McDonald’s has taken down a Christmas advert made with Artificial Intelligence (AI) following online backlash.

The 45-second advert was produced with generative AI clips and released publicly on McDonald’s Netherlands YouTube channel on 6 December.

Viewers on social media denounced the use of AI in the film, with one commenter calling it ”the most god-awful ad I’ve seen this year”.

On 9 December McDonald’s Netherlands removed the video, adding in a statement to BBC News that the moment served as ”an important learning” as the company explored ”the effective use of AI”.

A Virginia startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the federal agency to cancel X Corporation’s trademarks of the words “Twitter” and “tweet” since X has allegedly abandoned them.

“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”

If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)

The future of Hogwarts Legacy and other Warner Bros. Games titles are in doubt following Netflix’s $82.7billion bid for Warner Bros Discovery.

Last week, Netflix announced that it was set to buy Warner Bros Discovery with the deal including the DC universe, streaming service HBO Max and Warner-owned gaming studios.

However in a new interview, Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters has revealed that the streamer has no immediate plans for video games. “While they definitely have been doing some great work in the game space, we actually didn’t attribute any value to that from the get-go because they’re relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things,” he explained during an investors Q+A.

Apple on Wednesday released its annual list of the most downloaded apps and games for the year. For the U.S. market, OpenAI’s ChatGPT topped the ranks of free iPhone apps (not including games) with the most installs in 2025.

The AI app was followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google’s Gemini.

ChatGPT made it to No. 4 last year, but the top spot was taken by Chinese shopping app Temu. In 2023, the AI app didn’t make the top-10 list despite being released on the iPhone in May 2023 to a strong debut.