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With the third season of Overwatch 2 slated to start on February 7th, Blizzard is stepping up its efforts to combat cheating. In a blog post published Wednesday, the studio said it would begin identifying players who regularly play with known cheaters. Blizzard says the owners of those accounts will face repercussions, even if they’re not cheating themselves. It warns of “severe suspensions” and, in some cases, outright bans.

Next season, Blizzard will also introduce a system for moderating custom game modes. The company says the new technology will automatically remove games with inappropriate titles or content and sanction the accounts that create and post those modes. The system comes after the original Overwatch’s “sexual harassment simulator” custom mode made a brief reappearance last month. The mode tasked players with impregnating the game’s female heroes while playing as Cole Cassidy, the hero Blizzard renamed after allegations about its “frat boy” workplace culture came to light in 2021. After the mode appeared in Overwatch 2’s most popular list, Blizzard took action but didn’t say how it would prevent a similar incident from happening again.

Lastly, Blizzard says it’s taking action against a practice known as stream sniping. If you’ve ever watched a popular streamer play a multiplayer game like Overwatch 2 or Valorant, you know how frustrating it is for content creators when someone tries to queue into the same match and uses a stream to give themselves a competitive edge. Starting with season three, players will have the option to prevent their BattleTag, and the tags of anyone else in their match, from appearing in their game client. Blizzard will also allow players to hide or delay their queue time. The studio says those measures should prevent someone watching a stream from figuring out if they’re in the same lobby as a streamer. You’ll find the toggles to enable those features within Overwatch 2’s social settings.

EA didn't just kill Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile, apparently. Bloombergsources claim the publisher canceled an unannounced single-player game set in the Titanfall and Apex Legends universe. While details of the project aren't available, veteran developer Mohammad Alavi (who also worked on the Call of Duty series) was reportedly helming the project until he left Respawn in early 2022. EA is said to be finding places for the affected 50 team members when possible.

EA declines to comment. Respawn says it's shutting down Apex Legends Mobile as its content roadmap is starting to "fall short" of expectations. The studio also delayed Star Wars Jedi: Survivor by six weeks over quality concerns.

The reported cancelation doesn't come as a shock. The global economy is slowing, and game publishers are among those scaling back to help endure financial turmoil. Ubisoft recently canceled three games amid a gloomy outlook, and Halo developer 343 Industries is dealing with the consequences of Microsoft's layoffs. Decisions like this theoretically help EA and Respawn concentrate on known money-makers like Apex Legends, which has earned over $2 billion so far.

The rumor is likely to be disappointing to fans if true. The Titanfall games are well-reviewed, but Titanfall 2 arrived seven years ago. A third title in the series eventually transformed into Apex Legends as the battle royale trend took hold. Now, players may have to wait even longer for a new story-driven game in the franchise — if it happens at all.

Paramount+ has reportedly joined the trend of streaming platforms removing original shows to cut costs. The Real World: Homecoming, which reunites casts of the original 1990s MTV reality series, got the boot along with six other shows.

Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone reboot, which ran from 2019 to 2020, was also a casualty. In addition, the streamer axed true-crime drama Interrogation, the animated series The Harper House, the comedy No Activity, the crime drama Coyote and the dark comedy Guilty Party. Parent company Paramount Global hasn’t announced whether they will land somewhere else after their removal.

The cuts follow similar removals from sister company Showtime, which Paramount will fold into Paramount+ later this year. (It will then take on the unfortunate rebranding, “Paramount+ With Showtime.”) Rival streamer HBO Max recently pulledWestworld, Raised by Wolves, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Nevers. They will begin appearing this month with ads on a Roku and Tubi channel creatively titled “WB TV Series.”

Don't worry if you missed out on Nintendo's bargain game vouchers from 2019 — they're back. The company is once again offering a pair of vouchers for $100 to Switch Online subscribers. If you buy two eligible $60 games, this could save you $10 on each. Needless to say, this could help you score a deal for a a blockbuster like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom even when it's brand new.

There are conditions beyond the limited catalog. You have to use the vouchers within a year, so you can't save them for perpetuity. You also can't hold more than eight at a time. You do get My Nintendo Gold Points equivalent to five percent of what you pay, though. Nintendo doesn't say if or when the vouchers will

There's no secret behind the strategy for the vouchers. Nintendo clearly hopes you'll not only join Switch Online, but commit to buying multiple games where you might have otherwise bought just one. Still, it's difficult to ignore the value. Even one set of vouchers can recoup the cost of Switch Online if you were already planning to buy games. In theory, you could quickly build a collection of major titles while saving a significant amount of money.

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that has blown up over the last few months, is going premium. After confirming a few weeks ago that it would test a paid plan, OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT Plus.

Although people will still be able to use the chatbot for free, there are of course some perks that come with a ChatGPT Plus plan. OpenAI says subscribers will have general access to the chatbot, even during peak times. They'll also get faster response times from ChatGPT, along with priority access to upgrades and new features.

The paid service is available in the US for now. OpenAI plans to gradually invite people from the ChatGPT Plus waitlist to sign up for the service over the coming months. The company is also looking to open up the plan to folks in other countries and regions in the near future.

OpenAI says that the premium plan will help to keep ChatGPT free for anyone to use. In addition, it's exploring cheaper subscriptions, as well as business plans and data packs to increase availability.

"We launched ChatGPT as a research preview so we could learn more about the system’s strengths and weaknesses and gather user feedback to help us improve upon its limitations," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. "Since then, millions of people have given us feedback, we’ve made several important updates and we’ve seen users find value across a range of professional use-cases, including drafting and editing content, brainstorming ideas, programming help and learning new topics."

OpenAI has found some other ways to bring in funding. Last month, Microsoft announced it's making a multibillion dollar investment in the company and it plans to use OpenAI's tech more broadly across its products. Google, meanwhile, has reportedly focused heavily on its AI work after the emergence of ChatGPT. It's said to be preparing its own chatbot and at least 20 other AI-powered products to show off this year.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he said he would offer “amnesty” to previously banned and suspended accounts. Since then, he’s restored dozens of controversial high-profile users, including Donald Trump (who has yet to return to the platform), comedian Kathy Griffin, and a number of whitenationalists and members of the far-right.

Now, Twitter is opening a public-facing appeals process, which will allow anyone whose account has previously been suspended to request reinstatement. The company posted a link to an online form accessible to users who are able to log into an account that’s previously been locked or suspended.

Earlier this week, the company indicated a new appeals process would be coming as part of its policy to take “less severe actions” against rule-breaking accounts. “Going forward, we will take less severe actions, such as limiting the reach of policy-violating Tweets or asking you to remove Tweets before you can continue using your account,” the company said. “Account suspension will be reserved for severe or ongoing, repeat violations of our policies.”

Twitter added that appeals would be “evaluated under our new criteria for reinstatement." But it didn't elaborate on what that criteria would be, or how long the process might take. The company says it expects to receive a “high volume” of requests and that reinstated requests are expected to “follow our rules.”

In 2016, Studio Ghibli co-founder and director Hayao Miyazaki, responsible for beloved anime classics like Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, made headlines around the world for his reaction to an AI animation program. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” Miyazaki told the software engineers who came to show their creation to him. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” A half-decade later, artificial intelligence and the potential role it could play in anime productions is once again in the spotlight.

This week, Netflix shared Dog and Boy, an animated short the streaming giant described as an “experimental effort” to address the anime industry’s ongoing labor shortage. “We used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts,” said Netflix Japan of the project on Twitter, according to a machine translation. The short is touching but was immediately controversial. As Motherboard points out, many Twitter users accused Netflix of using AI to avoid paying human artists.

Others took issue with how Netflix and Wit Studio, the company that produced the short, credited those who worked on Dog and Boy. As you can see at the end of the video, human animators were not only involved in the creation of the short’s backgrounds, but they also revised the AI’s work. However, the background designer is listed as “AI (+Human).” The credits go on to list Rinna Inc, an AI artwork company, and a handful of AI researchers.

Many artists worry about the potential for AI to devalue their work, but that concern is particularly acute among anime creators. The labor shortages Netflix points to are the result of unsustainable labor practices that see the majority of Japan’s animation studios depend on essentially unpaid freelancers to complete much of the work that makes anime possible.

According to data from the Japanese Animation Creators Association published in 2018, in-between animators, the workers who draw the frames that make a scene look fluid, earn about ¥200 (or less than $2) per drawing. With many frames taking more than an hour to produce, the average in-between animator can expect to make about ¥1.1 million (or $10,000) per year. For context, in 2019, Japan’s poverty line was at ¥2.2 million.

A new Twitch livestream tries to answer the question: What if AI made never-ending Seinfeld? “Nothing, Forever” is an experiment using OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language model to produce (occasionally coherent) dialog between pixelated counterparts of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. Although it’s closer to surreal performance art than the beloved 90s sitcom, it conjures images of a strange, dystopian future where we entertain ourselves with endless content generated by robots.

“Nothing, Forever” immediately hits you with well-known aesthetics. Scene transitions show the exterior of a line of New York City brownstones over the sound of a quirky jazz bassline. It frequently cuts to “Larry” (the Jerry equivalent) performing what AI passes as standup comedy. Scenes inside Larry’s apartment show him chatting with George, Elaine and Kramer's counterparts about appropriately mundane topics. Their conversations, while mostly unintelligible and lacking structure or narrative, make their inspiration clear.

On the other hand, the stiff and rudimentary character models look like they walked out of a 1980s Sierra adventure game. Their voices are robotic too, and Jerry and George sound less like their real-world counterparts and more like Mr. Van Driessen, the hippie social studies teacher from Beavis & Butthead. Finally, it’s a stretch to say the generated dialog is coherent — much less funny. (If not for its laugh track, you wouldn’t notice the laugh lines.) Generative AI’s current limits are as much on display as the show’s influence.

Twitch

“Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you’ll hear,” one of the show’s creators posted to Reddit, “everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music.” The stream has little human involvement and changes based on viewer feedback from the Twitch stream. “The show can effectively change, and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience,” said Hartle in an interview with Vice. “One of the major factors that we’re thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own.”

That goal may be far away, as any narrative — much less a personalized one — seems beyond its current capabilities. Still, with a sizable budget and several years of technological advancement, it’s easy to imagine someone producing more watchable generative programming, an endless stream of personalized, assembly-line digital media. “Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that’s truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality.”

Before Samsung Unpacked even wrapped up today, Amazon swooped in with an offer on pre-orders for unlocked units of the new Galaxy S23 Ultra, Plus and base model smartphones — bundling a $100 Amazon gift card with the Ultra and plus and a $50 card with the S23 standard. All three phones will also get a free bump to the larger storage size and the offer is good on all available colors (black, cream, green and lavender). Like Amazon, Samsung is also offering $100 or $50 bonus, but in the form of Samsung credit.  

The S23 Ultra has an MSRP of $1,200 for the 256GB storage capacity and the S23+ starts at $1,000 for the 256GB size. The free storage upgrade bumps both of those models up to 512GB. The base S23 goes for $800 with 128GB, and the upgrade brings that to 256GB. The phones will ship on February 17th and the Amazon gift card will be delivered via mail once the phones ship.

We got a chance to spend some time with the S23 and the S23+ this week. The notable differences between the two versions are screen size, battery capacity and price. Both have vivid and smooth screens, as you'd expect from Samsung's Galaxy S series, and this year's versions include software advances for both photo and video capture. 

We also got a chance to check out the S23 Ultra, and, of course, the big news there is the big 200 MP camera lashed to its back. We'll dive into full reviews on all three phones very soon, but in the meantime, the new S23 Galaxy phones are ready to pre-order as of today, and both Amazon and Samsung will throw in a bonus if you jump in now. 

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Electric vehicle maker Rivian is laying off another six percent of its workforce. The company reduced its headcount by the same proportion of workers back in July. The automaker has around 14,000 employees, according to Reuters, so it will be letting go around 840 people this time.

As with the previous round of layoffs, Rivian says it's focusing resources on increasing production and becoming a profitable company."While this doesn’t impact manufacturing jobs in Normal, teams across the company will be losing passionate collaborators — teammates who stretched themselves daily and have given their all to help us execute on our mission," CEO RJ Scaringe wrote in an email to employees. The company shared a copy of the memo with Engadget.

As part of its push toward profitability, Rivian is attempting to ramp up production of its R1T and R1S vehicles, as well as the delivery vans it's making for Amazon. It had to slash its production target for 2022 due to supply chain issues. Reuters notes that Rivian fell just short of its goal of making 25,000 vehicles last year.

The company is also working on more affordable R2 electric trucks, which it plans to produce at high-volume, but it doesn't expect to start shipping them until 2026. Rivian will build that truck at a $5 billion factory it's constructing in Georgia.

"Continuing to improve our operating efficiency on our path to profitability is a core objective and requires us to concentrate our investments and resources on the highest impact parts of our business," Scaringe wrote. "The changes we are announcing today reflect this focused roadmap." 

We'll get a clearer picture of the state of Rivian's business when it reports quarterly earnings on February 28th. The company announced its latest layoffs soon after Tesla and Ford cut prices of their EVs, making it more difficult for newer players like Rivian to compete. Earlier this week, EV startup Arrival said it would cut around half of its workforce.