Google is is bringing generative AI to advertisers

Very clickable good dogs. | Image: Google

Google is rolling out new generative AI tools for creating ads, from writing the headlines and descriptions that appear along with searches to creating and editing the accompanying images. It’s pitching the tool for use by both advertising agencies as well as businesses without in-house creative staff. Using text prompts, advertisers can iterate on the text and images they generate until they find something they like.

Google also promises that it will never generate two of the same images, which can avoid the awkward possibility that two competing businesses end up with the exact same photo elements.

The step-by-step ad creator is coming to those who use Google’s Performance Max ad campaign product, and it’s capable of generating ads...

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Apple updates iOS so BMW’s wireless charging won’t break your iPhone 15

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Apple just released iOS 17.1.1, and it has fixes for a couple notable bugs that have popped up recently.

One bug was pretty bad. Some users had reported that if they tried to charge their iPhone 15 using BMW’s in-car wireless charging, certain NFC features like Apple Pay or BMW’s digital car key would break. BMW’s UK account on X (formerly Twitter) confirmed in October that the issues were “being investigated together with Apple.” An Apple service memo reported on by MacRumors said the issue happened when charging an iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max in some BMW and Toyota Supra cars.

The other bug was more harmless: on the lock screen weather widget, the snow icon was sometimes showing up as just a file icon....

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Instagram will finally let you disable read receipts in DMs

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Soon, Instagram users will have a choice about using read receipts in direct message conversations.

Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri both announced on their Instagram Broadcast channels that the change is currently in testing, and Mosseri included this picture showing the toggle as well as what it looks like in action.

Image: Meta

Instagram’s read receipts toggle for DMs.

What they didn’t mention is if that option is coming to Messenger, which similarly forces users into using read receipts without any way to turn them off. We also have no idea how soon this could roll out more widely, but keep an eye on your conversations to see if those indicators suddenly start to disappear or if anyone is turning down your...

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Nintendo is making a live-action Zelda movie

Image: Nintendo

Nintendo’s foray into movies isn’t stopping anytime soon: the company has confirmed that it’s working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda. The movie will be directed by Wes Ball, best known for the Maze Runner trilogy and the upcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto will serve as a producer, much as he did on this year’s animated Super Mario Bros. movie. He’ll be producing alongside Avi Arad.

“This is Miyamoto. I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films,” Miyamoto said in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. We might be waiting a while for the movie, however; Miyamoto said, “It will...

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Theo Von’s podcast is climbing the charts, with a little help from TikTok

Photo by Stephen J. Cohen / Getty Images

This is Hot Pod_,_ The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.

Hope you all had a great weekend. Today, I’ve got news on James Corden’s new SiriusXM deal, Theo Von’s rise on the charts, and, in what I will admit is a significant tone shift, a look at which podcasts are actually helping the discussion around the Israel-Hamas war.

James Corden inks SiriusXM deal

Don’t call it a podcast deal (so I’ve been told). The former Late Late Show host will have a new weekly program on SiriusXM that is exclusive to subscribers. This Life of Mine with James Corden will be a weekly celebrity chat show, because literally what else would it be? The show, which will launch in early 2024, was announced in the...

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Ubisoft lays off dozens of workers as gaming industry struggles drag on

Image: Ubisoft

Ubisoft, the game publisher behind franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, is laying off 124 employees at its visual effects studio and on its global IT team.

Hybride — the name of Ubisoft’s Montreal-based visual effects studio — has worked on several big-name projects, including Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Beau Is Afraid, and more. Of the 124 impacted workers, Ubisoft spokesperson Antoine Leduc-Labelle says 98 people are based in Canada, making up less than 2 percent of the company’s workforce in the country. (Ubisoft has studios in Montreal, Quebec City, Chicoutimi, Toronto, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Sherbrooke.) Leduc-Labelle adds that this doesn’t affect Ubisoft’s production teams.

“Over the past few months,...

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Night in the Woods follow-up Revenant Hill has been canceled

Revenant Hill. | Image: The Glory Society

Revenant Hill, the much-anticipated follow-up to indie hit Night in the Woods, has been canceled. According to development studio The Glory Society, the decision was made after members of the team were forced to step away from the project due to “recent serious health issues.”

“Making anything complex poses challenges along the way,” reads a posting on the studio’s site. It continues on to say the following:

Games take a while to make and usually require a good team working together. We’ve been lucky to have one such good team. Unfortunately, recent serious health issues have necessitated two key members stepping away from the project indefinitely. We are a small team and we each wear multiple hats. This is a loss of several hard to...

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The Asus ROG Ally has fallen to an all-time low ahead of Black Friday

The ROG Ally certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s still a big step forward for Windows handhelds.

Thanks to the rousing success of the Nintendo Switch and Valve’s Steam Deck, it’s safe to say that portable gaming is having a moment — something The Verge’s David Pierce discussed at length with the Polygon crew on a recent episode of The Vergecast. Asus also entered the handheld fray earlier this year with the ROG Ally, and now, thanks to an ongoing Asus promo, it’s available with an AMD Z1 Extreme chip for an all-time low of $599.99 ($100 off) with offer code NC100.

We had some serious reservations with the ROG Ally when we first reviewed the handheld gaming PC. Asus has since ironed out some of our initial concerns, but some remain, including the console’s mediocre battery life and a bizarre performance gap between the retail units...

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Reddit is starting to test its own add-ons for the platform

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit is beginning to test the first of its own add-ons built through its Developer Platform. The company’s first add-ons, available to a small number of subreddits and only to mods, will include tools for mods to more easily monitor and remove comment threads; ban spammers and remove their content; and for sports-focused subreddits, create posts that are live scoreboards, spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr tells The Verge.

Reddit announced the Developer Platform in August 2022 as a way for developers to more easily host and develop things like apps, bots, and mod tools for Reddit. At the time, Reddit opened up a waitlist for interested developers, and although the platform is still in closed beta, Geesey-Dorr says a “handful” of...

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WhatsApp head confirms in-app ads are still in the works

Illustration: The Verge

WhatsApp might still deploy ads on the platform alongside the app’s Instagram Stories-like Status feature, company head Will Cathcart recently said in an interview. As pointed out by TechCrunch, Cathcart stated that WhatsApp ads could show up in different places within the app, including the newer Channels feature and statuses, though no timeline was provided for the change.

In the Brazilian publication Folha De S.Paulo, the interviewer asked Cathcart if WhatsApp would continue to be free and without ads. Cathcart responded that WhatApp will not have ads within the inbox or in the “messaging experience.” Cathcart also added that Channels could charge people to subscribe, and the owners could promote ads for it within Channels.

The...

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Google, Meta, Discord, and more team up to fight child abuse online

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

A new program called Lantern aims to fight online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) with cross-platform signal sharing between online companies like Meta and Discord. The Tech Coalition, a group of tech businesses with a cooperative aim to fight online child sexual exploitation, wrote in today’s announcement that the program is an attempt to keep predators from avoiding detection by moving potential victims to other platforms.

Lantern serves as a central database for companies to contribute data and check their own platforms against. When companies see signals, like known OCSEA policy-violating email addresses or usernames, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) hashes, or CSAM keywords, they can flag them in their own systems....

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Crunchyroll is adding mobile games to its subscription

Captain Velvet: The Jump+ Dimensions. | Image: Crunchyroll

Crunchyroll is making a bigger push into games. The anime streaming service, which has previously published a handful of mobile titles, is adding mobile games to its offering in a move similar to Netflix’s ongoing foray into gaming. The new feature is called the Crunchyroll Game Vault and is available starting today.

The vault is available for free to subscribers of the Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan tiers of Crunchyroll — the two higher-cost tiers available — and at launch, there will be five titles. That includes Captain Velvet: The Jump+ Dimensions, River City Girls, Wolfstride, Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery, and I_nbento_. Much like on Netflix or Apple Arcade, the games will all be free and devoid of in-app purchases.

Whereas most...

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Figma introduces FigJam AI to spare designers from boring planning prep

FigJam AI includes three tools for now, but Figma teases there are “more to come.” | Image: Figma

Figma, best known for its product design applications, has announced FigJam AI — a new suite of generative AI tools for its collaborative whiteboard service FigJam that creates ready-to-use templates for common design and planning projects. The idea is that FigJam AI can reduce the preparation time needed to manually create these collaborative whiteboard projects from scratch, leaving designers with time to concentrate on more pressing tasks.

FigJam AI is available in open beta starting November 7th and is “currently free” for all customer tiers. We have asked Figma to clarify if FigJam AI will remain free to use when it enters general availability and will update this article if we hear back.

Image: Figma

Want an...

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Waze rolls out crash history alerts for accident-prone roads

Waze will warn you when a route is crash-prone. | Image: Waze

Waze has a new safety feature that launches an alert when drivers are coming up on a particularly crash-prone section of their route. Waze’s blog post says the feature, which has been in beta since last year, uses “historical crash data and key information about your route” like traffic levels or what kind of road it is to generate the warnings.

Seeing if a route is crash-prone means drivers can be more alert, or that seems to be Waze’s hope. A Google help page says the crash history alerts don’t distinguish between major and minor incidents, so knowing what you’re in for — and whether you should consider another route — might be hard. But alerts like this have to strike a balance between being informative and not becoming a distraction,...

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Ram’s new 1500 EV truck has ‘unlimited’ range, thanks to built-in gas generator

© 2023 Stellantis

Stellantis is making a new electric-propelled Ram truck with a large EV battery pack linked to a gasoline engine that can extend range for long trips without frequent charging stops. The automaker’s new pickup, the 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger, claims to go up to 690 miles on a full tank and charge.

Since the Ramcharger runs on dual electric motors, a 250kW in the front and 238kW one in the rear, it’s effectively an EV. But operationally, it’s like dealing with a plug-in hybrid. If you recall Chevy’s discontinued Volt, it too operated like an EV and provided around 50 miles of pure range — but a gas engine then kicks in to continue powering the EV system once the battery is depleted. The Ramcharger is basically like a massive version of the...

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SAG-AFTRA won’t budge as studios push to own actors’ likenesses in perpetuity

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Though negotiators from both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) met this past weekend in hopes of bringing Hollywood’s ongoing labor strike to an end, contract talks have reportedly stalled once again due to the desire of studios to own performers’ digitally scanned likenesses in perpetuity.

Previously, the AMPTP insisted that its most recent proposed contract was its “best and final” offer. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, SAG-AFTRA refused and walked away from the negotiations over the AMPTP’s insistence on pushing for new rules regarding the use of people’s likenesses that would ultimately leave actors in the lurch. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the AMPTP’s...

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Sony claims to fix the rolling shutter problem with its latest A9 III mirrorless camera

The Sony A9 III features the company’s first global shutter in a full-frame mirrorless camera. | Image: Sony

Sony has announced the latest in its line of popular professional mirrorless cameras: the A9 III. It’s a $5,999 full-frame camera with a stacked 24.6-megapixel sensor that succeeds the A9 II released four years ago. But the most important thing about the A9 III is its new shutter.

The A9 III is the first full-frame camera to use a global shutter. This allows it to expose every pixel at the same time so there is no distortion in both stills and video. Within most mirrorless cameras, such as the Canon R5, Panasonic GH5, and Nikon Z9, there is a rolling shutter. Rolling shutters capture an image by exposing row by row of pixels, which can lead to distortion. Below is a graphic from Lensrentals.com that shows this difference well.

...

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This smart garage door controller is no longer very smart

The Chamberlain MyQ smart garage door controller connects to a garage door opener so you can control it from anywhere. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

The Chamberlain Group — owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech — has announced it’s shut off all “unauthorized access” to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.

The move comes a year after Chamberlain discontinued its official Apple HomeKit integration and a few months after it finally killed support for Google Assistant. It’s sadly another example of how the company continues to be hostile to the...

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The Verge’s 2023 Holiday Gift Guide

A selection of great tech and non-tech gifts aimed at the tinkerer, the creative, and the kid in all of us.

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YouTube’s ad blocking crackdown is facing a new challenge: privacy laws

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

As YouTube tightens its restrictions on ad blockers, privacy advocates in the European Union are betting that government regulations can put a stop to the crackdown.

One privacy expert, Alexander Hanff, filed a complaint in October with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). Hanff argues that YouTube’s ad blocker detection system is a violation of privacy — a charge Google denies — and illegal under EU law. “AdBlock detection scripts are spyware — there is no other way to describe them and as such it is not acceptable to deploy them without consent,” Hanff tells The Verge. “I consider any deployment of technology which can be used to spy on my devices is both unethical and illegal in most situations.”

The fight against ad blocker...

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Google contractors objected to reading obscene Bard prompts — now they’re unionizing

Illustration: The Verge

A group of Google contract workers who helped train the company’s Bard AI chatbot and write Google Help articles voted overwhelmingly to form a union on Monday. The workers, who are contracted to work for Google through Accenture, unionized to secure better working conditions and protections.

The contractors will join the Alphabet Workers Union, the labor organization that represents employees at Google and its Alphabet parent company. They first started unionization efforts in June after they were directed to work on the then-unannounced Bard chatbot. As part of their efforts to help train the bot, they were asked to “handle obscene, graphic and offensive prompts,” according to a report from Bloomberg.

When one of the contractors filed...

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Zero Motorcycles expands lineup with an eye toward bringing in new riders

Image: Zero

Zero Motorcycles is really leaning into its reputation as the “Tesla of motorcycles.”

The company, which is one of the leading electric motorcycle manufacturers in the country, announced two new models today: the Model S street bike, with an all-new motor; and two new sport offerings, the DS and DSR models.

The California-based company aims to bring in new riders by lowering barriers of entry like price and performance in the hopes of growing the number of people who would consider dropping tens of thousands of dollars on a battery-powered two-wheeler. And with new motorcycle purchases essentially doubling in the last two decades, Zero thinks it can capture those new riders by adding to its already impressive lineup of motorcycles.

Z...

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The Epic v. Google trial may come down to simple v. complicated

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

In opening statements, Google tried to outline the goals of its Android business. Epic focused on painting the tech giant as a bully.

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Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet

The former president joined me on Decoder to discuss AI regulation, the First Amendment, and of course, what apps he has on his homescreen.

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Former Kotaku writers are launching a new video game site — and they own it this time

The Aftermath logo. | Image: Aftermath

They’ve started Aftermath, a new website about video games and culture.

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Redwood Materials will recycle stationary storage batteries as it expands its scope

Image: Redwood

Redwood Materials has recycled e-bike batteries and Tesla batteries. Now, it’s ready to level up a few sizes.

The electric vehicle battery recycling and manufacturing venture founded by the former chief technologist of Tesla announced today that it will help decommission and recycle a 4MWh stationary storage substation in Kauai, Hawaii, as part of a massive solar array. The decommissioning recently wrapped and the batteries are now being transported to the company’s facility in north Nevada for recycling.

It will be one of Redwood’s first battery energy storage systems and an important step in the company’s broader effort to prove that lithium-ion batteries and energy storage products of all sizes can have a new life beyond their...

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How to give yourself a break from your Android phone

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

It can be all too easy to spend too much time on your phone, cycling through social media posts, news updates, video clips, messaging apps and then back round again. Before you know it, half an hour or more has gone by, and you’ve accomplished very little.

If you’re looking to get a better balance between the time you spend staring at your phone screen and the time you spend doing everything else, Android has a tool that can help. It’s called Digital Wellbeing, and like Screen Time for the iPhone, it can tell you about your phone use and help you set up limits on it.

Digital Wellbeing is enabled by default, so the first time you open it, you should find that it’s already keeping tabs on what you get up to on your phone. It’s available...

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Nvidia’s RTX 4070 / 4080 Super cards rumored for CES 2024 launch

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Nvidia’s rumored RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4080 Super GPUs might launch in early 2024. Hardware leaker Kopite7kimi says Nvidia’s RTX 40 series Super cards will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2024, reports VideoCardz. Kopite7kimi has a reliable track record for Nvidia hardware.

While Nvidia isn’t listed as an exhibitor at CES, the company often has conference rooms where it hosts press briefings and demonstrates its latest gaming technology. Hardware leakers have been teasing details about RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Super cards for weeks, with the RTX 4080 Super rumored to include 20GB of VRAM.

Both RTX 40-series Super GPUs are expected to also feature a higher memory bus than the existing 4080 / 4070 cards, with the RTX...

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Popsocket lets people design their cases with AI

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

Phone accessory maker Popsocket will now let people design their phone grips with AI via Stable Diffusion and award up to $100,000 in a holiday giveaway for the best designs.

Popsocket’s AI Customizer allows people to make their phone holders or cases exude as much personality as they want, and “bring their wildest visions to life,” says Popsocket. While the company previously offered a way to design cases and grips, that feature used a library of backgrounds or asked users to upload their own photos.

Image: Popsocket

Generate an image from a text prompt or with the help of an upload.

The AI customizer uses a “highly optimized version of Stable Diffusion XL,” the company tells The Verge in an email. Users...

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YouTube is testing a chatbot that will appear under select videos

YouTube’s conversational AI tool can summarize videos and answer questions. | Image: Google

YouTube’s latest AI experiments includes a new chatbot that’s designed to give you more information about a video you’re watching. The conversational AI tool, as Google’s support post calls it, aims to answer your questions about a video and can also recommend related content. It can also quiz you on a topic if you’re watching an educational video. The experimental feature has been announced alongside another AI tool that aims to organize a video’s comments into topics.

Both features come as part of a wider push from Google to integrate AI across its services including Search, Gmail, and its office productivity suite. In YouTube specifically we’ve already seen the company announce a host of AI features aimed at video creators, like...

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