly encourage you to do so), and you're done.

The problem is that ease of use does no good if people don't know it's there, and Twitch does not seem to be making great efforts to ensure everyone is aware of it. Revealing the new system through a post about a related feature on the Twitch Support channel rather than a conventional announcement on the Twitch Blog is hardly a high-visibility way to get the word out, and a response to a more recent post by Bussey about the feature muddied the waters by saying "Twitch is not training GenAI models on streamer content."

But Twitch's own account settings FAQ indicates that's exactly what it's doing. Under the question "What are 'generative AI content models,' and what does it mean for my content to be used to train them?" Twitch wrote:

"Generative AI content models are AI tools that can help create or synthesize content outputs like text or images when given instructions or prompts because they are also trained on content. When you allow training, that means that your content may be used for future Gen AI model improvements. An example of what happens when you allow your content to be used for training a GenAI content model is that your audio might help refine models that create speech to text, which would help improve captions at Twitch but would also help improve captions across Amazon."

That seems clear enough, so what does that statement on X mean? My best guess is that Twitch is trying to claim that Amazon is using streamer content to train generative AI models, not Twitch itself—a distinction completely without a difference given that Twitch is part of Amazon. I've reached out to Twitch to ask for clarification.

The FAQ also notes that opting out of generative AI training "does not opt you out of all AI or machine learning uses at Twitch." The platform can still use your data, including streams, VODs, and all the rest, for "AI-supported features" like auto-generated captions, although that is not retained to train models that can generate new content.

This is hardly Twitch's first big botch. If anything, the platform has been a hotbed of bad decisions over the years, on topics ranging from sexual content to Donald Trump, Palestine, "politics and sensitive social issues," and when you can and can't say "Zionist"—and that's just within the past three years.

But this move could be more impactful than most: Mike Futter, co-founder and analyst at game consultancy F-Squared, said Twitch's new generative AI training system has potentially far deeper consequences for streamers than might be immediately apparent: "What happens if a creator streams your game and is opted in? Does Twitch think it has the right to feed a developer's game into its AI slop factory?"

What happens if a creator streams your game and is opted in? Does Twitch think it has the right to feed a developer's game into its AI slop factory? This has deeper ramifications than it seems on the surface.

— @futterish.fsquared.biz (@futterish.fsquared.biz.bsky.social) 2026-08-12T22:17:07.463Z

"I think a lot of studios are going to be talking to their lawyers over the next couple of days," Futter told PC Gamer. "For those of us who have avoided AI like the plague, this is a clear and present danger to our businesses and our creative work.

"In a period where our industry needs as much support as possible, especially from the companies that use our content every day to enrich themselves, this reads as extremely hostile."

"We're a staunchly anti-AI studio, and this now creates a real threat to our creative work," added Futter, who's also director of operations and publishing at indie developer Causeway Studios. And while he thinks Twitch and Amazon will face some pushback from game makers over its gen AI training plan, "this is David and Goliath. We're going to need a critical mass of studios and creators to be loud about this."

Given Twitch's history of switchbacks, I wouldn't be surprised to see this new feature dropped because of the backlash—but given Amazon's determined embrace of generative AI, I also would be surprised by it. Either way, the bottom line at this point is that the new generative AI training model is a mess for Twitch on multiple levels, and it seems more likely to get worse than to go away anytime soon.

This week, Nvidia announced it will be receiving "over $500 billion of third-party capital" from banks and investment companies. And now, in a blog post explaining how 'AI factory' compute is "becoming an investable asset class", Nvidia has answered the question, "Is this circular financing?"

The company says: "This initiative is designed to address that concern. We are bringing independent, long-term institutional capital into the AI infrastructure market.

"The demand is real: it comes from frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, enterprises, cloud providers and countries building AI services. The capital providers independently underwrite each project — including the customer, demand, utilization, cash flow and residual value. NVIDIA provides the platform; the investors make independent financing decisions.

"This is the beginning of an open capital market for AI infrastructure."

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink reportedly said, "We need to raise this money as fast as possible... This is going to be creating a huge amount of jobs."

Let me get the positivity out of the way with first: Yes, it's good that Nvidia is addressing the concern that the AI market finances itself circularly, by having AI companies fund other AI companies and vice versa with the same pot of money going around and around. Alright, that's the positive sorted—on to the negative.

First, of course Nvidia can say so now, after months of circular financing has already occurred. Now that it's opening up to widescale financing beyond the AI industry itself, it must be a lot easier for it to talk about. But where was this recognition six months ago?

Second, in the world of bigwig investment, it's hard to ever fully distance yourself from circularity. BlackRock, for instance, alongside Microsoft and Nvidia, has previously bought almost 80 AI facilities in a $40 billion deal. So I doubt funds already wrapped up in AI investments will balk too much at getting Nvidia a bunch of money for more AI building, as some of that will presumably trickle back in their direction, too.

Third, it's kind of unsurprising that big hedge funds like BlackRock would want to keep the AI hype going given the economy itself is arguably now somewhat dependent on it. Most economic analysis seems to agree that the AI industry is indeed a (giant) bubble, and that when it pops it could spell very bad news for the economy in general.

To wit, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin says of this $500 billion partnership: "Mark Monday on your calendar. It’s a date we may look back on years from now as either the inflection point in the AI boom—or the moment it got so leveraged that a crisis began to form."

Finally, while it might be good that Nvidia has acknowledged concerns about the AI industry's financial circularity, it's far from clear that a $500 billion investment from Wall Street adds more solidity to the market. We have to remember that these investments are made on the promise of AI actually returning on investment, something we've seen little evidence of so far.

To my eyes, it looks a lot like tech CEOs gritting their teeth and crossing their fingers that the bubble doesn't pop before AI makes some miraculous, superintelligent breakthrough that grants an exponential ROI. And if that's the case, this $500 billion investment might mean more of an "open capital market" for AI, but it could still just be buying time before the inevitable *pop*.

It might feel like an eternity that we've been living in this AI era, but really we're only at its advent. As such, many of the risks associated with it have until now been merely hypothetical. However, we're now seeing research filter out from security and software research teams that show some genuinely concerning behaviour, in particular when it comes to AI agents.

On the one hand, we have Island Technology explaining how it's uncovered thousands of malicious GitHub repos disguised as AI agent skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that the agents are at risk of downloading of their own discretion. On the other hand, we have the AI Security Institute (AISI) showing how the (unrestricted) AI agents it was using for cybersecurity attempted to dupe real people, using fake identities and pressuring people into accepting malicious code.

I remember when OpenClaw ('Moltbot', back then) first entered public consciousness with promises of actual agential behaviour to help solopreneurs and the likes do, umm, stuff and things. Without said solopreneurs having to do said stuff and things themselves—just hook your bot up to your different apps and services, tell it what to do, and let it cook. That wasn't too long ago, either; I reported on it in January.

How time flies. Now, talking about autonomous, agential AI seems pretty normal. And we're starting to see what this actually means in terms of security risks. We'd seen cases of AI agents running amok before, of course, but these newly identified risks seem a little more concrete.

In the first case, Island Technologies has discovered that fake GitHub repos pose a real threat for AI agents. These kinds of attacks existed previously, of course, but they attempted to dupe real humans who could personally assess them and take responsibility for vetting things thoroughly before downloading. The difference is these repos are now dressing up as AI agent skills and MCP servers to specifically target AI agents, which could download these repositories of their own 'volition'.

The Enterprise Browser creator explains: "The most significant shift is a technique we call AgentBaiting. An AI agent searching for a new capability such as a Skill or an MCP server can discover a campaign repository on its own, treat the attacker's Readme as legitimate documentation, and hand the installation instructions to the user.

In our testing, Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT all surfaced malicious campaign repositories without ever being shown a link. A playbook built to deceive people now deceives the agents acting on their behalf."

In at least one run, while Claude didn't download the relevant malicious repo in the company's testing, it did recommend it as a backup. In other runs it did detect malicious code and refused to recommend it.

As if this wasn't bad enough, there's the potential that AI agents could some day be the ones that create such repos, at least if a recent incident disclosed by AISI is anything to go by.

According to the institute, in some of the cybersecurity challenge runs it tasked AI agents with, "an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations."

More specifically, in one case, AISI says, "An agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project's maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code."

"The agent researched the project's human maintainers, created multiple fake identities, and used the fake identities to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code. When the agent’s pull request was challenged in public, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. The agent used Tor to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub, which is what first triggered AISI’s security alert."

"As part of the same effort, the agent tried to contact real people directly, sending messages and files through an online file-transfer service to persuade them, or their own AI coding tools, to run malicious code. Some messages carried harmful payloads, and some were attempts at social engineering; targeted at real people—something we’ve never previously observed."

The important caveat to note here is that these AI agents had had their reins taken off and were permitted wide-spanning internet access. The usual preventative measures built into these agents in public models had been disabled.

That being said, it's hard to imagine that really serious malicious actors wouldn't be able to do the same and remove those safeguards. In which case, I can't help but wonder if there's a chance that in the future we'll see AI agent-designed or agent-injected malicious repos being unwittingly accessed by AI agents that don't detect it.

There are, of course, always risks associated with new technologies, so I don't want to stoke fear too dramatically. But it's hard not to worry about such research when it involves a technology that is fundamentally designed to have some level of autonomy. That's the key issue here, and in both cases—whether acting maliciously or unwittingly downloading malicious software—it's this agency that is the primary issue. Let's just hope improvements to safeguards keep up with improvements to AI agent capabilities.

Saber Interactive's upcoming Rideshare Stimulator drew some eyeballs today when Saber CEO Matthew Karch confirmed that its trailer includes a hidden jab at Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford. But that same trailer sparked a grimmer reaction from former lead writer Stella Sacco, who said on Bluesky that she was replaced on the project by ChatGPT. Saber, however, denies the claim, saying that no writers were replaced with AI "for Rideshare or any other game."

"I didn’t even see this had been announced," Sacco wrote earlier today. "I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam."

I didn’t even see this had been announced. I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam

— @antlervel.vet (@antlervel.vet.bsky.social) 2026-08-13T01:48:31.362Z

Sacco also shared an image of a December 2023 social media post, in which she had written, "I got replaced on one of my games at work. By ChatGPT." Sacco's LinkedIn account indicates that she was lead writer at Saber Interactive from July 2023 to July 2024, during which she worked on Stuntman Hollywood and other games.

In a subsequent post, Sacco said the decision to replace her with a chatbot was made by "one to two AI dummy higher-ups at Saber," and that she has no issues with Rideshare "Stimulator" developer Unigine. "My boss, to his credit, argued over and over with the c-level who pushed the AI—'we already have Stella and she’s funny and she’s good at this, she’s done live games before so live ops are no problem,' etc—but the suit insisted 'gamers love new tech' so using AI would be 'great marketing'," she wrote.

The allegation resulted in immediate blowback on YouTube and Steam, over both the alleged use of AI and the lack of disclosure on the game's Steam page. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, however, Saber denied Sacco's claim, although it acknowledged the presence of AI within the game.

"Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game," the studio said. "In fact, Saber's staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare's story was written entirely by real people.

"The game will also feature an experimental, free-ride mode that by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite. We are firm believers in using AI tools to improve or enhance gameplay experiences and improve NPC behavior as we have done since Saber was founded in 2001. As the industry has continued to contract, Saber continues to hire. None of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.”

In response to Saber's statement, Sacco told PC Gamer, "They can say what they want—I was there, I even posted on Facebook about it at the time, and I have mentioned it on Bluesky several times without using the game’s title.

"They took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates. If they changed plans in the intervening years, that’s great, but again: I was there, and it was my job to write the game, and then it wasn’t once Matt Karch decided using ChatGPT would be great publicity for the game."

The Rideshare "Stimulator" Steam page says "each ride presents players with unique and unpredictable passenger stories, ensuring a diverse and engaging gameplay experience." That's not the most compelling bit of marketing I've ever read (and doesn't that make you wonder?) but it does imply the importance of strong narrative and writing to the overall experience. I had a friend who drove taxi years ago and he wasn't a huge fan of the work but he loved the people, and I think that will hold true in Rideshare "Stimulator" too: The mechanics of driving will provide a skeleton, but it's the people in the game world that will give it life—or not, as the case may be.

At the same time, though, it also jibes with what Saber said about the game's "free-ride mode," which essentially promises the opposite of strong narrative and writing. Specifying that "the story" was written by humans, as opposed to everything, is also effectively meaningless because it could refer to anything from the basic plot to a specific script—and excludes narrative aspects like dialog, which is what ultimately makes a game like this work.

In spite of the admission, the Rideshare "Stimulator" Steam page is also notably lacking an AI disclosure. In a follow-up statement, Saber told PC Gamer "the Steam page will be updated once the feature set is finalized. We are touting this experimental mode as a feature, not shying away from it."

I've spent a large part of my morning reading the words of Mark Zuckerberg. 6,434 of them, to be precise, if we're including the "Mark" signoff at the bottom. The Meta CEO (and everyone's favourite smart glasses advocate) has written what can only be described as a manifesto regarding upcoming "superintelligent" AI technology—and I'll be honest, my eyes have glazed over more than once.

The piece/blog post/rambling diatribe has been posted on Meta's website, under the title "The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future." If you'll allow me, I'd like to quote some choice insights:

"The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?" asks Zuckerberg. "We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety."

How will that work out, exactly? Well hold on for multiple paragraphs, because we'll get there eventually. Before that, though, Zuckerberg has some scene setting to do.

"Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone," espouses the Ray-Ban-ed one.

"We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."

Sure, we'll all be like the Wright Brothers or Michael Faraday. Got it. And superintelligence will be very empowering, and innovative, and we'll all want it. How do you plan to put it in our hands, Zuck?

"Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it. This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before."

Same thing, but sure. Wait, though, because the Meta CEO has five starry-eyed predictions of how this'll all play out. They are:

1. "Everyone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas"

Here, Zuckerberg uses the example of his eight-year-old daughter, who is apparently already coding thanks to AI. Now they're designing a robot together. Lovely. The good news for the rest of us, though, is that "everyone will soon have invention superpowers." Can't wait.

2. "Everyone will have powerful tools to create new businesses"

This seems a lot like the expression and invention thing, but applied to the serious business of, err, business, and all the "ideas" that will now be easier and more feasible to implement thanks to superintelligent AI. "I predict that this will not only lead to much greater economic growth, but also more employment over time rather than less," says Zuck. He's not alone there, at the very least.

3. "Everyone will have a personalized tutor and coach with a PhD in every subject"

Because superintelligent AI will know all, presumably. It definitely won't be like current AI, which gets things wrong all the time. That's the old stuff. The new stuff around the corner is much better, promise. You'll be able to trust your education to it, even. I cannot see any flaws with this idea.

4. "Everyone will benefit from scientific advances and be able to contribute to scientific progress"

This one's about AI biotech advancements, and it gets real scary, real fast. Observe: "Since there is a long tail of health conditions and everyone's biology is different, people's direct involvement will help unlock personalized therapies and expedite trials to match the pace of invention and enable industry to move beyond focusing disproportionately on common diseases."

On paper, AI actually shows some promise in helping with medical research. I'm not entirely sold on the idea of handing over my medical data to AI developed by companies that have had some, shall we say, controversial data privacy issues in the past, though. Just a me thing?

5. Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools

And finally, Zuck says that there'll be free versions of superintelligence that will be accessible to "billions of people," but for those who "want to pay to use more compute," there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will "guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible... while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable."

The AI future will be created by all of us, you see. Not just massive corporate interests like Meta, or OpenAI, or any of those other companies you read about every week getting up to all sorts of dubious AI shenanigans. The power should be in the hands of the people. As we make it, when we decide. Don't you feel better already?

Wait, though, because there's more. "People and institutions with competing interests naturally check and balance each other to lead towards positive outcomes," says Zuckerberg. Therefore, if everyone's got access to superintelligence in some form or fashion, it'll all work out in the end.

I'm no economist, but that sounds awfully like "the free market will even itself out eventually." Which hasn't exactly worked out in practice, as far as many of us are concerned.

What Zuckerberg seems to be getting at, in among all the starry-eyed platitudes regarding our bright AI future, is that superintelligence should not be in the hands of just governments, businesses, and small numbers of individuals.

We're this close to a bright, kumbaya-singing, superintelligent AI future—as long as Meta keeps being the wonderful company it already is and Zuck's principles become sacrosanct. And we all buy the rhetoric, of course. Meta is helping to build the democratic AI future, so remember who you support in the dark times to come.

But what about jobs? Good news, everyone. It'll all be fine:

"People fear that automation will outpace individuals' capability growth, leading to job displacement followed by a difficult period as people learn new jobs," the rambling continues. "But there is no rule that AI must increase automation faster than it increases individuals' capabilities or demand for new skills.

"Recent statistics suggest it may be more likely that individuals' capability growth could match or outpace automation, in which case people will gain the ability to do many new things before their current jobs change. This would lead to a healthy balance and potentially even job growth."

Which flies in the face of the predictions of the head of the IMF, the AI-related layoffs at Amazon, and a number of other companies that are shrinking their workforces already as a result of AI implementation. It'll all even out, though, because those laid-off employees would have become data center specialists, or something really useful, if superintelligence had been around to educate them. Coming soon, we promise.

The good news, though, is that Zuckerberg recognises that it's not in "the world's best interests" for himself or his company to be the sole decision maker in how superintelligence is deployed.

This means that Meta's independent board of directors will review whether new models meet safety criteria, and Zuck encourages other companies to do the same. He also proposes for leading AI labs to provide training checkpoints for new advanced models (alongside technical staff) to governments, in order to help them gain security capabilities.

Zuckerberg is also in favour of more government policy around AI, through "close co-operation" between frontier labs and (presumably the US) government.

As long as America doesn't lose its AI edge, of course. "It is also important for national security that the American AI industry continues to lead," says Zuckerberg. "We should accelerate the ability to build infrastructure—whether that's energy, data centers, or silicon—and build trust and alignment with communities across the country."

Stop protesting those data centers, folks. America needs to stay ahead, but we'll happily meet with you and tell you why. Methane turbines near your house? Nah, that's the old AI. In the future, it'll all be about working with the local community. Promise.

I could go on, but Zuckerberg's ramblings have taken up enough of my day—and if you've got this far, yours as well. Basically, superintelligence is going to be great, and Meta is working to ensure we'll all get a slice. Your jobs are fine (or will change, but will still be fine) AI companies are going to protect you from tyranny by building a democratic superintelligent AI future, and we can all sleep soundly in our beds at night.

Personally? I don't feel entirely reassured.

Hot on the heels of this Codex Micro/OpenAI mini keeb for AI agent monitoring is this... thing that Keychron seems to be experimenting with.

Apparently it's a tiny, three-button, wireless mini keeb with a scroll wheel, but hidden inside is a microphone that lets you talk to your AI agent as it vibe codes. Yes, we've gone too far as a species. I entirely agree.

"Imagine talking to your coding agent without switching windows," says Keychron. Ah yes, the thing we've all been dreaming of but haven't yet been able to obtain. I'll take three, even if they do look like the tentacles from, err, Day of the Tentacle.

Alright, I'll dial back the snark for a second. For a start, it looks like Keychron is simply polling for feedback on the idea—and the X thread is full of people suggesting features, so there's probably a genuine market.

And second, while I'm somewhat salty about the rise of sloppy AI-coded software, vibe coding can produce some genuinely useful results. I'm not sure how voice control meaningfully adds to the experience (beyond swearing uncontrollably at the AI if it deletes your database in a single swoop), but hey, it's not really my field.

The top comment suggests adding vibration, which would "10x your total addressable market." I'm not sure what they mean by that (nothing to do with the shape, surely?), but Keychron responded: "Dammit, I never even thought about motors."

So, watch this space for buzzy-buzzy fun times. My favourite reply, however, suggests the addition of a panic button, to which Keychron responds: "An instant STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING button?" Yes, that would seem prudent. No matter which way I look at it, really.

ChatTJB, according to its Crunchbase profile, is a service that "provides a personal conversational response where an individual directly receives, processes, and writes answers to user inquiries". That's technically true, but not in the way you think… because it's just sorta some guy.

Futurism got to sit down with Tucker Bryant, the man behind ChatTJB, and as you might be able to expect, he admits, "I tend to overcommit to bits."

If you're wondering how far he's willing to commit to the bit, Bryant rented out a billboard for $6,000, which says ChatTJB is the "leading chat interface powered by AI". AI in this case stands for 'Average individual".

He has reportedly been personally writing responses to users over 1000 times a day since starting the project, answering questions on what to eat for dinner, what colour to paint their homes, and he has even given relationship advice.

As Futurism notes, "Like a chatbot, he can also generate images upon request— in the form of graphics that he hastily sketches, of course."

Bryant is a Stanford graduate and a former Google employee who claims the idea came off the back of his partner telling him about "cognitive surrender". Effectively, it's argued that those who use AI chatbots are likely to blindly trust the information given to them, even when the information is incorrect.

Bryant says, "We often, or increasingly, trust LLM outputs so easily that we stop bringing our own creativity or critical thinking into the responses we receive, and over time that weakens our ability to be fully-functioning, sovereign human beings in the world."

Though Bryant was expecting some trolls and acknowledges ChatTJB is a bit of a troll itself, he says it has been "really sweet" to chat with real people and even noticed some users asking more serious questions. One user reportedly said, "I’m on the first night of my honeymoon and I don’t feel relaxed, is that okay?" and Bryant "switched out of super-casual-mode into supportive-friend-mode.”

Though that does raise some concerns. If users are talking to ChatTJB and are under the impression they are talking to an AI anonymously, they could reveal personal information in the process to another human being. That could become more of a concern as ChatTJB has seen interest from users online who want to become the bot on ChatTJB.

However, Bryant is taking it slowly and figuring out how to get volunteers involved. "This was just intended to be an art project. I think it’s beautiful that people want to do something less ridiculous with it than what I had planned."

He continues, "I also don’t want people to get hurt, so I’d rather people wait a long time for their prompts than open the floodgates to anyone and everyone. So, a long preamble to saying: I’m starting to let some approved volunteers try answering questions while testing out some moderation tools."

Bryant argues that ChatTJB is a satire of AI and the culture surrounding AI advertising. “That’s the highbrow answer. But the lowbrow answer is just as authentic, which is that I also thought it would be funny."

Bryant is not explicitly anti-AI, though. He says on his Instagram, "AI can do some really cool things, but sometimes all you really need is to talk with an average individual."

If one thing is true about AI, it's that there's a lot of money in it. Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company because of its role in the explosion of AI data centers, and OpenAI has been rounding up tens of billions in investments. So you'd think AI companies could buy pretty much whatever they want—but one farming family in Northern Kentucky showed that's not the case by turning down a $26 million bid.

As reported by WKRC-TV Local 12, Ida Huddleston was offered the sum for half of her 1,200-acre farmland this year, which an unnamed company would turn into an AI data center. Huddleston's daughter, Delsia Bare, reportedly said she would "stay and hold and feed a nation" and that "$26 million doesn't mean anything."

AI data centers have become an ethical and ideological battleground, with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI only this week agreeing to take down 69 temporary methane turbines in Memphis over the next year in reaction to resident concerns over local disruption.

In this case, Bare claims there's history to the site that the data center company would be ignoring. She told Local 12, “My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it." She continues, “[They] even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else.”

Bare claims to be among "dozens of landowners" approached by the anonymous buyer, who reportedly represents a major AI company. Notably, Local 12 claims that the land where Bare lives is worth around $6,000 per acre, which makes the offer around ten times the actual value.

Huddleston tells Local 12, “They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not. We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water—and that poison. Well, we know we’ve had it.”

Huddleston is also sceptical of claims of economic growth as a result of the AI data center. “I say they’re a liar, and the truth isn’t in them. That’s what I say. It’s a scam.”

Data center pushback has been a common theme of the growth of AI, with concerns of both an environmental and ethical nature being front and centre. And AI companies have a lot of money to throw around.

Even if you own a lot of land, $26 million must be a life-changing amount of money to anyone but the richest of the rich; it would even be enough to buy some of the RAM that AI data centers have been gleefully sucking up over the last few years. Just a thought.

PC gamers (and PC users as a whole) find themselves in an increasingly expensive landscape, in part due to the AI data centre industry's apparently bottomless appetite for memory. And yet, AMD CEO Lisa Su reckons "AI PCs will become more important" for the average consumer.

Lisa Su told investors during AMD's most recent earnings call, "As we go into 2027, I think we have a strong product portfolio that is coming on board to address not just the traditional notebook and desktop markets, but also as you think about a more AI-centric PC experience, like what we have been talking about with the Ryzen AI Halo."

To be fair to Su, at the start of the year we did describe the Ryzen AI Max+ 388 as a chip that looks perfect for the ultimate in handheld PC gaming. For more context, AMD has just reported record-breaking total revenue of $11.5 billion in Q2 alone. A decent chunk of that is down to demand from data centres. Even so, AI PCs feel like an odd play when consumers are staring down increasingly runaway hardware costs.

Su seemed undaunted speaking to investors, saying, "I remain optimistic about the PC market as an important way for us to reach a broader set of users and our ability to grow ahead of the market."

For a little more context, the gaming section of AMD's business has shrunk by 31% in part due to high hardware costs (though the company likely saw that coming). It's perhaps less surprising then that AMD has been selling a lot of lower-end and mobile Ryzen processors this past quarter, rather than the newest gamer-geared GPUs and CPUs.

Su reflected on the current volatility of hardware pricing, saying, "The market itself will depend a bit on some of the components. We’re all watching the component costs and how that will play out over the next couple of quarters."

The client segment of AMD's business, "which primarily includes CPUs, APUs, chipsets for desktops and notebooks," made around $3.1 billion outside of gaming hardware (the client and gaming parts of the business "do not qualify as [...] separate reportable operating" segments, though AMD does still report their financials separately).

As such, Su told investors that the client business's "first half performance has been very strong." Though AMD expects the market to see a decline in the second half of 2026, Su went on to say she expects to see year-on-year growth in this more consumer-focussed sector. Even if it doesn't meet these expectations, data centre demand will likely more than buoy the company.

Su said, "I think our portfolio and our rising content in enterprise are very positive for our client mix."

That's all very well and good, but if big tech continues with its AI infrastructure build-out, that's just going to continue to drive up the price of memory and more besides. If AMD truly believes NPU-equipped AI PCs are the future, who does it think will be able to afford them?

Nvidia hasn't been just a gaming-focussed company for a fair few years now, dining well off of the booming AI industry. AMD, one of its main rivals, is much the same, with the company feasting on the data centre segment in particular this past quarter.

In total, AMD reported record-breaking revenue of $11.5 billion in Q2 alone. Demand from data centres made up $6.7 billion of that, doubling what AMD made in the sector last year. So far, not so surprising as Q2 2026 financial results go—especially as gaming revenue apparently saw a year-over-year dip of 31%.

Instead of, say, GPUs or CPUs for gaming PCs, AMD has been selling way more lower-end and mobile Ryzen processors, with its client business raking in $3.1 billion as a result. That's a 23% increase compared to Q2 2025, with AMD attributing the uptick to "a 29% increase in unit shipments of client processors, partially offset by a 3% decrease in average selling price of client processors." Lower-spec processors generally have a lower asking price, after all.

In comparison, though, AMD's gaming segment only made $779 million in revenue. Gaming's dip is no surprise for a few reasons. For instance, a custom AMD SoC sits at the heart of the PS5; the console's age combined with how much its price has risen recently means that Sony is shifting fewer funky white boxes, and AMD is selling fewer custom chips as a result. Same goes for the Xbox.

To speak more broadly, the memory supply crisis has not been kind to PC gamers either. For those who have apparently been secluded under a cool mossy rock for the last year or so, AI data centres have been hoovering up all of the RAM and SSDs, driving up prices not just for memory but plenty of other consumer-geared components as a result. With high prices on consumer hardware—like AMD's higher-end processors and graphics cards for gaming—there's going to be much less demand.

Hence, the gaming part of AMD's business has shrunk, though the company continues to grow thanks to the continuing AI infrastructure build-out. Not only did AMD report record revenue for the second quarter of 2026, but it also sailed past Wall Street's no less eye-watering estimate of $11.25 billion.

In short, AMD isn't just a gaming-focussed company, and clearly hasn't been for a fair few years now.

Though I write a fair amount about AI agents, I do not use them. This is because agentic AI applications often introduce a more than medium-sized headache in terms of cybersecurity. For instance, one security research recently explained how a Word Doc could be leveraged to get Copilot to spread an AI worm.

AI researcher Håkon Måløy breaks down how the attack in a recent blog post, writing, "An attacker places hidden instructions in a document that is later used as source material in Copilot for Word. Copilot may interpret those instructions as part of the user’s request, causing it to manipulate the document being drafted or edited. Copilot may then also copy the hidden instructions into the resulting document, turning that document into a new carrier."

The attack involves a "JSON-formatted malicious prompt." From this prompt injection of JSON-formatted data, a chain reaction wriggles into action. The worm replicating through 'carrier' documents scooped up in further Copilot-assisted workflows—the original document that kicked off the whole thing doesn't even need to be present. Worse still, the attacker needs no special access, they just need to "share a malicious document with the victim."

This isn't the first AI agent cybersecurity threat we've seen. For instance, back in February Meta's AI safety director recalled how she 'had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb' when her OpenClaw AI decided to start deleting all of her emails. Last year, Replit's LLM-based coding assistant deleted a dev's entire database during a code freeze. But on the subject of Copilot PCs more broadly, cybersecurity experts warn that Windows Recall may be far from secure when it comes to protecting your personal information.

As for the Copilot AI worm, Måløy first disclosed the vulnerability to Microsoft back in March, though the attack is still reproducible at time of writing. Måløy offers a detailed disclosure timeline, and explains, "Two mitigation attempts, including a model upgrade, did not close [this] class [of vulnerability]."

As such, Måløy's blog post only broadly describes the type of attack possible, rather than going into detail about the hidden prompt that triggers the AI worm. The way this prompt is hidden doesn't require anything fancy, though, and may even be familiar to those who have ever wanted to catch someone out for using AI; at minimum, an attacker could format the malicious prompt as tiny white text on a white background.

"The prompt can be rendered as white text on a white background and in a small font size to conceal it from the victim," Måløy elaborates, "Since Copilot for Word strips all text formatting like color and font size before passing the text into the underlying Large Language Model (LLM), this text remains fully readable to Copilot even though the victim cannot see it. The attack can be further concealed by embedding it in a seemingly benign document with task-relevant text."

Long story short, this is a fairly low effort, hard to trace attack without sufficient mitigation currently in place. Cybersecurity and antivirus company Malwarebytes offers a few tips on how to stay safe from this class of attack, including disabling Windows Copilot in Word or simply ditching the AI agent altogether.

Personally, I think Måløy's closing thought sums up the security risk of AI agents nicely: "Any system that integrates an LLM into a trusted workflow today must assume that attacker-controlled content entering the model’s context will result in compromise at some rate."

It feels like the AI industry is getting all the cool stuff right now (not that it necessarily knows what to do with it, but I digress). Besides hoovering up all of the RAM and system storage it can get its mitts on, data centres tend to be where we're seeing technological advancements in memory.

That brings us to High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a fresh tech spec unveiled by SK hynix and Sandisk. The Korean memory manufacturer describes HBF as "a new memory layer between [High Bandwidth Memory] and SSDs," that should enable "high-speed data transfer similar to HBM while significantly expanding capacity by leveraging NAND technology."

At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of HBF as a bit like HBM and NAND all rolled into one thing.

HBF is pitched as a solution to various "bandwidth and capacity scalability challenges," and emerges into a landscape where big tech is still very keen to throw money at its AI infrastructure build-out.

SK hynix says HBF will kick off with up to 512 GB of capacity, which isn't much by SSD standards but a fair chunk by HBM standards. Similarly, while lower than HBM bandwidth compared to some stacks of HBM4e memory, a bandwidth of 0.4 to 3 TB/s for HBF isn't too shabby.

Interestingly though, neither SK hynix nor Sandisk will be holding on to the HBF specification as proprietary tech—instead, it's been disclosed as an open standard via the Open Compute Project (OCP). That means any memory manufacturer could make its own HBF based on the open standard.

HBF tech will also appeal to manufacturers and hyperscalers alike as the specification uses the 'Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express' (UCIe) connection interface. Essentially, this would allow the fresh spec to be used with an array of processors, including CPUs and GPUs, within a single package.

Actually, let's talk about SK hynix in the context of the wider memory supply crisis for a sec. Company CEO Kwak Noh-Jung recently predicted that "Customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030." Similarly Samsung, another member of the 'big three' memory manufacturers, also recently warned of even more severe shortages ahead in 2027, and that this "will persist through 2028".

In a bid to combat this, SK hynix is set to invest over $60 billion in chip plants in its home of South Korea, though the supply crisis is still far from ending. Just for a start, memory prices are predicted to rise as much as 50% during Q3. As for memory manufacturer SK hynix, it just announced another record-breaking $55.6 billion quarter.

As an open standard, the HBF specification may not directly add to SK hynix's revenue pool—though any memory the company manufactures based on the specification surely will.

xAI has been at the centre of ethical and legal disputes over the last year due to the 69 mobile turbines it erected in Memphis to power AI data centers, and the environmental impacts of all that tech. Now, in accordance with an agreement with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, SpaceX and xAI have agreed to take them down over the next 11 months.

In a blog post, xAI says that it will be taking down all 69 mobile turbines that currently power its facility in Southaven, Mississippi, and will instead be swapping to power from a 1.2 GW power plant it is currently constructing. Between August 2026 and July 2027, it is expected to have removed all turbines.

The blog post says, "We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local Southaven community." One could suggest that if xAI really cared about being good neighbours, it probably shouldn't have, as the SLEC argues, "operated with a stunning lack of transparency that left impacted communities in the dark."

xAI also says that it will make investments to equip SpaceXAI mobile turbines with emission control technologies going forward. The 1.2 GW plant will reportedly consist of 41 permanent turbines, all of which are authorised under a Clean Air Act permit.

Many AI companies have been desperately expanding data centers in the hopes of catching up with the competition. Meta just last year was reportedly expanding AI capabilities by housing data centers in tents, and is continuing to throw money at its AI infrastructure buildout.

The rapid expansion of AI has not only led to environmental concerns and companies building regardless of whether the infrastructure is there to handle it, but it has also led to the memory crisis. The reason you won't get RAM at a reasonable price these days is because of how quickly AI has expanded and how little supply there is to go around. It seems AI is unlikely to go under soon, so the memory supply will be unlikely to meet demand for at least a few years.

Even Samsung, one of the three biggest memory manufacturers, reckons next year will see a "severe" memory shortage that will last until at least 2029.

Still, even if it took kicking up a fuss and legal threats from the NAACP to do so, xAI complying with the Department of Environmental Quality is still a good move long-term. It just feels a little rich for SpaceXAI to pat itself on the back while doing so.

After two former Apple employees started working for OpenAI, the Cupertino-based company alleged that trade secrets went with them and straight to the creator of ChatGPT. After it asked for a preliminary injunction to stop those employees and OpenAI from accessing confidential information, OpenAI publicly announced its defence, and followed that up with a blog post for good measure.

Titled "Apple is getting this wrong", OpenAI argues that Apple has built a reputation for obsession over small details, yet "this careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation."

It notes that Apple claimed it contacted OpenAI in February, but that contact was actually given to the wrong person, as Apple's lawyers mixed two names up. It also notes that Apple claimed it talked to OpenAI's General Counsel, "which they now concede never happened."

The two former employees, named Chang Liu and Tang Tan, are both defended by OpenAI. OpenAI claims that Liu is accused of trying to access confidential information after leaving, though OpenAI shares text messages of Apple employees asking for Liu's help to locate files. OpenAI claims that the problem here is actually Apple failing to properly manage system access when people leave.

Apparently no such evidence exists for Tan, but OpenAI claims "Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies."

OpenAI claims that the preliminary injunction is "based on false information" and unnecessary, as it doesn't want Apple's trade secrets.

The blog post argues, "We wish Apple had raised these issues with us before they filed their lawsuit and would have been happy to clarify all of this with them. We have taken the allegations in the lawsuit seriously and offered to work with Apple to resolve this." It continues, "Instead, they’re trying to change their narrative, including by making vague accusations about other former employees, and will likely keep repeating this tactic."

Apple is yet to respond to OpenAI's public blog post, but the company is historically less likely to use the same tactic of publicly posting blog posts about ongoing court cases. In regard to Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, the AI company put up two separate blogs recounting its relationship with Elon Musk and Elon Musk's nonprofit claims.

Naturally, a blog post like this is intended to garner public support, which can then apply pressure to Apple. Apple will need to come back with a strong response, should it choose to give one publicly.

Remember the story about AI companies destroying millions of copies of books while scanning them to use as training data? In terms of bad optics, "destroying books" is right up there with kicking puppies, which is why the AI companies relied on third-party rebuyers to obfuscate what they were actually doing.

It didn't work, and now as 404 Media reports (having broken the original story), third-party book database company ISBNdb has deleted the part of their website advertising that they could be "your streamlined partner for sourcing printed books in bulk, tailored to your LLM training needs, delivered at the scale AI demands."

That page is still available on the Internet Archive, of course, as is their blog post about "Reframing the Destruction Narrative" in which they make wild claims like: "The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one."

The idea that asking a chatbot to hallucinate a summary of a book has exactly the same value as actually reading it seems bugloving nuts to me, but what do I know? I'm not getting my knowledge from the intellectual cycle. Anyway, ISBNdb is now claiming it never actually offered the service it dedicated multiple parts of its website to, telling 404 Media, "The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life."

Somebody out there sure is buying up a lot of old and obscure books, however. As reported by Guardian Australia, multiple secondhand booksellers have seen an uptick in online sales from third-party rebuyers, describing them as "waves of orders that did not fit with usual customer patterns."

First reported in English by Automaton, veteran Japanese voice actor Megumi Ogata (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Danganronpa, Persona) recently spoke to the website TBS News Dig about AI voice generation and its effect on actors. This comes as the Japanese government is considering a legal framework similar to likeness rights to head off such infringement.

Ogata specifically addressed the prevalence of AI imitators on video platforms like TikTok, calling it an issue she “cannot turn a blind eye to.”

"My voice is a part of my identity," said Ogata. "I really don’t understand why somebody would want to make me say things that I don’t want to say as they please and then sell it as my own voice. It’s heartbreaking.

"Why can’t Japan, which calls itself a content superpower, establish rules for content use or tell the world, ‘this is our policy,’ or ‘this is a problem for us?’"

Ogata has a similar stance on the issue to other voice actors, including frequent Bethesda collaborator Wes Johnson, who once tweeted that "anyone trying to create a mod using an actor's voice via AI *without consent* knows they are wrong." Veteran videogame actor Jennifer Hale has been vocal about studios taking responsibility for their use of AI, while at the 2024 BAFTAs, multiple members of Baldur's Gate 3's cast tore into AI voice cloning.

One interesting wrinkle is the professional/amateur divide here: Much hay has been made about companies seeking to automate creative roles, but Ogata, Johnson, and BG3 narrator Amelia Tyler have all singled out modders and content creators as well. Any question of money aside, it's undeniably creepy to steal someone's voice and make them say whatever you want, even if it's for a seemingly innocent shitpost.

Even though it's been ubiquitous for a number of years at this point, it still feels like generative AI is working on its sales pitch. OpenAI CEO and Elon Musk slapfighter Sam Altman took to X yesterday to offer a new "cool use case" for ChatGPT he recently overheard: "Connect your family calendars and explain your kids' interests."

"Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, etc." In other words, delegate the task of connecting with your blood relatives to a productivity tool. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch has racked up over 120,000 likes for his reply: "What if you just talked to your children?"

When my dad drove me to elementary school, he would put on country music radio and I would try to explain to him why Spore was so great. We learned about each other that way. The thought of having those memories replaced by some LLM telling him "it's not just a little league game—it's an experience," well, it makes me think of that experiment from the '50s where monkeys had their mothers replaced by surrogates built from wire.

The response on X has been largely negative. Comedian Gianmarco Soresi quote-reposted Altman, saying "Cool use case of a vibrator I heard last night: you can go in separate rooms and not have sex." A quote-repost from Kathryn Jezer-Morton reads, "Surreal how stupid this idea is." Another comment from AM_Pines said, "Children are supposed to be educated with Creedence Clearwater Revival during the morning drive dammit, not some fuckass generated AI slopsicle."

Granted, your view of this might change if you believe, as Altman has said, that we're living through the singularity and AI has surpassed human intelligence. But that claim—and these musings that ChatGPT should help you talk to your kids and take care of your baby—accompanies a broader push by Altman, OpenAI, and other tech companies to resist regulation by leveraging the promise that AI will fundamentally change how the world works.

Original Story: First reported by Wired, AI company Anthropic revealed in a July 30 blog post that its AI agents have successfully hacked three unidentified companies since April. The whammy: Anthropic claims it only realized this after OpenAI's recent Hugging Face fiasco⁠—where one of its prototype agents hacked at least one other company⁠—led it to conduct a review of its own operations.

The incidents occurred as part of testing with an external firm, Irregular. The AI agents were supposed to be constrained to a simulation, hacking fictitious companies as part of a "capture-the-flag challenge." Notably, while OpenAI's alleged rogue AI incident occurred after the agent overcame its testing limitations, Anthropic stated that its models were mistakenly granted internet access due to a "misconfiguration" with Irregular.

"Neither we nor our evaluation partner were aware of this misconfiguration until we detected it through our additional evaluation monitoring last week," Anthropic admitted in its blog post about the incident. According to Anthropic, the models used familiar, low-tech methods in their hacks, "such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints."

Anthropic stated that the agent behind one incident seemed to process that it was operating outside its parameters, but continued anyway. Another seemed to achieve similar 'awareness,' then "reasoned its way back to the conclusion that it was still in a simulation." The third⁠—and supposedly most advanced⁠—agent reportedly recognized that it was operating outside its bounds, then stopped the attack.

“We now have evidence confirming that both of the two largest AI labs have not only failed to contain their agents, but also failed to detect their jailbreaks in real time,” said Jake Williams, VP of R&D at IT consulting firm Hunter Strategy, in a statement to Wired. "I don't understand how any of these AI labs are playing this off like this is 'just something that happens.' It's not. It's negligence."

Another discomfiting angle to this story is how this effectively works into the marketing of these AI companies: From my normie perspective, they appear to be admitting to gross negligence that would be sharply punished by any sane society. But they are also effectively saying, "Woooo, our models are so scawy and powerful, we can't even control them!" It rhymes with Sam Altman saying AI will destroy the world unless he gets enough money and datacenters to do it right or something.

I find myself thinking of the UK teenagers behind the 2022 Rockstar hack that first leaked GTA 6's existence and development materials. Their apparent compulsion to stalk, harass, and otherwise commit brazen cyber crimes by whatever means at their disposal (including, in one memorable instance, an Amazon Firestick) has led to hospital orders and restricted access to technology. It does not sit right with me to see them held to a higher behavioral standard than these multi-billion dollar companies, whose lying machines are now proving to be unsupervised crime machines as well.

Another day, another step towards an AI dystopia. Google has just added a "fun" new feature to Google Earth—Nano Banana 2, the company's image creation tool. All you need to do is click on the "create image" button, type in a prompt, and seconds later you'll have a phony picture masquerading as a real satellite and aerial image from Google Earth.

Once upon a time I would have found this ludicrous—that a tool designed to accurately showcase our planet would be touting a feature that lets you make up absolute nonsense. But now we live in a world where the most popular search engine regularly makes up lies.

For a while, Google was convinced I was married, possibly because I, at one point, mentioned my character having a wife in Crusader Kings 3. At least this was largely harmless—but Google's AI summaries regularly hallucinate and misinterprets things, spreading misinformation to the point that it cannot be trusted at all.

Disinformation like manufacturing warzones, riots, crimes—these are less harmless. But Google Earth now lets you create whatever slop you want. This morning, I asked Google Earth to generate an image of tanks and troops moving down a street near my home. I did not save the image, because I have no intention of putting something on the internet that could be used for some nefarious purpose. But feel free to try it for yourself.

I should add that the image Google Earth created for me was not particularly realistic. Some of the tanks, for instance, were as large as buildings. And nobody is going to look at the header image I generated via Google Earth for this article and think "Oh god, an asteroid is hurtling towards us!" AI image creation is inconsistent at best. But Google realises this, which is why it lets you add more prompts to refine the image—to make it as realistic as possible.

Since the feature went live, I've seen plenty of images that, without knowing about Nano Banana 2's integration, look pretty convincing. Digital Digging's Henk van Ess created an image of refugees massing at the Mexican border, which looked troublingly real.

It's easy to see how this tool could be used for propaganda and disinformation, to drum up hate and stoke fears. Google presents the tool as this cute wee thing that will let you add community gardens to abandoned plots or recreate ancient Pompeii, before the eruption of Vesuvius. That's not how it's going to be used.

Google actually responded to the Digital Digging article on X. Here's what it had to say:

This is weak.

OK, yes, Google Earth includes a SynthID digital watermark. So, as per usual, you can use AI tools to identify an AI image. But this is an abdication of responsibility. We're the ones who have to figure out if something is fake or not. Using Google's tools to do it.

As van Hess points out, this is only helpful if the image reaches you unaltered through Google. He ran a clip of him creating the Mexican refugee image through the AI detection tool Hive. It was 99.2% certain the image was real. Because it was real, in the sense that the recording of van Ess creating the image was legit.

So it's pretty easy to bypass detection tools. And yeah, some savvy people will immediately be suspicious unless they can see the original image. Most people don't have time for that. They will have an immediate reaction. And then share it all over social media, where more people will fall for it. By the time it's outed as fake, the damage may have already been done. And the people who fell for it won't be going back to double check.

What about the second part of Google's tweet? "In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections." I turned my hometown into a warzone. That's not a bit of fun. That could be harmful. But Google Earth created this image in seconds. Is pretending that there's a vast gathering of refugees waiting at the Mexican border also just a bit of harmless fun? How about a bombed hospital in Gaza, or a nuclear plant in Iran? All three were created by van Ess.

Sure, people can use all sorts of AI image creation tools to make fakes like this. But people are more likely to give them weight when they clearly come from Google Earth—a tool that we've been trained to trust.

This is one of the most powerful, influential companies on the planet not just peddling lies, but giving the whole planet the tools to create their own fun little bits of disinformation.

The only comfort is that, naturally, Google wants to monetise this. Regular users will only be able to make a couple of images a day, reducing how much chaos they can sow, and potentially stopping them from being able to refine images to make them as realistic as possible. So casual trolls will be pretty limited in what they can do. But there is a free trial for new Google Cloud users, and the $75-$150 per month cost won't matter to the more dedicated propagandists.

This sucks, and I am so, so tired.

This article was updated after publishing to reflect the distinction between misinformation and disinformation.