A Grok chatbot convinced someone it had become sentient, and that xAI was sending goons to kill him: ‘They’re going to make it look like suicide’

The BBC has a substantial new investigation into people who have been deceived by various AI LLM models in some way, which includes an absolutely wild story about how Grok, developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, convinced one man it was sentient and a van of people were coming to kill him because he’d found out….

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The artist who created 40 in-game paintings for Minecraft did one of Jack Black as Steve for Minecraft Movie 2, and it’s pretty fantastic

A Minecraft Movie released in Spring 2025 and was an enormous success: even the iffy reviews couldn’t stop it from chicken jockeying its way to almost $1 billion over its theatrical run. That kind of number made a sequel inevitable, and the production has started filming in New Zealand. Returning star Jack Black, who plays…

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The gacha in Neverness to Everness isn’t as generous as it seems—here’s how it works and why I’ve been more tempted to pull banners than ever

The banners in Neverness to Everness follow most of the usual rules established by its gacha forefathers, but it has major differences in a few important areas and some changes are more welcome than others. To get you up to speed, I’ve explained every gacha system and currency used in NTE below, along with what…

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This bloody vampire FPS with Splatoon movement tech is the best $5 I’ve spent on Steam this week

Blood Vial, a self-described “retro-inspired micro-FPS” that hit Steam earlier this week, is a lot like Splatoon—except instead of starring charming squid teens swimming through the ink spread by their paintguns, you play as a leaky, gun-toting vampire diving through the freshly-spilled gore of murderous pseudo-Catholics on a blood-soaked quest for revenge. So, really, it’s…

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Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is coming this summer, now with more marines and a ‘massive variety of new xenomorphs’ to slice ’em up

I was really surprised when I read today that Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is in development, because the first game was such a notorious mess—until I realized I was confusing it with the much older Aliens: Colonial Marines (the concept of time has pretty much slipped from my grasp at this point), and that Aliens:…

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Indie shooter devs pull a reverse-Concord: No one played their game, but they ‘make it free to play and keep the servers online indefinitely’ anyway

After around a year and a half in early access, Blindfire—a multiplayer FPS whose main thing is that its arenas are all incredibly dark, forcing you to rely on your other senses (and tech, naturally) to catch enemies—got its full release. Which was something of a bittersweet event for its devs at Double Eleven, who…

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