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The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content. Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, recently scrapped a title after players accused its trailer of containing AI-generated graphics. Goonswarm Games, the developer behind the canceled project, subsequently shut down entirely and cited six years of lost work alongside what it described as a flood of threats and accusations. Sandfall Interactive's "Obscur: Expedition 33" had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none. Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur's Gate 3, faced immediate backlash after CEO Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that the company was using generative AI to "explore ideas" for an upcoming release. Vincke later clarified on X that artists use AI only for reference images the way they would use "art books or Google," and Larian executives eventually stated on Reddit that AI would play no role in final artwork.

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Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...) This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"... "I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice." Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong.... "Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty." And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else." "Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil."

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Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its "Discover" feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage). "The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover." Xavi Beumala from website analytics platform Marfeel warned in a research update: "Google Discover is no longer a publisher-first surface. It's becoming an AI platform with YouTube and X absorbing real estate that once went to newsrooms..." [They warn later that "This is not a marginal UI experiment. It is a reallocation of feed real estate away from links and toward inline Youtube plays and generated summaries."] Google says it prioritises "helpful, reliable, people-first content". Unlike Google News, there is no requirement that Google Discover showcases bona fide publisher websites. In recent months fake news stories published by fraudulent website publishers have been promoted on Google Discover, reaping tens of millions of clicks. Google said it was working on a "fix" for this issue... Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok content may also start flowing into the Discover feed in future. When Google announced the addition of posts from X, Instagram and Youtube Shorts in September, it said there would be "more platforms to come".

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California-based Karman Industries "says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers," reports the Los Angeles Times, "chilling them with less space, less power and no water." Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company's efficient pumps can reduce the space required for data center cooling equipment by 80%. Over the years, data centers have used fans and air conditioning to blow cold air on the chips. Bigger facilities pass cold liquid through tubes near the chips to absorb the heat. This hot liquid is sent outside to a cooling yard, where sprawling networks of pipes use as much water as a city of 50,000 people to remove the heat. A 50 megawatt data center also uses enough electricity to power a mid-sized city... Cooling systems account for up to 40% of a data center's power consumption and an average midsized data center consumes more than 35,000 gallons of water per day... U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency... The cooling systems are projected to use up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028 per year... To serve this seemingly insatiable market, Karman has developed a rotating compressor that spins at 30,000 revolutions per minute — nearly 10 times faster than traditional compressors — to move heat... About a third of Karman's 23-person team came from SpaceX or Rocket Lab, and they co-opted technologies from aerospace engineering and electric vehicles to design the mechanics for the high-speed motors. The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide under high pressure to transfer heat from the data center to the outside air. Depending on the conditions, it can do the same amount of cooling using less than half the energy. Karman's heat pump can either reject heat to air, or route it into extra cooling, or even power generation. The company "recently raised $20 million," according to the article, "and expects to start building its first compressors in Long Beach later this year...."

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