Roblox adds further changes to safety systems and parental controlsUnder 13s can no longer use direct messaging on platform chats without parental consentImage credit: Roblox News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on Nov. 18, 2024 Roblox has announced significant changes to its safety systems and parental controls to protect children under 13.Starting today, Roblox will implement changes in remote parental control, updated communication settings, and the addition of content labels to experiences.Parents and caregivers will be able to remotely view and manage their child's account, where they can set spending limits and manage screen time.They will also have access to their child's friend list and monitor their child's access to specific chat features. Users under 13 can no longer use direct messaging on platform chats, and will be limited in what messages they can broadcast in games and experiences.As for content labels, these will replace experience guidelines and will describe what content users can expect in an experience. Users under nine can only access minimal or mild content by default, with parental consent required to access moderate content.Experiences with a restricted content label will remain blocked for younger users until they are 17 or over.These updates are supported by partner organisations of Roblox, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education and the Family Online Safety Institute."As our platform has grown in scale, we have always recognised that our approach to safety must evolve with it," said Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman. "Today's launch represents the next stage in that evolution."It is the culmination of many months of product development and consultation with online safety experts, and follows the rollout of more than 30 new safety feature enhancements this year alone, as we continue on our mission to build a safe and civil space to play."Family Online Safety CEO Stephan Balkam added: "As parents look for ways to stay informed and engaged in their children's digital lives, Roblox's enhanced parental controls are a considerable leap forward."By offering robust tools for non-intrusive monitoring and privacy, Roblox is providing families with the confidence they need to foster a secure and enriching online environment."Roblox's overhaul of safety features began last month, when it announced that the above changes in chat and content restrictions were to be introduced, in addition to a new type of parental account.Last week, Roblox rolled out additional safety features, including the moderation of unrated experiences, restricted access to social hangouts and free-form user creation.

Sam Dyer preserves video game history in hardbackBitmap Books' founder on the power of tangible media and how his books help preserve the joy of gaming's history after ten years in the businessImage credit: Cover of Metal Slug: The Ultimate History | Bitmap Books Feature by Jonny Malks Contributor Published on Nov. 18, 2024 Bitmap Books is a video game book publisher with a design-first mindset. This means that Bitmap's founder, creative director, and sole employee Sam Dyer, is all about creating tangible art, as fit for the coffee table and collector's shelf as it is for being read cover-to-cover.Maintaining this balance of aesthetic strike and informational acuity has defined Bitmap's journey since Dyer started his company in 2014. In the ten years since Bitmap's inception, the discourse surrounding game preservation and physical media has grown. But preserving games wasn't necessarily Dyer's initial goal, he tells us."I wouldn't say the company was started with any kind of core mission or end-game in mind," Dyer says. "It was really born out of my passion for craft design and my passion for games. The vision has always been to produce beautiful gaming books that gamers can enjoy and that can evoke lots of nostalgia."As he explains Bitmap's evolution, Dyer says he wants to be careful with how his business treats nostalgia. Retro gaming books are all about bringing people back to their happy memories of times past, yet Dyer says there's a fine line between celebration and predation when it comes to taking peoples' money for products that interact with this feeling."There's an interesting conversation to be had surrounding the word 'nostalgia.' It's starting to become a bit overused, and it's actually got a few negative connotations, where there are a lot of companies that prey on peoples' nostalgia. Big companies include gaming in their adverts to use as a hook to engage with a certain audience, for example. So, I'm sort of always a bit wary about that phrase. Bitmap began with me just wanting to produce things that I would want to buy. Things that reminded me of childhood."It turns out that what most reminded Dyer of childhood was the wonder he felt after his parents bought him his first computer: a Commodore 64. Though no one in his family knew about games, he learned how to load, code, and play all on his own. His initial interest in art and graphic design actually stemmed from being fascinated by the load screens of his favourite games. He describes it as "love at first sight.""There's an interesting conversation to be had surrounding the word 'nostalgia'""That said, the weird thing is I never thought of going into game art. I was always more interested in things like desktop publishing, typography, and graphic design. So, that naturally led me down a path that was actually away from games for a fair few years while I was going to art college. Then, like a lot of us do when you get older and start having children, you start looking back to your childhood and all that sort of fun stuff."Looking back helped Dyer press forward. But it wasn't about doing business at the start. He founded Bitmap because he had been working on a Commodore 64 book in his spare time and needed a platform if he wanted to have any chance at publishing it."The first real challenge was around funding," he recalls.He would eventually turn to Kickstarter, which was having a major moment in the mid-2010s, to secure funding for his first published book. However, he says that a more important aspect of Bitmap's original crowdfunding campaign was to see if there was any interest from a consumer audience in the product he was making.When Commodore 64: A Visual Compendium"I was lucky because I was quite early doors doing video game books, so there was sort of a massive appetite at the time for the thing I was doing. That said, it still took a long time to engage with the various sorts of communities and sharing designs. Obviously, at the time things just built and built and built, and I've got quite a big following now. But that was quite a challenge at the start when you're a nobody to try to get people to put their hard-earned money down and to trust you." Cover of Commodore 64: A Visual Compendium | Bitmap BooksAs far as sustaining and growing Bitmap's audience since the company's early days, Dyer attributes his success to his ability to deliver a consistent product. Producing books that are well-considered, cohesively designed, and provide good value for customers' money has helped him thrive in the video game publishing niche.Dyer says that the most helpful takeaway from his experience as far as audience-building for a boutique product goes is that loyalty is often more important than volume. Building a group of loyal customers who keep coming back is what propels Bitmap's momentum forward.The demographic makeup of that audience makes sense in light of the person Dyer mentions as his ideal target customer: himself."It sounds a little stereotypical, but the facts are that Bitmap's main consumers are male and around my age: between 40 and 50 years old," he says. "That sort of ties in with the age when the Commodore 64, Amiga, the Sega Mega Drive, and all [of these], were part of their childhood. It sounds a bit corny, but I am my target customer. And a lot of the time this sounds really self-indulgent but I am actually designing these books for myself. I constantly ask myself: 'If I were going to buy this book, would I want that?' I probably speak for a lot of our customer base. Not everyone, obviously, but a good majority. And that's helped me in good stead so far, approaching it like that.""When you look at why businesses fail, a lot of the time it's because they grow beyond their means... Whereas, I'm more than happy to grow the business slowly"Bitmap ships its books around the world, but as far as audience-concentration goes, Dyer mentions the UK, Germany, France, and Spain as some notable hotspots. In the last five years, though, the United States has become his biggest market by far.That's a lot of places to send a lot of different books for one person; because Dyer is Bitmap, taking his company's books from the proposal stage, through the design process, production coordination, and shipping all by himself. While he works with various authors to write the books and calls on a number of freelancers throughout his publishing process, Bitmap is his full time job and then some."That's a good thing and a bad thing," Dyer says. "The good side is that I get to control everything. Control the quality. Everything goes past me, so everything's consistent. Also, I can only produce a certain amount of books per year, which is a good thing."Because if we were 20 or 30 people, and we were producing a book a month, people would quite quickly get tired of that, and I would, as well. Producing three books a year which is what we do at the moment feels like a good amount for me, and it's a good amount for customers. The biggest thing is that people really look forward to when we release a book. It's like a real treat, and I would never want that to become like: 'Oh god, they've just released another book.' It would be time to pack up if that ever became the general feeling." Sam Dyer (second from the right) celebrating Bitmap's 10th anniversary this past March"A copy of each one of my books is in the British Library, and as far as I'm concerned that's a pretty strong sort of preservation"It's heartening to hear Dyer's take on the benefits of staying small. The industry is full of countless examples of companies growing beyond their means, which can lead to devastating layoffs and general instability. While capitalist ideologies often make growth seem like an inevitable result of success, Bitmap finds its sweet spot in the processes that helped make the company unique in the first place."Some people might say that I've got no ambition, and they could criticise me for not wanting to grow the business. But, when you look at why businesses fail, a lot of the time it's because they grow beyond their means and then it all just sort of goes a bit wrong. Whereas, at the moment, I'm more than happy to grow the business slowly, and do it at my pace, so as to not churn out too many titles and burn myself out."Bitmap's sustainable business model is a boon to the video game industry and consumers alike primarily due to the publisher's position as a hub of game preservation."It is absolutely all about physical media," Dyer says. "It's one of my biggest passions, being a graphic designer. That's one of the main reasons I want to do Bitmap Books because I'm a massive champion of stuff. I don't have a hatred of digital at all. But, if I think back to my childhood, all of my fondest memories are around cassette tapes, records, CDs, and video games, so I feel really passionate about that."A copy of each one of my books is in the British Library, and as far as I'm concerned that's a pretty strong sort of preservation. It's not just Bitmap doing this, it's other publishers as well. We're doing this job that is the most important way of preserving the history of video games." Sketches within Metal Slug: The Ultimate History | Bitmap BooksLooking toward the future, Dyer wants to expand Bitmap's partnerships with developers and studios to create distinct artefacts that enhance the video game industry's connection to its audience. He sees art as a uniting factor that can help accomplish this goal."We do collaborate with game developers and studios, occasionally. What I want to do in the future is become a lot more known for this. Say, for example, a studio does a game, and they're like: 'We need an art book.' I'd love for Bitmap Books to be the go-to company that they approach to produce that art book."Bitmap's work with the Japanese studio SNK is a blueprint for the execution of Dyer's dream. He's helped SNK publish books on the Neo Geo, in addition to their games Metal Slug and The King of Fighters. Bitmap also has a licensing agreement with Atari for a visual compendium on the Atari 2600 and 7800 and has worked with Sega in the past to produce a book on the Master System. For Dyer, this is just the beginning. Bitmap aspires to be the go-to bookmaker for industry leaders."Who knows, maybe one day we could work with Nintendo," he says. "That would be a dream come true to produce books on their IP."

Chris Kerr, News EditorNovember 18, 20243 Min ReadImage via SteamAt a GlanceValve co-founder Gabe Newell has been asked why the Steam owner isn't doing more to combat a surge in hateful extremism.U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has questioned whether Valve is committed to combating extremism on Steam.As spotted by The Verge, Warner sent a letter to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell to raise concerns over the "hate and extremism" that has allegedly been allowed to fester on Steam, and suggested the platform holder has "chosen to continue a 'hands off'-type approach to content moderation" that allows some to engage in "sustained bouts of disturbing and violent rhetoric."Warner's letter references a new Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report, which claims Steam now contains over 1 million unique user accounts and 100,000 user-created groups that glorify "antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender-and sexuality-based hate, and other extremist ideologies."He notes that Valve has previously been made aware of the issue via a Senate letter sent in 2022 but has seemingly failed to directly address the problem, and believes the company has avoided wider scrutiny despite being comparable in size to some of the largest social media networks."Steam is the largest single online gaming digital distribution and social networking platform in the world with over 10 million unique user accounts and a userbase similar in scale to that of the 'traditional' social media and social network platforms," he wrote."Steam is financially successful, with a dominant position in its sector, and makes Valve billions of dollars in annual revenue. Until now, Steam has largely not received its due attention as a de facto major social network where its users engage in many of the same activities expected of a social media platform."[...] It is reasonable to question how committed Valve is to effectively implement and enforce Valve's own, self-created Conduct Policy for its users, in light of the 1 million Steam user accounts and 100,000 user-created groups glorifying hateful ideologies that ADL found."Warner stated that "lax enforcement of the letter of user conduct agreements" on other social networks, combined with a "seeming reluctance" by those companies to embrace the spirt of those same agreements, has elevated harassment and abuse. With that in mind, he claimed Valve should be doing more to protect users, rather than leaving them vulnerable to harassment, intimidations and ridicule."As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve's approach of user moderation and hate type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation," he added."Valve must bring its content moderation practices in line with industry standards or face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk."Warner has requested Valve and Newell answer a series of questions before December 13, 2024, so he can better understand how the company is approaching content moderation.You can read the full letter here.Read more about:ValveTop StoriesAbout the AuthorChris KerrNews Editor, GameDeveloper.comGame Developer news editor Chris Kerr is an award-winning journalist and reporter with over a decade of experience in the game industry. His byline has appeared in notable print and digital publications including Edge, Stuff, Wireframe, International Business Times, andPocketGamer.biz. Throughout his career, Chris has covered major industry events including GDC, PAX Australia, Gamescom, Paris Games Week, and Develop Brighton. He has featured on the judging panel at The Develop Star Awards on multiple occasions and appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss breaking news.See more from Chris KerrDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

Netflix is trying to carve a slice of the live entertainment market, and its enlisting help from Beyonc to do so. The Houston-born singer will perform in her hometown on December 25th, headlining the halftime show for the Texans-Ravens NFL matchup as part of Netflixs Christmas Gameday live show.Beyoncs performance will take place in the second of two NFL games that Netflix is streaming on Christmas Day, the first being between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The star is set to perform songs from Cowboy Carter live for the first time, and is expected to bring along some special guests that featured on the album, according to Netflixs announcement. The games mark Netflixs NFL streaming debut, having secured a three-year deal in May that also includes at least one holiday game each year in 2025 and 2026.The streaming giant is investing heavily to expand into live sports and major events entertainment industries that attract some of the largest audiences and attention from advertisers. Its latest announcement comes two days after Netflix streamed a live boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul that attracted 65 million viewers. If were comparing with 2023 TV viewership, that would place the fight second only to the 115 million people who watched the Super Bowl telecast last year. For some, the Tyson vs Paul match was disrupted by buffering and connectivity issues that raised questions about the streamers capability to host live event coverage in the future.According to Bloomberg, Netflix is expected to gain 10 million viewers in its fourth quarter this year due to a combination of live sports and the upcoming second season of Squid Game which will air on December 26th. Netflix has also secured the rights to broadcast WWEs headline weekly show Monday Night Rawstarting January 6th, 2025, taking the show off linear television after 22 years.

Roblox is starting to roll out some recently-announced child safety features, and the updates include some new limitations for how users under 13 can communicate on the platform. Beginning Monday, users younger than 13 wont be able to DM players outside of games or experiences on Roblox. And theyll need parental permission to be able to send in-game DMs though this change wont be fully implemented across the platform until the first quarter of 2025.The changes follow recent reports highlighting instances of Roblox failing to protect children. A big article from Bloomberg described how predators on the platform use chat to communicate with kids. And a report from Hindenburg Research described Roblox as an X-rated pedophile hellscape. These new restrictions on chat will build on Robloxs automatic chat filters intended to block users from sharing personal information.In addition to the changes to chat, Roblox is rolling out its previously-announced accounts for parents and caregivers that will let them remotely manage things like a childs screen time limits. Previously, parents had to have physical access to their childs account to set parental controls.Roblox is also starting to use content labels to describe experiences instead of rating experiences for specific age groups. That means, for example, a moderate experience may contain things like moderate fear or crude humor. Users under the age of 9 will only be able to access experiences with minimal or mild content labels unless a parent gives permission. And Roblox will stop users under 13 from accessing social hangout experiences and experiences with free-form writing or drawing.

Recommender systems have been widely applied for studying user preferences; however, they face significant challenges in accurately capturing user preferences, particularly in the context of neural graph collaborative filtering. While these systems use interaction histories between users and items through Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to mine latent information and capture high-order interactions, the quality of collected data poses a major obstacle. Moreover, malicious attacks that introduce fake interactions further deteriorate the recommendation quality. This challenge becomes acute in graph neural collaborative filtering, where the message-passing mechanism of GNNs amplifies the impact of these noisy interactions, leading to misaligned recommendations that fail to reflect users interests.Existing attempts to address these challenges mainly focus on two approaches: denoising recommender systems and time-aware recommender systems. Denoising methods utilize various strategies, such as identifying and down-weighting interactions between dissimilar users and items, pruning samples with larger losses during training, and using memory-based techniques to identify clean samples. Time-aware systems are extensively used in sequential recommendations but have limited application in collaborative filtering contexts. Most temporal approaches concentrate on incorporating timestamps into sequential models or constructing item-item graphs based on temporal order but fail to address the complex interplay between temporal patterns and noise in user interactions.Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign USA and Amazon USA have proposed DeBaTeR, a novel approach for denoising bipartite temporal graphs in recommender systems. The method introduces two distinct strategies: DeBaTeR-A and DeBaTeR-L. The first strategy, DeBaTeR-A, focuses on reweighting the adjacency matrix using a reliability score derived from time-aware user and item embeddings, implementing both soft and hard assignment mechanisms to handle noisy interactions. The second strategy, DeBaTeR-L, employs a weight generator that utilizes time-aware embeddings to identify and down-weight potentially noisy interactions in the loss function.A comprehensive evaluation framework is utilized to evaluate DeBaTeRs predictive performance and denoising capabilities with vanilla and artificially noisy datasets to ensure robust testing. For vanilla datasets, specific filtering criteria are applied to retain only high-quality interactions (ratings 4 for Yelp and 4.5 for Amazon Movies and TV) from users and items with substantial engagement (>50 reviews). The datasets are split using a 7:3 ratio for training and testing, with noisy variations created by introducing 20% random interactions into the training sets. The evaluation framework uses temporal aspects by using the earliest test set timestamp as the query time for each user, with results averaged across four experimental rounds.The experimental results for the question How does the proposed approach perform compared to state-of-the-art denoising and general neural graph collaborative filtering methods? demonstrate the superior performance of both DeBaTeR variants across multiple datasets and metrics. DeBaTeR-L achieves higher NDCG scores, making it more suitable for ranking tasks, while DeBaTeR-A shows better precision and recall metrics, indicating its effectiveness for retrieval tasks. Moreover, DeBaTeR-L demonstrates enhanced robustness when dealing with noisy datasets, outperforming DeBaTeR-A across more metrics compared to their performance on vanilla datasets. The relative improvements against seven baseline methods are significant, confirming the effectiveness of both proposed approaches.In this paper, researchers introduced DeBaTeR, an innovative approach to address noise in recommender systems through time-aware embedding generation. The methods dual strategies DeBaTeR-A for adjacency matrix reweighting and DeBaTeR-L for loss function reweighting provide flexible solutions for different recommendation scenarios. The frameworks success lies in its integration of temporal information with user/item embeddings, shown through extensive experimentation on real-world datasets. Future research directions point toward exploring additional time-aware neural graph collaborative filtering algorithms and expanding the denoising capabilities to include user profiles and item attributes.Check out the Paper. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. If you like our work, you will love ournewsletter.. Dont Forget to join our55k+ ML SubReddit. Sajjad Ansari+ postsSajjad Ansari is a final year undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur. As a Tech enthusiast, he delves into the practical applications of AI with a focus on understanding the impact of AI technologies and their real-world implications. He aims to articulate complex AI concepts in a clear and accessible manner. LinkedIn event, 'One Platform, Multimodal Possibilities,' where Encord CEO Eric Landau and Head of Product Engineering, Justin Sharps will talk how they are reinventing data development process to help teams build game-changing multimodal AI models, fast

LatestMachine LearningHow To Learn Any Language Efficiently With AI? 0 like November 17, 2024Share this postLast Updated on November 18, 2024 by Editorial TeamAuthor(s): Nicolas MARTIN Originally published on Towards AI. Learning a language is often difficult and requires dozens of classes until reaching a reasonable level. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the world cannot afford to have quality classes. In addition, we can learn a language from books, but we dont have feedback about our pronunciation or actual level.What if AI is a great solution for learning any language efficiently and for free?This guide will teach us practical solutions to learn from chatbots in any language, using both textual and vocal features.AI-generated illustration (Grok)As I live in India, we will take the example of Tamil, one of the most difficult languages for Europeans and Americans to learn. The language I master the most is French. I will adapt this article to any language using the expressions [language_to_learn] for the language we want to learn and [my_language] for the primary language we already know. Note that you dont have to learn a language using English; you can use this guide based on any language you want.All the solutions are completely free and accessible with a smartphone, although a computer is recommended for reading long text and typing fast with any keyboard layout.1. Ask some questions about the language history and geography (5 min)A language never came out of the void; it always has a long story that is worth knowing to have a complete picture of its evolution and geography.This will help us connect the dots between the language and the people using it daily. A lack of general culture about a language can lead to misunderstanding and incomprehension between us and the people. We can be more specific by asking about the main differences in our culture, and the AI will answer more accurately.Therefore, we can first ask the question:In 300 words, explain the origin of [language_to_learn], its geographic limitations, and three critical things worth knowing about the [language_to_learn] culture today that differs from my [my_language] culture.The Tamil culture and its main differences with the French one (generated with ChatGPT)2. Make a learning plan for one month (5 min)Now that we have general knowledge about the language we want to learn, we can prepare a learning plan according to the main rules.Learning a language needs practice, and we can define the limits to have a realistic learning plan, such as the available time or if we want to know both writing and speaking. I recommend learning both, as writing and speaking create a strong connection with each other.To learn a language efficiently, discipline is vital, and learning 30 minutes every day, 6 times per week, is better than 3 classes of 2 hours per week because memorization works better daily.The smartphone version of ChatGPT is very useful as you can ask for the pronunciation of the words and get valuable tips. The free version is limited to 10 minutes, but it is enough for us to learn daily.How can I learn [language_to_learn] to reach a good basis in one month? Give a learning plan with the main steps, knowing that I have 30 minutes per day and I have some conversational tools with AI to check my pronunciation (with ChatGPT vocal) and my knowledge. Keep in mind I must learn to write and speak. Organize it in a table.The learning plan was obtained with Claude.ai (text) and transferred to the table with ChatGPT.As chatbot sessions are limited in request per page, I recommend keeping the learning plan structure and copying/pasting it every day on a new page to be able to handle questions and answers and maintain track of the conversation.Daily session structure and resources.Optional: Use tips and resources given by the ChatBot (see example above) if they are relevant to our learning habits.AI-generated picture of Nelson Mandela with one of his most famous quotes3. Follow your learning plan every day (30 min)The following steps are straightforward.Once you copy the learning plan in any chatbot, ask:Give the material for the Day [n] lesson.Tamil lesson 1 example with ChatGPTAbout the vocal chatbot on a smartphone (ex, ChatGPT), click on the bottom right button and first ask:What is the [content of the lesson n]? Check my pronunciation.Here is the vocal option in ChatGPT at the bottom right cornerHere is an example of Tamil. I should have asked in French, but I have done my best to do it in English for a better understanding.Keep in mind that the pronunciation function is very accurate in many languages. I have also tested the pronunciation in German, one of the languages I know the best, and the pronunciation advice was very accurate.In some cases, like in English, we can ask to learn a language with a specific accent so that we can choose the proper pronunciation we want.Here is a funny example of how ChatGPT can speak with specific English accents, including Japanese:https://x.com/minchoi/status/1857467047493480475?s=46&t=MxrSpRHarlH_X7ulzALqHwAbout the writing, we can take a picture of what we wrote and ask the chatbot whether it is well written or not.(click on + and Take Photo at the bottom left corner) Is this correctly written in [language_to_learn]?An example of vowel manual writing verification in Tamil.As you can see, the chatbot detected some mistakes in my writing style in some characters that I can correct to reiterate the process until the writing is fine.4. Know the major pronunciation difficulties from the beginningSome fundamental pronunciations are very different from one language to another, and it is essential to know them at an early learning stage.Give the 3 most difficult things in the [language_to_learn] pronunciation for someone who only speaks [my_language].Most challenging aspects of Tamil pronunciation for someone who speaks French5. Additional thoughtsThe best learning solution is to have a teacher. This guide is helpful for people who cant afford to have a teacher and want another efficient way to learn a language.A teacher is better because we have to go to classes and get direct feedback for our evaluation. Using AI grants us feedback but requires much more discipline to study every day, which is difficult overall when it is free (paying to learn something gives us more credit and commitment).Human interaction is still essential to learning a language. It is great to have AI tools to learn many things faster, but most of us are social beings with social needs. Discussing with people always plays an important role.Speaking about AI tools, hundreds of existing ones are worth testing. Here is a list from Theres An AI For That, including Lingolette or Jarggin.AI is evolving very fast, and learning solutions based on AI will probably get better and better. It also applies to translation AI tools where instant translation is already possible.ConclusionLearning a language is a tedious activity that requires patience, effort, and regularity. Even though a teacher is the best solution, not everyone can afford one and AI can be a good alternative. Indeed, more and more text and vocal AIs can organize a learning plan and evaluate our knowledge, including our pronunciation or writing style. Some might argue that learning a language is unnecessary, given the rapid advancements in AI, but isnt the ability to learn and speak languages essential to our humanity, just as chess remains beloved by human players despite AI surpassing human capabilities?Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming asponsor. Published via Towards AITowards AI - Medium Share this post

A U.S. senator has written an open letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell asking for more stringent moderation of Steam.Mark Warner, the United States senator from Virginia, demanded Valve crack down on what he called hateful accounts and rhetoric proliferating on Steam. IGN has asked Valve for comment.Warner alleged that Steam is home to tens of thousands of groups that share and amplify antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content, and called on Valve to bring its content moderation standards in line with industry standards and crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content.Valve boss Gabe Newell. Photo by Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty Images.Warners letter follows a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that identified over one million unique user accounts and nearly 100,000 user-created groups that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender and sexuality-based hatred, and other extremist ideologies on Valves Steam platform.The ADL found Steam hosts almost 900,000 users with extremist or antisemitic profile pictures, 40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, and rampant use of text-based images, particularly of swastikas, resulting in over one million unique hate-images.My concern is elevated by the fact that Steam is the largest single online gaming digital distribution and social networking platform in the world with over 100 million unique user accounts and a userbase similar in scale to that of the traditional social media and social network platforms, Warner said.Steam is financially successful, with a dominant position in its sector, and makes Valve billions of dollars in annual revenue. Until now, Steam has largely not received its due attention as a de facto major social network where its users engage in many of the same activities expected of a social media platform.We have seen on other social networking platforms that lax enforcement of the letter of user conduct agreements, when coupled with a seeming reluctance by those companies to embrace the spirit (namely providing users with a safe, welcoming place to socialize) of those same agreements, leads to toxic social environments that elevate harassment and abuse. You should want your users (and prospective users) to not have to wonder if they or their children will be harassed, intimidated, ridiculed or otherwise face abuse.This isnt the first time Warner has taken on video game tech companies over their alleged failings. He also pressed Discord to take action against hosting violent predatory groups that coerce minors into self-harm and suicide. Indeed, Warner said Valve was warned about this very problem two years ago when it received a Senate letter identifying nearly identical activity on your platform, and yet two years later it appears that Valve has chosen to continue a hands off-type approach to content moderation that favors allowing some users to engage in sustained bouts of disturbing and violent rhetoric rather than ensure that all of its users can find a welcoming and safe environment across your platform.Warners letter asks Valve to answer a series of questions on Steam no later than December 13, 2024. The questions directly ask about Valves current practices used to enforce its terms of service, its definition of terms, and the number of allegations it received about potential conduct violations and the findings of each complaint.It remains to be seen whether Valve responds to Warners letter, which is the third sent by Congress to the company in the last three years. Warners letter threatens Valve with more intense scrutiny from the federal government if it fails to take meaningful action against hate content, but as The Verge points out, First Amendment protections prevent the government from punishing companies for hosting legal albeit hateful speech.Photo by Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty Images,Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Sony's $700 PlayStation 5 Pro gives games such as God of War: Ragnarok and Baldur's Gate 3 a big performance boost but it's also enduring teething problems, with players reporting issues in the likes of Silent Hill 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.The recently released remake of beloved survival horror game Silent Hill 2 perhaps has the most complaints, with Eurogamer having spotted a number of fans flagging that both developer Bloober Team and publisher Konami have yet to comment on graphical issues headlined by a shimmering or flickering effect."I immediately knew something was off without even seeing gameplay previously or even playing the game before this," said Unlocky-Soil-2456 on Reddit. "Thats how bad this is. I cant even bring myself to play it in this state because its so distracting."Every Game Enhanced for PS5 Pro So FarIGN's Twenty Questions - Guess the game!IGN's Twenty Questions - Guess the game!To start:...try asking a question that can be answered with a "Yes" or "No".000/250Several other games are affected by this similar shimmering issue too. "I love my PS5 Pro for the most part, most games look wonderful, but there seems to be an issue with some games," said Chaystic on ResetEra. "There's this weird shimmering, aliasing, whatever you wanna call it. One big example is Black Ops 6, I thought my Pro was faulty or something, but it turns out I'm not the only one who noticed it. I've seen several social media posts who reported the same."Fellow PS5 Pro owners in the comments pointed it out in Spider-Man 2, Stellar Blade, and Alan Wake 2 as well, while Digital Foundry discovered what it called "severe image quality problems" in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. "There are severe image quality concerns when elements like foliage interact with ray tracing," it said. "The end result is a strobing image quality downgrade that makes this Pro patch difficult to recommend."The PS5 Pro arrived November 7 as Sony's now standard mid-generation upgrade. More than 50 games received PS5 Pro specific patches upon its launch but, as this list includes Alan Wake 2 and Black Ops 6 among others receiving complaints, it's worth proceeding with caution.In our 7/10 review of the PS5 Pro, IGN said: "The PlayStation 5 Pro is an impressive console with noticeable boosts in performance and graphics for games that take advantage of its powerful hardware. But for $700, youll need to think twice about whether or not the upgrade is worth the price tag."Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

As it turns out, Christmas did not come early this past weekend at the box office, even with a nominal holiday action movie playing in theaters around the world. Indeed, the long troubled and forthcoming Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans two-hander, Red One, saw its Yuletide hopes dashed over the weekend when estimates came in pegging the Christmas spectacles opening at $34 million.While technically the number one movie in North America, that number is down considerably when even compared to plenty of Johnsons other family friendly high-concept films like Black Adam (which was considered a disappointment when it opened at $67 million in 2022) and the second Jumanji movie he made with Kevin Hart, Jumanji: The Next Level, which debuted at $59.3 million five years ago in 2019.Technically Red Ones opening is comparable to Johnson and Harts first fun Jumanji flick, Welcome to the Jungle, which opened to $36.1 million in 2017. But that was seven years of inflation ago, and Jungle had a reasonable price tag of $90 million. Conversely, official reports claim Red One cost an eye-watering $200 million, andThe WrapOn paper, Red One was clearly intended to be a continuation of Jumanjis charm, with director Jake Kasdan helming all three movies. Yet Red One became something else as well: an attempt by an ambitious streamer to create its own family-friendly action IP by spending on Red One like it was a superhero movie. Crucially, however, Amazon MGM originally intended for Red One to be exactly thata streaming movie. When production began on the film in 2022, the plan was to have Red One on their streaming service Prime Video in time for Christmas the following year. Production pauses, caused by negotiations being dragged out during the acting and writers strikes of last year, delayed the movie until now. And during the interim, Johnson said he got the idea that the movie needed to be on the big screen in IMAX after watching the success of Christopher Nolans Oppenheimer in the same format.Whatever cracks one might wish to make at the folly of comparing intended streaming content starring Johnson and Evans to a talky, R-rated epic for adults, one should note that ahead of Red One, even Johnsons superhero stumble still actually eked out a north of $50 million opening. So a more interesting way to consider Red Ones failures might be to note that it offers a decent glimpse behind the curtain at the actual popularity of big, pricey streaming movies when their actual appeal isnt obscured by numbers massaged by the tech industry.The state of moviemaking is indeed in a strange place where audiences more often than not elect to stay home than go to the cinema on any given weekend, and in that environment streaming services and their owners have the opportunity to remain opaque about what is being watched for how long and by how many people. For instance, another Johnson streaming movie that never got released into theaters, Netflixs similarly titled Red Notice, was trumpeted by its streamer as its most popular movie of all-time, with the film allegedly generating 231 million views since 2021.Yet the numbers of how many people finished the film or actually enjoyed it (or even gave it their undivided attention) are murkier. There is obviously a world of difference between turning on something that is free (or part of a subscription you already paid for) and leaving it on in the background while wrapping presents versus paying $10 to $20 a ticket to see the film with your family ahead of Thanksgiving. But isnt that also kind of the point? Streaming services continue to be championed as the future of media consumption, or even cinema, and yet their seemingly algorithm-designed content with a tested movie star like Johnson and audience-favorite like Evans cannot generate as much excitement as an original (and sublime) family film, The Wild Robot, which opened at about $36 million in September.There are of course other conventional lessons that seem gleanable from Red Ones struggles, beginning with its price tag. As of press time, it is not clear if Red Ones exorbitant budget is partially borne out from the streaming model of paying above-the-line talent expanded fees to offset the films never having the opportunity to earn backends for the talent in a traditional theatrical rolloutwhich is why Amazons adult drama Air cost a reported $90 million, even though the non-salaried portion of that production was probably a fraction of the totalor if this is just the case of another Rock movie costing north of $200 million.According to The Wrap, though, Johnson alone demanded a $50 million payday and then allegedly caused the budget to balloon further by being chronically late to set. Producer Hiram Garcia categorically denied this allegation.Read more Whatever the case might be, it seems ill-advised to spend anywhere in the neighborhood of a quarter-billion dollars on a Christmas movie. Weve written before about how the industry went from reliably producing a few generally recognized Christmas favorites every decade to there not being a banner year for holiday classics since 2003. A large reason for that is the holiday movie has been surrendered to streaming services, which often treat them as disposable shovel programmer content. Conversely, attempting to rework the plot of 48 Hrs. or Lethal Weapon into a family movie with expensive talking polar bears and fist-fighting Krampuses seems equally tone deaf.Many of the celebrated holiday movies of yore, including 2003s Elf and Love Actually, were medium-budgeted movies that relied on quality talent in front of and behind the camera delivering the ephemeral magic. In other words, the best Christmas movies didnt try to just buy their popularity with special effects, or just phone the magic in, a la every Netflix Christmas movie you might watch this holiday season and have forgotten by New Years.Red One conversely feels like every other streaming service blockbuster that you might watch but regret afterward. Granted, not all audiences feel the same. It should be noted the film earned a respectable A- CinemaScore over the weekend, which is better than Black Adams B+. However, lest anyone has delusions of a long holiday season attempt to recover, it should be noted the traditional studios already seem to have the family market cornered with Universals highly anticipated Wicked slated to make landfall next week and, ironically enough, the Johnson co-starring Moana 2 from Disney prepared to open the weekend afterward. Just in time for the holidays.