"Denuvo plans to offer independent benchmarks in an attempt to prove its DRM doesn't cause performan

Full headline because Dreamwidth continues to suck: "Denuvo plans to offer independent benchmarks in an attempt to prove its DRM doesn't cause performance problems"

It's already been proven many times over that it does cause performance problems. Hell, I know for a goddamn fact myself through personal experience that it does cause performance problems. Their worthless, lying, "independent benchmarks" can eat shit. I will never (knowingly) buy a video game that contains that badware.

And here's the thing, even if there actually weren't any noticeable performance issues, there are more than enough other issues with Denuvo that make it utterly unacceptable. Just as one example: How many games are unplayable now because of lack of support for (and lack of removal of) shit like SafeDisc and SecuROM? How many games are unplayable now because of shit like Games for Windows Live going down (and the games that used it weren't updated to work without it)? And, follow me on this, how many games will be unplayable when Denuvo inevitably dies as well (hopefully sooner than later), if that dogshit hasn't been removed from the games infected with it by then? And there will be games from which the Denuvo malware will never be legitimately removed, regardless of the circumstances or reasons why it should be. So, yeah, even if the games contaminated with Denuvo did run flawlessly (which they demonstrably don't), it's still terrible and needs to die.

Just a couple more articles about AI being used for nefarious bullshit

"Anger from voice actors as NSFW mods use AI deepfakes to replicate their voices: 'This is NOT okay'"

"Persona 5 actress deletes Twitter account amid argument over AI voices, prompting other actors to weigh in"

It's the vocal equivalent of the age-old practice of Photoshopping a celebrity's face onto a porn actor's body. Even before AI came along, people were doing shit like this (for example), but now, with AI making this shit stupid easy to do, it's going to get even worse.

Roughly 99% of the comments under the PC Gamer article are of the "what's the big deal?" type. *weary sigh*

Also, "but but but impersonators tho..." Impersonators are using their own voices to sound like someone else. This shit here is using the actual voice of the person themselves, manipulated to make it seem like they're in porn or whatever. It's not the same goddamned thing. Sure, nobody in their right mind would ever believe that the voice actors themselves were involved with that shit[1], but still. Their voices are being used without their consent in things they may not want to be associated with, even indirectly.

It all comes to the same, i.e. AI being trained using the written works of people without their consent, or their art without their consent... now it's literally using their very voices without their consent. And the consensus, at least among the fuckwits who populate the comments under articles on video game websites anyway, seems to be "Who fucking cares?"

I'm not anti-AI, for sure, but I am anti-using-AI-for-insidious-shit-like-this, though. I know it's a banal platitude and all but... truly, this is why we can't have nice things. I feel bad for the voice actors in these cases, but assholes are going to be assholes, and there's not too awfully much that can be done about that, at least for the time being. Maybe not ever.

I mean, even something silly and mostly innocuous, like, say, that outro bit that Woolie made for his Disco Elysium WvTA videos using the voice of Lenval Brown doesn't really sit right with me. I mean, it was funny and all the first time I heard it, but the more I thought about it, I found it rather creepy, too.[2]

If I were in a position to be famous enough that my voice was being used for shit like this, I'd honestly be less offended if my voice were used in a porn thing than I would be if my voice were used to, let's say, endorse a bunch of pro-Trump/pro-GQP supporting shit. I mean, while the porn stuff would be bad, too, I'd be more actively enraged by the latter than the former.

[1] - Unless, of course, it ever turned out that some of the voice actors actually were directly involved with that shit, or were at least okay with it, in which case, more power to those particular hypothetical voice actors.

[2] - For the one of you reading this who may remember my old "fight" mp3s where I made various old text-to-speech programs fight each other, and the one where I used dectalk to make it sound like Stephen Hawking was involved, if you ever wondered why I retconned it in a later one to only be "an impersonator" and not the real thing, this is why. It didn't sit well with me. ("But all that other shit did?" Ha ha ha. >_>; Yeah, no, there was some shit in those old "fight" mp3s that the kids would call "problematic" these days. I don't really regret having made them at the time, but I definitely wouldn't be making shit like that these days.)