Just over half of game developers think gen AI is bad for the industry, according to a report published earlier this year. During The State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest on Wednesday, Epic Games revealed just how it's embracing generative AI in Unreal Engine (UE). Along with offering the first details on Unreal Engine 6 (UE6), the company discussed new features for Unreal Engine 5.8, which it also released on Wednesday. As part of the latest update, Epic is offering an experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin that will allow developers to hook gen AI models such as Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine. It's looking to make the MCP an integral part of UE6.

AI-generated music is becoming increasingly common and increasingly difficult to recognise. Here are the tell-tale signs that reveal whether a song is AI-generated – and what this development means for the music industry.

'Pretty Crazy' Token Usage Is Testing Bosses' Bet on AI A Silicon Valley software maker and an ecommerce company reveal to WIRED how they are navigating the emerging challenge of "tokenomics." At the software company 8x8, employees are using Anthropic's Claude to draft emails, analyze customer feedback, and write code, but so far, their growing reliance on the artificial intelligence chatbot hasn't troubled the finance team. While other Silicon Valley companies, such as Meta, Uber, and Salesforce, have publicly expressed concerns about the growing cost of generative AI tools and have begun introducing usage caps in some cases, 8x8 says it finds itself in the black. Over the past 18 months, the company estimates it has saved about $5 million in annual costs by canceling subscriptions to dozens of software and educational tools it deemed unnecessary in part because Claude could provide similar capabilities. So far, 8x8's annualized bill for Claude is "well below" that figure, says Joel Neeb, the company's chief transformation and business operations officer.

We introduce BikeBench, an engineering design benchmark for evaluating generative models on problems with multiple real-world objectives and constraints. As generative AI's reach continues to grow, evaluating its capability to understand physical laws, human guidelines, and hard constraints grows increasingly important. Engineering product design lies at the intersection of these difficult tasks, providing new challenges for AI capabilities. BikeBench evaluates AI models' capabilities to generate bicycle designs that not only resemble the dataset, but meet specific performance objectives and constraints. To do so, BikeBench quantifies a variety of human-centered and multiphysics performance characteristics, such as aerodynamics, ergonomics, structural mechanics, human-rated usability, and similarity to subjective text or image prompts. Supporting the benchmark are several datasets of simulation results, a dataset of 10,000 human-rated bicycle assessments, and a synthetically generated dataset of 1.6M designs, each with a parametric, CAD/XML, SVG, and PNG representation. BikeBench is uniquely configured to evaluate tabular generative models, large language models (LLMs), design optimization, and hybrid algorithms side-by-side. Our experiments indicate that LLMs and tabular generative models fall short of hybrid GenAI+optimization algorithms in design quality, constraint satisfaction, and similarity scores, suggesting significant room for improvement. We hope that BikeBench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark, will help catalyze progress in generative AI for constrained multi-objective engineering design problems.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. O.C. immigration attorneys suspended for filing briefs filled with AI-hallucinated errors The attorneys were fined $2,500 each and suspended from practicing in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for six months. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . A pair of Orange County immigration attorneys received temporary suspensions after the court discovered they used generative AI to write briefs that included "multiple nonexistent cases, misattributed quotations, and gross misrepresentations."

They Khan't get away with that. Paramount+ looks to have used generative AI to whip up a thumbnail for, according to a report by . The image shows Captain Kirk, as played by William Shatner, dressed in a business suit. Kirk never dons a business suit in, or any other time throughout Shatner's decades of portraying the character. He did rock a flannel shirt and jeans once during a visit to 1930s Earth.

Automated systems built on artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly deployed across high-stakes domains, raising critical concerns about fairness and the perpetuation of demographic disparities that exist in the world. In this context, causal inference provides a principled framework for reasoning about fairness, as it links observed disparities to underlying mechanisms and aligns naturally with human intuition and legal notions of discrimination. Prior work on causal fairness primarily focuses on the standard machine learning setting, where a decision-maker constructs a single predictive mechanism $f_{\widehat Y}$ for an outcome variable $Y$, while inheriting the causal mechanisms of all other covariates from the real world. The generative AI setting, however, is markedly more complex: generative models can sample from arbitrary conditionals over any set of variables, implicitly constructing their own beliefs about all causal mechanisms rather than learning a single predictive function. This fundamental difference requires new developments in causal fairness methodology. We formalize the problem of causal fairness in generative AI and unify it with the standard ML setting under a common theoretical framework. We then derive new causal decomposition results that enable granular quantification of fairness impacts along both (a) different causal pathways and (b) the replacement of real-world mechanisms by the generative model's mechanisms. We establish identification conditions and introduce efficient estimators for causal quantities of interest, and demonstrate the value of our methodology by analyzing race and gender bias in large language models across different datasets.

AI chatbots are giving out people's real phone numbers People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI--and there's apparently no easy way to prevent it. A Redditor recently wrote that he was "desperate for help": for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from "strangers" who were "looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith." Callers were apparently misdirected by Google's generative AI. In March, a software developer in Israel was contacted on WhatsApp after Google's chatbot Gemini provided incorrect customer service instructions that included his number. And in April, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington was messing around on Gemini and got it to cough up her colleague's personal cell phone number. AI researchers and online privacy experts have long warned of the myriad dangers generative AI poses for personal privacy.

Hackers and other cybercriminals are complaining about "AI shit" flooding platforms where they discuss cyberattacks and other illegal activity. "I'm disappointed that you are working to incorporate AI garbage into the site," one annoyed person, posting anonymously, said in an online message. "No-one is asking for this--we want you to improve the site, stop charging for new features." Only, this is not a regular internet user moaning about AI being forced into their favorite app . Instead, they are complaining about a cybercrime forum's plans to introduce more generative AI.

Tim Cook's Legacy Is Turning Apple Into a Subscription The soon-to-exit Apple CEO went all in on services. Now, the incoming CEO, John Ternus, will need to embrace the AI era. Tim Cook's tenure as CEO at Apple, which is coming to a close September 1, will likely be defined by operational efficiency and financial growth, ushering Apple into its trillion-dollar era. But his most significant achievement might be in doubling down on Apple's services business, which includes iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, News+, and more. It's the subscription layer on top of iOS, and almost all of the service apps are tightly integrated with Messages, the glue that keeps people stuck to their iPhones .