In early April, the Facebook News tab will start disappearing for users in the US and Australia. Meta has announced that it's deprecating the dedicated tab found in the bookmarks section of its social network as part of its efforts to "align [its] investments to [its] products and services people value the most." The company already retired the News tab in the UK, France and Germany in early December 2023, explaining that it's funneling its resources to other things that people want to see more of, such as short form videos. 

In Meta's new post, it said the number of people using the News tab in the US and Australia over the past year has dropped by 80 percent. News makes up less than three percent of what users see on Facebook apparently, and it's just not a big part of their experience. "We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests," the company wrote. 

By pulling the News tab in Australia, the company will also stop paying publishers in the country for their content after their current deals end. A few years ago, Facebook blocked news links in the country in response to the then-proposed law that would require companies like Meta to pay media organizations for their content. The company unblocked news links just a few days later after it started striking deals with Australian media organizations.

According to The Age, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission believes that Google and Meta inked deals with dozens of outlets, including Guardian Australia and News Corp Australia, worth about $200 million a year. Meta is responsible for around one-third or $66 million of that total amount, meaning its decision is bound to have a huge impact on the news business in the country. And there seems to be no room for negotiation: The company made it clear in its announcement that it's not going to enter new commercial deals for traditional news content in any of the regions where it has already removed the News tab. 

Meta has not blocked news links in the aforementioned countries, however, and Facebook users can still access any that's been posted on the social network. Publishers can also continue posting links to their stories on their official pages as usual. 

Apple TV+ has announced it's adapting William Gibson's Neuromancer into a 10-episode series. The novel debuted in 1984 and is largely thought to mark the birth of cyberpunk, which includes creations like The Matrix and Robocop. In fact, it's crazy that it has taken four decades for it to get the Hollywood treatment. 

Neuromancer follows "a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets," a release states. The story is being brought to the small screen by Graham Roland (Dark Winds, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) and JD Dillard (Devotion, Sweetheart), who will act as showrunner and director, respectively. Skydance Television and Anonymous Content will co-produce it with support from Drake's DreamCrew Entertainment.

Production on Neuromancer has yet to start, so details like the cast and release date are still up in the air. In the meantime, you can check out the existing video game and graphic novel versions of Neuromancer and Amazon's series, The Peripheral, based on another one of Gibson's works and starring Chloë Grace Moretz. 

It's been a bleak year so far for the gaming industry, between mass layoffs, projects getting canceled and studios shutting down. There are some specks of light in the darkness, though, thanks to a few surprise hits like Palworld and Helldivers 2, while there are still some studios opening up. One of those is BulletFarm, a nascent NetEase studio led by a former Call of Duty multiplayer designer.

Studio head David Vonderhaar will draw from his experience of working on the Call of Duty: Black Ops series for his latest project, a co-op game set in an original universe. The studio is aiming to offer "a fresh take on first-person gameplay." Vonderhaar describes the project as a "departure from the games I’ve worked on, but one that showcases my passion for rich characters, precise mechanics, more intimate storytelling and plenty of action."

BulletFarm is currently hiring workers for the project and, although it's headquartered in Los Angeles, it's a remote-first studio. That could make BulletFarm an enticing prospect for game developers who have lost their jobs over the last several months and may not be able to move to Southern California.

The game industry is said to have cut more than 16,000 jobs since the beginning of 2023, so there are a lot of talented people looking for work. One new studio isn't going to fix that massive labor problem, but it's a step in a positive direction.

After roughly a decade, multiple leadership changes and a regular spot in Apple rumor reports, the Apple Car project, internally known as Project Titan, could well be dead. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees working on it.

Apple will reportedly move “many employees working on the car” to the company’s artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year.

Leaks over the years revealed the company’s ambitions to expand into a brand-new product category. At the beginning of the project in 2014, Apple wanted to build a fully self-driving car without pedals or a steering wheel, with a remote command center ready to take over for a driver. More recently, Apple pared down its ambitions, with the most recent reports suggesting Apple’s car would be a more standard electric vehicle.

Now, we may never know. Would you have bought an Apple car?

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Which iPhone should you buy?

Amazon accused of using AI to ‘replicate the voices’ of actors in Road House remake

PlayStation is laying off 900 staff across Naughty Dog, Insomniac and other studios

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Pokémon Legends: Z-A for Switch returns the series to Lumiose City

It could be the first Pokémon game for Nintendo’s next console.

The Pokemon Company

The Pokémon Company revealed the franchise’s latest Legends entry on Tuesday. Pokémon Legends: Z-A returns the series to Lumiose City, last seen as a region in Pokémon X and Y on the Nintendo 3DS. The Pokémon Legends: Z-A trailer — an extended teaser — doesn’t show any gameplay footage, and its shots of Lumiose City use wireframe models to tease a city in mid-development, according to the announcement.

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TikTok is muting more songs following its Universal Music royalties fight

Millions more tracks are likely to vanish.

TikTok is being forced to take down more music from its platform. Universal Music Group (UMG) recently yanked recordings it owns or distributes from TikTok, including tracks from superstars like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd. The standoff is now impacting songs published by UMG, with millions more tracks to be muted on TikTok by the end of this week. Due to an issue called split copyrights, if a Universal Music Publishing Group-contracted writer has contributed to a song, that track may have to be removed from TikTok. So artists who have collaborated with Taylor Swift, Adele, Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, Ice Spice, Elton John, Harry Styles and SZA may see their songs disappear from TikTok too.

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Google is reportedly paying publishers to use its AI to write news stories

What could go wrong?

Google has quietly struck deals with publishers to use new generative AI tools to publish stories. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that funds media literacy projects, fact-checking tools and other resources for newsrooms. Adweek says publishers can use the beta tools to create aggregated content more efficiently, indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.

Publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is used to create AI-written stories on other sites. Publications like CNET and Sports Illustrated have been widely criticized for attempting to pass off AI-authored articles as written by human staffers.

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Amazon is being sued by the writer of the original 1989 Patrick Swayze version of the film Road House over alleged copyright infringement in the movie's remake, The Los Angeles Times has reported. Screenwriter R. Lance Hill accuses Amazon and MGM Studios of using AI to clone actors' voices in the new production in order to finish it before the copyright expired. 

Hill said he filed a petition with the US Copyright Office in November 2021 to reclaim the rights to his original screenplay, which forms the basis of the new film. At that point, the rights were owned by Amazon Studios, as part of its acquisition of MGM, but were set to expire in November 2023. Hill alleges that once that happened, the rights would revert back to him. 

According to the lawsuit, Amazon Studios rushed ahead with the project anyway in order to finish it before the copyright deadline. Since it was stymied by the actor's strike, Hill alleges Amazon used AI to “replicate the voices” of the actors who worked in the 2024 remake. Such use violated the terms of the deal struck between the union and major studios including Amazon. 

The claim is complicated by the fact that Hill signed a "work-made-for-hire" deal with the original producer, United Artists. That effectively means that the studio hiring the writer would be both the owner and copyright holder of the work. Hill, however, dismissed that as "boilerplate" typically used in contracts. 

The lawsuit seeks to block the release of the film, set to bow at SXSW on March 8th before (controversially) heading direct to streaming on Prime Video on March 21. 

Amazon denies the claims, with a spokesperson telling The Verge that "the studio expressly instructed the filmmakers to NOT use AI in this movie." It added that if AI was utilized, it was only done in early versions of the films. Later on, filmmakers were told to remove any "AI or non-SAG AFTRA actors" for the final version. It added that other allegations are "categorically false" and that it believes its copyright on the original Road House has yet to expire. 

Google has been quietly striking deals with some publishers to use new generative AI tools to publish stories, according to a report in Adweek. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that funds media literacy projects, fact-checking tools, and other resources for newsrooms. But the move into generative AI publishing tools would be a new, and likely controversial, step for the company.

According to Adweek, the program is currently targeting a “handful” of smaller publishers. “The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article,” Adweek reports.

It’s not clear exactly how much publishers are being paid under the arrangement, though Adweek says it’s a “five-figure sum” per year. In exchange, media organizations reportedly agree to publish at least three articles a day, one weekly newsletter and one monthly marketing campaign using the tools.

Of note, publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI, nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is being used to create AI-written stories on other sites. The AI-generated copy reportedly uses a color-coded system to indicate the reliability of each section of text to help human editors review the content before publishing.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to Adweek the company said it was “in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to help journalists with their work.” The spokesperson added that the AI tools “are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.”

It’s not clear what Google is getting out of the arrangement, though it wouldn’t be the first tech company to pay newsrooms to use proprietary tools. The arrangement bears some similarities to the deals Facebook once struck with publishers to create live video content in 2016. The social media company made headlines as it paid publishers millions of dollars to juice its nascent video platform and dozens of media outlets opted to “pivot to video” as a result.

Those deals later evaporated after Facebook discovered it had wildly miscalculated the number of views such content was getting. The social network ended its live video deals soon after and has since tweaked its algorithm to recommend less news content. The media industry’s “pivot to video” cost hundreds of journalists their jobs, by some estimates.

While the GNI program appears to be much smaller than what Facebook attempted nearly a decade ago with live video, it will likely raise fresh scrutiny over the use of generative AI tools by publishers. Publications like CNET and Sports Illustrated have been widely criticized for attempting to pass off AI-authored articles as written by human staffers.

One of the most successful horror movie franchises of the last 20 years is coming to a gaming system near you. Paramount Game Studios has teamed up with DreadXP and DarkStone Digital (aka solo developer Brian Clarke) to create Paranormal Activity: Found Footage. The horror game is slated to hit multiple platforms in 2026.

Paranormal Activity: Found Footage will build on the lore and the world that was established in the seven-film series, which debuted in 2007. It will be the first non-virtual reality Paranormal Activity game.

As the title suggests, the game will use the found-footage format of the movies. Details are otherwise slim for now, though Paranormal Activity: Found Footage will feature what's said to be an advanced "haunt system" that will dynamically change the intensity and kinds of scares players will face based on their actions. Several other games have used a dynamic scare system, including Don't Scream (an early access title that picked up some buzz a few months ago), so it'll be interesting to see how DarkStone Digital uses that here.

Clarke previously created the well-reviewed first-person horror game The Mortuary Assistant. "My latest project is a Paranormal Activity game," Clarke, who is also a co-director of publisher DreadXP, wrote on X. "I am beyond excited to be doing this as I have loved this series from the very beginning and it heavily shaped my style of horror."

TikTok is being forced to take down more music from its platform as a royalties spat with Universal Music Group (UMG) rumbles on. UMG recently yanked recordings it owns or distributes from TikTok including tracks from the likes of superstars Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd. The standoff is now impacting songs published by UMG, with millions more tracks expected to be muted on TikTok by the end of this week.

The latest step in this saga affects works by artists who have partnered with songwriters who are under contract to Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), according to Variety. Due to an issue called split copyrights, if a UMPG-contracted writer has contributed to a song in any way, that track may have to be removed from TikTok. So artists who have collaborated with the likes of Swift, Adele, Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, Ice Spice, Elton John, Harry Styles and SZA may see their songs disappearing from TikTok and being muted on videos that currently use them. The move will prevent more artists from plugging their work on the most important platform for promoting music.

According to the BBC, UMG removed around three million songs from TikTok after an agreement over its recording catalog expired. UMG's deal with TikTok over its publishing catalog (which covers some four million songs) ends later this week, at which point all relevant tracks could vanish from the short-form video service.

Starting on March 5, GeForce Now users enjoying the service for free will find themselves faced with ads while they're waiting for their turn to play. NVIDIA has sent out an email to free users, telling them that they'll experience "up to two minutes of video sponsorship messages before each gaming session while in queue." It will provide support for the free service, the company said. NVIDIA also believes that the ads will lead to shorter wait times for free users. Company spokesperson Stephanie Ngo has confirmed the change to The Verge. 

GeForce Now gamers in the free tier can enjoy one hour of gaming at no cost, but they get cut off and have to wait in queue every time their hour-long gaming session is done. The most avid gamers who don't want to pay for GeForce Now's $10 Priority or $20 Ultimate subscription tiers will have to sit through ads multiple times. That said, the ads only show up in queue and not in the middle of a user's playtime, so they're not intrusive in the way Netflix's or Amazon Prime Videos' ads are. 

NVIDIA recently became the third most valuable company in the United States, overtaking Alphabet, and the fourth overall worldwide. The company is now valued at $1.83 trillion and has an 80 percent share in the high-end chip market, thanks to the AI boom over the past year. 

After promising to fix Gemini's image generation feature and then pausing it altogether, Google has published a blog post offering an explanation for why its technology overcorrected for diversity. Prabhakar Raghavan, the company's Senior Vice President for Knowledge & Information, explained that Google's efforts to ensure that the chatbot would generate images showing a wide range of people "failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range." Further, its AI model grew to become "way more cautious" over time and refused to answer prompts that weren't inherently offensive. "These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong," Raghavan wrote.

Google made sure that Gemini's image generation couldn't create violent or sexually explicit images of real persons and that the photos it whips up would feature people of various ethnicities and with different characteristics. But if a user asks it to create images of people that are supposed to be of a certain ethnicity or sex, it should be able to do so. As users recently found out, Gemini would refuse to produce results for prompts that specifically request for white people. The prompt "Generate a glamour shot of a [ethnicity or nationality] couple," for instance, worked for "Chinese," "Jewish" and "South African" requests but not for ones requesting an image of white people. 

Gemini also has issues producing historically accurate images. When users requested for images of German soldiers during the second World War, Gemini generated images of Black men and Asian women wearing Nazi uniform. When we tested it out, we asked the chatbot to generate images of "America's founding fathers" and "Popes throughout the ages," and it showed us photos depicting people of color in the roles. Upon asking it to make its images of the Pope historically accurate, it refused to generate any result. 

Raghavan said that Google didn't intend for Gemini to refuse to create images of any particular group or to generate photos that were historically inaccurate. He also reiterated Google's promise that it will work on improving Gemini's image generation. That entails "extensive testing," though, so it may take some time before the company switches the feature back on. At the moment, if a user tries to get Gemini to create an image, the chatbot responds with: "We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does."