Aside from the customizable stink, the Fragrance Mouse is a reasonably full-featured functional PC accessory. It supports Bluetooth as well as the USB wireless dongle, three DPI levels (1,200, 1,600, and 2,400) for customizing responsiveness, and understated white and pink color options. Asus says the mouse’s switches are rated for 10 million clicks, ensuring that you will be able to smell your mouse for years to come.
We’ve emailed Asus to ask about pricing and availability and will update the article if we get a response.
Strange as it is, the Fragrance Mouse isn’t totally without precedent; in the summer of 2024, Asus released a laptop called the Adol 14 Air that included a compartment in the lid that could hold a switchable “fragrance pack.” But this laptop was only released in China, so laptop buyers in the US and other countries weren’t given an opportunity to smell it firsthand.
The Fragrance Mouse doesn’t feel like a thing that anyone was asking for, but it’s also probably something that no one thought not to ask for. And that, my friends, is the place where imagination and innovation thrive.
It’s hard to review a product if you don’t know what it will actually cost!
The Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
The Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Nvidia’s RTX 50-series makes its first foray below the $1,000 mark starting this week, with the $749 RTX 5070 Ti—at least in theory.
The third-fastest card in the Blackwell GPU lineup, the 5070 Ti is still far from “reasonably priced” by historical standards (the 3070 Ti was $599 at launch). But it’s also $50 cheaper and a fair bit faster than the outgoing 4070 Ti Super and the older 4070 Ti. These are steps in the right direction, if small ones.
We’ll talk more about its performance shortly, but at a high level, the 5070 Ti’s performance falls in the same general range as the 4080 Super and the original RTX 4080, a card that launched for $1,199 just over two years ago. And it’s probably your floor for consistently playable native 4K gaming for those of you out there who don’t want to rely on DLSS or 4K upscaling to hit that resolution (it’s also probably all the GPU that most people will need for high-FPS 1440p, if that’s more your speed).
But it’s a card I’m ambivalent about! It’s close to 90 percent as fast as a 5080 for 75 percent of the price, at least if you go by Nvidia’s minimum list prices, which for the 5090 and 5080 have been mostly fictional so far. If you can find it at that price—and that’s a big “if,” since every $749 model is already out of stock across the board at Newegg—and you’re desperate to upgrade or are building a brand-new 4K gaming PC, you could do worse. But I wouldn’t spend more than $749 on it, and it might be worth waiting to see what AMD’s first 90-series Radeon cards look like in a couple weeks before you jump in.
Meet the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
RTX 5080
RTX 4080 Super
RTX 5070 Ti
RTX 4070 Ti Super
RTX 4070 Ti
RTX 5070
CUDA Cores
10,752
10,240
8,960
8,448
7,680
6,144
Boost Clock
2,617 MHz
2,550 MHz
2,452 MHz
2,610 MHz
2,610 MHz
2,512 MHz
Memory Bus Width
256-bit
256-bit
256-bit
256-bit
192-bit
192-bit
Memory Bandwidth
960 GB/s
736 GB/s
896 GB/s
672 GB/s
504 GB/s
672 GB/s
Memory size
16GB GDDR7
16GB GDDR6X
16GB GDDR7
16GB GDDR6X
12GB GDDR6X
12GB GDDR7
TGP
360 W
320 W
300 W
285 W
285 W
250 W
Nvidia isn’t making a Founders Edition version of the 5070 Ti, so this time around our review unit is an Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti provided by Asus and Nvidia. These third-party cards will deviate a little from the stock specs listed above, but factory overclocks tend to be inordinately mild, and done mostly so the GPU manufacturer can slap a big “overclocked” badge somewhere on the box. We tested this Asus card with its BIOS switch set to “performance” mode, which elevates the boost clock by an entire 30 MHz; you don’t need to be a math whiz to guess that a 1.2 percent overclock is not going to change performance much.
Compared to the 4070 Ti Super, the 5070 Ti brings two things to the table: a roughly 6 percent increase in CUDA cores and a 33 percent increase in memory bandwidth, courtesy of the switch from GDDR6X to GDDR7. The original 4070 Ti had even fewer CUDA cores, but most importantly for its 4K performance included just 12GB of memory on a 192-bit bus.
The 5070 Ti is based on the same GB203 GPU silicon as the 5080 series, but with 1,792 CUDA cores disabled. But there are a lot of similarities between the two, including the 16GB bank of GDDR7 and the 256-bit memory bus. It looks nothing like the yawning gap between the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080, and the two cards’ similar-ish specs meant they weren’t too far away from each other in our testing. The 5070 Ti’s 300 W power requirement is also a bit lower than the 5080’s 360 W, but it’s pretty close to the 4080 and 4080 Super’s 320 W; in practice, the 5070 Ti draws about as much as the 4080 cards do under load.
Asus’ design for its Prime RTX 5070 Ti is an inoffensive 2.5-slot, triple-fan card that should fit without a problem in most builds. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
As a Blackwell GPU, the 5070 Ti also supports Nvidia’s most-hyped addition to the 50-series: support for DLSS 4 and Multi-Frame Generation (MFG). We’ve already covered this in our 5090 and 5080 reviews, but the short version is that MFG works exactly like Frame Generation did in the 40-series, except that it can now insert up to three AI-generated frames in between natively rendered frames instead of just one.
Especially if you’re already running at a reasonably high frame rate, this can make things look a lot smoother on a high-refresh-rate monitor without introducing distractingly excessive lag or weird rendering errors. The feature is mainly controversial because Nvidia is comparing 50-series performance numbers with DLSS MFG enabled to older 40-series cards without DLSS MFG to make the 50-series cards seem a whole lot faster than they actually are.
We’ll publish some frame-generation numbers in our review, both using DLSS and (for AMD cards) FSR. But per usual, we’ll continue to focus on natively rendered performance—more relevant for all the games out there that don’t support frame generation or don’t benefit much from it, and more relevant because your base performance dictates how good your generated frames will look and feel anyway.
Testbed notes
We tested the 5070 Ti in the same updated testbed and with the same updated suite of games that we started using in our RTX 5090 review. The heart of the build is an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D, ensuring that our numbers are limited as little as possible by the CPU speed.
Per usual, we prioritize testing GPUs at resolutions that we think most people will use them for. For the 5070 Ti, that means both 4K and 1440p—this card is arguably still overkill for 1440p, but if you’re trying to hit 144 or 240 Hz (or even more) on a monitor, there’s a good case to be made for it. We also use a mix of ray-traced and non-ray-traced games. For the games we test with upscaling enabled, we use DLSS on Nvidia cards and the newest supported version of FSR (usually 2.x or 3.x) for AMD cards.
Though we’ve tested and re-tested multiple cards with recent drivers in our updated testbed, we don’t have a 4070 Ti Super, 4070 Ti, or 3070 Ti available to test with. We’ve provided some numbers for those GPUs from past reviews; these are from a PC running older drivers and a Ryzen 7 7800X3D instead of a 9800X3D, and we’ve put asterisks next to them in our charts. They should still paint a reasonably accurate picture of the older GPUs’ relative performance, but take them with that small grain of salt.
Performance and power
Despite including fewer CUDA cores than either version of the 4080, some combination of architectural improvements and memory bandwidth increases help the card keep pace with both 4080 cards almost perfectly. In most of our tests, it landed in the narrow strip right in between the 4080 and the 4080 Super, and its power consumption under load was also almost identical.
Benchmarks with DLSS/FSR and/or frame generation enabled.
In every way that matters, the 5070 Ti is essentially an RTX 4080 that also supports DLSS Multi-Frame Generation. You can see why we’d be mildly enthusiastic about it at $749 but less and less impressed the closer the price creeps to $1,000.
Being close to a 4080 also means that the performance gap between the 5070 Ti and the 5080 is usually pretty small. In most of the games we tested, the 5070 Ti hovers right around 90 percent of the 5080’s performance.
The 5070 Ti is also around 60 percent as fast as an RTX 5090. The performance is a lot lower, but the price-to-performance ratio is a lot higher, possibly reflecting the fact that the 5070 Ti actually has other GPUs it has to compete with (in non-ray-traced games, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX generally keeps pace with the 5070 Ti, though at this late date it is mostly out of stock unless you’re willing to pay way more than you ought to for one).
Compared to the old 4070 Ti, the 5070 Ti can be between 20 and 50 percent faster at 4K, depending on how limited the game is by the 4070 Ti’s narrower memory bus and 12GB bank of RAM. The performance improvement over the 4070 Ti Super is more muted, ranging from as little as 8 percent to as much as 20 percent in our 4K tests. This is better than the RTX 5080 did relative to the RTX 4080 Super, but as a generational leap, it’s still pretty modest—it’s clear why Nvidia wants everyone to look at the Multi-Frame Generation numbers when making comparisons.
Waiting to put theory into practice
Asus’ RTX 5070 Ti, replete with 12-pin power plug. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Being able to get RTX 4080-level performance for several hundred dollars less just a couple of years after the 4080 launched is kind of exciting, though that excitement is leavened by the still high-ish $749 price tag (again, assuming it’s actually available at or anywhere near that price). That certainly makes it feel more like a next-generation GPU than the RTX 5080 did—and whatever else you can say about it, the 5070 Ti certainly feels like a better buy than the 5080.
The 5070 Ti is a fast and 4K-capable graphics card, fast enough that you should be able to get some good results from all of Blackwell’s new frame-generation trickery if that’s something you want to play with. Its price-to-performance ratio does not thrill me, but if you do the math, it’s still a much better value than the 4070 Ti series was—particularly the original 4070 Ti, with the 12GB allotment of RAM that limited its usefulness and future-proofness at 4K.
Two reasons to hold off on buying a 5070 Ti, if you’re thinking about it: We’re waiting to see how AMD’s 9070 series GPUs shake out, and Nvidia’s 50-series launch so far has been kind of a mess, with low availability and price gouging both on retail sites and in the secondhand market. Pay much more than $749 for a 5070 Ti, and its delicate value proposition fades quickly. We should know more about the AMD cards in a couple of weeks. The supply situation, at least so far, seems like a problem that Nvidia can’t (or won’t) figure out how to solve.
The good
For a starting price of $749, you get the approximate performance and power consumption of an RTX 4080, a GPU that cost $1,199 two years ago and $999 one year ago.
Good 4K performance and great 1440p performance for those with high-refresh monitors.
16GB of RAM should be reasonably future-proof.
Multi-Frame Generation is an interesting performance-boosting tool to have in your toolbox, even if it isn’t a cure-all for low framerates.
Nvidia-specific benefits like DLSS support and CUDA.
The bad
Not all that much faster than a 4070 Ti Super.
$749 looks cheap compared to a $2,000 GPU, but it’s still enough money to buy a high-end game console or an entire 1080p gaming PC.
The ugly
Pricing and availability for other 50-series GPUs to date have both been kind of a mess.
Will you actually be able to get it for $749? Because it doesn’t make a ton of sense if it costs more than $749.
Seriously, it’s been months since I reviewed a GPU that was actually widely available at its advertised price.
And it’s not just the RTX 5090 or 5080, it’s low-end stuff like the Intel Arc B580 and B570, too.
Is it high demand? Low supply? Scalpers and resellers hanging off the GPU market like the parasites they are? No one can say!
It makes these reviews very hard to do.
It also makes PC gaming, as a hobby, really difficult to get into if you aren’t into it already!
It just makes me mad is all.
If you’re reading this months from now and the GPUs actually are in stock at the list price, I hope this was helpful.
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
If you know how OLED displays work, you know about one of their greatest strengths: Individual pixels can be shut off, offering deeper blacks and power savings. Dark modes, now available on most operating systems, aim to save power by making most backgrounds very dark or black, while also gratifying those who just prefer the look.
But what about on the older but still dominant screen technology, LCDs? The BBC is out with a small, interesting study comparing the light and dark modes of one of its website pages on an older laptop. Faced with a dark mode version, most people turned up the brightness a notable amount, sometimes drawing more power than on light mode.
It’s not a surprise that dark modes don’t do anything to reduce LCD power draw. However, the study—not peer-reviewed but published as part of the International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing—suggests that claims about dark mode’s efficiency may be overstated in real-world scenarios, with non-cutting-edge hardware and humans at the controls.
A 2017 MacBook Pro, a power monitor, and the brightness keys
The BBC R&D team’s small-scale brightness testing setup: a power monitor, a testing laptop (with LCD screen), and a monitoring laptop.
Credit: BBC
The BBC R&D team’s small-scale brightness testing setup: a power monitor, a testing laptop (with LCD screen), and a monitoring laptop. Credit: BBC
The R&D arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation got to wondering just how useful a dark mode was in lowering broader power consumption. So the team “sat participants in front of the BBC Sounds homepage and asked them to turn up the device brightness until they were comfortable with it,” using both the light and dark mode versions of the BBC Sounds website.
The BBC Sounds website responds to user preferences for light or dark mode. Light mode is shown here on the left, dark on the right.
Credit: Kevin Purdy/BBC
The BBC Sounds website responds to user preferences for light or dark mode. Light mode is shown here on the left, dark on the right. Credit: Kevin Purdy/BBC
Faced with the dark mode version of the site, 80 percent of participants turned the brightness up “significantly higher” than in light mode, the BBC writes in its blog post. In the study, the Beeb posits something broader:
Our findings suggest that the energy efficiency benefits of dark mode are not as straightforward as commonly believed for display energy, and the interplay between content colourscheme and user behaviour must be carefully considered in sustainability guidelines and interventions.
The study used a physical power monitor (a Tektronix PA1000) and two laptops, one for testing—a 2017 MacBook Pro with a 13.3-inch LCD display—and another for monitoring. The LCD laptop seems like a curious choice, given that dark mode’s savings are largely tied to OLED pixel technology. The BBC study suggests that, “given that most devices still use LCDs, where power consumption may not be reduced by displaying darker colours” (British spelling theirs), broad claims about energy savings may not be appropriately scaled.
“When consumers can easily access information on how to fix devices, it makes it easier for people who can’t afford the latest and greatest technology to still be able to access the tools they need,” Nersisyan added.
Apple lags but shows some improvement
Apple’s MacBook repairability scores placed it at the lowest grade of the US PIRG’s list, save for Lenovo.
However, Apple’s overall repairability score improved from 4.3 last year to 5.1 this year. It gained a quarter of a point in this year’s score because it supported right-to-repair legislation in California within the last year. Apple’s support was a divergence from previous repairability stances from Apple, which had fought right-to-repair efforts for a decade before its about-face on California legislation starting in August 2023. Some have suggested that the change was due to Apple wanting input in legislation that, at the time, seemed likely to pass (California’s bill did eventually pass). Apple has also made notable self-repairability efforts lately, though, including launching and expanding a Self Service Repair program.
Still, Apple has room to grow, with the manufacturer earning the lowest total disassembly score (97)—besides Lenovo, whose score (14) only included one device. Apple also had the lowest disassembly average score (4.9 versus an average of 7.4) out of brands examined. Last year, Apple had an average disassembly score of 4.
In a deeper breakdown of the scores below, Apple’s disassembly scores improved compared to 2024 (9.7 versus 8), as did its parts pricing score (10.9 versus 9.8). However, parts availability declined (13.2 versus 12.8), per US PIRG.
Overall, Apple wasn’t able to compete with Asus and Acer, last year’s and this year’s winners. According to the report, “Asus and Acer continue to manufacture the most repairable laptops due largely to their ease of disassembly.”
Looking ahead, tariffs and other things impacting laptop availability and pricing, like the supply-chain disruptions witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, could drive demand for more easily repairable PCs.
“When [laptops and electronics] cost more or are harder to get, I’d expect shoppers to want to keep them in use for as long as possible and value their repairability,” Gutterman said.
After launching its AI Pin in April 2024 and reportedly seeking a buyout by May 2024, Humane is shutting down. Most of the people who bought an AI Pin will not get refunds for the devices, which debuted at $700, dropped to $500, and will be bricked on February 28 at noon PT.
At that time, AI Pins, which are lapel pins with an integrated AI voice assistant, camera, speaker, and laser projector, “will no longer connect to Humane’s servers,” and “all customer data, including personal identifiable information… will be permanently deleted from Humane’s servers,” according to Humane’s FAQ page. Humane also stopped selling AI pins as of yesterday and canceled any orders that had been made but not yet fulfilled. Humane said it is discontinuing the AI Pin because it’s “moving onto new endeavors.”
Those new endeavors include selling off key assets, including the AI Pin’s CosmOS operating system and intellectual property, including over 300 patents and patent applications, to HP for $116 million, HP announced on Tuesday. HP expects the acquisition to close this month.
Notably, Humane raised $241 million to make its pin and was reportedly valued at $1 billion before launch. Last year, Humane was seeking a sale price of $750 million to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.
But the real failure is in the company’s treatment of its customers, who will only get a refund if they “are still within the 90-day return window from their original shipment date,” Humane’s FAQ page says. “All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024, are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.”
AI Pins “will no longer function as a cellular device or connect to Humane’s servers. This means no calls, texts, or data usage will be possible,” according to the startup, which noted that users can’t port their phone number to another device or wireless carrier. Some offline features “like battery level” will still work, Humane said, but overall, the product will become $700 e-waste for most owners in nine days.
Nvidia’s PhysX offerings to developers didn’t always generate warm feelings. As part of its broader GamesWorks package, PhysX was cited as one of the reasons The Witcher 3 ran at notably sub-optimal levels at launch. Protagonist Geralt’s hair, rendered in PhysX-powered HairWorks, was a burden on some chipsets.
PhysX started appearing in general game engines, like Unity 5, and was eventually open-sourced, first in limited computer and mobile form, then more broadly. As an application wrapped up in Nvidia’s 32-bit CUDA API and platform, the PhysX engine had a built-in shelf life. Now the expiration date is known, and it is conditional on buying into Nvidia’s 50-series video cards—whenever they approach reasonable human prices.
See that smoke? It’s from Sweden, originally.
Credit: Gearbox/Take 2
See that smoke? It’s from Sweden, originally. Credit: Gearbox/Take 2
The real dynamic particles were the friends we made…
Nvidia noted in mid-January that 32-bit applications cannot be developed or debugged on the latest versions of its CUDA toolkit. They will still run on cards before the 50 series. Technically, you could also keep an older card installed on your system for compatibility, which is real dedication to early-2010’s-era particle physics.
Technically, a 64-bit game could still support PhysX on Nvidia’s newest GPUs, but the heyday of PhysX, as a stand-alone technology switched on in game settings, tended to coincide with the 32-bit computing era.
If you load up a 32-bit game now with PhysX enabled (or forced in a config file) and a 50-series Nvidia GPU installed, there’s a good chance the physics work will be passed to the CPU instead of the GPU, likely bottlenecking the game and steeply lowering frame rates. Of course, turning off PhysX entirely raised frame rates above even native GPU support levels.
Demanding Borderlands 2 keep using PhysX made it so it “runs terrible,” noted one Redditor, even if the dust clouds and flapping cloth strips looked interesting. Other games with PhysX baked in, as listed by ResetEra completists, include Metro 2033, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and the 2013 Star Trek game.
Commenters on Reddit and ResetEra note that many of the games listed had performance issues with PhysX long before Nvidia forced them to either turn off or be loaded onto a CPU. For some games, however, PhysX enabled destructible environments, “dynamic bank notes” and “posters” (in the Arkham games), fluid simulations, and base gameplay physics.
Anyone who works in, or cares about, game preservation has always had their work cut out for them. But it’s a particularly tough challenge to see certain aspects of a game’s operation lost to the forward march of the CUDA platform, something that’s harder to explain than a scratched CD or Windows compatibility.
PC-manufacturer Acer has said that it plans to raise the prices of its PCs in the US by 10 percent, a direct response to the new 10 percent import tariff on Chinese goods that the Trump administration announced earlier this month.
“We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” said Acer CEO Jason Chen in an interview with The Telegraph. “We think 10 percent probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”
These price increases won’t roll out right away, according to Chen—products shipped from China before the tariffs went into effect earlier this month won’t be subject to the increased import taxes—but we can expect them to show up in PC price tags over the next few weeks.
Chen also said that Acer was considering moving more of its manufacturing outside of China as a result of the tariffs, something that Acer had done for some of its desktop PCs after Trump imposed similar tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term. Manufacturing systems in the US is also “one of the options,” according to Chen.
Remember the Lumia 1020? It’s back—in iPhone SE form.
The Lumia 1020 was a lot of smartphone in July 2013. It debuted with a focus “almost entirely on the phone’s massive camera,” Ars wrote at the time. That big 41-megapixel sensor jutted forth from the phone body, and Nokia reps showed off its low-light, rapid-motion camera abilities by shooting pictures of breakdancers in a dark demonstration room. The company also offered an optional camera grip—one that made it feel a lot more like a point-and-shoot camera. In a more robust review, Ars suggested the Lumia 1020 might actually make the point-and-shoot obsolete.
Front of the Lumia 1020, showing a bit of Windows Phone square grid flair. Casey Johnston
The Lumia 1020 contained yet another cutting edge concept of the day: Windows Phone, Microsoft’s color-coded, square-shaped companion to its mobile-forward Windows 8. The mobile OS never got over the users/apps, chicken/egg conundrum, and called it quits in October 2017. The end of that distant-third-place mobile OS would normally signal the end of the Lumia 1020 as a usable phone.
But there was a person named /u/OceanDepth95028 who saw beyond, and where others thought, “LOL,” this person thought, “Why not?” And this person looked at the Lumia 1020 and saw a third-generation iPhone SE inside of it. And then this person made that phone, and it booted. And the person saw that it was good, and they posted the tale to Reddit’s r/hackintosh.
X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, is seemingly blocking links to Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, according to journalist Matt Binder and other firsthand accounts.
Binder wrote in his Disruptionist newsletter Sunday that links to Signal.me, a domain that offers a way to connect directly to Signal users, are blocked on public posts, direct messages, and profile pages. Error messages—including “Message not sent,” “Something went wrong,” and profiles tagged as “considered malware” or “potentially harmful”—give no direct suggestion of a block. But posts on X, reporting at The Verge, and other sources suggest that Signal.me links are broadly banned.
Signal.me links that were already posted on X prior to the recent change now show a “Warning: this link may be unsafe” interstitial page rather than opening the link directly. Links to Signal handles and the Signal homepage are still functioning on X.
Binder, a former Mashable reporter who was once blocked by X (then Twitter) for reporting on owner Elon Musk and accounts related to his private jet travel, credited the first reports to an X post by security research firm Mysk.
Mods ask Reddit for tools as generative AI gets more popular and inconspicuous.
Credit: Aurich Lawson (based on a still from Getty Images)
Credit: Aurich Lawson (based on a still from Getty Images)
Like it or not, generative AI is carving out its place in the world. And some Reddit users are definitely in the “don’t like it” category. While some subreddits openly welcome AI-generated images, videos, and text, others have responded to the growing trend by banning most or all posts made with the technology.
To better understand the reasoning and obstacles associated with these bans, Ars Technica spoke with moderators of subreddits that totally or partially ban generative AI. Almost all these volunteers described moderating against generative AI as a time-consuming challenge they expect to get more difficult as time goes on. And most are hoping that Reddit will release a tool to help their efforts.
It’s hard to know how much AI-generated content is actually on Reddit, and getting an estimate would be a large undertaking. Image library Freepik has analyzed the use of AI-generated content on social media but leaves Reddit out of its research because “it would take loads of time to manually comb through thousands of threads within the platform,” spokesperson Bella Valentini told me. For its part, Reddit doesn’t publicly disclose how many Reddit posts involve generative AI use.
To be clear, we’re not suggesting that Reddit has a large problem with generative AI use. By now, many subreddits seem to have agreed on their approach to AI-generated posts, and generative AI has not superseded the real, human voices that have made Reddit popular.
Still, mods largely agree that generative AI will likely get more popular on Reddit over the next few years, making generative AI modding increasingly important to both moderators and general users. Generative AI’s rising popularity has also had implications for Reddit the company, which in 2024 started licensing Reddit posts to train the large language models (LLMs) powering generative AI.
(Note: All the moderators I spoke with for this story requested that I use their Reddit usernames instead of their real names due to privacy concerns.)
No generative AI allowed
When it comes to anti-generative AI rules, numerous subreddits have zero-tolerance policies, while others permit posts that use generative AI if it’s combined with human elements or is executed very well. These rules task mods with identifying posts using generative AI and determining if they fit the criteria to be permitted on the subreddit.
Many subreddits have rules against posts made with generative AI because their mod teams or members consider such posts “low effort” or believe AI is counterintuitive to the subreddit’s mission of providing real human expertise and creations.
“At a basic level, generative AI removes the human element from the Internet; if we allowed it, then it would undermine the very point of r/AskHistorians, which is engagement with experts,” the mods of r/AskHistorians told me in a collective statement.
The subreddit’s goal is to provide historical information, and its mods think generative AI could make information shared on the subreddit less accurate. “[Generative AI] is likely to hallucinate facts, generate non-existent references, or otherwise provide misleading content,” the mods said. “Someone getting answers from an LLM can’t respond to follow-ups because they aren’t an expert. We have built a reputation as a reliable source of historical information, and the use of [generative AI], especially without oversight, puts that at risk.”
Similarly, Halaku, a mod of r/wheeloftime, told me that the subreddit’s mods banned generative AI because “we focus on genuine discussion.” Halaku believes AI content can’t facilitate “organic, genuine discussion” and “can drown out actual artwork being done by actual artists.”
The r/lego subreddit banned AI-generated art because it caused confusion in online fan communities and retail stores selling Lego products, r/lego mod Mescad said. “People would see AI-generated art that looked like Lego on [I]nstagram or [F]acebook and then go into the store to ask to buy it,” they explained. “We decided that our community’s dedication to authentic Lego products doesn’t include AI-generated art.”
Not all of Reddit is against generative AI, of course. Subreddits dedicated to the technology exist, and some general subreddits permit the use of generative AI in some or all forms.
“When it comes to bans, I would rather focus on hate speech, Nazi salutes, and things that actually harm the subreddits,” said 3rdusernameiveused, who moderates r/consoom and r/TeamBuilder25, which don’t ban generative AI. “AI art does not do that… If I was going to ban [something] for ‘moral’ reasons, it probably won’t be AI art.”
“Overwhelmingly low-effort slop”
Some generative AI bans are reflective of concerns that people are not being properly compensated for the content they create, which is then fed into LLM training.
Mod Mathgeek007 told me that r/DeadlockTheGame bans generative AI because its members consider it “a form of uncredited theft,” adding:
You aren’t allowed to sell/advertise the workers of others, and AI in a sense is using patterns derived from the work of others to create mockeries. I’d personally have less of an issue with it if the artists involved were credited and compensated—and there are some niche AI tools that do this.
Other moderators simply think generative AI reduces the quality of a subreddit’s content.
“It often just doesn’t look good… the art can often look subpar,” Mathgeek007 said.
Similarly, r/videos bans most AI-generated content because, according to its announcement, the videos are “annoying” and “just bad video” 99 percent of the time. In an online interview, r/videos mod Abrownn told me:
It’s overwhelmingly low-effort slop thrown together simply for views/ad revenue. The creators rarely care enough to put real effort into post-generation [or] editing of the content [and] rarely have coherent narratives [in] the videos, etc. It seems like they just throw the generated content into a video, export it, and call it a day.
An r/fakemon mod told me, “I can’t think of anything more low-effort in terms of art creation than just typing words and having it generated for you.”
Some moderators say generative AI helps people spam unwanted content on a subreddit, including posts that are irrelevant to the subreddit and posts that attack users.
“[Generative AI] content is almost entirely posted for purely self promotional/monetary reasons, and we as mods on Reddit are constantly dealing with abusive users just spamming their content without regard for the rules,” Abrownn said.
A moderator of the r/wallpaper subreddit, which permits generative AI, disagrees. The mod told me that generative AI “provides new routes for novel content” in the subreddit and questioned concerns about generative AI stealing from human artists or offering lower-quality work, saying those problems aren’t unique to generative AI:
Even in our community, we observe human-generated content that is subjectively low quality (poor camera/[P]hotoshopping skills, low-resolution source material, intentional “shitposting”). It can be argued that AI-generated content amplifies this behavior, but our experience (which we haven’t quantified) is that the rate of such behavior (whether human-generated or AI-generated content) has not changed much within our own community.
But we’re not a very active community—[about] 13 posts per day … so it very well could be a “frog in boiling water” situation.
Generative AI “wastes our time”
Many mods are confident in their ability to effectively identify posts that use generative AI. A bigger problem is how much time it takes to identify these posts and remove them.
The r/AskHistorians mods, for example, noted that all bans on the subreddit (including bans unrelated to AI) have “an appeals process,” and “making these assessments and reviewing AI appeals means we’re spending a considerable amount of time on something we didn’t have to worry about a few years ago.”
They added:
Frankly, the biggest challenge with [generative AI] usage is that it wastes our time. The time spent evaluating responses for AI use, responding to AI evangelists who try to flood our subreddit with inaccurate slop and then argue with us in modmail, [direct messages that message a subreddits’ mod team], and discussing edge cases could better be spent on other subreddit projects, like our podcast, newsletter, and AMAs, … providing feedback to users, or moderating input from users who intend to positively contribute to the community.
Several other mods I spoke with agree. Mathgeek007, for example, named “fighting AI bros” as a common obstacle. And for r/wheeloftime moderator Halaku, the biggest challenge in moderating against generative AI is “a generational one.”
“Some of the current generation don’t have a problem with it being AI because content is content, and [they think] we’re being elitist by arguing otherwise, and they want to argue about it,” they said.
A couple of mods noted that it’s less time-consuming to moderate subreddits that ban generative AI than it is to moderate those that allow posts using generative AI, depending on the context.
“On subreddits where we allowed AI, I often take a bit longer time to actually go into each post where I feel like… it’s been AI-generated to actually look at it and make a decision,” explained N3DSdude, a mod of several subreddits with rules against generative AI, including r/DeadlockTheGame.
MyarinTime, a moderator for r/lewdgames, which allows generative AI images, highlighted the challenges of identifying human-prompted generative AI content versus AI-generated content prompted by a bot:
When the AI bomb started, most of those bots started using AI content to work around our filters. Most of those bots started showing some random AI render, so it looks like you’re actually talking about a game when you’re not. There’s no way to know when those posts are legit games unless [you check] them one by one. I honestly believe it would be easier if we kick any post with [AI-]generated image… instead of checking if a button was pressed by a human or not.
Mods expect things to get worse
Most mods told me it’s pretty easy for them to detect posts made with generative AI, pointing to the distinct tone and favored phrases of AI-generated text. A few said that AI-generated video is harder to spot but still detectable. But as generative AI gets more advanced, moderators are expecting their work to get harder.
In a joint statement, r/dune mods Blue_Three and Herbalhippie said, “AI used to have a problem making hands—i.e., too many fingers, etc.—but as time goes on, this is less and less of an issue.”
R/videos’ Abrownn also wonders how easy it will be to detect AI-generated Reddit content “as AI tools advance and content becomes more lifelike.”
Mathgeek007 added:
AI is becoming tougher to spot and is being propagated at a larger rate. When AI style becomes normalized, it becomes tougher to fight. I expect generative AI to get significantly worse—until it becomes indistinguishable from ordinary art.
Moderators currently use various methods to fight generative AI, but they’re not perfect. r/AskHistorians mods, for example, use “AI detectors, which are unreliable, problematic, and sometimes require paid subscriptions, as well as our own ability to detect AI through experience and expertise,” while N3DSdude pointed to tools like Quid and GPTZero.
To manage current and future work around blocking generative AI, most of the mods I spoke with said they’d like Reddit to release a proprietary tool to help them.
“I’ve yet to see a reliable tool that can detect AI-generated video content,” Aabrown said. “Even if we did have such a tool, we’d be putting hundreds of hours of content through the tool daily, which would get rather expensive rather quickly. And we’re unpaid volunteer moderators, so we will be outgunned shortly when it comes to detecting this type of content at scale. We can only hope that Reddit will offer us a tool at some point in the near future that can help deal with this issue.”
A Reddit spokesperson told me that the company is evaluating what such a tool could look like. But Reddit doesn’t have a rule banning generative AI overall, and the spokesperson said the company doesn’t want to release a tool that would hinder expression or creativity.
For now, Reddit seems content to rely on moderators to remove AI-generated content when appropriate. Reddit’s spokesperson added:
Our moderation approach helps ensure that content on Reddit is curated by real humans. Moderators are quick to remove content that doesn’t follow community rules, including harmful or irrelevant AI-generated content—we don’t see this changing in the near future.
Making a generative AI Reddit tool wouldn’t be easy
Reddit is handling the evolving concerns around generative AI as it has handled other content issues, including by leveraging AI and machine learning tools. Reddit’s spokesperson said that this includes testing tools that can identify AI-generated media, such as images of politicians.
But making a proprietary tool that allows moderators to detect AI-generated posts won’t be easy, if it happens at all. The current tools for detecting generative AI are limited in their capabilities, and as generative AI advances, Reddit would need to provide tools that are more advanced than the AI-detecting tools that are currently available.
That would require a good deal of technical resources and would also likely present notable economic challenges for the social media platform, which only became profitable last year. And as noted by r/videos moderator Abrownn, tools for detecting AI-generated video still have a long way to go, making a Reddit-specific system especially challenging to create.
But even with a hypothetical Reddit tool, moderators would still have their work cut out for them. And because Reddit’s popularity is largely due to its content from real humans, that work is important.
Since Reddit’s inception, that has meant relying on moderators, which Reddit has said it intends to keep doing. As r/dune mods Blue_Three and herbalhippie put it, it’s in Reddit’s “best interest that much/most content remains organic in nature.” After all, Reddit’s profitability has a lot to do with how much AI companies are willing to pay to access Reddit data. That value would likely decline if Reddit posts became largely AI-generated themselves.
But providing the technology to ensure that generative AI isn’t abused on Reddit would be a large challege. For now, volunteer laborers will continue to bear the brunt of generative AI moderation.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of Reddit.
Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.
The GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 are both very fast graphics cards—if you can look past the possibility that we may have yet another power-connector-related overheating problem on our hands. But the vast majority of people (including you, discerning and tech-savvy Ars Technica reader) won’t be spending $1,000 or $2,000 (or $2,750 or whatever) on a new graphics card this generation.
No, statistically, you (like most people) will probably end up buying one of the more affordable midrange Nvidia or AMD cards, GPUs that are all slated to begin shipping later this month or early in March.
There has been a spate of announcements on that front this week. Nvidia announced yesterday that the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which the company previously introduced at CES, would be available starting on February 20 for $749 and up. The new GPU, like the RTX 5080, looks like a relatively modest upgrade from last year’s RTX 4070 Ti Super. But it ought to at least flirt with affordability for people who are looking to get natively rendered 4K without automatically needing to enable DLSS upscaling to get playable frame rates.
RTX 5070 Ti
RTX 4070 Ti Super
RTX 5070
RTX 4070 Super
CUDA Cores
8,960
8,448
6,144
7,168
Boost Clock
2,452 MHz
2,610 MHz
2,512 MHz
2,475 MHz
Memory Bus Width
256-bit
256-bit
192-bit
192-bit
Memory Bandwidth
896 GB/s
672 GB/s
672 GB/s
504 GB/s
Memory size
16GB GDDR7
16GB GDDR6X
12GB GDDR7
12GB GDDR6X
TGP
300 W
285 W
250 W
220 W
That said, if the launches of the 5090 and 5080 are anything to go by, it may not be easy to find and buy the RTX 5070 Ti for anything close to the listed retail price; early retail listings are not promising on this front. You’ll also be relying exclusively on Nvidia’s partners to deliver unadorned, relatively minimalist MSRP versions of the cards since Nvidia isn’t making a Founders Edition version.
As for the $549 RTX 5070, Nvidia’s website says it’s launching on March 5. But it’s less exciting than the other 50-series cards because it has fewer CUDA cores than the outgoing RTX 4070 Super, leaving it even more reliant on AI-generated frames to improve performance compared to the last generation.
Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.
Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create “content that only paid members can see,” Huffman said:
It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming… We’re working on it as we speak.
When asked about “new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025,” Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”
Reddit’s paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available. In August, Huffman said that even with paywalled content, free Reddit would “continue to exist and grow and thrive.”
A critical aspect of any potential plan to make Reddit users pay to access subreddit content is determining how related Reddit users will be compensated. Reddit may have a harder time getting volunteer moderators to wrangle discussions on paid-for subreddits—if it uses volunteer mods at all. Balancing paid and free content would also be necessary to avoid polarizing much of Reddit’s current user base.
Reddit has had paid-for premium versions of community features before, like r/Lounge, a subreddit that only people with Reddit Gold, which you have to buy with real money, can access.
Reddit would also need to consider how it might compensate people for user-generated content that people pay to access, as Reddit’s business is largely built on free, user-generated content. The Reddit Contributor Program, launched in September 2023, could be a foundation; it lets users “earn money for their qualifying contributions to the Reddit community, including awards and karma, collectible avatars, and developer apps,” according to Reddit. Reddit says it pays up to $0.01 per 1 Gold received, depending on how much karma the user has earned over the past year. For someone to pay out, they need at least 1,000 Gold, which is equivalent to $10.
