It seems that the need to monetize everything is coming to the world of AI chatbots. There has been talk of ChatGPT putting ads on their site. It has been such a great tool not having to see ads popup on a website, not having Video ads that break immersion while watching a history video or tutorials on software. However, with so many users on ChatGPT, some 800 million strong, it is clear that ads are going to be put on the site. I believe that it is going to occur early in 2026 as the site needs a way to make up for its debt it has been acquiring and the cost of all the investments from other companies.
I think what needs to happen is that ads have to be implemented carefully. I do not want to have full screen ads such as on YouTube. Every single video seems to have these annoying video ads that comes up every time the content creator is getting to an important part of their video here.
They need to make sure the ads are non-intrusive and relate to agentic AI. Instead of just filling everything with ads which are taking up space, they need to make sure the ads are speaking to customer’s precise views on what they want to purchase on the site.
I have been using the Motorola Edge 2023 since August 2024 and this camera takes some incredible images.
In comparison to the older cameras that I used to have in the mid 2010s, this camera is much better than those older phones here. I decided to take some pictures in the Northern Virginia area. Specifically, the Tysons Corner area with all the big glass buildings.
The Motorola Edge 2023 is not a high-end phone but the quality of these images show powerful the phone cameras are getting now. When I got my Nikon L810 in 2012, I thought that was an impressive camera. These photographs are showing the improvement in the quality of phone cameras since the mid 2000s. In that previous era, the quality of these cameras was quite limiting and sometimes were seen as potato cameras. Now, these phone cameras are being used to make high quality movies.
While these buildings in Tysons Corner are not the nicest looking buildings, they are futuristic looking buildings that appear well in the camera.
This phone is absolutely worth the money just for the camera alone. The smartphone has long since made the regular cameras unnecessary for most consumers. I still have my Nikon L810 for the uses of taking pictures of objects which are far away but the smartphone is simply more convenient and better to use when you just want to take photos with as little in the way as possible here.
Overall, these photographs are of high quality and well worth a look if you want a cheap smartphone that takes great photos.
There is a general consensus among gamers now, that art style matters more than graphics.
The screenshot above is of a 2001 game known as Empire Earth. It looks rather crude now, but it has a unique style that no other game can replicate.
We have seen this with independent games, which replicate the simpler and colorful graphics of older generations. Photorealism is great in Chatbots if one is attempting to brainstorm how a character appears but there is a place for all sorts of artistic styles. The Japanese have shown this in many of their games. Some games aim for photorealism, but they also show that they want to continue their tradition of having many art styles, especially their homegrown anime. Japanese games often have a reputation for being more stylistic and it’s not surprising that Nintendo did not give up on their original IPs in favor of more mature ideas. They sometimes did have more mature games in their earlier consoles, but this was to compete with Sega and after Sega was beaten, they began to focus on their generally cozy game reputation here.
Style matters more than graphics. I remember that in the 1990s, graphics cards companies had managed to change this idea. Graphics were more important than style as many programmers wanted to showcase the power of their inhouse engines. This was the age of graphics growing every year here. It was truly an exciting age where every game seemed like a foreign country with its own rules.
Now every game seems to have the same GPS navigation and isn’t really interesting here. Unreal Engine is used heavily in many games now, but it is also getting in the way of helping games to distinguish their styles from one another.
It isn’t just in the graphics. It is also in the interfaces also. The interfaces in earlier games were art styles that were peculiar to that one game. Now, too much of it is optimized to be interchangeable between genres and games.
We need to have friction once again. That may make things some what more uncomfortable to use but it will allow for a greater variety of games to made.
The independents are often cited as an example of creativity. However, they cannot carry the industry alone here. They need to work in synergy with middle budget and high budget games. The independents are often works of passion, but they lack the ability to get a product out to the gamers within a reasonable time before they have their attention going to somewhere else.
Style is what companies should be chasing now. We have enough photorealistic games. With generative AI, photorealism is available in a way that surpasses even the best camera.
What we need now is way to encourage the creation of new styles instead of just attempting to outcompete on the issue of photorealistic graphics.
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