Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Nexus Mods says that authors of newly uploaded mods will have to declare whether AI was ‘used in their work.’
I’m getting some real mixed messages here, boys!
Both Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa are projected by NBC News to win their Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively. Hinojosa has called for a moratorium on data center development in the state, while Talarico has favored ending tax incentives and creating an “AI dividend” for Americans to share in profits.
The pro-data center Republican Byron Donalds has won the race for governor, according to the AP. He beat Democrat David Jolly with just over 50 percent of the vote — a far tighter margin than predecessor Ron DeSantis in 2022.
It’s Election Day in the United States, and data centers have become a core issue in some of the country’s most important midterm races. The Verge’s Adi Robertson explains why people are uniting against data centers, why they’ve become a proxy for all kinds of other fights, and how this year’s results might change the AI industry going forward.
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Ahead of the game’s release on Wednesday, 404 Media reports the influx of vibe-coded AI slop add-ons pushed one developer to make their Github repositories private after finding AI ripoffs of their code. The CEO of the popular Warcraft Logs site also said it’s struggling to keep up with surging requests to use its API.
Dan Driscoll will head up “national security modernization” in a newly-created role, OpenAI said Tuesday, advising company leadership and external partners on AI’s uses in defense. The role will focus on helping US allies adopt AI responsibly and supporting “the buildout of democratic AI.” Driscoll resigned as Army Secretary two months ago.
The indie game hosting platform didn’t specifiy what was purged, but it has clear creator guidelines around acceptable AI usage. The cleanup comes after itch.io reported that daily game submissions have doubled in two months. Meanwhile, almost half of all games released on Steam in October disclosed AI-generated content.
The creator behind AO3.life, a vibe-coded website that scraped the Archive of Our Own fanfiction repository and re-sold content as AI audiobooks, said they received over 2,000 takedown requests during the single day the website was live. The real AO3 platform is still suffering a partial system outage after announcing some lengthy downtime last Thursday.
A banner in the app says the app will “retire” on January 30th, 2027, according to 9to5Mac. The banner also points users toward the updated app, which was released earlier this year.
As AI becomes able to do more work, that will create opportunities for everyone to think seriously about what creation really means. Copy-pasted designs have existed before, but they don’t last. When an individual designs something, they create with intention. All a computer does is help with that work. I think that no matter how much it evolves, there will still be things we can do.
According to TechCrunch, OpenAI said in an email to users that it’s merging ChatGPT’s chat and work tabs, but Codex will remain separate. OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux said on X that it’s “working on this but it’s not rolling out just yet.” Anthropic merged Claude chat and Cowork earlier this year.
This profile of friend-to-the-stars Charles Porch (formerly of Meta) details how OpenAI is working to seed AI within the entertainment industry.
Porch describes, for example, how having Real Housewives stars at personal events could pay off in the future: “If an AI model comes up on the show, it might be Chat because we have this nice drumbeat. This is what I’ve been trying to explain to folks: It’s not about deals; it’s about relationships.”
[Intelligencer]
Anthropic updated its IPO prospectus with full third-quarter earnings, reporting $33.24 billion in revenue through September 30th, up 1,200 percent from last year. It also reported a $104 billion net loss during the same period, mostly from accounting charges. For this quarter alone, Anthropic reports roughly $17 billion in revenue with a net loss of $23.29 billion, plus commitments to spend $895.4 billion “mostly on compute and infrastructure.”
Musk hinted at the change in an X post after users complained they were hitting usage limits sooner than expected. The cost of running xAI’s always-on AI agent was “unsustainably high relative to revenue,” he said, without providing details on what has changed.
This graph shared by game hosting platform Itch.io doesn’t flag when AI was specifically used in game development, but at a time when so many studios are struggling, its hard to think of another reason why daily game submissions would have doubled in two months.
Teen accounts will have further limits on receiving weapons-related information from the chatbot, “even when a question appears harmless.” Additional restrictions for all users are also being placed on how ChatGPT responds to questions about past mass attacks, sharing fewer details about who carried them about, the weapons used, and how they were obtained.
The best part: You don’t need to belong to a church or even believe in a god to do it. David Durman recently secured a religious exemption from using AI at work based on non-theist humanist beliefs. According to TechCrunch:
Durman is the first humanist to secure workplace accommodations that allow him to abstain from AI use, and one of the first people to publicly discuss their pursuit of these protections. He was inspired to seek them when he read that Erin Maus, a Unitarian Universalist and software engineer, was able to secure similar protections for herself.
No, you can’t buy it. It’s a “just for fun” project to show off Google AI Studio. But it’s also undeniably cute. Sprout wanders autonomously to find the best sunlight and sends an alert when the plant needs watering.
This week, 404 Media reported that Proton would be “re-interviewing” staff to ask about how they use AI at work and published an investigation into the company’s push into AI, driven in part by CEO Andy Yen.
But today, 404 Media reports that Yen is canceling the interviews. There will be a reorganization, but Yen said that “there will be no loss of jobs from AI.”
[404 Media]
Anthropic is renaming its Claude Max plans. The Max 5x plan is now just Max, while the Max 20x plan is Ultra. (Apple also does Max followed by Ultra for its most powerful chips.) The prices for the plans stay the same: $100 per month for Max, $200 per month for Ultra.
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