Mods are developed by fans in their free time, like the original Counter-Strike. To play it you had to own the original game and could get the mod for free. In contrast games like Half-Life are developed by a company with full-time employees, and sold for money.

Of course Counter-Strike hasn’t been a mod for a long time now. Valve took it over and turned it into a full game.

And yet the article manages to get people upset, makes the talk about it and get shared. Basically free marketing for SH2. It’s a win-win for eurogamer and for the game publisher. All it takes is a single troll on Wikipedia and some PR work.

All that said, I imagine the area that China is concerned with would be AI generated content passed off as news. You can easily generate deepfake video of a politician for example, and having rules to prevent such a video being passed around as real seems prudent.

The solution to that is verifying sources and cross-referencing to make sure that its actually real. It has been possible for a very long time to edit images and videos in a way that appears real, AI just makes the process faster.

This is ridiculous, how would you even determine that a given image was created or edited with AI? And what about images that were generated with Photoshop, do they also require a watermark?