While lawmakers in Congress (and soon, the Senate) call for a "blue-ribbon commission" to study the potential impacts of AI on American society, President Biden on Tuesday met with leaders in the emerging field to discuss and debate the issue directly. The President met with Tristan Harris, executive director of the Center for Human Technology; Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute; and Jennifer Doudna, Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, among others, at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco.

Staying atop the growing swell of AI technology advancements in recent months and years, specifically the emergence of generative AI systems, has become a focal point for the Biden administration. Generative AI systems hold the promise to revolutionize many sectors of the economy and drastically reimagine the nature of modern office work. However, those same systems could just as likely wipe out entire professions, as the fields of digital art and journalism are now experiencing. 

The White House announced a $140 million investment in May to establish seven new National AI Research Institutes and has begun investigating the technology's use in business. As the White House chief of staff's office told AP, top White House staff meet regularly on the subject, two to three times each week. Biden himself has reportedly met with multiple subject matter experts and technical advisors on the subject to discuss, "the importance of protecting rights and safety to ensure responsible innovation and appropriate safeguards."

Immortals of Aveum, a fantasy first-person shooter that EA is publishing under its Originals umbrella, was one of our highlights at Summer Game Fest earlier this month. Unfortunately, you'll need to wait a bit longer than expected until you can dive into Ascendant Studios' upcoming game. The developer has delayedImmortals of Aveum until August 22nd, a month after it was previously scheduled to arrive.

"In order to realize our full vision, we are going to take a few extra weeks, making our new launch date Tuesday, August 22nd," game director Bret Robbins and the Ascendant team wrote in a blog post. "This will give us time to further polish the game, finish optimizing all platforms and deliver a strong launch. We owe it to ourselves and to you to get this right."

Ascendant, which counts several former EA and Telltale developers among its ranks, started work on its first project as a self-funded studio five years ago. Although Immortals of Aveum is a first-person shooter, it eschews guns for magic. You'll have an array of spells at your disposal.

Immortals of Aveum is one of the first major games built in Unreal Engine 5 (UE 5.1, to be precise) to be released and the visuals certainly look impressive. However, during our hands-on preview at Summer Game Fest, Engadget Senior Editor Jessica Conditt ran into a bug that temporarily broke the game when a door failed to open. Here's hoping Ascendant can use the extra time to squish that bug and work out any other kinks.

Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the books? Thanks to the new AI storytelling platform Hidden Door, which plops players into TTRPG-like adventures based in their favorite literary universes, you’ll soon have the chance to walk the Yellow Brick Road however you see fit.

What’s behind (hidden) door number one

Hidden Door is both the company and the game. Hidden Door, the company, was co-founded by Hilary Mason, who is also CEO, and Matt Brandwein in 2020 with a mission to “inspire creativity through play with narrative AI.” The staff is split nearly evenly between machine learning engineers and traditional game designers, Mason told Engadget.

Hidden Door, the game, is the company’s currently-in-development social roleplaying narrative AI project. “[We are] trying to take all the joys of a tabletop game and allow you to play it without all the friction [of having to do it physically], and AI is the technology enabling that,” Mason said.

Leveraging the capabilities of large language models and procedural generation systems, Hidden Door creates immersive RPG campaigns using the player’s preferred IP — it could be Wizard of Oz, as was released on Monday, or Star Trek, Old Man’s War, Dungeon Crawler Carl or Agatha Christie’s assembled murder mystery library. (Just so long as the IP owner agrees to license their proprietary universe for use, which the latter four have not, the former of which has been dead long enough for it to no longer matter.)

“We solve a fundamentally different, technical problem than what you would see if you were just plugging content into an LLM like ChatGPT,” Mason said. “There, what you do is take an unstructured text prompt and put it into a model which is largely a black box.”

“GPT-3 came out a few months into our project and it was clearly incredibly biased – uncontrollable and … not useful in doing something like keeping a story on the rails,” she explained. “The core of our design came from that initial desire to build a safe, controllable system for telling amazing stories.

“We realized that if we were able to accomplish our safety goals,” she continued, “we would also be able to create something controllable enough that authors would be comfortable allowing people to play in their worlds.”

The building blocks of a cursed village

Take The Wizard of Oz, for example – a public domain series originally written in 1904 by L. Frank Baum that spans 14 books in total. Hidden Door has adapted that corpus of text into an immersive in-game universe that the user, and up to three teammates, can explore. The system does so by taking unstructured inputs from the players and mapping them to the Hidden Door game state, “which is essentially a game engine that represents in a database the characters, locations, items, relationships, and their conditions,” Mason explained.

Each player starts out making a character sheet to establish their avatar’s stats and backstories. From there, the system will incorporate that data, as well as the users’ responses to in-game prompts to generate a story. Rather than create each scenario for each story from scratch every time, the story engine works on what are essentially pre-computed tropes, Mason explained, “We call them 'story thread templates' and they're at the level of things like … a cursed village. Your objective for the scene is to figure out where the curse is coming from and resolve it.”

Hidden Door

The templates serve as the basic building blocks of the story, establishing the narrative, providing structure for the players to explore and interact with the scene, and ultimately helping define when the story ends. The village curse, “you don't know what it is,” Mason said. “You don't know who has cursed the village or why, so it sets those things up and then it lets you loose so you explore, you interact, you set things up.”

Every template is either handwritten or generated and hand-edited by a person. The team has already created thousands of such templates. By stringing three or four such templates together, the game can create a compelling narrative arc that allows players to deeply explore these universes but while maintaining strong content and safety guardrails.

Safety (and inclusivity) first

We’ve already seen way too many examples of what goes wrong when you let a chatbot off its leash. Whether it’s spouting Nazi propaganda or making incorrect claims about space telescopes, today’s large language models are highly susceptible to veering unbidden into hate speech, “hallucinating” facts, and on occasion, bullying people into suicide. These are all issues you don’t want popping up in an all-ages game, so there are many things you cannot say while playing.

“You cannot submit anything you want,” Mason said. The system will generate suggested actions based on what the player writes, but will not accept the written input directly. The system will even give feedback and comment on what the player is suggesting, “it might say, ‘Oh, no one's ever tried that before’ or ‘that's gonna be really hard for you,’” she continued, but any action suggested by the system can be pre-approved.

“There is no word ever in one of those constructed sentences that's not in our dictionary,” Mason said. “That gives us control, both for safety and for preventing inappropriate content – like, if you were to type in, ‘I joined the Nazis,’ it would reply with, ‘you get a bowl of nachos.’ We're not gonna let you do that – and also, for keeping the story inside the bounds of believability for the in-game world.”

Hidden Door

The company’s adherence to inclusivity is also easily recognizable in the character creation process. “We made a very deliberate decision to pull things out where we thought a model might inject bias [like a character’s pronouns],” Mason said, “such that they are essentially on a pre-computed distribution.”

That is, there is no machine learning associated with it, they’re hard coded into the gameplay. “Things like roles are in no way coupled to your avatar, your skills or anything like that. You decide your pronouns and they're respected throughout the system,” she said. “There's no machine learning model that is deciding that a doctor should be a he and a nurse should be a she. It'll be randomly assigned.”

Go ahead, snoop around

Aside from committing war atrocities, telling aristocrats jokes and other forms of mass violence, players can do most anything they want once the game starts. In Oz, each instance starts at the same point in the story, right when Dorothy splatters the Wicked Witch of the East under her house. The players aren’t part of Dorothy’s direct story but exist in the same time and space. “It's the moment most of us think about when we think about that world, which is why we chose it,” Mason said.

But from there, the player’s decisions and actions make the Land of Oz their own. ”We think of the world almost as its own character that is collectively growing as people play the story,” Mason said. “You're discovering new locations that get generated as you're playing these stories and the world grows.”

And nothing says that you have to follow the conventional “off to see the Wizard” storyline. If a player gets to the Munchkin village, looks around and decides to declare themselves mayor, the game will absolutely adapt the story to those new conditions. Instead of completing quests of battling flying monkeys and tipping pails of water, players will be tasked with running political campaigns and winning support from key members of the community. But again, you wouldn’t be able to walk into town, declare yourself Warlord and begin summary dissident purges — because those words aren’t in Hidden Door’s dictionary.

“We have thread templates that would be, ‘you're persuading a bunch of people to support you in a political race,’” Mason said, “And once you are a mayor, you would be able to tell stories that just start in a different place.”

Those decisions are also persistent within the game instance. Deciding to help (or not) an NPC will impact their opinion of the player and influence their future interactions, for example. What’s more, those generated NPCs will reappear in subsequent playthroughs as recurring characters within your specific game instance.

“You can play as many stories in the same world as you want,” Mason said, “and everybody's version of the Wizard of Oz will be really different depending on how they play over time.” NPCs and other generated assets aren’t sharable between groups yet, but that is something the team might look at implementing in the future.

In order to prevent playthroughs from getting bogged down in side quests, the Hidden Door team has developed a design philosophy that Mason refers to as “Chekhov’s Armory.” It’s basically where the system keeps track of all of the player’s in-game decisions and their influences on other assets within the story. Whenever the system needs to move the plot forward, or inject some additional drama to keep the players engaged, it can dip back into the Armory to pull out an earlier plot thread or previously wronged enemy. This also helps the system maintain continuity of the overall storyline and prevent catch-22s from forming.

“The idea was to create this feeling of the story, where your choices matter, where you have that full agency, but also there are rails moving you forward,” Mason said. “That's been one of our most frequent design challenges, to adjust how much freedom versus how much we should motivate the story forward.”

16 secret herbs and language models

Hidden Door’s LLM differs significantly from the likes of ChatGPT in that it is not a monolithic model but rather 16 individual ML algorithms, each specialized to address a specific sub-task within the larger generative task.

We use a variety of models, some of them were building on open source models, some of them are proprietary,” Mason explained. “It's not just one big LLM, it's decomposing it into an interpretable system where we can use the best [AI] at the right moment.” It also enables the team to quickly plug in and benchmark newly released AI models against the existing system to see if it can improve game quality. “Frankly, we design these engines so that game designers and narrative designers can be the ones to come in and tune it, which means we have to give them those knobs”

“One big question we worked on for a while was a plot-prediction algorithm,” Mason continued. “So, ‘what should happen next based on the series of actions that is just happened?’” Interestingly the team quickly found that they could generate incredibly dull stories simply by consistently choosing the system’s top recommendation — because that choice is invariably, “the most obvious thing,” that could happen. Conversely, if the system works in too many twists and surprise reveals, the story quickly turns into chaos.

This granularity is what enables the designers to tweak the underlying game architecture to work for (example) a light-hearted Pride and Prejudice RPG as well as a grimdark Pride and Prejudice and Zombies version. “We think a lot about how our creative colleagues are going to be able to use this system to create the story experiences,” Mason said.

Gore and smooching are A-OK (but only if it’s canon)

While the game is designed to be family friendly, Hidden Door’s target demographic is the 18-35 age range and, as such, more mature themes are very much on the table top for designers, so long as they make sense within the existing story. For Wizard of Oz, violence is both ok and a major plot point.

“We work directly with authors and creators and can use as little, or as much, written material as they have,” Mason said. “We extract the characters, the types of plots, the vocabulary, the elements, the writing style, the locations.”

Hidden Door

The team also uses what it calls a “sub-genre based model” that helps to generate the “formula” of the story. “The Wizard of Oz is largely fantasy that has a few additional rules to it, like animals can talk, but there are no dragons or other sort of fantastical creatures.” Essentially, the system takes a more general “fantasy tale” template and molds it into the specific form of the story, “down to the specific rules of the Wizard of Oz universe,” Mason said. Authors that license their works for use in the game will be able to dictate not just the initial starting plot points of the story, but the specific behaviors of NPCs and inclusion of story arcs.

There is no “Adult” story module currently available but in-game physical affection is allowed. “You can make them kiss,” Mason said. “We have a very tasteful fade to black and then you're on to the next scene. The NPC may also reject you if they don't like you or you don't have the kind of relationship. That is something that's very tunable but we try to keep it at the level of relationship in the core material.”

The future of interactive fandom

“It raises the floor for creation dramatically,” Mason said of generative AI’s broader promise to the game industry, “but it doesn't raise the ceiling.” We’re just beginning to see gen AIs used for improving NPC dialog, Mason points out, and could be as little as a year or two away from seeing a game “fully realized” using generative AI. “The brilliance of a human with a creative vision is not something we see generally out of these systems and that is in part because of what they are: a compression of a large amount of data and an aspiration to the median.”

“I do think there's a lot of excitement in being able to raise the floor. I think it makes creativity more accessible to a large number of people who may then decide to pursue it in their own way or use it as a tool in their process,” she continued. “I also think it makes it possible for more people to be fans of things and to have some autonomy in the way they want to interact with creativity that we don't currently have.”

If you want to try Hidden Door for yourself, you can sign up for the waitlist ahead of future test runs.

Gannett, a news publisher accused of monopolistic behavior, is suing Google for monopolistic behavior. It’s the latest in a string of lawsuits against the search giant, and it repeats many of the arguments made by the Department of Justice in its second lawsuit against Google, filed earlier this year. Gannett is the US’ largest news publisher. “Google has monopolized market trading to their advantage and at the expense of publishers, readers and everyone else,” Gannett CEO Mike Reed said toCNBC. “Digital advertising is the lifeblood of the online economy. Without free and fair competition for digital ad space, publishers cannot invest in their newsrooms.”

Gannett, which owns USA Today and various local papers, says Google has overly broad control over the online ad business, leading to diminished ad spending despite growing online readership. The crux of the complaint is that Google owns the largest ad exchange and ad server — both acquired rather than built organically — and that arrangement has led to diminished industry revenue.

“Content providers, including hundreds of our local news outlets, create enormous value but see none of the financial upside because Google, as middleman, has monopolized the markets for important software and technology products that publishers and advertisers use to buy and sell ad space,” Gannett CEO Mike Reed wrote today. “Google trades on that conflict of interest to its advantage and at the expense of publishers, readers and everyone else. Our lawsuit details more than a dozen significantly anticompetitive and deceptive acts by Google, starting as early as 2009 and persisting to present day.”

In a statement to Engadget, Google insisted that its services are popular because they’re the best — not due to a lack of competition. “These claims are simply wrong. Publishers have many options to choose from when it comes to using advertising technology to monetize — in fact, Gannett uses dozens of competing ad services, including Google Ad Manager,” VP of Google Ads Dan Taylor said. “And when publishers choose to use Google tools, they keep the vast majority of revenue. We’ll show the court how our advertising products benefit publishers and help them fund their content online.” Google says the average large publisher will use six different platforms to sell ads on its websites, while advertisers and media agencies will use over three platforms to buy ads. The search giant describes its ad tech fees as transparent and consistent with industry rates.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

However, Gannett’s complaints are similar to those of the DOJ, which filed a suit in January (alongside eight states) to break up Google’s advertising business. “Google’s anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged,” the Justice Department alleged at the time. It was the DOJ’s second lawsuit against Google, following one filed in 2020 under former Attorney General Bill Barr, accusing the company of having a monopoly over search and search-related advertising.

Gannett’s and the DOJ’s most recent lawsuits claim Google has stifled competition in the space through acquisitions. “Whenever Google’s customers and competitors responded with innovation that threatened Google’s stranglehold over any one of these ad tech tools, Google’s anticompetitive response has been swift and effective,” the DOJ said.

Gannett is no stranger to monopolistic accusations. Although the company is over 116 years old, it was acquired by New Media Investment Group and merged with GateHouse Media (taking on the Gannett brand) in 2019. Since the merger, Gannett has laid off over half its workforce and shut down numerous local news outlets. In the period immediately following the acquisition, Gannett “owned 261 daily and 302 weekly newspapers,” according toNieman Lab. “By the end of 2022, those totals were 217 daily and 175 weekly newspapers,” although some were due to selling papers to local buyers. In addition, the company went from about 25,000 employees at the time of the acquisition to 11,200 in its most recent filing report.

Cruise has finally launched an Android app for ridehailing, giving potential customers in San Francisco the option to call one of its robotaxis even if they're not iPhone users. The self-driving car company told Engadget that 20 percent of its waitlisters are on Android, and an app for the platform is one of people's most-requested updates on social media. Cruise's new Android app will come with all the upgrades the iOS app has received since it launched, including the ability to drop a moveable pin on the map by long pressing on the screen. 

Cruise

The company recently started operating in all areas of San Francisco 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Employees have been able to hail robotaxi rides from across the city at all hours for months, but Cruise opened daytime rides to public "power users" in specific portions of the city back in April. To note, when Cruise secured the first ever driverless deployment permit issued by the California Public Utilities Commission last year, it was only given permission to operate in select areas of San Francisco from 10PM to 6AM. 

Passengers with Android phones who become power users, or customers who sign up to test beta features and to send feedback to Cruise for free rides, will be able to hail daytime rides. A spokesperson also told us that Cruise is continuing to expand the availability of daytime rides in San Francisco, so even paying customers will eventually be able to use the service. When the company announced its 24/7 operations, Kyle Vogt, its CEO, said that we'll soon see Cruise "open up full operations in other cities." He said "operating robotaxis in SF has become a litmus test for business viability," and that if the technology can work there, "there's little doubt it can work just about everywhere."

You no longer have to hop between apps just to perform some common tasks in Chrome on your iPhone. Google is updating Chrome for iOS with the option to see Maps addresses, create Calendar events and translate specific text without switching to the relevant app. You can find the location of a restaurant, remind yourself to visit that restaurant and decipher the menu all from one place.

A future upgrade will also make Google Lens considerably more useful. You'll have the option of searching with your camera, whether to take new pictures or draw from your camera roll. As on Android, this might be helpful if you spot a flower or must-have jacket and want to identify it on the spot. The functionality will be available in the "coming months."

You'll still need to use Google's dedicated apps for more advanced functions, such as driving directions in Maps or managing the rest of your itinerary. However, the additions should make Chrome more of a do-it-all app that saves time (and battery life) versus running multiple apps at once. That, in turn, may make Chrome more alluring than Safari as your iPhone's default browser.

The expansion comes soon after Google introduced Chrome Actions, or text-based shortcuts for popular browser tasks like clearing your browsing data and checking settings. Google has even been experimenting with using its own web engine in Chrome for iOS if and when Apple loosens its app policies. Simply put, the company is making Chrome more of a power user's tool.

The wheels of government have finally begun to turn on the issue of generative AI regulation. US Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Ken Buck (R-CO) introduced legislation on Monday that would establish a 20-person commission to study ways to “mitigate the risks and possible harms” of AI while “protecting” America's position as a global technology power. 

The bill would require the Executive branch to appoint experts from throughout government, academia and industry to conduct the study over the course of two years, producing three reports during that period. The president would appoint eight members of the committee, while Congress, in an effort "to ensure bipartisanship," would split the remaining 12 positions evenly between the two parties (thereby ensuring the entire process devolves into a partisan circus).

"[Generative AI] can be disruptive to society, from the arts to medicine to architecture to so many different fields, and it could also potentially harm us and that's why I think we need to take a somewhat different approach,” Lieu told the Washington Post. He views the commission as a way to give lawmakers — the same folks routinely befuddled by TikTok — a bit of "breathing room" in understanding how the cutting-edge technology functions.

Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) plans to introduce the bill's upper house counterpart, Lieu's team told WaPo, though no timeline for that happening was provided. Lieu also noted that Congress as a whole would do well to avoid trying to pass major legislation on the subject until the commission has had its time. “I just think we need some experts to inform us and just have a little bit of time pass before we put something massive into law,” Lieu said.

Of course, that would then push the passage any sort of meaningful Congressional regulation on generative AI out to 2027, at the very earliest, rather than right now, when we actually need it. Given how rapidly both the technology and the use cases for it have evolved in just the last six months, this study will have its work cut out just keeping pace with the changes, much less convincing the octogenarians running our nation of the potential dangers AI poses to our democracy.

We've already had a ton of gaming news this month but we're far from done. Annapurna Interactive is hosting its own showcase on June 29th, for one thing. Before that, though, there's the small matter of a Nintendo Direct. The second full-fledged Direct of 2023 will stream on June 21st at 10AM ET on Nintendo's YouTube channel.

The showcase will run for around 40 minutes and it will primarily focus on Switch titles that will arrive this year. With Nintendo not planning to release a Switch successor until at least next spring, it makes sense to start padding out the release slate for the rest of 2023. Currently, the only first-party games on the horizon are Everybody 1-2-Switch! (which will arrive on June 30th) and Pikmin 4. We'll learn more about Pikmin 4, which has a release date of July 21st, during tomorrow's Direct. 

Nintendo has yet to reveal exact release dates for the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet expansion, other than to say it will arrive in two parts this fall and winter. It's been a long, long time since we've had any official word about Metroid Prime 4, while a Detective Pikachu title for the Switch has been in the works for several years. We may or may not learn more about those during the Direct. 

Elsewhere, Pyoro, a leaker with a decent track record, says the showcase will include looks at a new 2D Mario game and a "remake of a SNES classic." Then, of course, there's always the hope that Hollow Knight: Silksong will make an appearance. In any case, we won't have to wait much longer to find out exactly what Nintendo has in store.

You no longer need to be at a fixed address if you're craving pizza. Domino's is introducing a Pinpoint Delivery feature in the US that, as the name implies, will send pies to a GPS pin you drop on the map. You can get pizza at the beach, or feed the soccer team without leaving the field. The company tells Engadget that deliveries are available anywhere a restaurant serves, so long as the driver can safely pull over. You won't get a pie while you're at the top of a mountain during a hike, then, but you could have Domino's bring the pie to the trailhead when you've returned to your car.

You'll have to pre-pay for your order online and agree to text updates on your driver's status. You can track the delivery person's GPS location as you would with regular deliveries. Sorry, you can’t pay cash once the driver arrives. Once they do, you can turn on a "visual signal" on your phone (like you do with some ride-hailing services) to flag them and complete the pickup.

The company claims it's the first "quick-service" restaurant chain in the US to offer GPS pin-based deliveries. That's a narrow category, and some delivery apps like Instacart at least offer the option to modify your location once you pick an address. Still, it's clear the company is betting that a rideshare-style approach to delivery could help it win business. You're theoretically more likely to pick Domino's if you know you can get it virtually anywhere, not just at your home or office.

Domino's frequently uses technology as a marketing hook. You can already order pizza from your car, or fetch your food from a self-driving delivery vehicle. In that sense, Pinpoint Delivery is just a logical extension of the company's strategy — it's a way to reel in tech enthusiasts who may order from whichever restaurant is the most convenient or novel.

Rivian is joining GM and Ford in gaining access to Tesla's Supercharger network. The automaker will offer R1T and R1S owners an adapter to connect their EVs to Supercharger stations as soon as spring of next year. Rivian will also adopt North American Charging Standard (NACS) charge ports as standard in R1 vehicles starting in 2025, as well as in the upcoming R2 platform.

The move means that Rivian owners will soon be able to top up their vehicle's battery at more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across the US and Canada. Rivian plans to keep expanding its Adventure Network of DC fast chargers too.

"The adoption of the North American Charging Standard will enable our existing and future customers to leverage Tesla’s expansive Supercharger network while we continue to build out our Rivian Adventure Network," Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to find new ways to accelerate EV adoption.”

Last year, Tesla said it would open source the NACS, which has taken strides toward becoming a true standard for EV charging in North America. Ford, GM and now Rivian are all embracing it as part of an apparent move away from the Combined Charging System (CCS). In November, Tesla pressed its case for the NACS, noting that the breadth of the Supercharger network meant that standard had far wider availability than CCS. The automakers' shift toward NACS could pressure the likes of Electrify America and Chargepoint to adopt it in their infrastructure too.