"Updating our site reputation abuse policy" is how Google, in almost wondrously opaque fashion, announced yesterday that big changes have come to some big websites, especially those that rely on their domain authority to promote lucrative third-party product recommendations.

If you've searched for reviews and seen results that make you ask why so many old-fashioned news sites seem to be "reviewing" products lately—especially products outside that site's expertise—that's what Google is targeting.

"This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host's already-established ranking signals," Google's post on its Search Central blog reads. "The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users."

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The Starlink waitlist is back in certain parts of the US, including several large cities on the West Coast and in Texas. The Starlink availability map says the service is sold out in and around Seattle and Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Sacramento, California; and Austin, Texas. Neighboring cities and towns are included in the sold-out zones.

There are additional sold-out areas in small parts of Colorado, Montana, and North Carolina. As PCMag noted yesterday, the change comes about a year after Starlink added capacity and removed its waitlist throughout the US.

Elsewhere in North America, there are some sold-out areas in Canada and Mexico. Across the Atlantic, Starlink is sold out in London and neighboring cities. Starlink is not yet available in most of Africa, and some of the areas where it is available are sold out.

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Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.

All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we've heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.

"Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse," Niantic wrote in a company blog post.

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In the short-term, the most dangerous thing about AI language models may be their ability to emotionally manipulate humans if not carefully conditioned. The world saw its first taste of that potential danger in February 2023 with the launch of Bing Chat, now called Microsoft Copilot.

During its early testing period, the temperamental chatbot gave the world a preview of an "unhinged" version of OpenAI's GPT-4 prior to its official release. Sydney's sometimes uncensored and "emotional" nature (including use of emojis) arguably gave the world its first large-scale encounter with a truly manipulative AI system. The launch set off alarm bells in the AI alignment community and served as fuel for prominent warning letters about AI dangers.

On November 19 at 4 pm Eastern (1 pm Pacific), Ars Technica Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards will host a livestream conversation on YouTube with independent AI researcher Simon Willison that will explore the impact and fallout of the 2023 fiasco. We're calling it "Bing Chat: Our First Encounter with Manipulative AI."

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Last week, actor and director Ben Affleck shared his views on AI's role in filmmaking during the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit, arguing that AI models will transform visual effects but won't replace creative filmmaking anytime soon. A video clip of Affleck's opinion began circulating widely on social media not long after.

"Didn’t expect Ben Affleck to have the most articulate and realistic explanation where video models and Hollywood is going," wrote one X user.

In the clip, Affleck spoke of current AI models' abilities as imitators and conceptual translators—mimics that are typically better at translating one style into another instead of originating deeply creative material.

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