Kai Cenat at The 2023 Streamy Awards held at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel on August 27, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Christopher Polk/Penske Media via Getty Images
Twitch streamer Kai Cenat was so frustrated with a video game that he got a therapist on his stream.
He had been struggling for 60 hours to beat the final boss of "Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree."
Cenat eventually beat the video game boss about six hours after the mental health session.
Frustrated with his performance against a video game boss, Twitch streamer and YouTuber Kai Cenat went viral on Tuesday evening for bringing a therapist to his livestream to help process his emotions.
Cenat, 22, was well into his 60th hour of fighting the final boss of the "Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree" when Aubri Williams appeared in his streaming room.
Williams, a full-time model who also provides counseling sessions, told Cenat that someone booked him an appointment with her, but did not say who.
What ensued was a bizarre blend of two worlds. For half an hour, Cenat haphazardly talked through the mechanics of "Elden Ring" as Williams taught him to breathe, think positively, and envision the outcomes of him achieving his gaming goal.
Kai Cenat got a therapist on stream after being stuck on the last Elden Ring boss for 60+ hours
Cenat had been streaming his playthrough of the video game for a total of 92 hours, with six to seven hours of sleep interspersed between gaming sessions.
"I've been on the last boss for the past 60 hours of my life that I can't get back," Cenat lamented. "And I'm trying everything, I went to get a new weapon, I went to go upgrade new stuff like my dexterity, my arcane, I dropped my faith, I got more strength. I've done so much."
"Let's close our eyes for a sec," Williams said.
"Oh, I got scared, I see Radahn again," Cenat said, referring to the final boss blocking his victory.
Calming down and steeling his mind under Williams' guidance, Cenat played the boss fight again for her to observe.
"When I win, I win," Cenat said. Williams applauded his newfound positivity.
His character spun and slashed for several minutes but eventually fell to Radahn's two gigantic swords. A death counter on Cenat's stream updated to 992.
He slapped his knee in anger. "I got greedy," he said, raising his head and roaring the same words.
"You might need to pull away and give yourself a good five minutes of just resetting and putting your energy only on seeing that good run. Only a continuous good run," Williams told him later.
The streamer eventually appeared to get insecure. "92 hours and 992 deaths. Am I a bad player?" he asked Williams.
"I would probably have way worse. So no, you're actually a phenomenal player," Williams replied, encouraging Cenat to avoid "negative self-thoughts."
Her advice appeared to take root when Cenat's character died again. "It's OK," he said. "And that's fine. That was just fine."
After a few breathing exercises — and a brief segment where Cenat seemed to get suspicious that his therapist was laughing at his gaming performance — Williams wished Cenat luck and exited his stream.
Williams, who has 72,500 followers on Instagram, said on social media that she had opted not to run a full clinical session with Cenat when he was "trying to reach his goal" on a livestream.
"Did this young man need some mental health support during a tough time while he's legit LIVE STREAMING? Yes," wrote Williams, who said she has a Master's Degree in Marriage, Couples, and Family Counselling from Stetson University.
Cenat would defeat Radahn about six hours and 40 deaths later, or 67 hours after his first encounter with the video game boss.
It was the end of an ordeal for the streamer, who collapsed on the floor in ecstasy. He'd also broken down days earlier in front of his fans because he kept losing.
Williams and representatives for Cenat did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular business hours.
Cenat, with 11.7 million followers on Twitch, is one of the biggest creators on the streaming platform, just behind the likes of Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who holds the top spot with 19.1 million followers.
Though its main title was launched in February 2022, Cenat was playing a recently released expansion, "Shadow of the Erdtree," when Williams appeared on his stream.
Blue Origin recently expressed concerns over the environmental impacts of SpaceX's rocket launches on nearby facilities in a filing to the FAA, which the agency published on Friday.
The company also recommended imposing a cap on the Starship-Super Heavy mega-rocket's "launch, landing, and other operations" so that it would have a "minimal impact on the local environment, locally operating personnel, and the local community."
"An obviously disingenuous response," Musk said on X on Tuesday. "Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX's progress by lawfare."
"Sue Origin," Musk said in a subsequent post, taking a jab at the company's name.
In fact, Musk himself mentioned two other disputes that SpaceX had with Blue Origin in the past in an earlier post he made on Tuesday.
In 2013, Blue Origin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) after NASA chose to lease one of its launchpads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to SpaceX. The GAO rejected their complaint.
Then, in 2014, Blue Origin was granted a patent for a reusable rocket concept that involved landing the rocket on a boat. The US Patent and Trademark Office canceled the patent a year later after SpaceX protested that the technology being patented "was, at best, 'old hat' by 2009."
In past years, Blue Origin also sued to stop SpaceX from using what is now our primary launchpad at 39A and tried to patent landing a rocket on a ship, even though that idea had been around for 70 years!
To be sure, Blue Origin isn't the only party that has flagged the environmental concerns posed by SpaceX's rocket launches.
In 2021, residents of Brownsville, Texas, told BI that rocket explosions at a nearby SpaceX launchpad were a source of environmental pollution.
"SpaceX explosions are littering our ecosystems, home to the endangered ocelot, aplomado falcon, and numerous migratory birds," Brownsville resident Bekah Hinojosa told BI's Kate Duffy.
SpaceX and Blue Origin did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
Starting Monday, some workers in Greece could have 48-hour workweek. The change aims to tackle labor productivity issues stemming from unemployment and shrinking populations, which have left many employees to work beyond theirhours without extra compensation.
The reform, which was passed in September, applies to workers in selectedprivateindustries, including retail, agriculture, and some service sectors. It also applies to businesses that provide round-the-clock services.
Employees can be asked to split their work in various ways: working two additional hours a day or working a maximum of eight hours on a sixth day of the week. They will also be allowed to voluntarily have a second job with another employer of five hours a day, alongside their full–time job of eight hours.
Employers who follow the new structure are required to inform their workers of additional hours at least 24 hours before.
Change could 'kill' the traditional workweek
The new rules were met with backlash from trade unions and opposition groups.
One day before the bill was passedin the fall, thousands of public-sector workers, including teachers, doctors and transportation staff, marched to protest the reform.
While adopting the change is voluntary, opponents say the new bill will make six-day workweeks the norm because Greece has a poor history of conducting labor inspections.
The new law "will kill off the five-day work week for good," Aris Kazakos, a labor law professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, told German media outlet DW last week. The employer has the authority to require staff to work a sixth day in the week and staff cannot refuse to work, he said.
Kazakos also said he worried about the bill increasing safety risks for staff in industrial sectors. In 2023, 179 workers were killed in accidents at work in Greece, up from 104 the year before, DW reported.
Greeks work more than any of their European counterparts, even before the new bill. Per the OECD, they work an average of 36 hours a week, while workers in France, Netherlands, and Germany work less than 30 hours. US employees work about 35 hours a week on average.
In April, Singapore announced that employees in the country will soon be able to request shorter workweeks and flexible hours. Iceland, Ireland, UK, and Spain have all experimented with four-day workweeks. Out of 61 UK companies that took part in the six-month trial in 2022, 54 have continued with the shortened week, with 31 of them saying they would do so permanently.
Ford has issued a recall notice for over 550,000 of its 2014 model F-150 pickup trucks in the US.
The recall came after users complained that the trucks would suddenly drop to first gear.
At least two injuries were reported as a result of the transmission issue.
Ford has issued a recall for half a million of its F-150 pickup trucks after receiving hundreds of complaints that they suddenly downshifted to first gear.
The auto manufacturer will call back 552,188 units of its 2014 model truck in the US, according to documents by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) filed on June 14.
The total number of recalls worldwide is 668,000 units, per Reuters.
Ford said that it received 300 warranty reports, 96 field reports, and 124 customer complaints concerning some 482 vehicles, per Reuters. And vehicle users said they faced problems with their truck's transmission shifting unexpectedly to first gear, Reuters reported.
"A downshift to first gear without warning could result in a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash," per the NHTSA document.
At least two injuries have been reported from the issue, per Reuters.
Ford said in the NHTSA document that owners would be notified by mail by July 1 and "instructed to take their vehicle to a Ford or Lincoln dealer to have the PCM calibration updated."
PCM refers to the Powertrain Control Module, which manages the functions of the car's engine and transmission.
The company said in the document that it would foot the cost of the repairs.
This week's recall is not the first time the company has had to bring in its pickup trucks because of this issue.
Last July, the company took back 870,000 trucks of its 2021 to 2023 models after receiving complaints that their parking brakes activated randomly while driving.
Despite the problems, Ford's F-series trucks have been one of the top-selling vehicles in the US for decades.
The controversial congresswoman won a crowded GOP primary in Colorado's 4th congressional district on Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ and the Associated Press.
That's despite her only having lived there since the beginning of this year. Given that the district is far safer than the one she abandoned, Boebert is now on a glide path toward reelection in November.
One recent poll gives us a big clue as to how she pulled it off: name recognition.
Love her or hate her, you probably know who Lauren Boebert is, especially if you live in Colorado.
Polling from Kaplan Strategies conducted in May found that she had by far the highest name recognition among GOP primary voters in the district, with just 3% saying they didn't know who she was. The rest of her opponents hoverered around 50% name recognition.
The poll also revealed a substantial improvement of her image among GOP voters over time: In February, the same firm found that she had a net unfavorable rating, which she managed to turn around to a net favorable rating by May.
Of course, the congresswoman also caught a couple of lucky breaks along the way.
Rather than having to face one candidate head-to-head, she was able to dominate a crowded field of lesser-known candidates. She also caught a lucky break when local Republicans nominated a placeholder candidate to serve out the remainder of retiring Rep. Ken Buck's term, denying a potential advantage to one of her primary opponents.
On top of all that, Boebert won her old district by less than 600 votes in 2022, and a moderate Democrat backed by an avalanche of money appeared ready to throw her out of Congress this year.
But all in all, Boebert's primary victory sends a clear signal to other GOP candidates: Engaging in attention-getting tactics can pay off.
After all, how else would voters in Boebert's new district have known her name if she wasn't constantly appearing on cable news stations, or if she didn't have a massive social media following?
In an era where both television and social media have contributed to the nationalization of politics — the dissolution of local issues and concerns into a stew of nation narratives — candidates like Boebert can thrive, no matter where they might actually live.
Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, recently filed concerns to the FAA about Elon Musk's SpaceX, requesting that Starship's launch operations be potentially limited over environmental impact concerns.
The filing focused on the FAA's intentions to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of issuing SpaceX a commercial launch license for its Starship-Super Heavy mega-rocket.
The SpaceX launch system is a work in progress. Consisting of the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster and standing taller than the Statue of Liberty, the system has only flown four times, with just two of those attempts making it to space.
Yet these few launches have already indicated some environmental impacts — once creating the heat and pressure equivalent of a volcanic eruption, according to a physicist, and another time raining soil and sand down on a nearby town.
A screengrab from SpaceX's livestream of a test launch shows Starship sitting atop its Super Heavy booster on the launchpad.
SpaceX via X
According to the filing, the Super Heavy booster can contain up to an "unprecedented" 5,200 metric tons of liquid methane for its propulsion — which Blue Origin said may result in"qualified distancesfor safety margins that potentially overlap the operational sites of other companies, the government, and the public."
Citing concern over Starship having a "greater environmental impact than any other launch system" at Kennedy Space Center, Blue Origin asked the FAA to consider capping the rate of the Super Heavy "launch, landing, and other operations […] to a number that has minimal impact on the local environment." The filing did not specify what that number should be.
Blue Origin wrote in the filing that it's concerned because it also conducts operations nearby: the company occupies a large manufacturing site at Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX's leased Launch Complex 39A for its Starship operations is located. It also employs multiple properties "all within the vicinity " of SpaceX's proposed Super Heavy booster launches, Blue Origin said.
Blue Origin's filing highlighted the potential risks to the safety of personnel and assets on nearby sites, such as explosions, debris, blast and sonic boom overpressure, and air toxins.
SpaceX plans to launch 44 Starship-Super Heavy missions per year under a NASA lease, Blue Origin wrote in the filing.
Indeed, SpaceX has earned a reputation for regular launches. The company accounted for nearly half of the world's orbital launches last year. It launched its Falcon 9 rocket 91 times in 2023, breaking its previous record by 30 launches, CNBC reported.
In addition to capping the number of launches, Blue Origin suggested other mitigations, including adding more infrastructure to reduce the risk to other nearby launch providers and requiring SpaceX to compensate for any losses caused by their operations.
Musk responded to the complaint on X by writing "Sue Origin," adding another swipe at Bezos to their 15 years of public feuding.
The Tesla CEO later added, "An obviously disingenuous response. Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX's progress by lawfare."
Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin immediately responded to Business Insider's requests for comments ahead of publication.
After being asked to decipher Musk's initial message, xAI chatbot Grok wrote that his post "appears to be a tongue-in-cheek comment" about Blue Origin's "history of resorting to legal action rather than competing fairly in the marketplace."
The Tesla CEO simply replied with a bull's-eye emoji.
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati weighed in on AI-driven job loss, saying AI will eliminate some creative jobs — but those jobs "shouldn't have been there in the first place."
PATRICK T. FALLON via Getty Images
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati weighed in on the topic of AI-driven job loss.
AI will eliminate some creative jobs, "but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place," she said.
Writer Ed Zitron called Murati's remarks "a declaration of war against creative labor."
OpenAI's CTO Mira Murati weighed in on AI-driven job loss this month, suggesting that some workers — especially creatives — replaced by AI had jobs that "shouldn't have been there in the first place."
In doing so, she not only outraged people at risk of losing their livelihoods due to technological advancements but also seemed to reveal that she doesn't even know what AI is good for.
During an event at Dartmouth on June 8, Murati, speaking to university trustee Jeffrey Blackburn, discussed the AI behind ChatGPTand DALL-E, as well as safety and ethical considerations as the technology progresses.
When the conversation turned to how AI can disrupt the process for artists, Murati said she believes the tech will soon be primarily used as a collaborative tool to help more people become creative.
"Some creative jobs maybe will go away," Murati said, "but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place — you know, if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality."
Notably, Murati raised the topic of AI-driven job loss on her own, suggesting that the very workers whose creations helped train AI into what it is today have jobs that shouldn't even exist now that it's here.
Ed Zitron, writer and CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public relations agency, told Business Insider that Murati's perspective results from management's distance from the people who actually build things.
"The people losing their jobs to AI so far have been contract workers that helped fill gaps at organizations — necessarily so — that are now going to be filled with deeply mediocre slop, ordered by people who don't understand the businesses they're in, to fulfill a need that they neither care about nor appreciate, a kind of slow-moving poison that will weaken the edges of companies," Zitron said.
Zitron added he's tired of people "who don't build or write or draw or paint or sing or do anything creative making statements about what the creative arts should be, or how they should be run."
"These people treat creativity like a problem to be solved," he continued.
When Business Insider reached representatives for OpenAI, they declined to comment, instead pointing to a June 22 post on X by Murati expanding on her thoughts.
How artists are actually approaching AI
Boris Eldagsen is a photographer and visual artist who embraces AI. Last year, as part of an effort to demonstrate how impossible it is to tell the difference between "real" and AI-generated artwork, he entered — and won — the World Photography Organization's Sony World Photography Awards with a picture created with help from OpenAI's DALL-E2. He ultimately declined the award.
Where in the past he was "a solo instrument" working to create new work, Eldagsen told BI that he now collaborates with AI technology, considering himself more of a conductor while the training data serves as a "gigantic, anonymous choir," making his job to "bring that into some kind of harmony and make sense out of it."
That said, he still doesn't agree with Murati.
Boris Eldagsen shows a printed photograph of his work "Pseudomnesia: The Electrician," which he created using AI and won the "Sony World Photography Award."
FABRIZIO BENSCH via Reuters
"I think it's a pity, and I can't feel any empathy here. For me, her comments are a mix between being naive and arrogant," Eldagsen told BI. "I think she didn't really think it through, or she can't put herself in the position of those people who are afraid of losing their jobs."
To say those jobs that could be eliminated by AI shouldn't exist in the first place, Eldagsen said, "is just nonsense," and to suggest poor quality is at the core of why those jobs might be lost shows Murati doesn't have much of a grasp on how and why people create or consume things.
"The majority of things that we produce are not high quality. We have fast food, we have trash TV, we have bad products that you can use one time, and then you throw them away," Eldagsen said. "All these things shouldn't be there in the first place, but all these things are work that some people have to do. They pay the rent, they enable a living — and why should you just be so arrogant and say it shouldn't exist? This is something that I just don't understand."
Miles Astray, an artist, photographer, and writer, told Business Insider that Murati's comments come across as "condescending."
Like Eldagsen, Astray made AI the focal point of one of his art pieces this month: He turned Eldagsen's stunt on its head and took 3rd place in an AI art contest with a real-life photo he'd shot of a flamingo.
Miles Astray won third place in the "AI generated" category of the 1839 Awards.
Miles Astray
Astray said he doesn't buy the narrative of creativity being boosted by AI. The technology has the ability to free up time, make some repetitive work tasks more efficient, and give artists more space to ideate on the things that actually make them creative, he said, but asking a computer to do the creative work itself cheapens the process and ultimately produces an end result that's a regurgitated copy of the data the AI was trained on, not anexampleof a human's creative expression.
"You need to sit down with your piece of paper and your paintbrush and start painting — that is how you hone your skill," Astray said. "I think who it will really boost is companies, who will use it as a tool to increase productivity and to cut corners."
In the end, Astray said he sees the tension between tech and creativity as less about making the creative process easier and more about companies leveraging technology to outsource jobs to the point where they no longer need to employ a creative workforce.
"I think we need to have an honest public debate about the advantages, but also the pitfalls and dangers of AI technology," Astray said. "But that's not what she was doing."
'Mediocre is all they want'
"AI tools could lower the barriers and allow anyone with an idea to create," Murati wrote in her June 22 post on X. "At the same time, we must be honest and acknowledge that AI will automate certain tasks. Just like spreadsheets changed things for accountants and bookkeepers, AI tools can do things like writing online ads or making generic images and templates."
She added that a key part of the conversation around AI-driven job loss, especially among creative professions, is to "recognize the difference between temporary creative tasks and the kind that add lasting meaning and value to society."
"With AI tools taking on more repetitive or mechanistic aspects of the creative process, like generating SEO metadata, we can free up human creators to focus on higher-level creative thinking and choices," Murati wrote. "This lets artists stay in control of their vision and focus their energy on the most important parts of their work."
But not everyone is convinced.
"Throughout the last two years of AI hype, OpenAI and their ilk have been exceedingly careful not to directly attack labor," Zitron told BI. "What Murati is saying here — that some creative jobs 'shouldn't have existed in the first place' — is an outright declaration of war against creative labor, clearly stating that OpenAI believes that not only are there parts of creativity that are 'inefficient,' but that OpenAI will be part of the process of 'fixing' them."
Zitron said he believes that AI is approaching the top of the S-curve, with limited progress left to be achieved, and that Murati, Sam Altman, and the rest of OpenAI are "desperate to suggest that we're just about to have AGI or some sort of magnificent machine that can do the job of a hundred thousand people."
Such a suggestion keeps the money flowing as companies clamor for the latest version of a promising new technology that proponents swear will make their workplace faster, more efficient, and cheaper to run — all the buzzwords needed to keep investors interested, even if it means they're churning out a subpar product.
"The output from AI is mediocre, barely rising to the quality that the task requires," Zitron said. "But the people in charge are so often removed from the process that mediocre is all they want, even if it ends up making the rest of the project worse."