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  Boundless premieres tonight, taking Vision Pro users on a hot air balloon ride in Turkey. [credit: Apple ]

Today, Apple announced a slate of more than a dozen upcoming Immersive Videos for its Vision Pro spatial reality headset. The first, titled Boundless, launches tonight at 9 pm ET. More will follow in the coming weeks and months.

The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple. The headset launched in early February with a handful of Immersive Video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added.

On March 28, Apple released a highlight reel of Major League Soccer plays from the season that had ended months prior. A second episode of Prehistoric Planet, Apple's Immersive Video dinosaur nature documentary, went live on April 19. Likewise, a new episode of the Adventure series titled "Parkour" landed on May 24.

Enlarge / Apple seeks to continue to augment its library of original films like Argylle with films from other studios.

Apple TV+ has carved a niche for itself with strong original programming, and while it's still far behind the likes of Netflix in terms of subscribers, it has seen a fairly strong initial run. To build on that, Apple is talking with major studios about ways to complement its slate of original programming with films from other companies in order to expand and extend the service's appeal.

That's according to Bloomberg reporters Lucas Shaw and Thomas Buckley, who cite people familiar with Apple's workings. Those sources say Apple is "having discussions" with more than one large film studio about bringing more movies to the service.

Apple previously experimented with this by licensing around 50 movies and making them available on the service for limited runs over the past several months. That experiment seems to have gone well, leading Apple to begin laying the groundwork for expanding on that.

Enlarge / YouTuber Marques Brownlee discusses iOS 18 in a new video. This specific video wasn't part of the large dataset that was used to train AI models, but many of his others were. (credit: Marques Brownlee)

AI models at Apple, Salesforce, Anthropic, and other major technology players were trained on tens of thousands of YouTube videos without the creators' consent and potentially in violation of YouTube's terms, according to a new report appearing in both Proof News and Wired.

The companies trained their models in part by using "the Pile," a collection by nonprofit EleutherAI that was put together as a way to offer a useful dataset to individuals or companies that don't have the resources to compete with Big Tech, though it has also since been used by those bigger companies.

The Pile includes books, Wikipedia articles, and much more. That includes YouTube captions collected by YouTube's captions API, scraped from 173,536 YouTube videos across more than 48,000 channels. That includes videos from big YouTubers like MrBeast, PewDiePie, and popular tech commentator Marques Brownlee. On X, Brownlee called out Apple's usage of the dataset, but acknowledged that assigning blame is complex when Apple did not collect the data itself. He wrote:

Enlarge / Professional writers' names were attached to AI content they had nothing to do with. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Christina Warren)

In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we've seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs, like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge, by mimicking the bylines of the websites' former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names.

The Verge reported on the fiasco in detail, including speaking to Christina Warren, a former writer for TUAW who now works at GitHub. Warren took to the social media platform Threads yesterday to point out that someone had re-launched TUAW at its original domain and populated it with fake content allegedly written by her and other past TUAW staff. Some of the content simply reworded articles that originally appeared on TUAW, while other articles tied real writers' names to new AI-generated articles about current events.

(Disclosure: I worked with Warren at Mashable several years ago, and before that, I also worked at the original parent company of TUAW.)

Enlarge / Vampire Survivors on the iPhone. It doesn't look like much, but it sure is addictive. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple recently announced new games coming to Apple Arcade, its gaming subscription service for iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple TVs, and Vision Pro headsets. The headlining title is Vampire Survivors, an indie hit that combined the gameplay of bullet hell shooters and the addictive quality of clickers to become a mega sensation two years ago. Also coming is Temple Run: Legends, an updated take on the popular game from 2011.

Vampire Survivors was already available on the App Store, but it was ad-supported, with the option to spend money in-app to get additional content. The Apple Arcade version, dubbed Vampire Survivors+, is more akin to the PC or Xbox versions that don't have ads. Both paid expansions will be included at no additional charge.

Meanwhile, Temple Run: Legends is a completely new game (not just a remake of the original Temple Run) that bucks the "endless runner" genre label by breaking its gameplay into individual levels—though there will be some kind of optional endless mode, too.

Enlarge / Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. (credit: Epic Games)

It's been a whirlwind journey of stops and starts, but AppleInsider reports the Epic Game Store for iOS in the European Union has passed Apple's notarization process.

This paves the way for Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to realize his long-stated goal of launching an alternative game store on Apple's closed platform—at least in Europe.

Apple announced plans to allow third-party app stores on iOS in the region earlier this year, complying with the letter of the law (though some say not the spirit) as required by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which was enacted in hopes of making platforms more open and competitive.

Enlarge / The app lets you invoke ChatGPT from anywhere in the system with a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight-style. (credit: Samuel Axon)

OpenAI announced its Mac desktop app for ChatGPT with a lot of fanfare a few weeks ago, but it turns out it had a rather serious security issue: user chats were stored in plain text, where any bad actor could find them if they gained access to your machine.

As Threads user Pedro José Pereira Vieito noted earlier this week, "the OpenAI ChatGPT app on macOS is not sandboxed and stores all the conversations in plain-text in a non-protected location," meaning "any other running app / process / malware can read all your ChatGPT conversations without any permission prompt."

He added: