
‘We’re harkening back to ‘Three Days of The Condor,’ ‘The Parallax View,’ and things like that of the ’70s.’
Character.AI is chasing the booming microdrama market with three AI-assisted vertical series whose characters remain available for conversations, questions, and fresh role-playing after each episode.

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Peter Kafka, who is chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of Channels, a podcast about the media industry. And it’s a big week for the media industry — Comcast just announced that it’s splitting itself up, into the Comcast broadband company and the NBCUniversal entertainment company. That’s after […]

Character.AI’s plan to become more than just an LLM-powered chatbot platform is going beyond interactive books, comics, and audio dramas. Today, the company announced the debut of c.ai Series – short-form, episodic videos designed to be watched and interacted with – on your phone. Unlike traditional microdrama services that feature cheaply produced, live-action shows starring […]

Last year, Image Line introduced Gopher for FL Studio, an AI chatbot that was basically a glorified instruction manual. You asked it how to do something, and it would serve up the relevant instructions. It’s the kind of thing I actually use AI for on a semi-regular basis. But in the new release, Gopher can […]
Samantha Morton’s performance as Circe in The Odyssey has the Christopher Nolan seal of approval — but there’s an obvious reason why we should have seen her brilliance coming.

As part of Microsoft’s big Xbox “reset,” which includes layoffs affecting 3,200 staffers, jettisoning studios, and shifting investments to focus on “higher priority projects,” Obsidian Entertainment is changing its plans. The studio, behind games like Grounded and The Outer Worlds, is starting work on a new Fallout title and has canceled “multiple projects,” including a […]

This week, Microsoft took a huge ax to its Xbox business. The company announced that it would be laying off 1,600 workers now, 1,600 more over the next fiscal year, and that it would be shedding four studios. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma hasn’t been shy about why she’s making such dramatic cuts, saying in a […]
Scammers are using adult creators’ names to poison trusted government and university websites, while copyright complaints are quietly pushing thousands of malicious pages out of Google.

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been in an extremely lucky position: I’ve been spending a lot of time playing games on Valve’s Steam Machine. We gave the Steam Machine a 6, and I don’t disagree with my colleague Sean Hollister’s review. But even though I already own a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, […]