There were times I wasn’t sure the Rabbit R1 was even a real thing. The AI-powered, Teenage Engineering-designed device came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest stories at CES, promising a level of fun and whimsy that felt much better than some of the more self-serious AI companies out there. CEO Jesse Lyu practically promised the world in this $199 device.
Technology
Spanish fascists stole a game publisher’s domain
Last week, IGN featured a game called Ecumene Aztec — in which you play as an Aztec warrior going full guerrilla warfare on Spanish conquistadors. In the wake of this IGN profile, Ecumene Aztec’s developers have been harassed by far-right extremists, including having the website associated with the publisher stolen by far-right trolls, who then made it into a page promoting Spanish imperialism.
In the initial write-up for the game, IGN named Giantscraft as Ecumene Aztec’s developer and publisher. Giantscraft is also listed as the publisher on press materials for the game that The Verge has obtained. There are no links to Giantscraft’s site on IGN’s article, but searching for Giantscraft reveals a single Instagram page.
On this Instagram page, Ecumene Aztec does not appear; instead, the page features a link to the website giantscraft.com. Upon visiting the website, users are greeted with an extremely bare-bones site for a game publisher, featuring a quote attributed to Hernán Cortés — one of the conquistadors responsible for the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the enslavement of its people — as well as a giant image of the Cross of Burgundy — heraldry linked to Spanish royalists, far-right South American extremists, and Nazis. Also featured on the page is a link to another Instagram page that is very clearly a kind of “anti-woke” 4chan-esque account filled with memes celebrating Spanish imperialism.
To be clear, Giantscraft does not appear to be affiliated with the Spanish far right. A translation of a post on the fascist Instagram page suggests that Giantscraft did not reserve the domain giantscraft.com and, after the reveal of Ecumene Aztec, an opportunist swiped the domain and set up what is essentially a Spanish Imperial fan page. The Verge reached out to Giantscraft and its PR, and a PR spokesperson confirmed this via email, writing that “since the announcement they have been under assault from hard right groups” and that the domain was taken shortly after Aztec’s announcement. Due to apparent death threats the development team has received, we are granting the PR spokesperson anonymity.
Ecumenegames.com is the publisher’s official website, with its PR spokesperson claiming that the publisher was in the midst of a name change to Ecumene Games when all this happened.
On social media, Ecumene Aztec received a mixed response. Some praised the overall concept of the game — after all, there are very few games in which conquered peoples get the opportunity to fight back against their historical oppressors — while others derided the game’s stereotypical take on Aztec civilization featuring an ahistorical depiction of Tenochtitlan and human sacrifice built into the game’s mechanics. Another subset of detractors were upset that you couldn’t play as the Spanish.
The criticism of the game seemed enough to prompt the developers to update its scope. In an update on the game’s Steam page, the developers wrote that they would rework the game to allow players to choose to work with the conquistadors as well as implement additional features to make the game more historically accurate.
In a statement made through its PR, the developers of Ecumene Aztec said the change in scope was due to asks from the community.
“It was not planned. However we saw that about 40 percent of [the] audience says that [they] would like to have [the] choice to join [the] conquistadors, so we might actually try to give this possibility. The game is not political in anyway and never will be, it is history FICTION.”
Technology
Drake threatened with lawsuit over diss track featuring AI Tupac
While Drake’s fans have been having a ball with the Canadian rapper’s recently released track dissing fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, the legal team representing Tupac Shakur is threatening to take legal action if the song isn’t pulled off the internet.
Billboard reports that late rapper Tupac’s legal team is ready to take Drake to court over the release of “Taylor Made,” Drake’s recently released song featuring the AI-generated voices of Shakur and Snoop Dogg. In a statement about Drake’s creation of “Taylor Made,” litigator Howard King called the song a “blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time” and said the Shakur estate never cleared the use of Tupac’s voice.
“The Estate is deeply dismayed and disappointed by your unauthorized use of Tupac’s voice and personality,” King said. “The Estate would never have given its approval for this use.”
For the past few weeks, a number of rap artists, including Lamar, Drake, and J. Cole, have been pointedly attacking one another (and entertaining everybody else) through their music after years of simmering tensions over — among other things — who’s the biggest in the game. In response to “Like That,” Future’s recently released song featuring Lamar in which he calls Drake out for making previous jabs, Drake dropped “Push Ups,” a track poking fun at Lamar’s height, shoe size, and the details of his old deal at Top Dawg Entertainment.
Rather than waiting for a response, Drake also debuted “Taylor Made” on April 19th, and the song immediately raised eyebrows — less so for its reference to Taylor Swift and more so for its prominent use of voices from West Coast rappers (one of whom is quite dead) who did not seem to be involved in any of the ongoing beef. Following the release of “Taylor Made,” Snoop uploaded a video to Instagram with an assortment of emoji seemingly indicating bemusement.
Tupac’s estate wants “Taylor Made” pulled within 24 hours, and if Drake made the song without their permission, we might just see it disappear. But as much as this beef has been about garnering attention, Drake could be very willing to go to court to make his case.
Technology
Fox News AI Newsletter: AI predicts your politics with single photo
Welcome to Fox News’ Artificial Intelligence newsletter with the latest AI technology advancements.
IN TODAY’S NEWSLETTER:
– AI can predict political orientations from blank faces – and researchers fear ‘serious’ privacy challenges
– Google to provide AI to military for disaster response
– AI could predict whether cancer treatments will work, experts say: ‘A natural progression’
BLANK SPACE: Researchers are warning that facial recognition technologies are “more threatening than previously thought” and pose “serious challenges to privacy” after a study found that artificial intelligence can be successful in predicting a person’s political orientation based on images of expressionless faces.
DISASTER RESPONSE: An artificial intelligence venture backed by Google is partnering with the military to use AI in responding to natural disasters.
‘NATURAL PROGRESSION’: A chemotherapy alternative called immunotherapy is showing promise in treating cancer — and a new artificial intelligence tool could help ensure that patients have the best possible experience.
GOOGLE AI MOVES: Google announced on Thursday that it will consolidate a pair of its internal teams that are focused on building artificial intelligence models.
COUNTERING SCAMS: Unfortunately, scammers are using artificial intelligence to mimic the voices of people, potentially turning these fake voices into things like kidnapping scams. This particular scam seems to be rare, but it’s happening.
Subscribe now to get the Fox News Artificial Intelligence Newsletter in your inbox.
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Technology
A morning with the Rabbit R1: a fun, funky, unfinished AI gadget
Well, say this for Rabbit: it’s real. Last night, I went to the swanky TWA Hotel in New York City, along with a few hundred reporters, creators, and particularly enthusiastic R1 buyers. After a couple of hours of photo booths, specialty cocktails, and a rousing keynote and demo from Lyu — in which he made near-constant reference to and fun of the Humane AI Pin — we all got our R1s to take home. I’ve been using mine ever since, and I have some thoughts. And some questions.
From a hardware perspective, the R1 screams “kinda meh Android phone.” Here are the salient specs: it’s about three inches tall and wide and a half-inch thick. It weighs 115 grams, which is about two-thirds as much as the iPhone 15. It has a 2.88-inch screen, runs on a 2.3GHz MediaTek MT6765 processor, and has 128 gigs of storage and four gigs of RAM. It has a speaker on the back, two mics on the top, and a SIM card slot on the side right next to the USB-C charging port. It only comes in one color, a hue Rabbit calls “leuchtorange” but is often known as “brilliant orange” or “luminous orange.” It’s definitely orange, and it’s definitely luminous.
At this point, the best way I can describe the R1 is like a Picasso painting of a smartphone: it has most of the same parts, just laid out really differently. Instead of sitting on top or in the back, the R1’s camera sits in a cutout space on the right side of the device, where it can spin its lens to face both toward and away from you.
The R1 is like a Picasso painting of a smartphone
After spending a few hours playing with the device, I have to say: it’s pretty nice. Not luxurious, or even particularly high-end, just silly and fun. Where Humane’s AI Pin feels like a carefully sculpted metal gem, the R1 feels like an old-school MP3 player crossed with a fidget spinner. The wheel spins a little stiffly for my taste but smoothly enough, the screen is a little fuzzy but fine, and the main action button feels satisfying to thump on.
When I first got the device and connected it to Wi-Fi, it then immediately asked me to sign up for an account at Rabbithole, the R1’s web portal. I did that, scanned a QR code with the R1 to get it synced up, and immediately did a software update. I spent that time logging in to the only four external services the R1 currently connects to: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, and Midjourney.
Once I was eventually up and running, I started chatting with the R1. So far, it does a solid job with basic AI questions: it gave me lots of good information about this week’s NFL draft, found a few restaurants near me, and knew when Herbert Hoover was president. This is all fairly basic ChatGPT stuff, and there’s some definite lag as it fetches answers, but I much prefer the interface to the Humane AI Pin — because there’s a screen, and you can see the thing working so the AI delays don’t feel quite so interminable.
Because there’s a screen, the AI delays don’t feel quite so interminable
Almost immediately, though, I started running into stuff the R1 just can’t do. It can’t send emails or make spreadsheets, though Lyu has been demoing both for months. Rabbithole is woefully unfinished, too, to the point I was trying to tap around on my phone and it was instead moving a cursor around a half-second after every tap. That’s a good reminder that the whole thing is running on a virtual machine storing all your apps and credentials, which still gives me security-related pause.
Oh, and here’s my favorite thing that has happened on the R1 so far: I got it connected to my Spotify account, which is a feature I’m particularly excited about. I asked for “Beyoncé’s new album,” and the device excitedly went and found me “Crazy in Love” — a lullaby version, from an artist called “Rockabye Baby!” So close and yet so far. It doesn’t seem to be able to find my playlists, either, or skip tracks. When I said, “Play The 1975,” though, that worked fine and quickly. (The speaker, by the way, is very much crappy Android phone quality. You’re going to want to use that Bluetooth connection.)
The R1’s Vision feature, which uses the camera to identify things in the scene around you, seems to work fine as long as all you want is a list of objects in the scene. The device can’t take a photo or video and doesn’t seem to be able to do much else with what it can see.
When you’re not doing anything, the screen shows the time and that bouncing rabbit-head logo. When you press and hold the side button to issue a command, the time and battery fade away, and the rabbit’s ears perk up like it’s listening. It’s very charming! The overall interface is simple and text-based, but it’s odd in spots: it’s not always obvious how to go back, for instance, and you only get to see a line or two of text at a time at the very bottom of the screen, even when there’s a whole paragraph of answer to read.
Rabbit’s roadmap is ambitious: Lyu has spent the last few months talking about all the things the R1’s so-called “Large Action Model” can do, including learning apps and using them for you. During last night’s event, he talked about opening up the USB-C port on the device to allow accessories, keyboards, and more. That’s all coming… eventually. Supposedly. For now, the R1’s feature set is much more straightforward. You can use the device to play music, get answers to questions, translate speech, take notes, summon an Uber, and a few other things.
That means there’s still an awful lot the R1 can’t do and a lot I have left to test. (Anything you want to know about, by the way, let me know!) I’m particularly curious about its battery life, its ability to work with a bad connection, whether it heats up over time, and how it handles more complex tasks than just looking up information and ordering chicken nuggets. But so far, this thing seems like it’s trying to be less like a smartphone killer and more like the beginnings of a useful companion. That’s probably as ambitious as it makes sense to be right now — though Lyu and the Rabbit folks have a lot of big promises to eventually live up to and not a lot of time to do so.
Photography by David Pierce / The Verge
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