I'm not gonna pretend I've figured you, the Engadget reader, out. Trying to predict what is gonna get your little nerd hearts all a flutter is kind of a crapshoot. But, I'm pretty confident that a Tamagotchi in a guitar pedal is right up your alley. Ground Control Audio showed up to NAMM 2024 with the UwU virtual pet buffer pedal.
Now buffer pedals are about the least exciting piece of gear you can buy for your pedal board. Probably even less so than a tuner. But, if you've got a particularly large board or long cables, a buffer can dramatically improve your tone. Basically all it does is take the signal coming in and give it a little boost so you don't lose precious high end to tone suck. Like I said, not exciting.
What UwU does is no different, except that it has a Tamagotchi-style virtual pet and a handful of mini-games built in. As you play, your new pedalboard buddy dances and gains experience points. As the little cat like creature gains experience it evolves over 30 levels with unique animations. As for what happens once you cross that 30 level threshold, well, the company hasn't decided just yet. But there is still time to decide that since the pedal isn't set to start shipping until March.
If simply having a new little virtual friend on your board isn't enough whimsy for you, the UwU also has three mini-games built in. There's Long Cat (a snake clone), Fishy Blox (vaguely Tetris-like) and Neko Invader. The tiny monochrome OLED and small buttons aren't exactly ideal for playing games (and neither is hunching over a pedalboard I might add), but it feels true to its inspiration in old cellphone games.
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
If you're sitting there wondering, "why?" Well, first off, why not? Secondly, to keep you playing, obviously. Finding the time and drive to play or practice guitar can be tough. Especially if you're teen with a hectic life of extra curriculars or, like me, a busy dad of two with a demanding day job. The UwU gives you a reason to play beyond just knowing you should. Carving out a few minutes every day to play will keep your adorable little UwU happy and healthy. Frankly, if I had one of these when I was younger and stubbornly clinging to my belief that I didn't need to know music theory or technique, maybe I'd be a more proficient guitarist.
Of course none this would matter if the UwU was a crappy buffer. But it's got 18v headroom and doesn't color your tone at all. It's even super tiny, so finding room for it on even the most crowded of pedalboards shouldn't be too difficult.
The UwU virtual pet buffer is available now for preorder directly from Ground Control Audio for $139.
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-uwu-virtual-pet-buffer-is-a-tamagotchi-in-a-guitar-pedal-193633790.html?src=rss
Annapurna is delaying the release of its upcoming narrative adventure game, Open Roads, by a few weeks so the team can do a little more refining. It’s now scheduled for release on March 28 instead of the originally planned date of February 22. The decision was made to “ensure the most polished experience for players,” a spokesperson for Annapurna told Engadget.
Open Roads, which we had a chance to preview earlier this month, is a nostalgia-heavy experience that follows 16-year-old Tess Devine (voiced by Kaitlyn Dever) and her mother, Opal (Keri Russel), on a road trip to explore their family’s past. It features hand-drawn animations and, of course, carries the promise of deep, dark family secrets to unearth. It’ll be available for Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and PC.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/narrative-game-open-roads-has-been-delayed-by-a-month-221217266.html?src=rss
We were so close to finally drifting on the cobblestone streets of Yharnam, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer for Bloodborne Kart. And, it’ll be called something else when it does arrive. Lilith Walther, the developer behind the project, said the team has to “scrub the branding” off of the game and delay its release after Sony intervened. It was supposed to be released on January 31 for PC. The outcome isn’t exactly surprising, but it means the game will take shape a bit differently than planned — in a thread posted on X, Walther said, “This is a fan game no more!”
Bloodborne Kart, a retro-style racing game that started out as a meme, has generated a ton of support from fans who have been yearning for new Bloodborne content. In response to the latest development, many have joked that the whole saga has forced Sony, which owns the IP, to actually acknowledge the title for the first time in years. Walther previously released a free Bloodborne “demake” in the style of a PS1 game.
“So Sony contacted us,” Walther wrote in an update on Friday. “Long story short, we need to scrub the branding off of what was previously known as Bloodborne Kart. We will do this, but that requires a short delay. Don't worry, the game is still coming out! It'll just look slightly different.”
The developers planned to feature 12 racers styled after familiar Bloodborne characters, including The Hunter and The Doll from the Hunter’s Dream, with single-player and multiplayer modes. There were to be 16 maps and boss fights, so you could race against the likes of Father Gascoigne. It really sucks that they won’t be able to follow through with the original idea, because it looked awesome, but I have no doubt they’ll spin it into something equally great.
“We were honestly expecting something like this to happen and the idea of having full creative control is kind of exciting!” Walther wrote. There's no new release date just yet, but in the meantime, you can rewatch the Bloodborne Kart trailer on a loop and dream of what we almost had.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fan-made-bloodborne-kart-catches-heat-from-sony-forcing-developers-to-shift-gears-183652390.html?src=rss
We were so close to finally drifting on the cobblestone streets of Yharnam, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer for Bloodborne Kart. And, it’ll be called something else when it does arrive. Lilith Walther, the developer behind the project, said the team has to “scrub the branding” off of the game and delay its release after Sony intervened. It was supposed to be released on January 31 for PC. The outcome isn’t exactly surprising, but it means the game will take shape a bit differently than planned — in a thread posted on X, Walther said, “This is a fan game no more!”
Bloodborne Kart, a retro-style racing game that started out as a meme, has generated a ton of support from fans who have been yearning for new Bloodborne content. In response to the latest development, many have joked that the whole saga has forced Sony, which owns the IP, to actually acknowledge the title for the first time in years. Walther previously released a free Bloodborne “demake” in the style of a PS1 game.
“So Sony contacted us,” Walther wrote in an update on Friday. “Long story short, we need to scrub the branding off of what was previously known as Bloodborne Kart. We will do this, but that requires a short delay. Don't worry, the game is still coming out! It'll just look slightly different.”
The developers planned to feature 12 racers styled after familiar Bloodborne characters, including The Hunter and The Doll from the Hunter’s Dream, with single-player and multiplayer modes. There were to be 16 maps and boss fights, so you could race against the likes of Father Gascoigne. It really sucks that they won’t be able to follow through with the original idea, because it looked awesome, but I have no doubt they’ll spin it into something equally great.
“We were honestly expecting something like this to happen and the idea of having full creative control is kind of exciting!” Walther wrote. There's no new release date just yet, but in the meantime, you can rewatch the Bloodborne Kart trailer on a loop and dream of what we almost had.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fan-made-bloodborne-kart-catches-heat-from-sony-forcing-developers-to-shift-gears-183652390.html?src=rss
Note: This review was originally published during Sundance 2024. We're reposting it because Seeking Mavis Beacon is now out in theaters.
With a healthy dose of heart and whimsy, the Sundance documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon follows two young Black women who are devoted to finding the original model for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. If you touched a computer during the '80s or '90s, there's a good chance that Mavis helped you get comfortable with a keyboard. Or at the very least, you might remember her from the program's original 1987 cover: a smiling, elegant Black woman dressed in a cream-colored outfit. She embodied style and professional poise — it was as if you could be just as capable as her if you bought that program.
It's no spoiler to say that "Mavis Beacon" didn't really exist – she was a marketing idea crafted by a group of white dudes from Silicon Valley. But the program's cover star was real: Her name was Renee L'Esperance, a Haitian model who was discovered while working at Saks Fifth Avenue in Los Angeles. After her image helped make Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing a success, she retreated from the spotlight, reportedly heading back to retire in the Caribbean.
Seeking Mavis Beacon
The documentary's director and writer, Jazmin Jones, as well as her collaborator, Olivia McKayla Ross, start with those basic details and set out to find L'Esperance like a pair of digital detectives. From a home base in a rundown Bay Area office – surrounded by tech ephemera, a variety of art pieces and images of influential black women – they lay out L'Esperance's reported timeline, follow leads and even host a spiritual ceremony to try and connect with the model.
I won't say if the pair actually end up finding L'Esperance because it's the journey that makes Seeking Mavis Beacon such a joy to watch. Jones and Ross both grew up with the typing program and felt a kinship toward the character of Mavis Beacon. It was the first program to prominently feature a Black woman on the cover (a move that reportedly caused some suppliers to cut their orders), so it made the technology world seem like somewhere young Black women could actually fit in. Beacon's digital hands also appear on-screen, as if she's gently guiding your fingers to the correct letters and positioning.
To help uncover more details about the whereabouts of Mavis Beacon, Jones and Ross set up a hotline and website for anyone to submit clues. Some of those calls are featured in the film, and they make it clear that her digital presence inspired many people. The film opens with references to Beacon throughout culture, including one of my favorite bits from Abbott Elementary, where Quinta Brunson's over-achieving teacher is far too excited to spot the typing icon in a school crowd. I was reminded of my own childhood experience with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, spending free periods at school and idle time at home trying to get my typing speed up. By middle school, typing felt as natural as breathing. And yes, I would also have freaked out if I saw the real Beacon in person.
While the documentary doesn't seem out of place at Sundance, which is known for innovative projects, it also sometimes feels like a piece of experimental media meant for YouTube or an art show filled with impossibly cool twenty-somethings. (At one point, Ross attends a farewell ceremony for one of her friends' dead laptops, which was hosted in an art space filled with people dressed in white. That's the sort of hip weirdness that will either turn you off of this film, or endear you to it more.)
Yeleen Cohen
Jones shows us screen recordings of her own desktop, where she may be watching a TikTok alongside her notes. Instead of a full-screen video chat with another person, sometimes we just see a FaceTime window (and occasionally that reflects Jones' own image looking at the screen). Finding Mavis Beacon tells its story in a way that digital natives will find natural, without locking itself exclusively into screens like the film Searching.
As is true for many first features, the film could use some narrative tightening. Jones and Ross's investigation stalls at several points, and we're often just left adrift as they ponder their next steps. The pair also occasionally appear too close to the story, or at least, that's how it seems when we see Jones tearing up while pleading to meet with L'Esperance.
But I'd argue that's also part of the charm of Seeking Mavis Beacon. Jones and Ross aren't some true crime podcast hosts looking to create content out of controversy. They're young women who found comfort in one of the few faces in tech that looked like them. With this film, Jones and Ross could be similarly inspirational for a new generation of underrepresented techies.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/seeking-mavis-beacon-review-sundance-documentary-140049830.html?src=rss
Instagram is testing yet another feature meant to give users an alternative to finstas. It’s called “flipside” and it allows people to create a secondary photo grid that only designated friends can see.
If that sounds somewhat familiar it’s probably because Instagram already makes it pretty easy for users to create posts intended for a more limited audience. The app added the ability for users to share grid posts with “close friends” back in November (Stories for close friends has been a thing since 2018). More recently, it tested audience lists for Stories, so users could create multiple lists for small-group sharing. The app, of course, also makes it fairly easy to create an actual finsta.
Flipside, somewhat confusingly, offers yet another way of doing essentially the same thing. Users create a separate list of friends, distinct from “close friends,” to add to their “flipside.” They can then choose to post to their main grid or to their “flipside,” which is also accessible from their profile but only visible to the aforementioned list of friends. People will know if they have access to someone’s flipside if they see a key icon in someone’s grid, according to screenshots shared on Threads. (You can see a video of it in action over on Threads.)
Apparently, even Instagram head Adam Mosseri realizes this is all a bit redundant. “On one hand it feels good to create a clear space that feels more private,” he wrote in a post on Threads. “On the other, it's yet another way to reach a smaller audience on top of secondary accounts and Close Friends.”
He added that “we're not even sure we'll launch it,” which might explain why the company has been relatively quiet about the test. Flipside was first spotted back in December but was an internal prototype at the time, according toTechCrunch. However, it's now started to appear for actual users, with a number of reports of it appearing on Threads over the last day.
Early reactions seem to be mixed, with some enthusiasm for the update and some wondering why on earth they need yet another social media profile to maintain. Others seem to be, understandably, confused.
While finstas have (sometimes hilariously) been maligned, Meta’s recent obsession with creating “more private” spaces on Instagram is likely about more than simply adding convenience. Mosseri has noted many times over the last couple years that Instagram users simply aren’t posting as much as they used to, especially in their feeds. For an app that relies on advertising — much of it in users’ feeds — that’s less than ideal. So it’s not all that surprising Instagram would be looking for new ways to get people to spend more time posting to and scrolling their feeds.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-is-testing-flipside-a-finsta-feature-that-already-kind-of-exists-215905150.html?src=rss
Cities: Skylines II developer Colossal Order has a uniquely close relationship with its community. The original Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and gobbled up the audience that was left behind by EA’s SimCity, which came out in 2013 and was a busted mess. Cities: Skylines scratched that urban-planning itch, plus it cost just $30. The game came first to PC, Mac and Linux with modest hardware requirements, and it hit consoles within two years. Critically, Cities: Skylines also supported mods through the Steam Workshop, allowing players to add their own tools to the game and share those features with others.
“With Cities: Skylines, the audience grew in size and the modding took even a bigger role, allowing for a huge amount of creativity and inspiration for us devs,” Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen told Engadget. “Anything from quality-of-life improvements to ideas for DLC content, we have gathered a huge amount of information to help us create the game that Cities: Skylines is today.”
Colossal Order and its publisher, Paradox Interactive, continued to support Cities: Skylines with consistent game updates and DLC drops, and its mod community continued to grow. The game picked up a ton of new players during the pandemic in 2020, and around that time, a number of now-prominent content creators leaned into Cities: Skylines for streams and videos.
In the months before the launch of Cities: Skylines II in October 2023, Colossal Order partnered with a handful of content creators and gave them access to bits of the game early, so they could create YouTube videos showing off specific features each week. These partners included Biffa, two dollars twenty, YUMBL, Infrastructurist and City Planner Plays. City Planner Plays has a clever edge in this space — Philip, the man behind the builds, worked as an urban planner for more than a decade, and his videos often include insights about how real-life cities are designed. He started his channel in mid-2020, and today he’s a dedicatedCities: Skylines streamer and video editor with nearly 650,000 subscribers on YouTube. Like many other community members, he has a history with Colossal Order that spans years.
“Prior to the Cities: Skylines II release, I think that most everyone in the community viewed them incredibly positively, looking at them as ‘one of us’ and the type of developer that you want making a game that you love,” Philip said. “They were viewed as responsive and generous. …I can’t recall a bad thing being said about them.”
“We have seen a growing tendency of toxicity in our community, something we have not experienced to this extent before,” Hallikainen wrote, clarifying that the negativity was being directed at developers and players alike. She continued, “We have always treasured having the devs present on the different social platforms and having direct communication with the community, but our biggest responsibility will always be protecting the team.”
Tensions have been high in the Cities: Skylines community since the launch of the sequel in October. Though the game was originally pitched as a simultaneous PC and console release, it’s only available on PC and there’s no concrete timeline for when the other versions will come out. On top of that, Colossal Order raised the game’s minimum and recommended specs just a month before release, and the new requirements placed it out of reach for a large chunk of players.
Colossal Order
Even with a capable rig, the game is riddled with visual and mechanical bugs. Philip said Cities: Skylines II strained his RTX 4090 graphics card, making it run at 100 percent on the main menu, and he couldn’t play in 4K at launch because the game was so GPU-bound.
Simply put, it feels like the game needed more time in development.
“Since the launch of Cities: Skylines II, things have without a doubt gotten more prickly,” Philip said. “While many people have been appreciative of Colossal Order’s transparency with the weekly updates as well as the frequent bug fixes, many appear to view Colossal Order as being all-too-willing to release a game that wasn’t ready to be released.”
Hallikainen acknowledged that the game is missing some promised and highly publicized features, like mod support.
“Naturally we’re disappointed we weren’t able to achieve everything we aimed for, but it’s fantastic to have the game finally out and continue working on it with more openness,” she said.
The issue, as far as Colossal Order sees it, lies in the community’s response to Cities: Skylines II. Players have been venting on social media and in the Steam and Paradox forums, and the feedback has risen to toxic levels, according to Hallikainen. She cites a surge in personal attacks on developers and other players.
Colossal Order
“Cities: Skylines II attracted a lot of attention and very high expectations were set,” she said. “When the game did not fulfill all the promises, it was natural to cause frustration in the audience. However, the shortcomings should spark a conversation on ideas for improvement, constructive feedback and respectful discussions in the community.”
For City Planner Plays and other community members, the issue is the game itself. Where Colossal Order sees toxicity, Philip sees justified frustration.
“I will admit that I was taken aback by this description of what’s happening in the Cities: Skylines community regarding Cities: Skylines II,” he said. “I have noticed increased negativity. However, I wouldn’t say that I have noticed increased toxicity. And bluntly, I think the negativity is completely understandable and predictable.”
Philip identified four factors driving the negative sentiment: The game is only on PC, it’s buggy and unplayable on many common hardware configurations, there’s no official support for mods, and Colossal Order hasn’t held itself accountable for the game’s blunders.
“Colossal Order has been transparent, talking with the community, but has not taken accountability for the release of the game,” Philip said. “I hear this over and over again. Many players appear to want them to admit that the release state of the game was poor, say that they are sorry, and make some gesture to make amends. To date, they have delayed the DLC release — which actually was a huge negative for people that purchased the Ultimate Edition of the game — but not made amends. [They haven’t] provided the information that people are looking for.”
Colossal Order
The biggest misstep on Philip's list is the lack of mods. Colossal Order is planning to add an official pipeline for mods directly through Paradox, rather than Steam Workshop, which was the home for mods in Cities: Skylines. Shifting to an in-house modding platform will ensure parity across all platforms, bringing mods to consoles and players outside of Steam. However, the Cities: Skylines mod community was built on Steam Workshop, a popular and easy-to-use platform, and with the delay of the console release, the current player base is simply being inconvenienced.
“The maps that come with the game aren’t great — incredibly high difficulty level, unforgiving weather — and many basic features need refinement,” Philip said. “Mods offered that opportunity and they aren’t available just yet. Worst of all, early messaging made it seem like modding was around the corner, weeks after launch, [but it’s been delayed] to some undetermined time in Q2 of 2024.”
Collaboration with the community is what made the original game so successful, and the sequel could certainly benefit from crowdsourced improvements. For now, some players are using a third-party tool to make mods work in Cities: Skylines II.
“The tech is new, the simulation has been entirely rewritten and the game has all the potential to become the city-builder of this decade,” Hallikainen said. “What we failed in was to get the modding support available for the release, and we’re doing our best to catch up. We have been delighted to see the modding community has not waited for us, but are already creating amazing mods for the game.”
Paradox Interactive
This is only the beginning for Cities: Skylines II. Colossal Order has plans to support and expand the game over the next 10 years. The original Cities: Skylines didn’t have all of the bells, whistles and mods when it first came out in 2015, and the sequel is starting in a similar position. Colossal Order sees Cities: Skylines II as a fresh foundation, but its core community expected a more complete experience.
“The feedback we’ve gotten from the content creators and modders has immensely helped us in heading in the right direction, and we love working in cooperation with different parties,” Hallikainen said. “There’s a lot of work to be done and we plan to keep going for the next decade.”
Cities: Skylines II has improved significantly in the months since launch, thanks to a slew of updates from Colossal Order. It’s on the right track. Colossal Order continues to publish updates on the game’s progress each week, but it’ll take time — and maybe an apology, a plan and free in-game perks — to rewrite the narrative around Cities: Skylines II.
“I think the most ‘toxic’ people right now are the game’s biggest fans,” Philip said. “And bluntly, they are just disappointed that the game doesn’t run well for them or that they can’t play it at all. They’re disappointed and lashing out, which isn’t right. But to me, that means that there is a path to repair the issues if the game is fully fixed and accountability is taken.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whats-up-with-the-toxicity-around-cities-skylines-ii-213034938.html?src=rss
To the surprise of just about everyone — seemingly including the studio behind it — virtual reality game Ultrawings 2 has hit PlayStation VR2 earlier than expected. Developer Bit Planet Games wrote on X that "shadow dropping Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 today was not on our 2024 bingo card but, well, here we are." (A shadow drop refers to a surprise release of a product as soon as it's announced, like Hi-Fi Rush.)
It's unclear exactly how Ultrawings 2, which debuted on Steam and Meta Quest in 2022, arrived on PS VR2 ahead of schedule. Bit Planet had wanted to bring the aerial adventure title to that platform by the end of 2023 but was unable to. It instead promised to release Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 early this year. On January 9, Bit Planet noted it had started the submission process.
Nevertheless, the studio says the PS VR2 debut was "unforeseen." While the developers say the current version of the game has some "relatively minor issues," those have been resolved and were planned to be fixed in a day-one patch. That's more likely to be a day-five update, but the studio saidUltrawings 2 is "solid" as is.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ultrawings-2-hits-ps-vr2-early-and-even-the-developer-was-surprised-173918655.html?src=rss
A woman has a text chat with her long-dead lover. A family gets to hear a deceased elder speak again. A mother gets another chance to say goodbye to her child, who died suddenly, via a digital facsimile. This isn't a preview of the next season of Black Mirror — these are all true stories from the Sundance documentary Eternal You, a fascinating and frightening dive into tech companies using AI to digitally resurrect the dead.
It's yet another way modern AI, which includes large language models like ChatGPT and similar bespoke solutions, has the potential to transform society. And as Eternal You shows, the AI afterlife industry is already having a profound effect on its early users.
The film opens on a woman having a late night text chat with a friend: "I can't believe I'm trying this, how are you?" she asks, as if she's using the internet for the first time. "I'm okay. I'm working, I'm living. I'm... scared," her friend replies. When she asks why, they reply, "I'm not used to being dead."
Beetz Brothers Film Production
It turns out the woman, Christi Angel, is using the AI service Project December to chat with a simulation of her first love, who died many years ago. Angel is clearly intrigued by the technology, but as a devout Christian, she's also a bit spooked out by the prospect of raising the dead. The AI system eventually gives her some reasons to be concerned: Cameroun reveals that he's not in heaven, as she assumes. He's in hell.
"You're not in hell," she writes back. "I am in hell," the AI chatbot insists. The digital Cameroun says he's in a "dark and lonely" place, his only companions are "mostly addicts." The chatbot goes on to say he's currently haunting a treatment center and later suggests "I'll haunt you." That was enough to scare Angel and question why she was using this service in the first place.
While Angel was aware she was talking to a digital recreation of Cameroun, which was based on the information she provided to Project December, she interacted with the chatbot as if she was actually chatting with him on another plane of existence. That's a situation that many users of AI resurrection services will likely encounter: Rationality can easily overwhelm your emotional response while "speaking" with a dead loved one, even if the conversation is just occurring over text.
In the film, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle suggests that our current understanding of how AI affects people is similar to our relationship with social media over a decade ago. That makes it a good time to ask questions about the human values and purposes it's serving, she says. If we had a clearer understanding of social media early on, maybe we could have pushed Facebook and Twitter to confront misinformation and online abuse more seriously. (Perhaps the 2016 election would have looked very different if we were aware of how other countries could weaponize social media.)
Beetz Brothers Film Production
Eternal You also introduces us to Joshua Barbeau, a freelance writer who became a bit of an online celebrity in 2021 when The San Francisco Chronicle reported on his Project December chatbot: a digital version of his ex-fiancee Jessica. At first, he used Project December to chat with pre-built bots, but he eventually realized he could use the underlying technology (GPT-3, at the time) to create one with Jessica's personality. Their conversations look natural and clearly comfort Barbeau. But we're still left wondering if chatting with a facsimile of his dead fiancee is actually helping Barbeau to process his grief. It could just as easily be seen as a crutch that he feels compelled to pay for.
It's also easy to be cynical about these tools, given what we see from their creators in the film. We meet Jason Rohrer, the founder and Project December and a former indie game designer, who comes across as a typical techno-libertarian.
"I believe in personal responsibility," he says, after also saying that he's not exactly in control of the AI models behind Project December, and right before we see him nearly crash a drone into his co-founders face. "I believe that consenting adults can use that technology however they want and they're responsible for the results of whatever they're doing. It's not my job as the creator of the technology to prevent the technology from being released, because I'm afraid of what somebody might do with it."
But, as MIT's Turkle points out, reanimating the dead via AI introduces moral questions that engineers like Rohrer likely aren't considering. "You're dealing with something much more profound in the human spirit," she says. "Once something is constituted enough that you can project onto it, this life force. It's our desire to animate the world, which is human, which is part of our beauty. But we have to worry about it, we have to keep it in check. Because I think it's leading us down a dangerous path."
Beetz Brothers Film Production
Another service, Hereafter.ai, lets users record stories to create a digital avatar of themselves, which family members can talk to now or after they die. One woman was eager to hear her father's voice again, but when she presented the avatar to her family the reaction was mixed. Younger folks seemed intrigue, but the older generation didn't want any part of it. "I fear that sometimes we can go too far with technology," her father's sister said. "I would just love to remember him as a person who was wonderful. I don't want my brother to appear to me. I'm satisfied knowing he's at peace, he's happy, and he's enjoying the other brothers, his mother and father."
YOV, an AI company that also focuses on personal avatars, or "Versonas," wants people to have seamless communication with their dead relatives across multiple channels. But, like all of these other digital afterlife companies, it runs into the same moral dilemmas. Is it ethical to digitally resurrect someone, especially if they didn't agree to it? Is the illusion of speaking to the dead more helpful or harmful for those left behind?
The most troubling sequence in Eternal You focuses on a South Korean mother, Jang Ji-sun, who lost her young child and remains wracked with guilt about not being able to say goodbye. She ended up being the central subject in a VR documentary, Meeting You, which was broadcast in South Korea in early 2020. She went far beyond a mere text chat: Jang donned a VR headset and confronted a startlingly realistic model of her child in virtual reality. The encounter was clearly moving for Jang, and the documentary received plenty of media attention at the time.
"There's a line between the world of the living and the world of the dead," said Kim Jong-woo, the producer behind Meeting You. "By line, I mean the fact that the dead can't come back to life. But people saw the experience as crossing that line. After all, I created an experience in which the beloved seemed to have returned. Have I made some huge mistake? Have I broken the principle of humankind? I don't know... maybe to some extent."
Eternal You paints a haunting portrait of an industry that's already revving up to capitalize on grief-stricken people. That's not exactly new; psychics and people claiming to speak to the dead have been around for our entire civilization. But through AI, we now have the ability to reanimate those lost souls. While that might be helpful for some, we're clearly not ready for a world where AI resurrection is commonplace.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sundance-documentary-eternal-you-shows-how-ai-companies-are-resurrecting-the-dead-153025316.html?src=rss
Catching up on a new podcast should get easier very soon. Apple has announced that it will automatically transcribe podcasts, which should allow more people to enjoy episodes. Apple Podcast will allow creators to upload their own transcript for display or opt for Apple to create one.
There are some caveats to be aware of, though. Apple Podcasts should start creating the transcription when the episode is uploaded. However, it has a "short delay" until it's available, so people eager to play their favorite podcast right away will have to wait for an unspecified amount of time (Apple tells podcasters to give it at least 24 hours after uploading an episode). It's likely that the longer the episode is, the longer the transcription will take to be ready. The transcription will also not update if parts of the recording are changed with dynamically inserted audio, and it won't display music lyrics.
Podcasters must follow Apple's quality requirements for their episodes to get correctly transcribed. According to Apple, podcasts with people talking over each other or music might not have as good a transcription. If someone chooses to upload their own, it must be a VTT or SRT file. A podcaster can also edit a transcription for greater accuracy.
Apple Podcasts' transcriptions should launch in the spring on iOS 17.4 in English, German, Spanish and French. The feature is available in over 170 countries and regions, with older episodes getting transcribed over time.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-podcasts-will-automatically-generate-transcripts-in-ios-174-091040750.html?src=rss