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According to Bloomberg News, Meta is considering slashing its metaverse spending by as much as 30% in 2026 — although no plans are final yet — after meetings at Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound laid out a slimmer future for its namesake ambitions. For three years, the company tried to brute-force another new reality into existence: new name, new stock ticker, new keynote vocabulary about “presence” and “embodied internet.”
https://qz.com/meta-metaverse-cuts-mark-zuckerberg-reality-labs
Apple’s app of the year, Tiimo, for instance, is described as a visual AI planner that turns to-dos into plans with visual timelines. The app uses AI to break down your tasks into a realistic schedule by estimating how long each step of a task could take and helping you to create a plan.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/04/ai-finds-its-way-into-apples-top-apps-of-the-year/
[Slop Evader is] a new browser tool that filters your web searches to only include results from before November 30, 2022 — the day that ChatGPT was released to the public. Created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry’s unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called “generative AI”—despite widespread criticism and the wider public’s distaste for it.
https://www.404media.co/slop-evader-browser-extension-pre-generative-ai-search-filter/
Google has hit back at claims circulating on social media that accuse the tech giant of training its Google Gemini AI on users' emails without their permission. In a statement shared with The Verge, Google called reports "misleading," saying that the company has “not changed anyone’s settings. Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model.”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-no-were-not-secretly-training-gemini-on-your-gmail-account
Google on Thursday rolled out Nano Banana Pro, its latest image editing and generation tool, continuing the company’s momentum after launching its new Gemini artificial intelligence model earlier this week. “It’s incredible at infographics. It can make slide decks. It can take up to 14 different images, or five different characters, and sort of keep that character consistency,” [Josh Woodward] said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/20/google-nano-banana-pro-gemini-3.html
The flaw in OpenAI’s attempt to stop users from generating videos of Nintendo and popular cartoon characters exposes a fundamental problem with most generative AI tools: it is extremely difficult to completely stop users from recreating any kind of content that’s in the training data, and OpenAI can’t remove the copyrighted content from Sora 2’s training data because it couldn’t exist without it.
https://www.404media.co/openai-cant-fix-soras-copyright-infringement-problem-because-it-was-built-with-stolen-content/
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/