Since its earliest days, the video game industry has been built on developers creating clones of competing games, with varying levels of originality and varying levels of enforcement from game platforms. Now, though, AI coding tools are making that cloning process so efficient that many developers are getting extremely cautious about sharing their early work too widely.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/ai-game-clones-are-making-indie-developers-afraid-to-show-their-work/
“We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote on social media shortly after the Bloomberg story was posted. “The aim isn’t to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.”
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/report-epic-games-goes-all-in-on-ai-for-disney-collaboration
GitHub has announced that it will be shifting to a usage-based billing model for its GitHub Copilot AI service starting on June 1. The move is pitched as a way to “better align pricing with actual usage” and a necessary step to keep Copilot financially sustainable amid surging demand for limited AI computing resources. These kinds of pricing moves could become more common as major AI companies try to convert growing revenue and high demand for their services into the kinds of profits that have so far been illusory. Amid an ongoing shortage of computing resources to meet that demand, the days of subsidized, subscription-based usage discounts for the most voracious users of AI may be coming to an end.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/github-will-start-charging-copilot-users-based-on-their-actual-ai-usage/
But since the appearance of ChatGPT, the instructor’s job isn’t just to teach the subject and frantically attempt to keep every student’s plate spinning. Increasingly, it’s to moonlight as a detective and prosecutor because students without the motivation to do the work don’t have to skip it anymore. They can turn in a work-shaped simulacrum almost as easily. And a substantial number do—in a recent College Board survey of 600 high school students, 84 percent said they had used generative AI for schoolwork.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time-of-chatgpt-is-to-know-pain/
When graphic design platform-provider Canva bought the Affinity image-editing and publishing apps early last year, we had some major questions about how the companies’ priorities and products would mesh. This week, Canva gave us definitive answers to all of those questions: a brand-new unified Affinity app that melds the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps into a single piece of software called “Affinity by Canva” that is free to use with a Canva user account, but which gates generative AI features behind Canva’s existing paid subscription plans ($120 a year for individuals).
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/canvas-new-affinity-app-is-free-to-use-but-locks-ai-features-behind-a-subscription/
Attackers are exploiting a major weakness that has allowed them access to the NPM code repository with more than 100 credential-stealing packages since August, mostly without detection. Anyone who regularly downloads packages from NPM should check the Koi post for a list of indicators that their system has been compromised through PhantomRaven. These indicators can be used in system scans to determine whether they’ve been targeted.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/npm-flooded-with-malicious-packages-downloaded-more-than-86000-times/
It's called the "Truckle," and it's a hand-crafted silver and bronze belt buckle that might be the envy of every other cowboy out there, since this one has a place to keep your F-150's key fob without ruining the lines of your jeans. "Once you have it in there, you're not going to lose that key fob. You’re not going to be scratching your head (wondering) where it’s at. It's right there with you in the Truckle."
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/10/keep-losing-your-key-fob-fords-new-truckle-is-the-answer/