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The Great Barrington Declaration and how polarized we arePublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read1 day ago-- Happy Friday, yallIssue #223: legislating social media + the ceiling of your inputsLast week, Trump picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. federal agency responsible for public health research.Dr. Bhattacharya is best known for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter to the U.S. government arguing against Covid lockdowns. (It was drafted in Great Barrington, MA, hence the name.) Alongside two epidemiology professors, he advocated to let healthy adults freely contract the virus in the name of reaching herd immunity.The Declaration was endlessly politicized, and still is. Dr. Fauci called it nonsense. Facebook allegedly removed it for a week. Twitter shadow-banned Bhattacharya.Personally, I understand why public health officials went HAM to hold the line in 2020, and why Trust and Safety employees at Twitter may have been quick to push the shadow ban button. 2020 and 2021 were scary, uncertain years. And yet, the pushback GBD got feels overblown to me. Im curious how it feels to you.Scientists now agree we may never reach herd immunity as it was envisioned in 2020 (and in the Declaration) because Covid evolves so quickly. On Medium, epidemiologist Gideon M-K notes that Sweden implemented some of the GBDs recommendations and did not achieve herd immunity. (Swedens curve swung up and down just like the rest of the worlds, in the long run.) Most of what Ive read points to the fact that the GBD was misinformed. But we were all misinformed in 2020, to some degree. We were all trying to figure it out, and there wasnt a right path forward only a path that would reduce some risks at the expense of others.When Dr. Bhattacharya was nominated, Bulletproof Coffee inventor Dave Asprey called the Declaration an attempt to stand up to evil. That feels extreme and emblematic of how polarized weve become. Why do we need to frame this in terms of good v. evil? How is that helpful, ever? What I see is a philosophical disagreement over how to weigh pros and cons, which is hard in a situation where some of the first-order risks are clear (lives lost) but the second- and third-order risks are less clear (schools closed for 18 months). Harris Sockel One more story: the future of social mediaEntrepreneur and media vet John Battelle adds context to a post by Emily Liu, Blueskys head of comms. Liu explains how Blueskys project is bigger than building just one social network. Theyre building an open protocol, similar to email or the web itself. Anyone can spin up an app on this protocol, and users can keep their identity and followers/networks when they flee Bluesky in a decade (or tomorrow) for the next app of their choice. Its intentionally billionaire-proof.Battelle thinks thats great (so do I), but adds historical context from the cell phone industry. Until around 2004, it was impossible to switch carriers and keep your number. The only reason I could switch from Verizon to AT&T last year and still get texts from old friends? Legislation. Maybe, Battelle argues, now is the time to pass one elegant piece of legislation (the ACCESS Act, anyone?) that would enshrine our right to data portability. Practical wisdomThe quality of your outputs can only ever reach the ceiling of your inputs. (Jasmine Sun)

A photo of the 124th Army-Navy Game, which was held on December 9, 2023 Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsLess than two weeks after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an Army-Navy football game played in front of a crowd of 102,000 spectators at Philadelphias Municipal Stadium on December 7, 1963, might have been a subdued and somber affair.For the crowd watching at home on CBS, however, football changed forever when Army quarterback Carl Stichweh faked a handoff and ran for a touchdown. Just a second later, he appeared to do it again. But this wasnt a second touchdown. It was the first use of instant replay.At first, this historic game almost didnt take place. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, many sporting events were called off, and the raucous, patriotic annual match between the two service academies nearly met the same fate.Kennedy, a Navy veteran and football fan, had been a steady presence at the annual game. For those who were privileged to cover Army-Navy and Orange Bowl games, the president was such a familiar sight that he became almost a personal friend, Associated Press sports reporter Bob Hoobing wrote.Navy Beats Army in 1963: The Football Game That Paid Tribute to JFKWatch on The game was originally scheduled for November 30just eight aching days after the assassination. But at the request of the Kennedy family, who insisted that the late president and committed Navy fan would have wanted the game to go on, the Army-Navy bout was pushed back by a week.In the meantime, Tony Verna, a young CBS director, was hatching a plan to test an innovation that would change sports and live television forever.Like other major networks, CBS had used a bulky videotape machine called the Ampex VR-1000 to replay highlights since the mid-1950s, according to Smithsonian historian Eric S. Hintz. But finding the precise moment or desired play on the tape was challenging.Preparing these replays required considerable time and effort, Hintz wrote. With up to ten seconds of video static before each clip, replays were imprecise and hardly instant, airing only during halftime or after the game. Tony Verna, the inventor of instant replay Joi via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0Verna, for one, imagined that the long, actionless stretches between football plays could be filled with clips of moments that had just transpired from different camera angles, keeping viewers entertained and engaged with the game. The challenge was to queue up the replay perfectly.His innovation was to mark the tape with audio cues that could signal the exact points where an instant replay should start. One beep meant the huddle broke; two beeps meant the quarterback was ready for the play to begin. Starting at the first beep, Verna planned to allow visual static to air just long enough before the second set of beeps, at which point the instant replay would beam into millions of living rooms across the country.On the way to the stadium in a cab on the morning of December 7, Verna nervously told the veteran CBS crew about his plan. For an intrepid director, he later told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I had a lot of trepidation.The first few times Verna tried to queue up replays of the Army and Navy quarterbacks during the game, old footage from the used videotape CBS had provided him came onto his monitor. Instead of Navy quarterback Roger Staubach rolling out of the pocket to deliver a pass, he saw Lucille Ball in an old I Love Lucy episode.INSTANT REPLAYWatch on Verna and his team tried again, making about 30 failed attempts before Stichweh ran into the end zone for an Army touchdown in the fourth quarter. Verna watched the static turn to a clear picture on his monitor and give two clean beeps. I had to make sure it wasnt Lucy, Verna later said. Then it was a go: Stichweh ran into the end zone again.This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again! announcer Lindsey Nelson told the crowds at home.After dozens of false starts and a high-stakes game, the first instant replay was a successhelped along by the ups and downs of a game considered by some to be the greatest-ever bout between Army and Navy.People saw it, and they wanted it, Verna told the Tribune-Review. He and CBS quickly honed the technique, using it again at the Cotton Bowl a month later. By the next fall, CBS used instant replay for most of its NFL games, turning an innovation from December 7, 1963, into the future of live television coverage.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Football, Innovations, John F. Kennedy, Journalism, Media, On This Day in History, Sports, Television

Hawaiian crows, or alal, are intelligent birds that play an important role in Hawaiian culture. (This is not one of the five individuals taking part in the pilot release on Maui.) San Diego Zoo Wildlife AllianceOn the slopes of the Haleakal volcano in the Kpahulu Forest Reserve, Hawaiian crows, known as alal, are flying free. The species has been extinct in the wild since 2002, and past efforts to reintroduce them to their native range were unsuccessful. Now, employing a new strategy, scientists released five crows in November to a new islandMaui.They are shouldering all of the hopes of their species, says Alison Greggor, an ecologist who led the reintroduction for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, to the New York Times Catrin Einhorn. They are the future.In the past, attempts to reintroduce alal to Hawaiis Big Island during the 1990s and late 2010s did not turn out as well as scientists hoped. The crows were preyed upon by the Hawaiian hawk, or io, its natural predator. With only about 110 Hawaiian crows remaining on Earth, conservationists built upon the lessons of those past reintroductions to try to secure hope for the species once more. On Maui, there are no io, so the crows chance of survival is better.Conservation doesnt happen overnight, says Hannah Bailey, conservation program manager for the Hawaiian Endangered Birds Program at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, to Scientific Americans Elizabeth Anne Brown. Were still learning, and so are the birds.Conservationists selected the Kpahulu Forest Reserve for its semi-isolation and vegetation, an ideal space for the birds. Over the past several months, the five crowsthree males and two femaleshave formed a close-knit group, a bond that scientists hope will enhance their chance of survival in the wild. The birds were also evaluated based on their foraging success and predator response.Alal is a species of crow that is about the size of the carrion crow, though it is presently extinct in the wild. (The individuals in this photo are not among the five individuals involved in the pilot release on Maui.) San Diego Zoo Wildlife AllianceWith so few living individuals, alal is the most endangered species in the crow family. The threats to their survival range from habitat loss to predation and disease. Their population numbers have dwindled since the 1970s. Now, this collaboration between nonprofit, state and federal partners has brought the species back to its forest home.In Hawaiian culture, alal are spirit guardians, or aumakua, per Scientific American. They often appear in dreams or visions to warn people of danger and act as protectors.For Keanini Aarona, an avian recovery specialist at Maui Bird Conservation Center, it holds a special significance to care for alal, according to a statement from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. To me, and in my culture, the alal are like our ancestorsour kpuna. The forest wouldnt be there without these birds.There is a shared ecology among the forest and its animals, and the alal have historically been part of it. They are also highly intelligent and charismatic creatures. Research has shown the crows even know how to use tools like sticks to bring food out of crevices.When you are in the presence of an alala, it is a humbling moment, says biologist Jacqueline Gaudioso-Levita, coordinator for the Alal Recovery Project, to Ke Kalaheas Daisy Stewart. Their intelligence and uniqueness is very apparent.The previous reintroduction effort between 2016 and 2020 saw a total of 30 alala reintroduced on the Big Island. Initially, it was a success. Most survived for the first year, but their numbers started to dwindle, and in 2020, conservationists returned the remaining birds to human care. The effort, however, was not in vainit proved essential for informing this new phase on Maui.Reintroduction projects always come with some type of risk. In this case, as Maui is not the birds native range, introducing them to the habitat involves a risk of ecological consequences. For this reason, researchers chose a site where there were few animals of great concern, like rare snails and forest birds, to minimize the potential damage, per the Washington Posts Dino Grandoni.We didnt want to risk native species on Maui just in pursuit of finding a better path for alal, says Michelle Bogardus, a deputy field supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to the Washington Post. We would not be doing this if we thought that this action was going to risk all of the other species that are also within our stewardship.On release day in early November, the five alal hesitantly made their way out of the aviary, where they had been acclimating for six weeks. The birds took their time, climbing atop the aviary first, then going from tree to tree. With time, they spread their wings and joined the forest.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Animals, Birds, Conservation, Endangered Species, Good News, Hawaii, Land Birds, Volcanoes, wildlife

Sam Altman's new $200 ChatGPT has a big Elon problem...

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreIn a world where efficiency is king and disruption creates billion-dollar markets overnight, its inevitable that businesses are eyeing generative AI as a powerful ally. From OpenAIs ChatGPT generating human-like text, to DALL-E producing art when prompted, weve seen glimpses of a future where machines create alongside us or even lead the charge. Why not extend this into research and development (R&D)? After all, AI could turbocharge idea generation, iterate faster than human researchers and potentially discover the next big thing with breathtaking ease, right?Hold on. This all sounds great in theory, but lets get real: Betting on gen AI to take over your R&D will likely backfire in significant, maybe even catastrophic, ways. Whether youre an early-stage startup chasing growth or an established player defending your turf, outsourcing generative tasks in your innovation pipeline is a dangerous game. In the rush to embrace new technologies, theres a looming risk of losing the very essence of what makes truly breakthrough innovations and, worse yet, sending your entire industry into a death spiral of homogenized, uninspired products.Let me break down why over-reliance on gen AI in R&D could be innovations Achilles heel.1. The unoriginal genius of AI: Prediction imaginationGen AI is essentially a supercharged prediction machine. It creates by predicting what words, images, designs or code snippets fit best based on a vast history of precedents. As sleek and sophisticated as this may seem, lets be clear: AI is only as good as its dataset. Its not genuinely creative in the human sense of the word; it doesnt think in radical, disruptive ways. Its backward-looking always relying on whats already been created.In R&D, this becomes a fundamental flaw, not a feature. To truly break new ground, you need more than just incremental improvements extrapolated from historical data. Great innovations often arise from leaps, pivots, and re-imaginings, not from a slight variation on an existing theme. Consider how companies like Apple with the iPhone or Tesla in the electric vehicle space didnt just improve on existing products they flipped paradigms on their heads.Gen AI might iterate design sketches of the next smartphone, but it wont conceptually liberate us from the smartphone itself. The bold, world-changing moments the ones that redefine markets, behaviors, even industries come from human imagination, not from probabilities calculated by an algorithm. When AI is driving your R&D, you end up with better iterations of existing ideas, not the next category-defining breakthrough.2. Gen AI is a homogenizing force by natureOne of the biggest dangers in letting AI take the reins of your product ideation process is that AI processes content be it designs, solutions or technical configurations in ways that lead to convergence rather than divergence. Given the overlapping bases of training data, AI-driven R&D will result in homogenized products across the market. Yes, different flavors of the same concept, but still the same concept.Imagine this: Four of your competitors implement gen AI systems to design their phones user interfaces (UIs). Each system is trained on more or less the same corpus of information data scraped from the web about consumer preferences, existing designs, bestseller products and so on. What do all those AI systems produce? Variations of a similar result.What youll see develop over time is a disturbing visual and conceptual cohesion where rival products start mirroring one another. Sure, the icons might be slightly different, or the product features will differ at the margins, but substance, identity and uniqueness? Pretty soon, they evaporate.Weve already seen early signs of this phenomenon in AI-generated art. In platforms like ArtStation, many artists have raised concerns regarding the influx of AI-produced content that, instead of showing unique human creativity, feels like recycled aesthetics remixing popular cultural references, broad visual tropes and styles. This is not the cutting-edge innovation you want powering your R&D engine.If every company runs gen AI as its de facto innovation strategy, then your industry wont get five or ten disruptive new products each year itll get five or ten dressed-up clones.3. The magic of human mischief: How accidents and ambiguity propel innovationWeve all read the history books: Penicillin was discovered by accident after Alexander Fleming left some bacteria cultures uncovered. The microwave oven was born when engineer Percy Spencer accidentally melted a chocolate bar by standing too close to a radar device. Oh, and the Post-it note? Another happy accident a failed attempt at creating a super-strong adhesive.In fact, failure and accidental discoveries are intrinsic components of R&D. Human researchers, uniquely attuned to the value hidden in failure, are often able to see the unexpected as opportunity. Serendipity, intuition, gut feeling these are as pivotal to successful innovation as any carefully laid-out roadmap.But heres the crux of the problem with gen AI: It has no concept of ambiguity, let alone the flexibility to interpret failure as an asset. The AIs programming teaches it to avoid mistakes, optimize for accuracy and resolve data ambiguities. Thats great if youre streamlining logistics or increasing factory throughput, but its terrible for breakthrough exploration.By eliminating the possibility of productive ambiguity interpreting accidents, pushing against flawed designs AI flattens potential pathways toward innovation. Humans embrace complexity and know how to let things breathe when an unexpected output presents itself. AI, meanwhile, will double down on certainty, mainstreaming the middle-of-road ideas and sidelining anything that looks irregular or untested.4. AI lacks empathy and vision two intangibles that make products revolutionaryHeres the thing: Innovation is not just a product of logic; its a product of empathy, intuition, desire, and vision. Humans innovate because they care, not just about logical efficiency or bottom lines, but about responding to nuanced human needs and emotions. We dream of making things faster, safer, more delightful, because at a fundamental level, we understand the human experience.Think about the genius behind the first iPod or the minimalist interface design of Google Search. It wasnt purely technical merit that made these game-changers successful it was the empathy to understand user frustration with complex MP3 players or cluttered search engines. Gen AI cannot replicate this. It doesnt know what it feels like to wrestle with a buggy app, to marvel at a sleek design, or to experience frustration from an unmet need. When AI innovates, it does so without emotional context. This lack of vision reduces its ability to craft points of view that resonate with actual human beings. Even worse, without empathy, AI may generate products that are technically impressive but feel soulless, sterile and transactional devoid of humanity. In R&D, thats an innovation killer.5. Too much dependence on AI risks de-skilling human talentHeres a final, chilling thought for our shiny AI-future fanatics. What happens when you let AI do too much? In any field where automation erodes human engagement, skills degrade over time. Just look at industries where early automation was introduced: Employees lose touch with the why of things because they arent flexing their problem-solving muscles regularly.In an R&D-heavy environment, this creates a genuine threat to the human capital that shapes long-term innovation culture. If research teams become mere overseers to AI-generated work, they may lose the capability to challenge, out-think or transcend the AIs output. The less you practice innovation, the less you become capable of innovation on your own. By the time you realize youve overshot the balance, it may be too late.This erosion of human skill is dangerous when markets shift dramatically, and no amount of AI can lead you through the fog of uncertainty. Disruptive times require humans to break outside conventional frames something AI will never be good at.The way forward: AI as a supplement, not a substituteTo be clear, Im not saying gen AI has no place in R&D it absolutely does. As a complementary tool, AI can empower researchers and designers to test hypotheses quickly, iterate through creative ideas, and refine details faster than ever before. Used properly, it can enhance productivity without squashing creativity.The trick is this: We must ensure that AI acts as a supplement, not a substitute, to human creativity. Human researchers need to stay at the center of the innovation process, using AI tools to enrich their efforts but never abdicating control of creativity, vision or strategic direction to an algorithm.Gen AI has arrived, but so too has the continued need for that rare, powerful spark of human curiosity and audacity the kind that can never be reduced to a machine-learning model. Lets not lose sight of that.Ashish Pawar is a software engineer. DataDecisionMakersWelcome to the VentureBeat community!DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.You might even considercontributing an articleof your own!Read More From DataDecisionMakers

Epic Games announced that Fortnite is going first person with Fortnite Ballistic, a 5v5 multiplayer tactical shooter game. The title launches into early access on December 11 with ranked and unranked play. Ballistic is intended to be an adrenaline-filled, round-based 5v5 competitive game mode where strategy, tactical teamwork, and individual prowesRead More

Stories from 30 years of PlayStationFormer UK and European PlayStation veterans share stories from their time working on PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 Feature by Christopher Dring Head of Games B2B Published on Dec. 6, 2024 During EGX in London, PlayStation veterans Chris Deering, David Wilson, Geoff Glendenning, David Ranyard and Masami Kochi took to the stage to share stories from the history of PlayStation.I hosted the special session and there were some fascinating little insights into working on PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4. To mark the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation brand, here are some of the key anecdotes from that very session.Sony Europe's target was to sell just 3m PS1s in three years"I had worked in the industry way before PlayStation at Atari in the mid-80s," began Chris Deering, who ran the PlayStation European business up until the launch of PS3."Since that time, Nintendo and Sega were the dominant factions on console. I was happy to get involved with Sony's entry because I thought it would legitimatise console gaming in some countries where it was seen as very downmarket, or even criminal like the arcades down by the train station."I knew that the Sony name would legitimise the concept. But what excited me the most was the disc, which would allow us to get games that were selling fast into store a lot faster than eight weeks, which was the time it would take to order new discs from Japan."So I was optimistic, but not too optimistic to think it wasn't going to be a fight. What we set out to sell in the first three years of the European division was three million units and 14 million games. It ended up being ten million units and 40 million games. We were very conservative in setting the objectives, but we had the ability to scale up. Then we had a lot of fun with the marketing, and developers coming in with new games and super better looking versions of old games, and that all helped to make the phenomenon happen. And it's been here ever since.""I was optimistic about PS2, but not too optimistic to think it wasn't going to be a fight."Chris DeeringPlayStation UK gave away loads of PS1s to 'cool' peopleThe UK PlayStation team was determined to make this new console a desirable, cool product for adults. And to do so, it tapped into the club and rave scene of the mid 1990s."There was this revolution in youth culture at the time," revealed former UK marketing boss Geoff Glendenning. "So we positioned PlayStation in the UK to an 18 to 30-year old market. We made the brand edgy. We made it cool. We didn't pay for any endorsement. We gave hundreds upon hundreds of PlayStations away to very cool people. I didn't say they had to talk about it. There was no social media then. It was truly word of mouth. And that word of mouth was a spark that spread amongst youth tribes and friendships groups. It was very underground."I knew that giving a PlayStation to a top DJ that they'd love it. And they're cool amongst their friends, they'd have their friends round, they'd play it, and they'd effectively become an ambassador for it. We created an army of ambassadors. It wasn't a cool brand because the advertising was cool, it was cool because the movers and shakers and influencers of youth culture were out there saying that Sony really knew it stuff. I employed culturally connected people, who worked in music and fashion and taught them marketing. Because you can't teach a corporate marketer youth culture."It wasn't just club culture. It was also snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti, hip hop, breakdancing... we were in the underground, supporting culture. I wasn't interested in football or F1."The Crash Bandicoot marketing campaign saw a man attacked by pimps PlayStation's slightly unorthodox approach to marketing extended to the launch campaign of Crash Bandicoot saw them create fake Bandicoot road signs and lost pet posters. But one slightly edgier idea may have resulted in a real life assault."We had slightly controversial postcards that went into phone boxes in Soho," Glendenning remembered. "It's where you'd get a lot of postcards featuring... well, ladies who wanted to date people. The guy who was putting these [Bandicoot postcards] up in the phone boxes... well, we found out that all the pimps owned these phone boxes. It was their phone box. We only found out when the guy who was putting those postcards out got beaten up. Which was a shame. Lesson learned."Recollections over whether the assault actually took place, or whether it merely nearly took place, differed amongst the panellists. Either way, they didn't repeat the idea again.Chris Deering beat Richard Branson at Tekken PlayStation rooms featuring consoles connected to the TVs cropped up in all sorts of places, including clubs and retailers. It also featured during the relaunch of Virgin Megastores in London."We created a room full of PlayStations and TVs," Glendenning remembered. "And I just went up to [Virgin boss] Richard Branson and said, 'Hey, would you like to play PlayStation'. And that picture is of [Richard and Chris Deering] playing Tekken against each other."Deering quips: "And I won, thankfully. It would have been embarrassing if I didn't."Rayman was the best-selling game on PS1 in the UKWhat was the best-selling game on PS1 in the UK? Tomb Raider perhaps? Gran Turismo?Nope. It was the original Rayman. The game found its way to the summit due to various bundles and pricing activity. Here's the full Top Ten courtesy of Nielsen.UK Best-Selling PS1 Games (Nielsen)PositionTitle1Rayman (Ubisoft)2Gran Turismo (Sony)3Tomb Raider 2 (Eidos)4Driver (Atari)5Tomb Raider (Eidos)6Gran Turismo 2 (Sony)7Colin Mcrae Rally (Codemasters)8Crash Bandicoot (Sony)9Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (EA)10Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (Eidos)The trade media were sceptical about PS2 ahead of launchPS2 would go on to become the most successful games console of all time. But the trade media at the time was somewhat sceptical about its chances."The popular consensus was that the same platform holder had never maintained dominance over two generations," recalled former PlayStation UK and European PR leader David Wilson. "There was a lot of naysayers. I remember someone at Sega saying on the front page of one of the trade titles, 'We'll kick their asses, they're running away'. So there was negativity about it. But we felt we had a great product. A great heritage. We didn't launch with a great line-up. But you could tell by the anticipation that we had something special."But the stock shortages, which the panellists insisted was not manufactured, caused a real headache."It was tough because there was a special chip in it that was slow to produce. We had supply chain-related issues. The demand was there, but there just wasn't enough machines," Deering said."It was also financially difficult because the publishers had all made games to come out at a certain time, and they couldn't work on anything. So the part of the industry that was involved in PlayStation did have a punch to the gut in 2001. But it all passed."PlayStation took huge financial risks on EyeToy and SingStar Two of the most innovative and successful products on PS2 came out of Sony's London Studio: SingStar and EyeToy. And both of them saw PlayStation Europe take a real gamble that they would take off due to the fact both involved expensive to produce hardware."The EyeToy team went next door to the corporate headquarters," said Dave Ranyard, who held numerous roles at London Studio, including studio director."The team asked them, 'We don't know how many cameras to order, should we order 30,000 or 50,000?' and Chris [Deering] said: 'Order 500,000'. It was a big bet, and it paid off."Deering observed: "Well, we ended up selling six million.""I had Russians having sex on the PlayStation Network"David WilsonIt wasn't the only time Deering backed the London development team."There was another big decision around SingStar," Ranyard added. "Karaoke was huge in Asia, but it wasn't so much in Europe. How do you get people who have never sung in front of their friends or a TV to do that? It's quite a behavioural shift. So the dev team suggested we ship the game with two microphones. Which is double the cost of goods. If you go to any business school, they'd say that was nuts. Ship it with one and sell the other. But we went to Chris Deering, and asked and he said yes. And it worked. It gave people the confidence to play it. They were always with someone else doing this new thing."EyeToy caused some X-rated PR headachesEyeToy did create some unexpended challenges."The games were amazing," Wilson shared. "SingStar and Eyetoy expanded the audience. It was really incredible. But there were a few headaches on the comms side. The ability to broadcast your own content... I had Russians having sex on the PlayStation Network."Ranyard laughed: "We had pioneered user-generated content with video... which yes, had some issues. But it was on a par with YouTube at the time with content creator."The GTA exclusivity deal was partially a reaction to Xbox"We were worried when we saw Xbox coming," Deering remembered. "We knew exclusivity was the name of the game in a lot of fields, like Sky TV with sports. Just as Christmas was approaching when Xbox would launch, a few of us went out to our favourite third-party publishers and developers, and we asked them, 'How would you like a special deal if you keep your next generation game on PlayStation exclusive for a two-year period?' And one of the deals we made was with Take-Two for the next three Grand Theft Auto games. At the time, it wasn't clear that Grand Theft Auto 3 was going to be as huge as it was, because it used to be a top down game."It was very lucky for us. And actually lucky for them, because they got a discount on the royalty they paid. Those deals aren't uncommon in industries with platforms. Including today with things like social media."God of War 2 was a challenge for PS3 David Wilson said that the PlayStation PR team knew that PS3 was going to be a challenge "straight out of the box.""It was our difficult third album. We had a terrible E3. We had a higher price point. We were late to market. It was a challenge."And what made matters worse, the PS2 was still going strong with games that were on par with the PS3 launch line-up."We were launching God of War 2 on PS2, and it looked amazing," Wilson lamented. "And I was like, 'Oh my god, we are trying to push this super expensive machine against our existing machine that had a huge install base and had games that looked this amazing'."Yet things improved. "The PS3 was a game of two halves. In the latter half we had some amazing properties.""We had built up all this technology around camera tracking thinking we had this whole new market, but we didn't"David RanyardThe PS4 was great for developers except for oneThe PS3 was notoriously hard to develop for, while the PS4 was, by comparison, a dream. But when we asked London Studio how they found the PS4, they had one pretty major complaint."London Studio used to work on camera games," Ranyard pointed out. "Even SingStar was considered a camera game as you could use it. And the camera was going to be bundled with the PS4."Usually only about 10% of PlayStation players are going to have a camera. And we thought, 'Wow, this console is going to have a camera in the box'. But then Xbox announced it was going to have Kinect in the box and it became this battle around cameras and price. And the PlayStation Camera was doing this Hokey Cokey, it was in the box, then it was out of the box, then it was in again... but eventually it wasn't in the box. And we had built up all this technology around camera tracking thinking we had this whole new market, but we didn't. So it was a bit challenging for us. And that is what led us towards VR."The UK PS4 launch happened early to compete with Xbox PlayStation was notoriously aggressive against Xbox during the battle between Xbox One and PS4, with the infamous Sony video mocking Xbox's (eventually scrapped) policy around sharing games.Xbox was having a tough time and PlayStation was eager to press the advantage. In the UK, PS4 unlike in the US was launch after the Xbox One release. The UK team's response? Throw a launch party early."We just went early to get out ahead of Xbox," Wilson revealed. "We had the OXO tower [PR stunt in London] at the same time, and a massive party on the night of the US launch so we went a week early to try and get ahead of things."

Chris Kerr, News EditorDecember 6, 20245 Min ReadImage via Google / DeepmindGoogle has unveiled a large-scale foundation world model called Genie 2 that it says is capable of "generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments."Genie 2 is the brainchild of the company's AI research division, Deepmind, and can purportedly create playable 3D worlds "based on a single prompt image."It's billed as a seismic leap forward when compared to Genie 1, which introduced an approach for generating 2D worlds, but what are we actually looking at here?After a fleeting glance, it's tempting to proclaim Google has successfully created a model capable of turning rudimentary prompts into expansive virtual realms. The company itself is eager to suggest as much, writing that Genie 2 can "generate a vast diversity of rich 3D worlds" with emergent capabilities such as "object interactions, complex character animation, physics, and the ability to model and thus predict the behavior of other agents.""Below (as pictured) are example videos of people interacting with Genie 2. For every example, the model is prompted with a single image generated byImagen 3, GDMs state-of-the-art text-to-image model," says the company."This means anyone can describe a world they want in text, select their favorite rendering of that idea, and then step into and interact with that newly created world (or have an AI agent be trained or evaluated in it). At each step, a person or agent provides a keyboard and mouse action, and Genie 2 simulates the next observation. Genie 2 can generate consistent worlds for up to a minute, with the majority of examples shown lasting 10-20s."Image via GoogleThe examples selected by Google to showcase its new model are uniform in their sterility. Character models wander vapid interpretations of forests and deserts, scarcely populated with structures and foliage looped on repeat. Pyramids that bend and warp as the camera swings overhead. A forest of trees echoing ad infinitum.Emergent interactions take the form of basic movements and character animations that flatter to deceive. The short clips shared by Google (which presumably elected to showcase only the finest Genie 2 outputs) feature bland facsimiles of vaguely familiar video game scenarios that quickly fragment and decay when placed under any sort of scrutiny."Genie 2 generates new plausible content on the fly and maintains a consistent world for up to a minute," states Google. This sentence is not the ringing endorsement the company thinks it is.Google and other AI companies fail to understand the act of creationGame developers (and creatives cut from any cloth) do not aspire to create "plausible content." People (and I'm talking about the humans working on your favorite games, not their corporate employers) create to delight, inspire, entertain.We create to connect with each other and unpack our shared human condition. To create anything is to send fragments of yourself into the eternal aether, hoping that someone, somewhere, will find meaning in the deliberate, unpredictable, collaborative mess that art so often becomes.Google evidently doesn't understand how developers make games, either. There's intentionality behind every single decision, whether it's designing an open-world in service of pacing or mechanicsor baking your narrative into the very fabric of the environment. These are not elements you can simply conjure into being with a string of text or AI-generated image.Genie 2 is a blunt instrument lacking precision or purpose. Google has spent time and resources creating a tool that can scarcely reproduce the most cliched examples of video game guff. A blurry neon city. Fantasy man on horse. Now, it must convince us the crumbling husks churned out by Genie 2 are worthy of our time and attention. Let's be clear: they are not.Right now, they're barely even viable. Google itself has admitted the model is only capable of maintaining consistent worlds for less than a minute. It's like watching the memory of a memory swirling the cosmic drain. There is only degradation and collapsepresumably at great real-world cost (via The Guardian).Who is all this for? Based on what Google has showcased here, players dreaming of eventually blinking their own games into reality with the help of AI tools will quickly realize their 'creations' are devoid of both style and substance. Two aspects of video games that are unmistakably human.Developers, meanwhile, have already shown how existing technologies such as procedural generation can be used make entire galaxies corporeal. Robust asset stores exist for those in need of pre-made building blocks to assist with rapid prototyping or full blown production. Engines like Unity, Unreal, Godot, and GameMaker continue to cater to the needs of developers at all levelswhile some might choose to build their own from the ground up.If AI tools like Genie 2 are the solution, what is the problem?In an era of layoffs, studio closures, financial upheaval, and mass conglomeration, the biggest challenge facing developers is finding the resources needed to unlock their creativity in a way that feels sustainable. In an industry that's becoming increasingly risk-averse and insular at the top level, developers need those with the deepest wallets to start taking chances on new ideas instead of trying (and so often failing) to replicate the successes of their competitors.Forget about churning out plausible content. Give developers what they need to pull their most abstract, ambitious ideas into reality. If you really want innovation, invest in people.Read more about:Generative AIAbout 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