Melbourne

Apparently you have to have a paid subscription to use Pantone colours in Adobe (ie Photoshop) and if you don’t pay, their colours in your finished artworks turn to black? Ruining them. I’m not aware of the fine points as I don’t use Photoshop but wtf. This is some Anish Kapoor shit. Ok it’s due to a dispute about licensing fees.

Stuart Semple has released his own versions of the colours in a palette for free, accessible through a plugin. And calling back to his dispute with Anish Kapoor, he’s included Pinkest Pink and Pantone don’t have permission to use his colours. Classic.

Also Unity is gearing up to charge game developers for customer downloads. They’re apparently apologising and somewhat? backing down now but yeah. They tried it. (They also sold a lot of stock before the announcement.)

It matters because Unity is the game engine that is taught to game developers in school, and has been used to make popular games like Rust, Fall Guys, Cuphead, Among Us and Pokémon Go. This affects devs with large projects in development and screws over smaller indie devs. Also *because it counts repeated downloads it’s vulnerable to griefing. If a demographic get pissed off at a game? What was once limited to review bombing could become actual real world debt.

It seems what happened with Reddit’s third party tools isn’t a one off. The world has changed so rapidly and it’s slipping into enshittification.

Unity is thinking about AI games.

AI art is also filling the various art references I look through, I see artists having to put anti-ai filters over their work because it gets stolen.

It’s affecting writers too. Bogus ai-written foraging guides are being sold on Amazon. Do not go mushroom picking with one of these babies OK? I think we all know how that ends up.

Famous authors are suing OpenAI as their work is getting scraped ( this is the second lawsuit apparently) and fake ai books are being sold under the names of established authors.

Last but not least there’s a bill called KOSA that will infringe on privacy (it wants ID) and target trans/queer content under the guise of protecting kids.The idea is platforms are responsible for the content each user posts so to avoid consequences anything adult in nature is at risk of being scrubbed.

I’m still getting my head around all the fine points of both bills but apparently it’s been changed to a different bill called the Online Safety Bill which also wants ID and to scan encrypted messages like WhatsApp. The UK has just passed it.

This stuff matters because Australians use sites or services hosted in America (and any other country that brings in these laws).