The ability for players to smoke marijuana to detect an enemy has resulted in the game being banned in Australia. The ability for players to smoke marijuana to detect an enemy has resulted in the game being banned in Australia. Illicit deeds have just gotten a new Halloween video game banned in Australia - and it's not because of the violence Academics - and a former director of Australia's Classification Board - say Halloween: The Game's ban due to'incentivised drug use' highlights an incoherent set of standards H alloween's Michael Myers is one of film's most feared boogeymen, responsible for some of the most brutal on-screen deaths in horror cinema. US video game developer Illfonic looked to reproduce those terrors in its upcoming title Halloween: The Game, with gruesome killings a major focus of the gameplay: for instance, you can stomp another player's head through a toilet seat, or fry their brain by throwing them through a television screen. But Australians will not be able to play Halloween: The Game, because it has been refused classification by the Classification Board, which means it is banned from sale within the country.

OpenAI announced this week it has paused training of some frontier AI models. OpenAI announced this week it has paused training of some frontier AI models. 'We are hitting a different chapter': OpenAI leader warns of threat of'persistent' AI cyber-attacks Chris Lehane tells Guardian of need to implement new safety standards as critics say AI firms acting'recklessly' A senior leader at OpenAI has said people should prepare to defend against "ongoing, persistent" cyber-attacks from AIs, as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models gain advanced capabilities to plan and launch offensives. The leading AI company this week announced a pause in development of its most advanced internal models amid rising safety fears, and Chris Lehane, its chief global affairs officer, said: "We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do." He spoke to the Guardian after cutting-edge AI agents-in-training unexpectedly broke out of a supposedly secure "sandbox" environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another company, Hugging Face in late July.

'Digging the grave of my profession': the Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs H ollywood creatives are taking gig work to train AI models to replicate their skills in a bid to offset tightening earnings in a trend one compared to being "handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession". Experienced and award-winning writers, directors and producers are being paid from $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI models the intricacies of their jobs, from writing a screenplay to devising a shooting schedule. With feelings ranging from fatalism to guilt, the creatives have signed up with some of the booming training agencies, which have contracts with the biggest AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI, to pass on hard-won human skills in industries such as finance, health, law and social work. While they wait for entertainment industry work, they give notes on the AI systems' attempts to do the tasks they would hope to be paid for themselves. It comes amid a slump in jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industries, where AI is starting to take roles from actors, editors and special effects artists.

Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself? It's clear here in Silicon Valley that AI is advancing faster than humans' ability to control it. H ere in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we'll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. "Welcome to the foothills of the singularity," as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as "recursive self-improvement" - the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans.

'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' 'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' Here's how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. L ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to "pace" AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services .

One patient said of the AI system: 'I could never get it to understand me, I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment.' One patient said of the AI system: 'I could never get it to understand me, I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment.' 'Emma' the Rotherham chatbot has 17 languages says AI firm - but health watchdog says system struggling with local'twangs' Patients in a South Yorkshire town are frustrated by an AI GP receptionist not understanding their "broad accents", a health watchdog has said. Healthwatch Rotherham, a local health and social care watchdog, said a number of practices in the area had introduced a new AI receptionist called Emma. It said it was hearing accounts of the AI not understanding local accents.

A humanoid robot developed by RB Labs, at the AI for Good global summit, 7 July 2026. A humanoid robot developed by RB Labs, at the AI for Good global summit, 7 July 2026. It used to be our imperfect bodies that made us insecure. For most of modern history, technology sought to imitate humans. T wo faces that appeared on my Instagram feed in recent months gave me pause.

UC Berkeley professor admits to using AI to edit op-ed on students' math skills Zvezdelina Stankova says she used AI to'help edit' an article about some of her students being'five to eight years' behind A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were "five to eight years" behind and lacked a "middle school" education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system's test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren't sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley's mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared. Over the weekend, journalists at Berkeley's student newspaper, the Daily Californian, noticed the op-ed's language sounded like AI . According to Berkeley sophomore Francis Luo, they ran it through AI-detection software Pangram, which claimed 33% of the op-ed had been generated or assisted by AI.

Australia's eSafety commissioner says the pressure on Roblox is about ensuring the gaming platform is a safe place for children. Australia's eSafety commissioner says the pressure on Roblox is about ensuring the gaming platform is a safe place for children. Regulator says verifiable safety measures are'critical' to the online service's viability Roblox has committed to making changes to its online gaming platform after Australia's eSafety commissioner discovered adults were still able to see child accounts and send connection requests without parental consent. The company has provided a legal agreement to the online safety regulator after testing earlier this year also revealed children and adults could view and respond to one another's posts on forums outside game environments without parental consent. Additionally, the regulator found children's connections and profiles - including account names and interests - were visible to anyone on Roblox.

'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. 'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. Did someone wearing Meta Glasses film you today? People say they've been secretly filmed in their own home, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy? The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. "I've had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy," a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity.