Players have increasingly bristled over talkative characters, just as studios are betting on buzzy AI tech to add even more dialogue to games.
Driving the news: Developers of Forspoken, one of 2023’s earliest big releases for PlayStation 5, updated the game this week to adjust how chatty the main character, Fey, and her magical companion can get.
Rebecca Hahn has joined Tools for Humanity — the parent organization of WorldCoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, Alex Blania and Max Novendstern — as chief communications officer, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: Hahn was one of the last communications professionals standing at Twitter under Elon Musk, and is now working for OpenAI founder and Musk rival Altman.
One more concern to add to the long list of fears stoked by the rise of generative AI: Experts say it could incite more antisemitism in the U.S. at an already fraught time for American Jews and other groups targeted by hate.
Driving the news: Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, which respond to prompts with written responses pulled from web data, have sparked a frenzy over the capabilities and potential dangers of AI's rapid technological advancement.
A Chinese state-sponsored group has hacked into critical American infrastructure, including in the U.S. territory of Guam, Microsoft and the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance warn.
Sony plans to release a new handheld later this year that will play games streamed from the PlayStation 5, a partial return to portable gaming after a decade away.
Why it matters: The device, codenamed Project Q, will further test the potential of cloud-based gaming, just as it'll test whether Sony can rediscover its footing in a market where it struggled.
A lab-made opioid makes its way as chemical components from China to a shop in Latin America, where it's made into fentanyl, packaged and trafficked into the U.S. — a drug move that crypto can track.
Why it matters: Criminals use crypto as a means to operate — but that also means that law enforcement can leverage blockchain analysis to stop them.
The sprawling Swedish video game company The Embracer Group is reeling following its announcement that a "transformative" partnership that's been negotiated for months fell apart Tuesday night.
Driving the news: Embracer said the collapse of the mega-deal, the partner of which still has not been revealed, was unexpected. Embracer said it had a verbal commitment in October and described negotiations as "taking far longer than expected."
Large tech companies crowd both ends of the rankings in this year's Axios Harris Poll 100 brand reputation survey, with those that provide tangible products and useful services clustered near the top and those that trade in social-media messages banished to the bottom.
