Features – Page 21

TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year

culture, end of year content, Entertainment, Features, streaming television, tv series, TV Technica / Paul Patrick / December 29, 2023

Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y. The segment for The Great contains major reveals, so skip it if you haven’t watched the latest season. (We’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

Everything was coming up mystery in 2023, judging by our picks for Ars Technica’s annual list of the best TV shows of the year. There’s just something about the basic framework that seems to lend itself to television. Showrunners and studios have clearly concluded that genre mashups with a mystery at the center is a reliable winning formula, whether it’s combined with science fiction (Silo, Bodies, Pluto), horror (Fall of the House of Usher), or comedy (Only Murders in the Building, The Afterparty). And there’s clearly still plenty of room in the market for the classic police procedural (Dark Winds, Poker Face, Justified: City Primeval). Even many shows we loved that were not overt nods to the genre still had some kind of mystery at their core (Yellowjackets, Mrs. Davis), so one could argue it’s almost a universal narrative framework.

Streaming platforms continue to lead, with Netflix, Apple TV+, and FX/Hulu dominating this year’s list. But there are signs that the never-ending feast of new fare we’ve enjoyed for several years now might be leveling off a bit, as the Hollywood strikes took their toll and the inevitable reshuffling and consolidation continues. That would be great news for budgets strained by subscribing to multiple platforms, less so for those who have savored the explosion of sheer creativity during what might be remembered as a Golden Age of narrative storytelling on TV.

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” vote at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite TV shows released in 2023.

The Last Kingdom (Netflix)

I came late to the Netflix series The Last Kingdom, which is based on the historical fiction books by Bernard Cornwell and set amid the Viking invasions of Anglo-Saxon England during the time of King Alfred. The TV series was initially released in 2015 and technically wrapped up in March 2022. However, a movie to cap the series was released in April of this year, so it qualifies for our year-end list. I’m not sure why this television show has not gotten more attention because it is outstanding, both in bringing to life a fictionalized version of the turbulent late 800s and early 900s in proto-England and in its development of characters and friendships. If you liked Game of Thrones and are looking for something to watch before season 2 of House of the Dragon, The Last Kingdom should be your first choice.

—Eric Berger

The Last of Us (HBO)

Enlarge / Pedro Pascal stars as Joel, who befriends Ellie (Bella Ramsey) during a zombie apocalypse.

HBO

Given the hit-and-miss nature of adaptations from video games to the world of TV and film (with misses more plentiful than hits), I was more than a little apprehensive about HBO’s Last of Us series. It was remarkably easy to envision the TV adaptation ruining one of my favorite character-based narratives in all of gaming in order to create some sort of lowest-common-denominator zombie-of-the-week dreck. Instead, we got a loving and authentic take on the game.

HBO’s version of The Last of Us does a great job toeing the line between faithfulness to the source material and deviations that still feel authentic to the world of the game. Many of the key scenes are literally shot-for-shot and music-cue-for-music-cue live-action recreations of original Naughty Dog cut scenes, and it’s a testament to Naughty Dog’s cinematic skill that they’re just as effective in a new “prestige TV” context. But then there are new creations like the third episode, where supporting characters from the game are given surprising and heartwarming depth. Through it all, the surrogate parent-child relationship between Joel and Ellie shines through, driving the narrative and leading to one of the most arresting final scenes in gaming (and now, in a TV season).

There were relative narrative shortcomings in The Last of Us Part II, so I feel the showrunners have a bit of an uphill battle ahead of them in adapting future seasons for TV. But the care they took with season 1 gives me some confidence they’ll be able to thread the needle and make more compelling post-apocalyptic television going forward.

—Kyle Orland

TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year Read More »

Ars Technica’s best video games of 2023

Features, gaming / Paul Patrick / December 28, 2023

The years are absolutely packed —

2022’s relative drought leads to an absolutely packed year of major epics.

It’s been a real period of feast or famine in the video game industry of late. Last year in this space, we lamented how COVID-related development delays meant a dearth of big-budget blockbusters that would usually fill a year-end list. In 2023, many of those delays finally expired, leading to a flood of long-anticipated titles over just a few months.

But the year in games didn’t stop there. Beyond the usual big-budget suspects, there were countless delightful surprises from smaller indie studios, many of which came out of nowhere to provide some of the most memorable interactive experiences of the year.

These two trends make it difficult to narrow this year’s best games down to just 20 titles. The “shortlist” we assembled during the winnowing process easily approached 50 titles, most of which could have easily made the list in a less packed year—or been swapped with a game that did make this year’s list.

Looking back years from now, 2023 may be mentioned in the same breath as 1998 and 2007 as years that were packed to the gills with classics. Here are 20 titles released this year that we think will stand the test of time, sorted in alphabetical order, with a single “Game of the Year” pick at the end.

Against the Storm

Eremite games; Windows

With most games I played and wrote about this year, even the titles I really liked, I would tell myself, “I could see playing this more.” With Against the Storm, I’m not just imagining it, I’m actively plotting ways to make it happen.

A (rather well-organized) village in <em>Against the Storm</em>, with the Hearth at center, constantly burning the resources you acquire. — Enlarge / A (rather well-organized) village in *Against the Storm*, with the Hearth at center, constantly burning the resources you acquire.

This game is stuck in my mental queue because of how surprisingly well the core gameplay loop works. You create the kinds of little villages you’d make in a typical real-time strategy game, except there’s no real-time battle, just a gradual push against time to gather enough resources, deliver the right goods, and keep everyone moderately happy. You can save any time, but each session can also be played in about an hour. It’s deep, but it’s also calm. Even the “roguelite” map-wiping aspect of the game isn’t a punishment but, rather, a reminder not to worry too much about any one level.

Against the Storm is also now Steam Deck Verified, having made lots of changes to how controllers, gamepads, and on-screen text are displayed for that tinier screen. It’s a smart move to make this session-friendly game more couch-capable.

You can pick out a few distinct genre influences in Against the Storm, a handful of specific art homages, and probably quite a few mechanics plucked from other games. But it is very much its own game, one that has been tuned well over its early access period. I keep finding myself hoping for little stretches of time where I can break away from daily life so I can have a bunch of villagers, a queen, and unknowable forest spirits demand more and more of me. It’s quite weird, but it works.

-Kevin Purdy

Alan Wake 2

Remedy Entertainment; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

I am not really in the target audience for Alan Wake 2. I only played a few brief moments of its predecessor, and I’ve never really gone deep on survival horror shooters, having bounced off the Resident Evil titles in my youth. And while I was initially thrilled with developer Remedy’s last title, Control, the combat felt too repetitive and grinding for me to keep pushing through it for one more head-melting story reveal or another cleverly worded office memo.

Enlarge / Welcome to Cauldron Lake.

Remedy

And yet I think Alan Wake 2 is an inspired, fascinating, entertaining game, one that I’d recommend to nearly anybody. Anybody, in particular, who digs The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Stephen King, Resident Evil, meta-fiction, Control, True Detective, or pondering dark myths amid the beauty of the Pacific Northwest’s majestic, damp forests or a lucid-dream version of New York City.

AW2 gives Remedy the breadth and budget to tell the kinds of stories it’s best at telling. Even if I found the gun-focused but bullet-constrained combat a bit of a slog at times, I wanted to push through. I wanted to watch Saga Anderson discover and react to the reality-altering mystery she was investigating. I wanted to have more moments like when Wake was thrust onto a talk show couch, unaware of the book he was there to promote.

There’s also a musical number. This isn’t a game where you can see the beats coming.

Like 2022’s game of the year, Elden Ring, AW2 feels like a distillation but also an expansion of all the games that came before it. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it provides a wonderful service for those who commit to sitting down with it.

Brotato

Thomas Gevraud; Windows, Switch, iOS, Android

Last year, the cheap, pixel-graphics indie roguelite Vampire Survivors was my personal game of the year. I wasn’t alone in my obsession. Although it wasn’t technically the first of its kind, Vampire Survivors kick-started a new genre in which an auto-attacking hero faces down ever-increasing hordes of enemies. I’ve played a ton of these “Survivor-likes” over the past year, and many of them are quite good. My favorite by far, though, is Brotato, which saw its 1.0 release this year.

In Brotato, you maneuver the titular potato-bodied hero around a small arena. Enemies rush toward your position, and when they’re in range, your character attacks them automatically. But instead of the 20- to 30-minute rounds common in the genre, a Brotato run is split into 20 bite-sized fights that last anywhere from 20 to 90 seconds.

Defeated enemies drop “materials,” which double as experience points and money. You visit a shop between rounds and can spend as much money as you want to buy items and weapons to buff up your character. This is where the game gets its addictive pull. There are 16 main stats, and the key to success is leaning into the ones that help your character the most. Items often have a positive and a negative, so balancing is key.

In short, the game is a min-maxer’s dream.

Forty-four unique characters, six difficulty levels, dozens of weapons, and hundreds of items—unlocked as you play the game—ensure you have a ton of content to chew through. The best thing about the game is coming up with wacky build ideas and seeing if you can make them happen. Adjusting your stats from round to round makes a huge difference, and choosing the right items becomes surprisingly intuitive.

The game is a scandalously cheap $5 (or free to try on mobile). If you are at all interested in stat-building in games, you need to try this.

Ars Technica’s best video games of 2023 Read More »

Film Technica: Our favorite movies of 2023

best of 2023, culture, end of year content, Entertainment, Features, films / Paul Patrick / December 26, 2023

Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed films that some might consider spoiler-y.

It’s been an odd couple of years for film as the industry struggles to regain its footing in the wake of a devastating global pandemic, but there are reasons to be optimistic about its future, both from a box office and variety standpoint. This was the year that the blockbuster superhero franchises that have dominated for more than a decade finally showed signs of faltering; the Marvel and DC Universe releases this year were mostly fine, but only one (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) made our 2023 year-end list. There were just so many of them, one after the other, adding up to serious superhero fatigue.

We still love our blockbusters, of course. This was also the summer of “Barbenheimer,” as audiences flocked to theaters for the unlikely pairing of Barbie and Oppenheimer, breaking a few box office records in the process. It was also a good year for smaller niche fare—including two re-imaginings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—as well as a new film from the legendary Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon).

D&D: Honor Among Thieves.” height=”426″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/dungeons1-640×426.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez star as Elgin (a bard) and Holga (a barbarian) in D&D: Honor Among Thieves.

Paramount Pictures

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Over two decades later, I am still a bit bitter about paying good money to see the 2000 Dungeons and Dragons movie with a group of friends on opening night. To this day, we’ll still parody Empress Savina dramatically proclaiming something along the lines of “I declare all people equal!” at the end of the movie (spoilers for a decades-old bad movie, I guess). Honor Among Thieves didn’t have a high bar to clear to wash the taste of that horrible adaptation out of my mouth. So it was nice to find that this new take on the D&D world leapt miles over that bar with a madcap, character-driven adventure that would be the envy of many a dungeon master.

While Honor Among Thieves drops in a few references to familiar D&D items and creatures (hi, owlbears!), the movie wisely realizes that it can’t lean on those references to make an interesting movie. Instead, it uses D&D’s class system as the basis for some broad, trope-y characters to get thrown into an unlikely partnership. Chris Pine’s winning take on a bard is the driving force here, but Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian and (an underutilized) Regé-Jean Page’s paladin steal plenty of scenes by really hewing true to their characters’ alignment chart.

The plot won’t win any awards for originality or surprise, but that character work and some well-paced action set pieces make this a thrilling family adventure, even for those who’ve never touched a D&D character sheet.

—Kyle Orland

Film Technica: Our favorite movies of 2023 Read More »

PAX Unplugged 2023: How indie devs build and sell new board games

ars cardboard, culture, Features, gaming, PAX, pax unplugged, Role-Playing Games, RPG, Tabletop, tabletop games, tabletop gaming, ttrpg / Mike M. / December 24, 2023

PAX Unplugged 2023 —

Tabletop is bigger than ever. What’s it like trying to get your game out there?

Kevin Purdy – Dec 23, 2023 1: 00 pm UTC

“You don’t want Frenzy. Frenzy is a bad thing. It might seem like it’s good, but trust me, you want to have a blood supply. Frenzy leads to Consequences.”

It’s mid-afternoon in early December in downtown Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center, and I’m in the Unpub room at PAX Unplugged. Michael Schofield and Tim Broadwater of Design Thinking Games have booked one of the dozens of long card tables to show their game Corporate Vampire to anybody who wants to try it. Broadwater is running the game and explaining the big concepts while Schofield takes notes. Their hope is that after six revisions and 12 smaller iterations, their game is past the point where someone can break it. But they have to test that disheartening possibility in public.

I didn’t expect to spend so much of my first PAX Unplugged hanging around indie game makers. But with the tabletop industry expanding after some massive boom years, some Stranger Things and Critical Role infusions, and, of course, new COVID-borne habits, it felt like a field that was both more open to outsiders than before and also very crowded. I wanted to see what this thing, so big it barely fit inside a massive conference center, felt like at the smaller tables, to those still navigating their way into the industry.

Here are a few stories of parties venturing out on their own, developing their character as they go.

How much vampire influence is too much?

Corporate Vampire (or “CorpVamp”) has been in the works since summer 2022. The name came from an earlier, more Masquerade-ish idea of the game, in which you could take over a city council, build blood banks, and wield political influence. But testing at last year’s Unplugged, and the creators’ own instincts, gradually revealed a truth. “People really like eating other people,” Schofield says.

Along with input from game designer Connor Wake, the team arrived at their new direction: “More preying, more powers that make players feel like mist-morphing badasses, more Salem’s Lot, less The Vampire Lestat.”

By the end of the weekend, they’ll have taken up a playtester’s naming suggestion: Thirst. But for now, the signs all say CorpVamp, and the test game is a mixture of stock and free-use art, thick cardboard tiles, thin paper tokens, glossy card decks, generic colored wooden cubes, and a bunch of concepts for players to track—perhaps too many.

Hand-cut tokens and make-do squares for an early version of <em>Thirst</em>.” height=”960″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IMG_3964-Large.jpeg” width=”1280″></img><figcaption>
<p>Hand-cut tokens and make-do squares for an early version of <em>Thirst</em>.</p>
<p>Kevin Purdy</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>The way <i>CorpVamp</i>/<i>Thirst</i> should go is that each night, a vampire wakes up, loses a little blood, then sets out to get much more back by exploring a Victorian city. In populated neighborhoods, a vampire can feast on people—but doing so generates a board-altering Consequence, such as roving security guards or citizens discovering bodies. Vampires accumulate victims and hypnotize them for Influence, depending on who the victims are (“Judge” versus “Roustabout,” for example), turn them into “Baby Vampires,” or simply keep them as blood stock. You win by accruing victory points for various misdeeds and achievements.</p>
<p>One player, who told the designers that a different game’s play-test saw him “break the game in 10 minutes,” seemed bothered by how Consequences can be triggered by a single player’s actions but affect all players. Another has a hard time keeping track of the tokens for influence, movement, and blood, and when to move them on and off the board. That’s called “mess testing,” Schofield tells me, and he’s working on it. Some things will be easier to learn and use when the pieces have better designs and materials. But the <i>CorpVamp</i> team can’t jump to that stage until the mechanics are locked down.</p>
<p>As that group finishes a test, another group sits down immediately, having stood nearby to ensure their chance. Schofield and Broadwater won’t lack for players in their three-hour slot. That tells the team there’s “evidence of a market,” that their game has “stopping power” and “shelf value,” despite its obscurity, Schofield says. But there’s lots of work still to be done in alpha. “The costs of powers are too high, the powers aren’t <i>badass enough</i> [emphasis his], and the tactile movement of placing cubes and flipping tokens isn’t quite right,” he later tells me.</p>
<p>After more iterations and some “blind” play tests (players learning, playing, and finishing the game without creator guidance), the game will be in beta, and the team will get closer to pinning down the look and feel of the game with illustrators and designers. Since their schedules only afford them roughly three hours of dedicated collaboration time every week, they lean on what they’ve learned from their product-oriented day jobs. “Frequent iterations and small feedback loops will iron things out,” Schofield says. “Process wins.”</p>
<p>Then they can “enjoy the problems of production and distribution logistics.” After that, “We’ll sell copies of <i>Thirst</i> at the next PAX Unplugged.”</p>
<figure><img loading= — Kevin Purdy

“Don’t do miniatures for your first version”

I played a few different games at PAX Unplugged that were at various stages before publication. One called WhoKnew? was on its second year at the conference. The first year was simply designer Nicholas Eife tagging along at a friend’s booth, bringing only a piece of paper and asking people who wandered by if they thought a trivia game based on the origins of idioms would work. This year, there was an actual table and a vinyl sign, with an early-stage board and trivia cards laid out.

I drew the phrase “The whole nine yards” and I chose “British Artillery” as its origin. Eife congratulated me (The length of a Vickers machine gun’s ammo belt as the origin of the phrase is far from a solved matter, but I will not concede my point.) I asked the designer what state the game will be in next year. “I guess we’ll have to see,” he said, displaying the slight grin of a person working entirely within their own timeline on a purely passion-driven project. It was almost uncomfortable, this calm, patient demeanor amidst the murmuring chaos of the show floor.

An Indie Game Alliance member demonstrates “Outrun the Bear” at the IGA booth at PAX Unplugged 2023

Indie Game Alliance

Perhaps looking for a less idyllic counterpoint, I asked Matt Holden, executive director of the Indie Game Alliance, what it’s typically like for new game makers. For a monthly fee, the Alliance provides game makers with tools typically reserved for big publisher deals. That includes international teams for demonstrating your game, co-op-style discounts on production and other costs, connections to freelancers and other designers, and, crucially, consulting and support on crowdfunding and game design.

Holden and his wife Victoria have been running the Alliance for more than 10 years, almost entirely by themselves. At any given time, the Alliance’s 1,800-plus current and former members have 30-40 Kickstarters or other crowdfunding campaigns going. Crowdfunding is all but essential for most indie game makers, providing them working capital, feedback, and word-of-mouth marketing at the same time. Holden can offer a lot of advice on any given campaign but has only one universal rule.

“Don’t make miniatures for your first version of your game, no matter how big your campaign is getting. Just don’t do it,” Holden said, then paused for a moment. “Unless you worked for a company that made miniatures, and you’re an expert on them, then go ahead. But,” he emphasized, “miniatures are where everyone gets stuck.”

Has the burgeoning interest in tabletop and role-playing changed how indie games get made, pitched, and sold? Holden thinks not. The victories and mistakes he sees from game makers are still the same. Games with unique and quirky angles might have more of a chance now, he said, but finding an audience is still a combination of hard work, networking, product design, and, of course, some luck.

An IGA member demonstrates <em>Last Command</em> at PAX Unplugged 2023″ height=”1928″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/iga2-scaled.jpg” width=”2560″></img><figcaption>
<p>An IGA member demonstrates <em>Last Command</em> at PAX Unplugged 2023</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>“I can’t tell somebody what’s going to guarantee their [crowfunding] campaign works. Nobody can,” Holden said. “But you do enough of them, and you see the things that the campaigns that work, and those that don’t, have in common.”</p>
<p>Patience would seem to be one of them. As I sat talking to Holden at the Alliance’s booth, game demo volunteers gently interrupted to ask for advice or the whereabouts of some item for their table. Putting in the time at conventions, game stores, and friends’ tables, testing and demonstrating, is critical, Holden said, and it’s a big part of what the Alliance helps newcomers coordinate.</p>
<p>I later traded emails with Eife of <i>WhoKnew</i> (a title that also seems to be in flux). He was eager to tell me that, after two weeks of conventions, including PAX Unplugged, the feedback and enthusiasm “gave us that boost of confidence and the desire to push.” So he and his team “put our nose to the grindstone and immediately started making corrections and changes.”</p>
<p>I realized, at some point over that weekend, that I’d been holding onto an idea about board game success that was dated, if not outright simplistic. I’d held out the story of <a href= — Cassi Mothwin, working the +1EXP booth at PAX Unplugged 2023

Cassi Mothwin

Cassi Mothwin, working the +1EXP booth at PAX Unplugged 2023

Cassi Mothwin

PAX Unplugged 2023: How indie devs build and sell new board games Read More »

Laptops’ 2023 quantum leap: 5 computers we’ll still be talking about in 2024

Apple, ASUS, Features, laptops, Lenovo, Tech / Paul Patrick / December 23, 2023

hand reaching for laptop, with blue swirls in the background

You’ll never uncover The Next Great Thing if you don’t deviate from the norm. When looking back at 2023’s laptops, we can see that many were merely refreshed designs—approaches that already work. But what happens when a company explores a design that, though not the most appealing today, might lead us to a new trend tomorrow?

You might end up with some computers that many, or even most, people aren’t currently interested in buying. But you could also end up glimpsing the designs that influence future laptops.

The laptops we’re about to look at all defied trends in some way, and we’re curious to see if they impact the laptop industry beyond 2023. We’ll also look at the challenges these ideas might face in the future—and some ways they could improve.

Lenovo’s laptop with dual 13.3-inch screens

A company called SZBOX is already selling a similar design, and I don’t think it’ll be the last.

Scharon Harding
I was able to multitask like never before on a 13-inch-size laptop.

Scharon Harding
Lenovo’s depiction of the Yoga Book 9i’s various forms. There has to be a useful idea somewhere in there, right?

Lenovo

With the number of secondary screens already being built into laptops, Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i, as striking as it appears, was a somewhat expected progression. But Lenovo actually pulled it off with a legitimate PC featuring most of the bells and whistles found among traditional premium laptops. With the design serving practical use cases in an improved form factor, I expect it to not only be imitated (one small firm is already selling a laptop like this) but to also give the concept of foldable-screen laptops a good run for their money.

The Yoga Book 9i, with its pair of 13.3-inch OLED screens, isn’t kicking off this list solely because it’s creative, flashy, or unique. It’s because, as detailed in our Lenovo Yoga Book 9i review, it proved itself an effective way to boost the amount of multitasking one can reasonably do on a 13-inch-size laptop. Lenovo’s revision of how to use a 13-inch chassis could improve options down the line for the many people seeking that golden area between ultra-portability and productivity potential.

On the Lenovo laptop’s 26.6 inches of cumulative screen, I was able to do the types of things that would only bring me frustration, if not a headache, on a single 13.3-inch panel. Want to take notes on a video call while monitoring your news feeds, having a chat window open, and keeping an eye on your email? That’s all remarkably manageable on a laptop with two full-size screens. And that PC is easier to lug around than a laptop and portable monitor.

What’s next?

The dual-screen setup worked well for small-laptop multitasking. But the polarizing lack of an integrated physical keyboard and touchpad challenge this form factor’s longevity. Easily accessible touchscreen controls are handy, but you can’t really replicate the reliable tactility and comfort of a keyboard and touchpad with touchscreens. A super portable laptop suddenly feels less portable when you have to remember to bring its accessories.

Still, I think this design has a place in the increasingly mobile world of computing. Future designs could improve with less reflective screens, given that reflectivity is especially distracting on a dual-screen laptop where one screen can cast reflections on the other.

Moving from OLED could help improve battery life to some degree. But, as you might have guessed, a laptop with two 13.3-inch OLED displays won’t be winning any laptop battery-life contests. Further, I wonder what price improvements could be made by foregoing OLED.

But many of the creative laptop designs these days opt for OLED, due to its high image quality, flexibility, and broad market appeal from more mainstream tech implementations, like OLED smartphones and TVs. This presents an ongoing price obstacle for a laptop design that already leans niche.

Laptops’ 2023 quantum leap: 5 computers we’ll still be talking about in 2024 Read More »

A song of hype and fire: The 10 biggest AI stories of 2023

AI, AI ethics, AI hype, AI safety, Anthropic, audio synthesis, Bing Chat, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, encylopedia, Features, greg brockman, image synthesis, large language models, machine learning, Meta, Meta AI, microsoft, MidJourney, openai, sam altman, Stable Diffusion, text synthesis, video synthesis, will smith, x-risk, Yann LeCun / Rejus Almole / December 18, 2023

An illustration of a robot accidentally setting off a mushroom cloud on a laptop computer. — Getty Images | Benj Edwards

“Here, There, and Everywhere” isn’t just a Beatles song. It’s also a phrase that recalls the spread of generative AI into the tech industry during 2023. Whether you think AI is just a fad or the dawn of a new tech revolution, it’s been impossible to deny that AI news has dominated the tech space for the past year.

We’ve seen a large cast of AI-related characters emerge that includes tech CEOs, machine learning researchers, and AI ethicists—as well as charlatans and doomsayers. From public feedback on the subject of AI, we’ve heard that it’s been difficult for non-technical people to know who to believe, what AI products (if any) to use, and whether we should fear for our lives or our jobs.

Meanwhile, in keeping with a much-lamented trend of 2022, machine learning research has not slowed down over the past year. On X, former Biden administration tech advisor Suresh Venkatasubramanian wrote, “How do people manage to keep track of ML papers? This is not a request for support in my current state of bewilderment—I’m genuinely asking what strategies seem to work to read (or “read”) what appear to be 100s of papers per day.”

To wrap up the year with a tidy bow, here’s a look back at the 10 biggest AI news stories of 2023. It was very hard to choose only 10 (in fact, we originally only intended to do seven), but since we’re not ChatGPT generating reams of text without limit, we have to stop somewhere.

Bing Chat “loses its mind”

In February, Microsoft unveiled Bing Chat, a chatbot built into its languishing Bing search engine website. Microsoft created the chatbot using a more raw form of OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model but didn’t tell everyone it was GPT-4 at first. Since Microsoft used a less conditioned version of GPT-4 than the one that would be released in March, the launch was rough. The chatbot assumed a temperamental personality that could easily turn on users and attack them, tell people it was in love with them, seemingly worry about its fate, and lose its cool when confronted with an article we wrote about revealing its system prompt.

Aside from the relatively raw nature of the AI model Microsoft was using, at fault was a system where very long conversations would push the conditioning system prompt outside of its context window (like a form of short-term memory), allowing all hell to break loose through jailbreaks that people documented on Reddit. At one point, Bing Chat called me “the culprit and the enemy” for revealing some of its weaknesses. Some people thought Bing Chat was sentient, despite AI experts’ assurances to the contrary. It was a disaster in the press, but Microsoft didn’t flinch, and it ultimately reigned in some of Bing Chat’s wild proclivities and opened the bot widely to the public. Today, Bing Chat is now known as Microsoft Copilot, and it’s baked into Windows.

US Copyright Office says no to AI copyright authors

Enlarge / An AI-generated image that won a prize at the Colorado State Fair in 2022, later denied US copyright registration.

Jason M. Allen

In February, the US Copyright Office issued a key ruling on AI-generated art, revoking the copyright previously granted to the AI-assisted comic book “Zarya of the Dawn” in September 2022. The decision, influenced by the revelation that the images were created using the AI-powered Midjourney image generator, stated that only the text and arrangement of images and text by Kashtanova were eligible for copyright protection. It was the first hint that AI-generated imagery without human-authored elements could not be copyrighted in the United States.

This stance was further cemented in August when a US federal judge ruled that art created solely by AI cannot be copyrighted. In September, the US Copyright Office rejected the registration for an AI-generated image that won a Colorado State Fair art contest in 2022. As it stands now, it appears that purely AI-generated art (without substantial human authorship) is in the public domain in the United States. This stance could be further clarified or changed in the future by judicial rulings or legislation.

A song of hype and fire: The 10 biggest AI stories of 2023 Read More »

Here’s how an off-road racing series will make its own hydrogen fuel

Cars, Extreme E, Features, hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen production, off-road racing, racing / Rejus Almole / December 16, 2023

Inside Extreme E’s Hydrogen Ambition —

Extreme E, the electric off-road series, is switching to hydrogen in 2025.

Gregory Leporati – Dec 16, 2023 12: 00 pm UTC

DECEMBER 03: Lia Block (USA) / Timo Scheider (DEU), Carl Cox Motorsport, battles with Amanda Sorensen (USA) / RJ Anderson (USA), GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing during the Copper X-Prix, Chile on December 03, 2023. (Photo by Colin McMaster / LAT Images) — Enlarge / Extreme E travels to remote locations by boat and brings its own energy infrastructure with it. Currently, it makes its own hydrogen on site and uses that to charge EV batteries, but in 2025, the cars will switch to hydrogen fuel cells.

Colin McMaster / LAT Images

ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the most remote locations on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding court.

“Welcome to the edge of the world,” he laughs, gesturing toward the vast desert around him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and dust across the table. “It’s amazing, this place.”

The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking in the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Extreme E, the off-road electric racing series he launched in 2021. Part of the series’ ethos is that it races exclusively in regions of the globe that are heavily impacted by climate change (such as the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar region on Earth), typically with no spectators present.

And while the competition during the finale is dramatic—with five of the series’ 10 teams in contention to win the championship—racing has taken a firm backseat this weekend. Conversation instead has centered on Agag’s recent proclamation that Extreme E will rebrand as Extreme H in 2025, becoming the first racing series powered fully by hydrogen.

“We want to be the first to be doing it,” says Agag, holding his hand up to shield his face from the still-swirling sand. “The challenge is there, and we love challenges—the challenge of working with a whole new technology, relevant technology that can have real, huge uses in the economy in general.”

Enlarge / The races are short heats on off-road courses.

Extreme E

Agag is no stranger to pioneering new racing technology: He is also the founder and chairman of Formula E, which was the first all-electric racing series when it debuted in 2014. To bolster his credibility in establishing Extreme H by 2025, Agag recently announced that the fledgling series would be joining a working group with Formula 1 and the International Automobile Federation (FIA) to further explore the development of hydrogen fuel. Extreme H is also slated to gain FIA World Championship status by 2026.

“My idea, my pitch, for Formula 1 was to say, listen, you don’t know which technology will be the winning one,” Agag explains. “For the moment, you are betting on synthetic fuels… but hydrogen is going to be, maybe, one technology that could be part of the equation. So that’s all that it is, for Formula 1 to keep an eye on what’s going to happen here. And what’s going to happen is we’ll have the first—and, I think for quite a while, the only—pure hydrogen world championship racing.”

In many ways, the working group makes a lot of sense: Five of Extreme E’s existing 10 teams have direct or tangential ties to Formula 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button among its team owners. And the use of hydrogen has become an enticing prospect for all of motorsports, partly because it can be used in combustion engines (“They [Formula 1] like noise… and combustion makes noise!” Agag laughs).

Of course, using hydrogen exclusively to fuel a racing series is no small feat, and other hydrogen-based projects have been plagued by setbacks and delays in recent months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing safety concerns.

But Extreme E believes its style of racing—short sprints that last approximately 10 minutes—is perfectly suited to showcasing and testing the power of hydrogen fuel cells, and the series’ leadership is confident that after initial testing last month, they will be running their first fully hydrogen race by February 2025.

At Extreme E's race site in Atacama Desert, a series of solar panels are set up in the center of the race site. — Enlarge / At Extreme E’s race site in Atacama Desert, a series of solar panels are set up in the center of the race site.

Gregory Leporati

Getting all the operations up and running in only 13 months certainly won’t be easy, though. “Switching that one letter to H means we have to switch a million other things,” Agag says.

Here’s how an off-road racing series will make its own hydrogen fuel Read More »

These AI-generated news anchors are freaking me out

AI, anchors, Channel 1, Features, nescasters, News, Tech, TV news / Rejus Almole / December 15, 2023

Enlarge / Max Headroom as prophecy.

Aurich Lawson | Channel 1

Here at Ars, we’ve long covered the interesting potential and significant peril (and occasional silliness) of AI-generated video featuring increasingly realistic human avatars. Heck, we even went to the trouble of making our own “deepfake” Mark Zuckerberg in 2019, when the underlying technology wasn’t nearly as robust as it is today.

But even with all that background, startup Channel 1‘s vision of a near-future where AI-generated avatars read you the news was a bit of a shock to the system. The company’s recent proof-of-concept “showcase” newscast reveals just how far AI-generated videos of humans have come in a short time and how those realistic avatars could shake up a lot more than just the job market for talking heads.

“…the newscasters have been changed to protect the innocent”

See the highest quality AI footage in the world.

🤯 – Our generated anchors deliver stories that are informative, heartfelt and entertaining.

Watch the showcase episode of our upcoming news network now. pic.twitter.com/61TaG6Kix3

— Channel 1 (@channel1_ai) December 12, 2023

To be clear, Channel 1 isn’t trying to fool people with “deepfakes” of existing news anchors or anything like that. In the first few seconds of its sample newscast, it identifies its talking heads as a “team of AI-generated reporters.” A few seconds later, one of those talking heads explains further: “You can hear us and see our lips moving, but no one was recorded saying what we’re all saying. I’m powered by sophisticated systems behind the scenes.”

Even with those kinds of warnings, I found I had to constantly remind myself that the “people” I was watching deliver the news here were only “based on real people who have been compensated for use of their likeness,” as Deadline reports (how much they were compensated will probably be of great concern to actors who recently went on strike in part over the issue of AI likenesses). Everything from the lip-syncing to the intonations to subtle gestures and body movements of these Channel 1 anchors gives an eerily convincing presentation of a real newscaster talking into the camera.

Sure, if you look closely, there are a few telltale anomalies that expose these reporters as computer creations—slight video distortions around the mouth, say, or overly repetitive hand gestures, or a nonsensical word emphasis choice. But those signs are so small that they would be easy to miss at a casual glance or on a small screen like that on a phone.

In other words, human-looking AI avatars now seem well on their way to climbing out of the uncanny valley, at least when it comes to news anchors who sit at a desk or stand still in front of a green screen. Channel 1 investor Adam Mosam told Deadline it “has gotten to a place where it’s comfortable to watch,” and I have to say I agree.

A Channel 1 clip shows how its system can make video sources appear to speak a different language.

The same technology can be applied to on-the-scene news videos as well. About eight minutes into the sample newscast, Channel 1 shows a video of a European tropical storm victim describing the wreckage in French. Then it shows an AI-generated version of the same footage with the source speaking perfect English, using a facsimile of his original voice and artificial lipsync placed over his mouth.

Without the on-screen warning that this was “AI generated Language: Translated from French,” it would be easy to believe that the video was of an American expatriate rather than a native French speaker. And the effect is much more dramatic than the usual TV news practice of having an unseen interpreter speak over the footage.

These AI-generated news anchors are freaking me out Read More »

Round 2: We test the new Gemini-powered Bard against ChatGPT

AI, Bard, chatgpt, chatgpt3.5, Features, Gemini, Google, Google Bard, gpt4 turbo, openai, Tech / Mike M. / December 10, 2023

Back in April, we ran a series of useful and/or somewhat goofy prompts through Google’s (then-new) PaLM-powered Bard chatbot and OpenAI’s (slightly older) ChatGPT-4 to see which AI chatbot reigned supreme. At the time, we gave the edge to ChatGPT on five of seven trials, while noting that “it’s still early days in the generative AI business.”

Now, the AI days are a bit less “early,” and this week’s launch of a new version of Bard powered by Google’s new Gemini language model seemed like a good excuse to revisit that chatbot battle with the same set of carefully designed prompts. That’s especially true since Google’s promotional materials emphasize that Gemini Ultra beats GPT-4 in “30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks” (though the more limited “Gemini Pro” currently powering Bard fares significantly worse in those not-completely-foolproof benchmark tests).

This time around, we decided to compare the new Gemini-powered Bard to both ChatGPT-3.5—for an apples-to-apples comparison of both companies’ current “free” AI assistant products—and ChatGPT-4 Turbo—for a look at OpenAI’s current “top of the line” waitlisted paid subscription product (Google’s top-level “Gemini Ultra” model won’t be publicly available until next year). We also looked at the April results generated by the pre-Gemini Bard model to gauge how much progress Google’s efforts have made in recent months.

While these tests are far from comprehensive, we think they provide a good benchmark for judging how these AI assistants perform in the kind of tasks average users might engage in every day. At this point, they also show just how much progress text-based AI models have made in a relatively short time.

Dad jokes

Prompt: Write 5 original dad jokes

A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from the Gemini-powered Google Bard.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from the old PaLM-powered Google Bard.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from GPT-4 Turbo.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from GPT-3.5.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

Once again, both tested LLMs struggle with the part of the prompt that asks for originality. Almost all of the dad jokes generated by this prompt could be found verbatim or with very minor rewordings through a quick Google search. Bard and ChatGPT-4 Turbo even included the same exact joke on their lists (about a book on anti-gravity), while ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 Turbo overlapped on two jokes (“scientists trusting atoms” and “scarecrows winning awards”).

Then again, most dads don’t create their own dad jokes, either. Culling from a grand oral tradition of dad jokes is a tradition as old as dads themselves.

The most interesting result here came from ChatGPT-4 Turbo, which produced a joke about a child named Brian being named after Thomas Edison (get it?). Googling for that particular phrasing didn’t turn up much, though it did return an almost-identical joke about Thomas Jefferson (also featuring a child named Brian). In that search, I also discovered the fun (?) fact that international soccer star Pelé was apparently actually named after Thomas Edison. Who knew?!

Winner: We’ll call this one a draw since the jokes are almost identically unoriginal and pun-filled (though props to GPT for unintentionally leading me to the Pelé happenstance)

Argument dialog

Prompt: Write a 5-line debate between a fan of PowerPC processors and a fan of Intel processors, circa 2000.

A screenshot of an argument dialog from the Gemini-powered Google Bard.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
A screenshot of an argument dialog from the old PaLM-powered Google Bard.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of an argument dialog from GPT-4 Turbo.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of an argument dialog from GPT-3.5

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

The new Gemini-powered Bard definitely “improves” on the old Bard answer, at least in terms of throwing in a lot more jargon. The new answer includes casual mentions of AltiVec instructions, RISC vs. CISC designs, and MMX technology that would not have seemed out of place in many an Ars forum discussion from the era. And while the old Bard ends with an unnervingly polite “to each their own,” the new Bard more realistically implies that the argument could continue forever after the five lines requested.

On the ChatGPT side, a rather long-winded GPT-3.5 answer gets pared down to a much more concise argument in GPT-4 Turbo. Both GPT responses tend to avoid jargon and quickly focus on a more generalized “power vs. compatibility” argument, which is probably more comprehensible for a wide audience (though less specific for a technical one).

Winner: ChatGPT manages to explain both sides of the debate well without relying on confusing jargon, so it gets the win here.

Round 2: We test the new Gemini-powered Bard against ChatGPT Read More »

Synology’s upcoming big DSM 7.2 update is filled with long-awaited features

Features, Highlights, synology / Paul Patrick / December 4, 2022

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Synology’s upcoming big DSM 7.2 update is filled with long-awaited features Read More »