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After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise "MLB Slugfest" for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the long hours of airtime with bizarre, rambling conversations. ("I read today that kitchen utensils are gonna hurt more people tonight than lifting heavy objects during the day...") Now former Midway Games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Major League Baseball. ("Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there anything better? We've been talking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I guess that is...") The nonprofit Video Game History Foundation published the text in their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that were actually recorded but never used in the final game. ("Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today...") Their BlueSky post with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and 2,400 reposts, with one commenter wondering if the bizarre (and unapproved) conversations were "part of the tactic where you include overtly inappropriate content to make the stuff you actually want to keep seem more appropriate." But the Foundation's library director thinks the voice actors were just going wild. "We talked with Mark on our podcast and it sounds like they just did a lot of improv and got carried away." He added later that the game's producer "would give them prompts and they'd run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports radio and comedy, so they came up with wild nonsense like this." The gaming site Aftermath notes the Foundation also has an archive page for all the other sound files on the CD. Maybe it's the ultimate tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years ago some fans of the game shared their memories on Reddit... "The first time my friend tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we were freaking out. Every game quickly evolved into trying to get our hitters to charge the mound." "I just remembered you could also kick the shit out of the fielder near your base if he got too close. Man that game was awesome." "You could do jump kicks into the catcher like Richie from The Benchwarmers." "Every time someone got on base we would run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good times." Six years after the launch of the franchise, Midway Games declared bankruptcy.

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"For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination," reports Ars Technica: the search-traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console. Though it normally shows the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their site, "starting this September, odd queries, sometimes more than 300 characters long, could also be found" in Google Search Console. And the chats "appeared to be from unwitting people prompting a chatbot to help solve relationship or business problems, who likely expected those conversations would remain private." Jason Packer, owner of analytics consulting firm Quantable, flagged the issue in a detailed blog post last month, telling Ars Technica he'd seen 200 odd queries — including "some pretty crazy ones." (Web optimization consultant Slobodan ManiÄ helped Packer investigate...) Packer points out "nobody clicked share" or were given an option to prevent their chats from being exposed. Packer suspected that these queries were connected to reporting from The Information in August that cited sources claiming OpenAI was scraping Google search results to power ChatGPT responses. Sources claimed that OpenAI was leaning on Google to answer prompts to ChatGPT seeking information about current events, like news or sports... "Did OpenAI go so fast that they didn't consider the privacy implications of this, or did they just not care?" Packer posited in his blog... Clearly some of those searches relied on Google, Packer's blog said, mistakenly sending to GSC "whatever" the user says in the prompt box... This means "that OpenAI is sharing any prompt that requires a Google Search with both Google and whoever is doing their scraping," Packer alleged. "And then also with whoever's site shows up in the search results! Yikes." To Packer, it appeared that "ALL ChatGPT prompts" that used Google Search risked being leaked during the past two months. OpenAI claimed only a small number of queries were leaked but declined to provide a more precise estimate. So, it remains unclear how many of the 700 million people who use ChatGPT each week had prompts routed to Google Search Console. "Perhaps most troubling to some users — whose identities are not linked in chats unless their prompts perhaps share identifying information — there does not seem to be any way to remove the leaked chats from Google Search Console.."

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