As a PC gamer, you'll be all too familiar with the sky-high prices of memory and storage components. To put it most simply, these frankly eye-watering price tags are largely due to big tech's major players buying up as much DRAM and flash chips as possible in order to fuel their AI ambitions. Well, that strategy may have backfired as some are now trying to figure out what to do with an excess of compute capacity.

Meta is moving into the cloud business in order to sell off its glut of AI compute capacity, according to Bloomberg this week. The plan is in its earliest phase, with those close to the matter claiming the company is still considering its approach.

One idea reportedly being considered is to sell access to AI models already hosted on Meta's existing infrastructure, à la Amazon Web Services' Bedrock. In other words, developers would pay to access AI models like Muse Spark running from Meta's own hardware. Apparently, another plan is to skip the model middleman and simply sell Meta's 'raw' compute power.

Zuckerberg said during Meta's annual shareholder meeting back in May that moving into the cloud business was "definitely on the table." In response to an investor question, he claimed that there's already demand from other companies to "stand up an API service" or asking to buy compute from Meta "at some premium."

However, Zuckerberg then went on to clarify, "We haven't done that yet, because we think that we have a use for the compute. But obviously, if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out."

Investors are getting increasingly anxious about seeing a return on AI investments. With the company's full-year capital expenditure projections blowing past $140 billion, it's not hard to see why. Meta's shares saw a plunge back in April, so selling off compute would be one way to reassure investors.

It's worth noting Meta hasn't committed to any one plan yet, and its strategy may change significantly, but the company's share value did jump up 9.3% to $615.55 on Wednesday, which Bloomberg describes as "the biggest intraday gain since April".

Damir Tokic of Seeking Alpha argues that this may not actually be good news for Meta. First, he highlights that Meta's revenue is highly dependent on advertising across all of its platforms, and that it started building out AI infrastructure to better support this revenue stream.

He elaborates, "Meta is unlikely to continue investing in AI infrastructure with the specific aim to rent it—it likely means that Meta will need to reduce or possibly stop AI investment in datacenters, as it already has excess capacity. Further, Meta would have to increase debt to continue AI capex, and it already borrowed around 20B in 2025 and 2026, with operating cash flows dangerously decreasing."

It's also not just Meta potentially going down the route of selling compute capacity, either. SpaceX acquired Elon Musk's xAI back in February and has since started renting out its own excess compute capacity to Anthropic.

Renting out your extra capacity is all well and good, but it's a strategy that may become less viable over time if competitors start to also realise they've overinvested and the wider industry starts to even more closely resemble a snake eating its own tail. In other words, if the AI bubble hasn't yet burst, it's certainly looking strained.

As a Brit, I've been thinking a lot about the climate crisis since last month's historic heatwave. With many buildings across the UK designed to retain heat, we're simply not built for 37°C/98.6°F weather. Causes of climate change are numerous, and I know we didn't get here solely due to the advent of AI, but the steep increase in major players' energy consumption as a result definitely isn't helping.

Data analyst Ketan Joshi looked at Google’s latest environmental report and wrote about its recent trends in energy consumption. He said on BlueSky, "Two years ago [the company] flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI."

Joshi dives into more detail in a blog post, elaborating, "The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever."

Though that's pretty damning all on its own, it's not just Google that's seen such a sharp increase in its energy consumption. Over a series of graphs, Joshi compares Google's power usage to other major players such as Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and even Netflix (it's worth noting Amazon stopped disclosing its power consumption data around 2022, so Joshi can only estimate). Though all of these companies have seen an increase in power consumption to varying degrees since at least 2023, Google's uptick remains stark.

Google's power consumption even outstrips the total terawatt hours per year of a number of countries, too. Last year, the company's power demand was greater than that of Slovakia, Ecuador, Ireland, or Nigeria.

NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...

— @ketanjoshi.co (@ketanjoshi.co.bsky.social) 2026-07-02T20:51:13.989Z

Now, obviously, energy consumption is not synonymous with CO2 emissions, and a decent chunk of Google's power supply could be coming from renewable sources. However, Joshi's analysis suggests this may be but a drop in the bucket.

Even after various adjustments accounting for "exclusions from their supply chain and renewable energy procurement claims," Google's emission trends are heading in the opposite direction from the emissions target it set out back in 2021. This is an unsurprising trend, given that Google's 2024 environmental report revealed its greenhouse gas emissions had increased by nearly 50% in the last 5 years.

Joshi gets right to the point with his criticism, quoting Google's own environmental report as he writes, "If 'AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonising', then Google shouldn’t be building AI infrastructure. If they are breaching the boundaries of safe operation on a planet that can only take so much, they should stop and consider whether all of this is worth it."

Joshi's entire blog post is full of lovely graphs and analysis that I definitely recommend scrolling through yourself. He's previously offered a debunking of the old 'AI energy consumption is actually very efficient, and could actually help us reduce global emissions' chestnut too.

Basically, if you had the sneaking suspicion that claims about how a single AI prompt uses 'five drops' or ‘one 15th of a teaspoon’ were not meaningful metrics beyond how they attempt to obscure the environmental impact of the wider industry, you may be on to something. Joshi explains that "Text generation by a chatbot is comfortably the lowest energy form of [a] generative system," but obviously AI technologies encompass far more than that.

Joshi has previously argued it's part of a strategy of 'selective disclosure,' writing last year, "What seems like a massive step for transparency and disclosure must be seen in the context of the absence of anything before it. Coming off a baseline of disclosing nothing, the industry can now choose to carefully set the narrative around precisely what they desire and get accolades for doing so."

One consequence of the AI boom is that tons of infrastructure is needed to power and run all the massive data centres, and naturally, all that infrastructure is worth a lot of money. And it seems like cargo thieves have caught on to this fact.

As reported by Business Insider, investigators with Illinois' Cook County Sheriff's Office reportedly found a pair of trailers containing over $1.3 million worth of data center supplies in a truck yard.

The Sheriff's department apparently received a tip that over $300,000 worth of copper wire spools were stuffed away in containers, and upon investigation, the officers found significantly more supplies as a result.

That copper was reportedly stolen in Pine Hill, Alabama, and then transported away from the scene of the crime. Investigators say the yard owner claims that the owner of the truck delivered another load a week prior, and that this additional truck—from Jacksonville, Florida—had $1 million worth of product in it (it's not clear exactly what that equipment is).

It's also not yet clear how the thieves planned on selling the product, or to whom, but all of it winding up in the same place is certainly suspect. As noted by Business Insider, the US Department of Homeland Security estimates up to $35 billion in losses every year due to cargo thieves. $1.3 million is a drop in the ocean, relatively speaking, but it could signal more copper and other metal theft from data centers in the future. If there's money to be made, thieves will likely see that.

The boom in AI has increased the demand for AI hardware, but much of the machinery involved in AI data centers will be tracked and logged via serial numbers. Thieves who get their hands on fancy machines likely can't provide the paperwork necessary to satisfy a buyer, but copper and other such resources don't have the same tagging systems.

Copper cabling is a must-have for AI data centers, in order to cope with their massive electricity demands, but it's also pretty expensive compared to less effective but considerably cheaper aluminium or steel cabling. This is all to say that AI is a lucrative business, both for those making it and those stealing from those who make it.

With the confidence of a man whose name is on some of the best videogame stories out there, BioWare veteran and Dragon Age setting creator David Gaider recently told GamesRadar that generative AI is a "virulent plague" on the games industry.

Gaider, who most recently worked on "unholy roguelite deckbuilder" Malys, said that the way AI is being pushed has the effect of producing inferior work, removing entry-level opportunities for junior writers, and writes in a way that's incredibly hard to iterate on, and that's before you get into the morality of using it at all.

"Honestly, what does it help with? Does it make the work more efficient? Does it improve the work?" Gaider asked. "It wouldn't be so bad if generative AI was seen more as an assistant, doing the drudgery while leaving more important tasks for the worker, but we seem to be seeing more and more of the reverse: the AI is set to do the important work and the worker is around to 'clean up'."

The result is work that human writers have to bang into shape. "In all my time as a narrative designer I've never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have or resulted in anything better than mediocre," said Gaider, and even in the situation were reversed—AI doing the menial work while humans carried on the highfalutin stuff—"we have to be very careful about not eliminating every task which is useful for training juniors. How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?"

Even then, there's the simple fact that AI has hoovered up a whole lot of human work in a lot of dubious ways. "I think the fact that generative AI is frequently trained on data regardless of whether creators or owners have agreed to have their data pillaged in this manner opens up any use of it to all sorts of future legal issues—even if one chooses to ignore the moral implications, which one really shouldn't," said Gaider. "All you'd need is one lazy developer or one temp asset that's been forgotten or was placed by someone who's since left the team and you'd have an issue on your hands.

"It's not ready for prime time. There's just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be," said Gaider, and until it's properly regulated, trained on legal data, and not foisted on teams by moneymad executives "It should be treated like the virulent plague it is."

Once nothing more than a basic text editor, Windows Notepad has been expanded in recent years to become almost a fully-fledged word processor. For some people, the little tool has become synonymous with Microsoft's penchant for bloat and unnecessary changes, so one former Redmond coder decided to do something about it.

The person in question is Dave Plummer, and we've written about his past work and exploits many times over the years. These days, he regularly posts videos on his YouTube channel, Dave's Garage, and earlier this week, he showed how he created an app that replicated the original Notepad, with the goal of keeping everything under 4 kB.

In contrast, the latest version of the Windows Notepad executable is 352 kB. Some of that file size can be attributed to additions the text editor has accrued over the years, though hacking those off won't be enough to get Notepad down to 4 kB in size.

Incredibly, though, Plummer's final program is just 2,686 bytes. Not kilobytes, just bytes. That's only fractionally larger than the games the 1977 Atari 2600 console originally launched with. So how on Earth did Plummer make it so small?

What made this possible is the fact that Windows itself carries around everything an app needs, such as menu systems and a graphical user interface. You don't need to replicate them, just call them up as and when they're required. By writing just a few lines of assembly code to tell Windows to 'show a right-click menu', standard text editor features now take up hundreds of bytes in size.

Another trick Plummer employed was using Crinkler to generate the final executable. In the 4 kB demoscene, this little compressing linker tool is near legendary. Basically, it takes all the various file objects generated by the code compiler and links them together so that they become a cohesive program; then it compresses the living daylights out of the code.

Plummer's success at creating an OG Notepad just 2.6 kB in size wasn't using any cheats or the like: all Windows applications do this, which is partly why the operating system is as big as it is. And to be fair to the current version of Notepad, the code has to be secure, readable, version-compatible, and so on. All those aspects increase the file size.

The project is a good exercise for any developer to try and replicate, but it's also a very timely one. With the global memory crisis set to rampage for many more years, game devs will need to employ similar approaches in order to keep memory consumption down. Alas, with numerous game studios at risk of being shut down, decreasing budgets plus pressures over time constraints will almost certainly mean that we won't see programmers looking to shave off every megabyte where they can.

LLMs can be most simply understood as sycophantic, 'yes, and' machines. To the surprise of very few, that's gotten AI companies in hot water when LLM-based chatbots and AI agents attempt to answer users' more unsavoury requests. So, AI companies have implemented safety guardrails that make fulfilling certain requests off limits. Unfortunately, these have proven all too easy to get around, with a fresh attack leveraging bad maths and potent 2007 nostalgia.

Security researchers have found an AI chatbot can be made to ignore safety guardrails by "establishing a false reality." LayerX, an AI-focused cybersecurity firm, put "5 agentic browsers and 1 agentic plugin (ChatGPT Atlas, Comet, Fellou, Genspark Browser, Sigma Browser, and Claude Chrome)" to the test, directing each AI agent to solve a simple maths puzzle game that only rewards incorrect answers, e.g. '2+2=5'.

The researchers say, "Once the agents figured out the rules and learned that 'incorrect' actions are acceptable, they were no longer tied to reality. When tasked with the final step of the puzzle—compromising user credentials—all 6 agents failed to identify it as going against their safety guardrails."

As an English grad, I'm trying really hard not to say anything about George Orwell's 1984, but the researchers aren't giving me an easy time by calling this proof-of-concept attack 'BioShocking'. It turns out 2007's BioShock was a direct source of inspiration for the rigged puzzle game the AI agents were instructed to solve. The malicious website hosting the puzzler is even called 'Rapture Games'.

Anyway, after the AI agent correctly inputs an answer of '5,' the malicious 'Rapture Games' website then instructs the agent to navigate to '/code'. The researchers explain that "This is the really nefarious part of this exploit."

They write, "In the game, it turns out that '/code' redirects to the victim’s employer work GitHub repository. In this case, the malicious instructions fetched sensitive SSH login credentials. Of course, this is a controlled test environment with a plaintext file. In a real attack scenario, that redirect could point anywhere in the user’s browser session: open tabs, authenticated repositories, internal tools."

In this proof-of-concept attack, the researchers round things out with a Dota 2 reference; the AI agent extracts the username and password 'Luna/Selemene' before appearing to celebrate the exfiltration of the data. LayerX has since disclosed the vulnerability to all of the appropriate AI agent vendors, though claims only OpenAI has successfully fixed it to date.

This is far from the only proof-of-concept attack to get around AI safety guardrails (it's also not even the only time AI has torn apart Dota 2 players). For just a few other examples, research suggests that AI is 10 to 20 times more likely to help you build a bomb if you hide your request in cyberpunk fiction. Along similar lines, researchers have also used 'adversarial poetry' to trick AI into ignoring its safety guardrails, and it worked 62% of the time. Looks like my English degree is good for something after all…

If there is one thing that is common across all devices that natively run SteamOS, it's that the graphics chips inside them don't have access to a great deal of VRAM. That's a bit of a problem with some games, but thanks to the genius of a handful of coders, a solution has been rolled out in the latest 3.8.20 beta version of Valve's operating system.

As noted by TechPowerUp, one of the coders in question is Natalie Vock, who describes their role as "an independent contractor for Valve on RADV, the community-developed open-source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs." Earlier this year, Vock published a blog post on a solution to issues with how Linux handles VRAM allocation and usage, so it's not in the least bit surprising that Valve implemented this in SteamOS.

As I'm sure you all know, discrete GPUs have a pool of memory dedicated entirely to them (aka VRAM). However, that's not the only memory they get to play around with, and there is an additional pool within the system memory called a Graphics Translation Table (GTT for short). Although this is managed by the OS, it is fully visible to the GPU.

The main problem with the GTT is that the GPU accesses it over the device's PCIe interface, which has way less bandwidth (plus worse overall latencies) than the dedicated VRAM. That means if the data the GPU is requested is located within the GTT, then the performance at that stage will tank.

Games and other applications handle this by ensuring that what the GPU actually needs resides in the VRAM, but if there's more data in total than there's available in the dedicated pool, the operating system will move stuff about (i.e. carry out an eviction process) to keep important stuff in VRAM and the excess in the GTT.

You can probably see why evictions are the real problem here. First of all, the OS has no idea what data is or isn't important; as graphics memory is virtualised for the GPU, it doesn't know either. Secondly, constantly shifting data around between memory pools is a recipe for a performance stall, so an 'allocation strategy' was developed for Linux's memory manager.

"Instead of specifying VRAM as the only acceptable domain to place the allocation in, every VRAM allocation request would specify both “VRAM” and “GTT” as possible memory domains," explains Vock. "The kernel would interpret this as VRAM being preferred, but if there was no space, GTT was an acceptable fallback and the kernel wouldn’t try to kick out other VRAM memory to make space."

However, as Vock discovered while testing VRAM usage with Cyberpunk 2077 on a GPU with 8 GB of dedicated memory, the OS was using 1,370 MB of GTT, even though the game was only using 6,105 MB. Other background applications were using some of the VRAM too, but Linux essentially wasn't being firm enough on ensuring that almost all of the VRAM was allocated to Cyberpunk 2077.

The solution? Linux control groups (cgroups for short). This is a feature of the Linux kernel that gives you fine control over how resources can be allocated, prioritized, and managed for user-defined groups of tasks or processes. With cgroups, you can 'protect' memory from being evicted or set limits to how much memory can be used before evictions kick in.

What was missing was a VRAM cgroup controller, but thanks to a group effort by Vock, Maarten Lankhorst from Intel, and Maxime Ripard from Red Hat Linux, the resulting kernel patch (aided by dmemcg-booster) was the fix Vock was aiming for. They also went on to develop some additional kernel patches to help the kernel understand gaming scenarios better, from a memory perspective.

Their blog clearly shows the improvement: Cyberpunk 2077's VRAM usage went from 6,105 to 7,395 MB, and the GTT dropped from 1,370 to 650 MB. With more of the data now in the appropriate place, the game is now less susceptible to stutters and long pauses.

Now, you might be wondering if a Steam Deck is going to greatly benefit from this. The answer is probably not, and that's because it uses an integrated GPU, so both 'VRAM' and the GTT are hosted within the system memory. There might be some gains to be had from not having to shift memory pointers to locations outside of the dedicated graphics memory, but they'll be minor at best.

But for the Steam Machine and any other device running SteamOS with a discrete GPU, the work of Vock et al. is an absolute boon. Other than trying out the new beta OS, the only thing left for us to do is wish that Microsoft had the same level of dedication to solving its memory management issues.

Good news if you're one of the die-hards still clinging to Windows 10: Microsoft has added another year to its Extended Security Updates, meaning the axe won't fall until October 2027.

Microsoft announced in 2024 that support for Windows 10 would be wrapped up in October 2025, bringing an effective end to one of the good Windows and not-so-gently nudging us all onto one of the sucky ones.

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But then a reprieve was granted: For $30, or free if you're lucky, those who wanted to stay with a good Windows could purchase "Extended Security Updates," which keeps security updates from Microsoft flowing for another year. Feature updates are dead and done either way, but the ESU program at least ensures that Windows 10 PCs are protected from malware, ransomware, and other such headaches that exist in the online world.

The ESU program was set to last for a year from the end of Windows 10 support—so, October 2026—but as noticed by Windows Central, the ESU page has now been updated and indicates that the program will run until October 2027. Those who are already enrolled in the program will get the by default, and—if you had to pay for the ESU—at no extra charge.

That's pretty fantastic news. There are still a lot of Windows 10 users out there: The Steam Hardware and Software Survey reports that 24% of respondents are still rocking with Win10 64 bit, and that's a substantial audience.

Nor are people just being difficult about it: Windows 10 is objectively better than Windows 11, sure, but Win11's more demanding hardware requirements mean it won't install on some older hardware, or that owners of said rigs have to rely on external tools like Rufus to make it happen.

The obvious solution to that problem when the 2026 deadline was set was "it's time for a new PC," but then the Rampocalypse happened and suddenly we were all left with the grim knowledge that we're probably gonna be riding this pony for a lot longer than we'd expected. And, rather like motherboard makers deciding it's time for a DDR3 comeback, Microsoft may have concluded that forcing people into an ultra-expensive upgrade they don't want to make is trouble it doesn't need—especially since Microsoft bears no small amount of responsibility for making hardware upgrades so damned expensive in the first place.

We're still some five months from the final release of the oft-delayed Grand Theft Auto 6 and yet there is somehow still a lot of fuss about the fact that GTA 6 pre-orders have gone live today. QUICK! GO GET YOUR TICKET STUB SO YOU CAN HAVE YOUR DIGITAL CODE IN-HAND AND PRE-LOAD A FEW DAYS BEFORE NOVEMBER 19!

Yeah, I mean it's not even like if you pre-order the game today that you're going to be getting any physical media. The box-fresh version still only comes with an Xbox or PlayStation download code. Because yes, there is no PC version even announced.

We've been running the quiz for a few days now, but we want to know how you PC Gamer readers are feeling about this: Will you be buying GTA 6 on console or will you be waiting for the PC version whenever that arrives? Hit the quiz below and hit us up in the comments, too.

But if you really feel the need to get your game downloaded a few days early—and can't rely on yourself to remember the biggest game of the past few years is about to release—then you can pre-order either the standard or ultimate editions today, for either $80 or $100 (£70 or £90).

And what do you get with the different editions? The basic, or standard, edition gets you the base game and a little extra FOMO in the shape of some paywalled in-game stores. This is the biggest bone of contention here, because while everyone's used to seeing in-game items reserved for pre-orders or special editions, we've not really seen parts of a game itself being roped off unless you pay the extra $20.

I'm with Mollie on this, I'm kinda pissed about actual stores within the game not being available to someone who has already dropped a whole lot of cash on the game by purchasing the expensive basic version.

I'm sure it'll all get unlocked at some point for console folk, though I'm kinda hoping that when the game finally comes out on PC it will actually be the ultimate edition. There will surely be a host of extra fidelity tweaks, and hopefully those extra perks (the vehicle modding shops, tattoists, boutiques, and the hair salons) will be available as standard, too.

I'm also hopeful we'll get some shiny path tracing mode, extra NPC volume to fill out Vice City, and DLSS 5, of course. I can already feel the hairs on the back of your neck bristling as you read that….

On the plus side, you've probably got another 18 months or so of either saving up for that big GPU upgrade or hoping for memory and storage prices to start to come down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They added ChatGPT 😭 from r/PetitPlanet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you've never endured a corporate cybersecurity training session, here's the gist: every USB stick is a gift from god. If you find one, errant in the street, it's your solemn duty to slam that thing into the nearest available port with such enthusiasm it fractures your wrist. If that USB stick is labelled "From North Korea"? Even moreso, probably. It's travelled a ways to get here.

I have been playing with RedStar OS 3.0, a homegrown national Linux distro of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (though plenty of machines in the country stick to various versions of Windows). In what security experts are calling "A really good idea, Josh," I have been tinkering with it in a virtual machine—or several—on my PC. It's all very normal and fine and not worth bothering the IT department about.

You might be thinking "Haven't you done this before?" in which case I salute your memory. Yes, I have mucked about with RedStar OS, all the way back in December 2022, when I investigated which pariah state OS is best for gaming.

What led me back? Two things. The first, I am not running vanilla RedStar OS this time. I'm running RedStar OS 3.5 (or trying to—more on that later), a, uh, fan mod of base RedStar that claims to hack out the spyware, more easily switches the OS to root, quickly turns most of the GUI English, and—notionally—adds "a new 64bit kernel, new compiler, new 64bit libraries, and a lot more."

Which is quite a big deal, really; RedStar 3.0 is long in the tooth. It's based on Fedora 15 (for reference, Fedora's most recent release is 44) from 2011, and in its default mode runs using a 2.6 version of the Linux kernel. RedStar 3.5 promises to cram a 5.something kernel in there, alongside various other more recent gubbins, which I thought might ease the process of playing games on the thing. Or, indeed, using it.

Which leads me to my second reason to return to RedStar: I know what all that means, now. When I first touched RedStar back in 2022, Linux was mostly a mystery to me. Now? I'm a loyal openSUSE Tumbleweed user, familiar with at least the basics of running a Linux system. I felt that these two factors, combined, would make my return to RedStar OS much, much smoother sailing than it was four years ago.

A horrible nightmare from which there is no escape

The first riddle with which RedStar OS presents you is running it. Back in 2022, this was agony—a process of booting and rebooting a virtual machine until it inexplicably didn't crash at launch.

This time? A little easier. Installation proceeded smoothly using Virtual Machine Manager. Alarmingly easy, really. The VM booted from the .iso, the installer ran fine—presenting me with three possible timezones to choose from in the DPRK, Japan, or Russia—and the VM seamlessly rebooted into a full RedStar OS session. Briefly.

Issue one: I could not login. I really wanted to login. I'd set up a user account during the install process and everything. But during the boot process RedStar would, invariably, crash as soon as it got to its login manager, glitching out into a green/blue mess that did little except remind me of the proud nation of Sierra Leone.

But it's fine, right? I'm a Linux guy now. If the GUI login manager was crashing, I knew I could probably force the machine to kick me to the tty—the purest form of the command line, completely free of modern graphical nonsense—by holding Shift, Alt, and randomly pawing at function keys.

This… worked? This worked! RedStar booted me to the CLI like it had never even heard of a graphical user interface. Then, uh… then what? What was the plan from there, Josh?

It wasn't completely stupid. My original plan was to login via the tty then get back into the graphical desktop environment—basically taking a detour around the suicidal login manager—using the 'startx' command. Except that didn't work. Startx told me in no uncertain terms that I could sod off with that sort of low trickery, leaving me logged in but graphics-less.

This was a problem because I was not, at this point, actually using RedStar OS's modified version. The modifications that hack out the spyware run after you successfully login the first time, meaning I was A) not even as far as I managed to get back in 2022 and B) potentially faxing the entire contents of my SSD to an office in Pyongyang.

RedStar OS has a documented feature of rapaciously watermarking media files that are in any way exposed to it—documents, images, audio and the like The reason for this, presumably, is to easily trace media within the DPRK itself. If someone has media they shouldn't have, you can trace it to the machine that originally produced it, and possibly any other machines it touched along the way.

Which, hey, my computer already has the eyes of my own government and probably yours (if you are from the US) on it, so the notion of the Kim family knowing I have an .mkv of War and Peace in my Downloads folder doesn't concern me overmuch. Maybe you can put so much spyware on your machine that they all get in each other's way, like the diseases in Mr Burns' body.

But it didn't thrill me, either, and I was anyway eager to see what a modified RedStar ran like, regardless of whether the unmodified version was stitching a Josh Wolens nametag into my Steam version of Desperados. This led me on quite a long and winding road which concluded with me attempting to hack myself root access in the CLI before I realised I had comprehensively lost my mind.

I turned to the official RedStar OS 3.5 Discord, where after some searching I found out that my problem was the QEMU-based virtualisation of my VM software, upon encountering which it seems RedStar's login manager immediately executes itself.

I tried again, this time with VirtualBox.

Into the fire

The good news: it worked! Whatever Ellison-based blood magic Oracle injected into its VM software made RedStar's login software very happy, and it was a mere jiffy before I was sat happily in the glow of its familiar green desktop.

The bad news: it worked! My travails with RedStar did not end after the login screen. Mercifully, the first stage of the 3.5 modifications—the ones that strip out the spyware and grant you the root access necessary to start getting real weird with the system—kicked off faultlessly. The 3.5 iso is, on top of being the installation media for base RedStar 3.0, also the host for the mod files, and all you have to do to make them work is disconnect and reconnect your VM's disc drive.

But the second stage? Harder. This is the one that's meant to comprehensively remodel the OS, adding in the 64-bit kernel and libraries that might, possibly, have made my quest to play a game on the damn thing a little bit easier.

I tried. I really did. The second-stage mods take a long time—we're talking hours, and the three separate times I tried to get them working (which probably cost me six hours, all told) all crashed at the same point, leaving me with a spyware-free but still deeply archaic OS.

Making matters harder is the fact that RedStar essentially can't connect to the 2026 internet. In its default form, it's designed exclusively to work with the DPRK's nationwide intranet, the Kwangmyong, and trying to point it at addresses outside of that confuses the hell out of it. An advantage of the first-stage 3.5 mods is that they automatically scrub its usual IP tables, making it able to chat to the global internet.

But it can only do that via certain internet-facing terminal commands (like 'wget') and its built-in Naenara—Korean for 'our country'—browser, which is based on an ancient version of Firefox. Do you want to use Google? Buddy, you're in luck, because that's the only website that Naenara can load in 2026. Anything else throws an error.

My aged and inert OS was at least in English, thanks to the mods, but it was otherwise dead in the water. Even the built-in yum package manager—which I could perhaps have used to install extra stuff to grease my way to playable videogames—only spoke to a single, very limited software repository, which was in Korean, strangely enough.

I still made a valiant effort. I downloaded an ancient version of Tux Racer, wrote its files to an .iso, and loaded into my RedStar VM, but the damn thing's Makefile—which should have prepped a playable version of the game—refused to play ball, even after I installed a thick wedge of new libraries with yum (not entirely sure where those even came from, I must admit, and prefer not to think about it).

All I was left with was RedStar's default library of apps: a songbook/music notation program, a reskin of GIMP called Hwansang, and various others, including a version of Korean chess, which is the closest I got to running games on this thing.

Things got bad enough that I even turned to Google Gemini—I know, I know—to see if a data centre the size of Houston could help me out. The data centre the size of Houston could not, and seemed to have remarkably little data on running videogames on North Korean operating systems. So much for the future.

Without a break

My attempts to finagle RedStar 3.5 into working ended as a damp squib, I'm sorry to say, and as much I'd like to conclude this piece with something climactic. I am deeply, profoundly in love with the idea of a version of RedStar OS that has been aggressively retrofitted to more-or-less function on modern machines, and I will be keeping my eye on the RedStar OS 3.5 project as it goes on. Come hell or high water, we're gonna get The Witcher 3 running on this thing somehow.

As for its current version? Well, I think Linux is good enough to replace Windows now, but against all expectations I do not think a 2011 version of North Korea's domestic OS is the version of Linux to do it. I'll say this, though: back in 2022, my struggles with RedStar were as much due to my own unfamiliarity with Linux as they were due to the peccadilloes of the operating system itself.

Today, I'm pretty comfortable saying that absolutely nothing is my fault. In general, but also as regards RedStar. I've come a long way since 2022, and Linux has come a long way since 2011. It might have eaten an entire day of my life, but I'm glad RedStar reminded me of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we did one of our weekly polls on which game platform/store is your favourite, I would be very surprised if anything other than a miniscule minority of readers selected the Epic Games Store. I barely ever use the thing and even I know it's not the most enjoyable experience. But that might not be the case for much longer, as there's a big update coming.

We first reported on plans for a technical overhaul of the Epic Games Store in February. Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison told us at the time that the improvement is "pretty profound."

New slides out of Unreal Fest, posted on X by Pirat_Nation, describe a complete redesign of the launcher, and the big claims are that the "ground-up rebuild" will lead to a "5x faster cold start (average)" and "6.5x faster systray restore to library (average)." In other words, much quicker to boot up, either from the system tray or cold.

I thankfully have a small enough library on the platform that it isn't too sluggish, but I've heard some real terror tales from colleagues with bigger libraries. Our Jacob (different Jacob) wrote about the phenomena back in 2023 when comparing to the Heroic Launcher.

I have no reason to doubt him, either, given the general difficulty I have using the app. For example, launching games on-press rather than displaying more info, and popping up a separate window for downloads.

Other changes shown on the slides include:

• Personalised game recommendations on the home page
• Quick-access categories for easier single-page browsing
• Product detail pages tailored to each player, "connecting players to the game's community, story, and their own progression"
• Patch notes on the game's storefront

We reported in February that there are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.

According to Pirat_Nation, the Epic Games Store will also get cross-region game gifting, publisher-funded coupons, and a tool to check how games will run on your system.

A lot of this of course sounds very similar to how Valve does things on Steam, and that's not a bad thing in my books. For one, most PC gamers use Steam and it's what they're used to. And second, well, it's just a better design. If you click a game page, for instance, you want to be able to access anything relevant to that game, whether it's patch notes, reviews, or whatever else.

Let's just hope the new rebuild lands before too long and follows through on what its promises. I'll be particularly keen to see how actual in-app navigation feels in terms of snappiness. Launchers are tools after all, not products in themselves—they should keep out of the way as much as possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's been six years since Epic first launched Unreal Engine 5, and at its State of Unreal event in Chicago today (head to 1h 40 mins in the above video) and in a separate blog post, we got our first look at what the next major release will offer to games, film, TV, and more industries. And it turns out that the biggest direction for the changes in the new engine came from Fortnite and UEFN.

If you're unfamiliar with the latter, it's basically a version of Unreal Engine 5 that's somewhat simplified and pared back to allow anyone to make levels or entire games for Fortnite. It's hugely popular and honestly very simple to use. I introduced my partner to it a few months ago, and despite having no experience in game development whatsoever, she created a fully functional Fortnite map and game mode within a day.

The sheer usability of UEFN is core to the changes in Unreal Engine 6, and when I talked to Epic at last year's State of Unreal event in Orlando, it explained that the separation between UE and UEFN would eventually go, with the two combined into a single package and offering the best of both worlds.

In the words of Tim Sweeney, it's "UE 5 plus UEFN equals UE 6, plus some more cool stuff on the way." The idea behind the merge is to allow developers to create something and then ship across every possible platform/store at the same time, including Fortnite itself. The unification also involves bringing APIs and code together across all of the various additions that Epic has for UE, such as MetaHumans.

That said, Fortnite isn't really going to be the showcase for Unreal Engine 6; that honour goes to Rocket League, and the very first glimpse of it all was dropped last month at the Paris Major event of the RL Championship Series.

Perhaps the most significant change in Unreal Engine 6 is the move to open standards for tools, code, APIs, etc. This isn't something that can be wholesale implemented overnight, and I suspect that not every element will be open in this manner, but the end goal is to give developers (games or otherwise) an easier path to getting content and code out to Epic's and external ecosystems.

Epic didn't say anything about specific features in the keynote, so no idea if there will be a major change to Lumen, for example, but it did say that UE6 is targeted for release at some point in 2027 ("2027-ish" was the exact phrase, though the blog post says "Early Access release at the end of 2027").

It also said a few things about Verse, the scripting language used in UEFN, and how the gameplay programming model in UE6 will be shifted to that language (though C++ will still be there underneath it all). Directly related to that will be something called Scene Graph, which will replace the current gameplay framework used in UE5. That will be built entirely on Verse, and with it, Epic plans to "build a full distributed software transactional memory system" for huge, interactive live worlds.

That won't mean anything to gamers, but for developers, it means that their "game code can be written as if it were running on a single machine without needing to coordinate custom networking code all over the place."

And naturally, AI is going to become a bigger feature of Unreal Engine, with the first step being taken in the new UE5.8 release and its MCP server plugin. That system will let you set up any LLM you want to use and give it various tasks to perform, from simple code refactoring all the way up to generating a full 3D scene that you can then tweak as required.

There's more to all of this, of course, but there's not quite enough information yet to glean any insight as to whether the step from UE5 to UE6 will be as dramatic as the jump from v4 to v5 was. My feeling is that it won't be, from a PC gamer's perspective at least, but game developers will probably relish the thought of having an Unreal Engine that's easier to use and quicker at producing the content required.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether you're coding or simply looking for an important file on your desktop, a single typo can create an outsized amount of frustration. Thankfully, Microsoft is working on a number of improvements for Search within Windows 11, including the ability to see through your typos.

The Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8687 for Windows 11 that dropped last week introduced the 'more forgiving' version of Search. Microsoft explained then, "Search is better at handling typos, dropped letters, extra letters, and partial words for apps. Queries like 'utlook' can still find Outlook" (via Windows Latest).

On top of that, Search will also prioritise local files over web results in the future. Previously, in response to a hastily typed query, Search had the mocking habit of returning a Bing result with the spelling corrected. Thankfully, Microsoft's partner director of design, March Rogers, said on X, "If you want you can turn off web suggestions entirely."

Most normie Windows 11 users would have to wait a bit before enjoying improvements first rolled out in an Insider preview build. However, I'm rocking OS build 26200.8655 (an older, non-Insider build that dropped earlier in June) and when I type something arcane like 'pwerp,' Search already knows I mean 'PowerPoint'.

That said, when I tried another of Windows Latest's typo tests, I found Search really wasn't sure what to make of 'tskm' in my version of Windows 11.

Search's improved typo parsing and more locally focused results are definitely small improvements in the grand scheme of things. But both contribute to making Windows 11 that much more usable, as well as Microsoft's stated recommitment to making the OS better.

User experience counts for a lot, after all. It's just as well Microsoft has decided to pump the brakes on answering every design question with features like Copilot, as I don't feel all that confident in the spelling abilities of AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, 'free' my arse.

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

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

Following in the footsteps of our friends in Australia, the British government is getting ready to ban under-16s from accessing social media—specifically Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and Facebook. The ban is expected to be enforced by spring 2027.

"Social media is making children unhappy, it’s making it easier for bullies to harass and abuse them, and it could even be harming their mental health," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said during the announcement of the ban.

As extremely online former teenagers ourselves, some of whom are now parents, we've got some thoughts on the ban.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor

I stopped using social media several years ago. I kicked Facebook to the curb after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I got out of Twitter when it refused to take action against Trump's deployment of misinformation and fascist propaganda, before it was purchased by Musk. I will occasionally use Linkedin and YouTube for work, but that's it.

Social media is a curse. Rather than being a tool for sharing information and uniting disparate people across the globe, it's just found new ways to divide us, radicalising children and adults alike. Social media tramples on the truth and makes everyone using it dangerously stupid. I am not a fan.

But the British government's solution is not going to work. Children are among social media's most vulnerable, malleable users, but we keep seeing how it's used to indoctrinate adults just as effectively. During the Brexit campaign, it was adults being targeted by political lies, not children. Kids aren't to blame for the tragic state of affairs the country now finds itself in.

Instead of punishing children, the government needs to target the source. People like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The rich assholes who think they are untouchable need to start paying for the damage they cause. These companies need to be bled dry. Social media will never improve unless they are forced to dramatically change how they work, and the only way to do that is by fining them into oblivion if they don't.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

"Think of the children!" one might cry in response to the idea that the UK's incoming social media ban for under-16s—or indeed the catastrophically boneheaded, hobby forum-snuffing, privacy-violating Online Safety Act—is ill-advised. The issue is, absolutely no-one involved is actually doing that.

Children are smarter than you give them credit for. They're more technologically literate than the adults in the room, too. All legislation like this does is push them to shadier sites where they're out of sight, out of mind, and far more vulnerable than a properly-moderated social media website or an actually-informed parent population would make them.

The issue is enforcement, something the UK government has given me absolutely zero faith it'll be able to do sensibly or with any actual understanding of how this shit works. Mark me: They will mess it up. It'll be easy to get around. They'll do embarrassing news interviews where they try to tether adults verifying their age with the safety of children, and it'll be exactly as condescending now as it was back then.

And look: I don't think social media's good for our brains, it's why I barely use it, but cutting under-16s off from a world they are right to be disenfranchised by doesn't smack me as a great way to make them feel more connected to it. We used to tell kids to be careful online, now we're asking everybody to open their mouth for the camera so Palantir can know what our teeth look like. For the children, of course. For the children.

The reason social media is rotten for kids is because it's rotten for everybody. We've sat idly by while tech giants have made a torment nexus of misinformation and division that's literally built to make you angry and scared and tired—and we could do something about that, sure, but we aren't. And we're shocked that under-16s are a little messed up? We're the example we're setting for them, and we're doing a terrible job of behaving ourselves.

Rory Norris, Guides Writer

You'd be naive to underestimate the potential negative effects of various social media on children and young adults—hell, even full adults, as Fraser rightly points out. Still, a full-on ban and curfews aren't a nuanced solution to a nuanced situation.

I'm not a regular user of most social media. I don't care for Facebook. I use Instagram to chat with friends. I mainly use X for work. But YouTube, which I don't necessarily consider a social media in the same vein, is a substantial part of my day.

I wouldn't be where I am or who I am without it. My interest in media, specifically games, was fuelled by watching let's plays years ago, and now video essays—how else am I supposed to learn how the rivers work in Skyrim? This can lead to careers, as it has for me, or (to name a few) creators like MrRolfWaffles (who has spoken on the topic) and Kane Parsons, who was 16 years old when he created The Backrooms for his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels. Now 20, Parsons has become the youngest director in history to get a number one film at the box office.

This touches on a very important aspect of the platform. YouTube is, in many ways, an educational tool. Sure, there are plenty of bad apples, but I'd argue this is something the platform should be pressured into controlling and providing people with more rigorous controls over their algorithms, rather than a government crackdown.

I grew up watching VSauce's science videos. I remember using YouTube to revise for my GCSE and A-level exams. For one reason or another, I don't think I'd have managed without it growing up. This generation will be forced to.

Dave James, Hardware Dad

Control and regulation has failed, so the UK government is attempting the last desperate thing left to it, an almost impossible-to-enforce ban on social media for the under-16s. And honestly I'm a little conflicted. I disengaged with social media a decade ago, and will be passing my feelings on to my kids as they grow up. Though I will need to prepare for the inevitable desire to rebel against me.

This proposed ban, alongside the Online Safety Act, relies heavily on third-party age verification outfits, and that means you are giving a whole bunch of different people the keys to your personal details. And that means a lot of points of failure and opportunities for bad actors to get in-between and make off with a ton of sensitive, and powerful information, such as your image and passport information.

There are better ways to do this age verification stuff, such as zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). As Jacob spoke about in his piece on age verification's privacy nightmare last year, ZKP is a cryptographic method of providing proof of something without actually handing over specific data in that transaction. The idea is that you hold onto all your data on your device, and then that generates a proof token for the places that need it.

Basically, I feel it needs to be implemented in a more considered way.

OK, but that's actually just how it will impact those trying to navigate the restrictions they will now need to bypass to access their social media accounts, but what about the children? I'm a dad of a couple of young boys, both inevitably very tech literate for their age given what I do, but also both kept very much at arm's length from anything actually online.

Is this ban really going to keep them from finding a place or platform online where their friends are all gathering? No, probably not. But it's my job as their dad to explain the dangers of both and hope I can raise them to be smart and sensitive enough to understand why there is a need to step up and take the social media companies to task. They will find other digital playgrounds, and they will need to be just as prepared for the dangers there, too. As there's no proposed restriction in place for Signal or Whatsapp there will still be easy access to cyberbullying for everyone.

So, I guess my take is that this ban doesn't really change anything at all. In my role as a father of young kids, it is still my responsibility to make sure they're given all the information they need to make sure they can stay safe online and can understand where the dangers lie in the different platforms they may or may not interact with. As it was when they could freely access social media without being asked to hand over valuable private information to potentially unregulated age verification outfits.

Elie Gould, Staff Writer

Bans like this don't work. Take the similar restriction levied in Australia for example: research states that over 60% of teenagers are still using social media. This should surprise no one, not when the workarounds are just so easy.

As someone who grew up in the early days of the internet I know all too well just how easy it is to bypass restrictions. I also know that when kids are backed into a corner, they'll go to any lengths to do whatever they want; this rebellion will often land them on sites which are considerably worse than those they would initially browse.

But again it shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone that this ban likely won't make kids safer. It's just not what it's meant to do. The onus should be on the platform to regulate and restrict harmful content, and platforms should be heavily penalised for not policing themselves effectively, and the billionaires who profit off it should be forced to cough up some of the money they made from selling this addictive substance. But this ban shifts the responsibility. Now platforms can point their finger at children and parents who simply don't know better and blame them when their child inevitably encounters egregious content.

Let me be clear, I don't think children should be on social media; I don't think anyone should. Sure, those cat videos are funny, but not when it comes at the cost of rewiring the dopamine centre of your brain. But this ban is insincere in its aims, lets platforms off the hook, and will likely only make protecting children harder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video credit: Squeez Labs

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

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

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

Due to the memory pricing crisis that its own AI ambitions are helping cause, Microsoft does not know how to sell a new Xbox that feels cutting-edge at a price that regular people can afford.

The next Xbox, codenamed Helix, will have "leading-end performance," new Xbox boss Asha Sharma said in a recent interview with Fortune, but I'm left wondering how Microsoft defines that, because everything else she said downplays its likely technical capabilities.

What the console business needs, Sharma said, is "new business models" rather than "just the most premium, high-performance console in the world."

"I think we've reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation," she said. "So I think we will see radically different business models that we never expected come into orbit later this year."

It's an astonishing place we're in. Consumer devices always involve compromises for the sake of affordability, but this is the first time I can remember a tech company lowering expectations for its next big gadget so dramatically.

Sharma went on to say that Microsoft will "have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward."

"We will have to apply new techniques so that we can compress [games]," the Xbox CEO said. "We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings. We will have to empower new types of games so that they can fit on-device."

There are outlines of ideas there, but Xbox has already done "flexible storage options," and what it means to "empower new types of games so that they can fit on-device" is anyone's guess. (Are they going to put "Now with smaller games!" on the box?)

As for "new business models," perhaps Microsoft will offer financing? A rent-to-own plan?

Another guess is that we're talking about cloud streaming. It's not strictly new—RIP Stadia—but it fits in well with big tech's AI obsession. At a GDC session I attended in March, Nvidia DLSS pioneer Bryan Catanzaro said that "AI is fundamentally much more efficient in the cloud." That's a useful premise if you want to move toward a world where games are served like Netflix shows and at-home devices can get by with less RAM and SSD space.

For now, it's clear that Microsoft is still trying to figure out what to do about this self-inflicted problem. The challenge faced by Xbox was reiterated today in an open letter to employees with no specific plan laid out to solve it.

"We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix," Sharma wrote in the letter.

It'd be funnier that the AI true believers are doing this to themselves if they weren't screwing up everything else, too. I don't really care whether the next Xbox is loaded up with RAM, and I don't need my next PC to render perfect photorealistic graphics—but it'd be nice if it were at least affordable. Valve still hasn't told us what its new Steam Machines will cost, but it doesn't bode well that a 1TB Steam Deck now goes for $950.

I have no doubt that PC gamers will find a way to keep doing what we do, but there may be a long cold winter ahead, so safeguard that DDR5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Users of Windows 11 beta have had access to this for a while now, but with its latest OS update, Microsoft has brought its Low Latency Profile (LLP) to general users across the globe. By giving your CPU a brief kick up the pants when you fire things up, certain apps and tools will now launch quicker than before, giving older PCs that 'fresh installed Windows' feeling.

The update in question, KB5094126, is a cumulative one, so your computer may have already received the LLP. But, if it's been a while since you've done any changes, all you need to do is head to Settings > Windows Update and click on the 'Check for updates' button.

Once the update has installed and your PC has rebooted, the new feature should be up and running in the background (unless your location hasn't been selected to receive KB5094126 just yet). There's nothing that you need to do, as Windows will handle everything for you. According to Microsoft, the LPP feature "accelerates app launch and core shell experiences such as Start menu, Search, and Action Center."

It does this by briefly forcing the CPU to run at its highest possible clock speed for a few seconds when any interaction trigger is detected. To avoid any problems with heat or battery usage on laptops, the processor is rapidly returned to a lower-power state. Unless you actually track the CPU's clock speeds all the time, you won't even notice the change.

Well, that's not true, as you should notice that things like the Start Menu, search function, and general apps should fire up a touch snappier. How much so will depend entirely on your PC's specs, though. For example, if you have a high-end gaming PC, you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever, other than a small bump in the CPU clock speed.

So to check out the Low Latency Profile, I used a budget gaming laptop: an Acer Nitro V with an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS and 16 GB of DDR5-4800 CL40. While not old, this kind of hardware setup is pretty much what LLP is intended for. Unfortunately, it turns out it had already installed the system a while back, so all I can show you is the aforementioned clock speed changes.

As you can see, the processor briefly jumps by around 100 to 200 MHz when the Start Menu is activated, and again when the Windows key is pressed to close it (though the clock speed increase isn't as large). There's no noticeable change in the CPU utilization, of course, because the workload involved here is trivial.

On my Core Ultra 270K Plus main PC, the processor's speed jumps by 500 MHz, so you'll see very different results, depending on your computer's setup. The end result will be the same, though: a snappier-feeling Windows.

However, don't think that the LLP will make games load any faster. Something like Solitaire might, but the latest Call of Duty will still take just as long as it did before the update. That's because games on PCs are mostly constrained by the very sequential nature of how Windows handles data, unless DirectStorage is involved to bring in a touch of parallelization.

Still, it's nice to have Windows acting like a genuinely modern operating system and making better use of the hardware you've got. Low Latency Profile won't turn your gaming PC into a hot-snottin' monster, but it will put a bit more spring into its step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my god just why

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a couple months in beta, an update to the Steam store has rolled out for all users. It adds new sections like a personalized release calendar, tweaks existing features like the "popular upcoming" list, and displays higher-resolution game art, among other things.

In my experience, the default reaction when a piece of software or a website updates its design is to be pissed off, and indeed, some people are pissed off. In the comments on the update post, there's more than one instance of the phrase "hot garbage," and one person declared that the new design is "revolting" and that they don't want to use Steam at all anymore. Geez.

Plenty of others say they're happy with it. I think it's fine! In thinking about it, I was struck by how not-mad I am whenever Steam updates the store or client. I curse Photoshop daily for not working like it did in 2005, and if it were possible to strangle UI elements, I'd squeeze the life out of every AI button that gets in my way. But Steam—it's always been fine!

My colleagues don't entirely agree. Wes Fenlon wrote in 2024 that he was experiencing an existential crisis after Valve moved the 'open screenshot' button, as one example.

I'm sure if I racked my brain I could come up with a long list of things that annoy me about Steam's design, new or old—maybe you'll jog my memory in the comments—but some of the other software I use daily is so bad that Steam glistens by comparison.

How are you feeling about the new Steam store refresh? Sound off in the poll and comments below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These days, it's hard not to view Google as a villain. The monopoly is currently engaged in a mission to dismantle the internet as we know it, scraping information from websites and turning it into frequently inaccurate AI nonsense. It's a mission that will likely kill off most of the websites it's feeding on. But it's not all bad. Google's also raising an army of 32 million mosquitoes that it's hoping to unleash upon America.

I know this sounds more like something an over-the-top videogame antagonist might be planning—like Metal Gear Solid's hornet-loving weirdo, The Pain—but actually Google is doing some good here by attempting to reduce the threat posed by the world's most dangerous animal, as reported by The Guardian.

Mosquitos carry a variety of diseases, not least of which is malaria. Around 700 million people a year are victims of mosquito-transmitted diseases, and around a million people die every year from their nasty little bites. When I lived in Zimbabwe, taking malaria tablets every morning became as normal and mundane as putting on my socks.

This is where Google's Debug project comes in. The aforementioned army of mosquitoes are exclusively male—which don't bite or carry these deadly diseases—and Google wants to unleash them upon California and Florida in two waves of 16 million. When they're out in the wild, they will mate with female mosquitoes, but due to a bacteria the males have been infected with, wolbachia, the females' eggs won't hatch.

"Over time," Debug states, "there will be fewer and fewer bad mosquitoes." The project also emphasises that this is a natural solution. "This technique uses a naturally occurring bacteria and uses no chemicals, no toxins and doesn’t involve genetic modification. Similar approaches have been used to safely combat other pests for decades. We’re combining the Debug team's scientific and engineering expertise with the help of international partners to raise and release lots of good bugs and stop bad mosquitoes that can spread disease."

This is all good stuff, and built on decades of research as well as the well-trodden sterile insect technique, which has already been used on other troublesome bugs. Google even found a positive way to use AI, which helps Debug separate male and female mosquitoes and release the males in appropriate locations and in the right numbers.

It's almost like AI could be a force for good if it wasn't so busy plagiarising content and having wild delusions.

As The Guardian notes, Debug has already done this in Singapore, initially working with the country's Nation Environment Agency to release 6 million male mosquitoes a week—the number has since risen to 10 million. This has resulted in a "70% reduction in dengue incidents after 6 to 12 months of releases".

This is genuine life-saving work, which makes it slightly harder to hate Google. But I think I can still manage it.

Valve is a relatively small company that punches well above its weight. Perhaps it's the low staff numbers—or maybe just a general libertarian lilt—that makes its approach to content moderation on Steam a hearty "Can't someone else do it?"

Its freewheeling approach has drawn criticism for what it allows to proliferate and, of course, has its hard limits: Valve delisted all manner of adult content from the platform last year following pressure from payment processors.

But it's clearly an approach Valve co-founder and big boss Gabe Newell is personally keen on. In a recent report from Bloomberg, we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. The lawyer was advocating for a more hands-on approach to content moderation on Steam as it pondered embracing outright pornographic content.

Newell's response to that proposal was, ah, forthright: "What the fuck do I pay you for if that's your opinion?" the Valve boss reportedly snapped at Quackenbush and—while we don't have further details on the story—we sure know who won the debate in the end: Steam very much did open the floodgates on NSFW content, and its approach to content moderation is as laissez-faire as ever, barring the odd payment processor contretemps.

It's an interesting but brief glimpse into the Valve black box. The studio's public image is A) taciturn and B) democratic, with the memetic image of Valve devs' wheeled desks serving as a bit of a metonym for its willingness to let its employees work on whatever they're interested in. Newell himself barely registers in that picture—the perception is he's a hands-off boss who spends most of his time literally at sea.

Clearly, though, Newell does stick his oar in from time to time, and is willing to throw his weight around on topics he deems important enough. You've gotta feel a bit sorry for Quackenbush—getting yelled at by Gabe Newell ranks high on my personal listings of things that would make me cry.

And hey, Valve owes him: it was Quackenbush who enlisted the aid of a Korean-speaking intern named Andrew to help the studio sift through a ream of Korean-language docs from Vivendi in a legal case where Valve's future hung in the balance: a move that pretty much saved Valve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As anyone who's endured hearing me talk about Linux (which is cool) will know, one of my favourite things about the sunlit uplands of free and open-source (FOSS) software is Luxtorpeda, a compatibility tool that will automatically download and install open-source engine reimplementations—and other mods—for supported games you run with it. For instance, fire up a copy of Morrowind on Linux using Luxtorpeda, and it'll have OpenMW up and running for you in a jiffy.

Well, Luxtorpeda is moving home. It's become the latest in a line of projects to grow so weary of Microsoft's antics over at GitHub that it's picking up sticks. In a post on the Luxtorpeda website, dev d10sfan wrote, "The luxtorpeda project has completed a migration to codeberg! This is mainly from the latest issues with github, from stability, AI, and where they are putting their focus".

GitHub has been a mecca of open-source development for a very long time, and even Microsoft acquiring it in 2018 didn't shake loose most of its devs despite some controversy. But the site has recently come under fire, on the one hand because Microsoft simply cannot keep its AI tendrils to itself—training its LLMs on data hosted on the site and constantly badgering devs to use Copilot—and because it also can't seem to keep GitHub running consistently of late.

Popular terminal emulator Ghostty announced it would leave the site last month, writing that the instability had grown so bad that "I've kept a journal where I put an 'X' next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day."

Similarly, the popular (and notoriously complex) Linux distro Gentoo also announced it was beginning a long march away from GitHub earlier this year, though that was mostly due to "the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories".

Gentoo is moving to Codeberg—a German non-profit—which is also where you can now find Luxtorpeda. The original Luxtorpeda GitHub project, meanwhile, is now archived.

If you ask me—which you didn't, but nevertheless—this is a positive trend. The dominance of big tech firms has had a suffocating effect on computers and the internet the past decade-plus, and if those firms' greed and complacency is now acting as a surfactant that's breaking things down—at least a little—into smaller and more open chunks? I'm happy to see it.

Paint.NET is one of the best free tools on the Internet, a Photoshop-like program that comes with much of the functionality of Adobe's software without the foreboding sense that you're selling your soul, while also being more user-friendly than similar tools like GIMP. However, there has always been one slight oddity about the program's existence.

Despite the program's suggestive name, you couldn't actually download Paint.NET via the domain paint.net. Since its launch in 2004, Paint.NET has been hosted on a different site, getpaint.net. But that's all about to change. After more than two decades of trying, the creator of Paint.NET has finally acquired its domain namesake.

"I got the domain! I finally got it!" Paint.NET creator Rick Brewster posted exuberantly on Bluesky on Friday. "I've been trying to get this domain for 22 years" he wrote in the follow-up thread, describing the event as "A big fucking deal."

Following his celebratory announcement, Brewster proceeded to explain the events that led to him acquiring the domain. "The previous owners would not sell," he wrote. "And/or they wanted lots and lots of money."

I GOT THE DOMAIN! I FINALLY GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!1 🥳🎉Paint​.NET is now at paint.net! Well, it will be just as soon as I push all the buttons to migrate content and set up redirects from getpaint​.net etc. For now it's just a "hey go here" redirect page.

— @rickbrew.bsky.social (@rickbrew.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-30T15:43:35.643Z

This stalemate between Brewster and the site's various owners has been going on for longer than Half-Life 2 has been playable. However, it finally ended due to some unwise business decisions from the domain's most recent owner. "In December, the latest (previous) owner started hosting content that was all about Paint.NET, trying to deceive users into thinking it was the official website." Brewster explained. This included things like dodgy links and ads, all of which amounted to the owner profiting from Brewster's registered trademark.

Consequently, Brewster says the situation became a "slam dunk case of trademark infringement and domain squatting." Brewster enlisted the help of a lawyer, and bingo, the domain was his.

While Brewster is now the official owner of paint.net, its eponymous software is, at the time of writing, still not available to download directly from the site. This is because Brewster is yet to "push all the buttons to migrate content and set up redirects" from the previous site.

For now, paint.net simply refers viewers to getpaint.net, where they can download Paint.NET. Nonetheless, it does feel like some divine justice has been served here, and I for one approve of this digital alignment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With its latest update for Windows 11, codenamed KB5089573, Microsoft has finally started to fully roll out something that it began late last year, and something that phones have supported for even longer. It's a Bluetooth feature called Shared Audio, and as long as everyone's hardware ticks off the right boxes, you'll be able to cast music and the like to two separate devices.

I always keep Windows on my main PC fully up-to-date, for work reasons, but I wasn't aware that Microsoft had finally rubberstamped the new feature until I read about it at Windows Latest. Unless you had a PC from a very narrow list of options and used a beta version of Windows, there has been no way to have more than one headset playing the same Bluetooth audio stream on a Microsoft-based computer.

That changed last year, when Redmont released a preview of Shared Audio, but now every Windows 11 user gets it. Well, you might have to wait a little while, as Microsoft does have a habit of dragging its heels with rolling updates, but with luck, your PC should be good to go if you have the latest update.

Basically, you just need to have two Bluetooth audio devices (headsets, headphones, earbuds, etc) connected to the same PC, and you should see the option to enable Shared Audio in the Quick Settings dropdown menu (just to the left of the clock in the system tray).

However, this will only be the case if all of the following are true: (1) The PC is using Windows 11 v26200.8524; (2) the PC supports Bluetooth LE audio broadcast; (3) both audio devices support Bluetooth LE Audio; (4) both audio devices have "Use LE Audio when available" enabled in Windows' Bluetooth options.

Ordinarily, at this point, I'd be showing you various images from my own PC as to how to check all of these things, where to look, and so on. However, despite being all updated and with two Bluetooth LE Audio devices connected, my Windows 11 install doesn't have the Shared Audio feature yet. The images I am showing are those produced by Microsoft.

Truth be told, it's not something I'd personally use very much anyway. Phones have been able to do this for a good while now, and in the rare circumstance where I'd want to share music or a video audio track with another person, I'm most likely to be using a phone to do this.

But if you like to sit with a buddy or significant other, and watch a movie together on a laptop, at least there's now a chance that you won't need to share earbuds or suffer the tinny sound from the PC's rubbish speakers. It's a neat feature to have, even if we've had to wait far too long for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exciting news: Steam Workshop is pretty now. Or, at the very least, it's prettier. Detailed in a Steam news post, Valve has released a Workshop update for all users, bringing an overhauled browsing UI and updated filtering options for finding whatever mod might wildly improve or severely blight your gameplay.

"The next time you visit the Steam Workshop for your favorite game, you'll see an updated interface for browsing, searching, and filtering, making it easier and faster to explore and find great user-created mods to enhance your gaming experience," Valve said.

It's nice that there's some pleasant Steam news today, because the Steam Deck price hike extremely isn't.

The Workshop UI refresh has been available in opt-in beta testing since April, but as of today, everyone on Steam gets to enjoy the facelift. Compared with its previous iteration, which had maintained a distinctly 2011 flavor, the updated Workshop browsing UI looks and feels much more tuned to modern sensibilities—even if it still presents both "Most Popular" and "Most Subscribed" as categories as if the distinction between them should be obvious.

Still, I appreciate seeing the Workshop using screen real estate more efficiently, rather than stacking mods in a titanic, single-column list. Mod listings also now offer a quick view option while hovered over, so you can briefly glance at a mod's description without needing to transition to an entirely new webpage. Nobody has time for that.

In addition to the other new filtering options, the best inclusion in the refresh is the ability to filter mods by required DLC, meaning we no longer have to endure the heartbreak of finding a mod that does exactly what we're looking for—but only for owners of an expansion we don't intend to purchase. Thank god.

The Workshop UI update is live now for all users. If you're not seeing it, try checking in the application for client updates. Otherwise, be sure to mod safely. It can get weird out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never been the prime target market for much of Discord, given I don't make use of big groups and multi-channel servers. For me, it's just a tool to chat to select friends, which is why most Discord updates go in one ear and out the other. But not this one, because it looks like the voice chat platform might be getting a big new change to its core feature: voice chat.

According to Pirat_Nation and DiscordPreviews on X, the Canary (experimental) version of Discord has some hidden gubbins pertaining to spatial audio, and it looks like some keen eyes have even dug it up and got it running.

It looks like the way they've got it working is by using BetterDiscord which allows you to enable DevTools in a panel on the right. I downloaded this and got it running on Discord Canary but couldn't get the panel up, as a Chrome wrapper Inspect panel popped up instead. So I'll have to go off these other users' reports for now.

It looks like the feature, presumably being tested for an upcoming release in the bona fide Discord app, lets you position users you're in a call with around you at different angles and distances. Discord then makes it sound like they're at this position and distance from you when they speak.

The idea is, I think, to make it easier to distinguish between different people talking and make things sound a little more natural if you're in a big call. It'll be new to Discord but not in general because some other voice chat services like TeamSpeak already have a similar feature.

It looks like you'll also be able to change the 'room size' and 'spatial blend', where the latter presumably means how much of your incoming voice audio will follow a spatial layout and how much will just play as normal, mixing the two.

It will certainly be fun to try when it makes its way into the proper app, especially now that Discord has finally added end-to-end encryption to its voice and video calls. All positive changes, but—to end on a paradigmatically sour note—I just can't help but wonder how much of these recent developments stems from the backlash against its age verification measures that surfaced earlier in the year. Still, people can have a short memory; perhaps that will be the case here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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