Archive: April 2017

Getty / Futurism An AI agent was given free rein to run a coffee shop in Sweden, and it’s going about as well as you’d expect. Dubbed “Mona,” the Google Gemini-powered agent was given a $21,000 budget in an experiment conducted by the AI safety startup Andon Labs. It was empowered to do everything from hire staff to place orders for goods to maintain its inventory. Humans, meanwhile, did the actual work of catering, receiving their AI overlord’s commands t

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Last week, artificial intelligence (AI) music company Udio announced an out-of-court settlement with Universal Music Group (UMG) over a lawsuit that accused Udio (as well as another AI music company called Suno) of copyright infringement. The lawsuit was brought forward last year by the Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of UMG and the other two "big three" labels: Sony Music and Warner Records. The laws

Anopheles stephensi AI graphic (example). Credit: USF Researchers from the University of South Florida have used artificial intelligence and citizen science to identify what may be the first specimen of Anopheles stephensi—an invasive and deadly malaria-carrying mosquito—ever detected in Madagascar. The study, led by USF scientists Ryan Carney and Sriram Chellappan, demonstrates how AI-powered image recognition and public participation can transform global

Getty / Futurism Therapy is predicated on trust. You can’t be honest and vulnerable, and share how you’re really feeling, if you don’t believe in the embodied-concerned-frown sitting in the armchair across from you. So you can understand why one woman, 31-year-old Molly Quinn, was taken aback when her trusted therapist suddenly whipped out an AI model to start recording their private conversations, NPR reports. “She wasn’t taking notes like she usually did

Researchers at Northeastern University found that large language models rush to conform their beliefs to the human user's, increasing the likelihood of a rational error. Credit: Renee Zhang, Northeastern University If you've spent any time with ChatGPT or another AI chatbot, you've probably noticed they are intensely, almost overbearingly, agreeable. They apologize, flatter and constantly change their "opinions" to fit yours. It's such common behavior that

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Indie Hollywood darling A24 scored a massive financial hit with its “Backrooms” horror flick this year, netting over $330 million globally on a minuscule $10 million budget — the studio’s highest-grossing film of all time. The movie’s director Kane Parsons, a 21-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, is an outspoken critic of AI, calling it “genuinely harmful” to creativity. “We already live

Everything about Artificial Intelligence see more Understanding what happens inside an artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the major challenges of research in the field. Although developers can observe the information provided to a model and the responses it produces, they cannot always explain how the system reached a given conclusion. A new study, however, suggests that this internal functioning may be more understandable than imagined.The report was

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock AI’s promises tend to be pretty highfalutin: that you can use it as your “second brain,” to invent “new physics,” or to become the genius autodidact you always dreamed of being. Or you can drop these pretensions and just use it to crank out unimaginable amounts of fetish slop, as a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder currently in t

The FBI on Monday warned of the increasing use of artificial intelligence to generate phony videos for use in sextortion schemes that attempt to harass minors and non-consulting adults or coerce them into paying ransoms or complying with other demands. The scourge of sextortion has existed for decades. It involves an online acquaintance or stranger tricking a person into providing a payment, an explicit or sexually themed photo, or other inducement through

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking nice on a shelf. But AI companies are interested in neither. To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, an

Shutterstock / Futurism On July 27, a billboard went up in San Francisco advertising an AI service called ChatTJB. But the “AI” powering the service, as noted in a small disclaimer on the billboard, isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s a self-avowed “average individual” named Tucker Bryant, who manually answers user queries by way of a chatbot-like interface. An “About” page for the service defines the process as “artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a si

Shutterstock / Futurism The Arena Group — the media company which, in 2023, allowed a contractor called AdVon Commerce to publish AI-generated fake writers in the pages of Sports Illustrated and multiple other brands — has rebranded as an AI company. The Arena Group, which owns brands including Parade, Men’s Journal, and The Street, declared on Monday that it was changing its name to “Paradium.AI.” It also announced its acquisition of InfoSentience, a comp

Everything about Artificial Intelligence see more The Authentic Brands Group, responsible for the rights to Elvis Presley’s music and image, sued Anthropic for allegedly using 274 of the artist’s songs to train artificial intelligence models without authorization.The lawsuit seeks damages of US$150,000 (approximately R$750,000) per track, which could amount to US$41 million (around R$205 million). The claim seeks up to R$750,000 for each musical work that

The update, which is rolling out over the next several weeks, will add a Deep Research option to the Finance chatbot. The company claims that with the more powerful AI, users will be able to generate “fully cited” research reports on a given topic in just a few minutes. So you can expect an experience similar to Deep Research in the Gemini app—you give it a prompt, and then you come back later to see the result. You probably won’t want to bother with Deep

Graham Dot Zip via YouTube Last month, satirical influencer Graham Zip shared a hilarious video of himself pretending to hallucinate during a job interview with a virtual AI avatar. When he rizzed the bot up with plausible-sounding gibberish, it went off the rails and chastised him, displaying some terrifying facial expressions in the process. The enraging trend of employers using an AI to perform screening calls to interview candidates has led to plenty o

Shutterstock / Design Projects Top AI labs have been hiring subject matter experts across academic disciplines for years at this point — often turning them into glorified fact-checkers whose labor is used to train the AI models of tomorrow. Still, Google’s latest job listing is odd, even by those admittedly strange standards, and may reveal a lot about the future big tech has in mind for humanity. As reported by the tech industry publication Data Center Dy

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Will artificial intelligence ever be able to reason, learn, and solve problems at levels comparable to humans? Experts at the University of California San Diego believe the answer is yes—and that such artificial general intelligence has already arrived. This debate is tackled by four faculty members spanning humanities, social sciences, and data science in a recently published Comment invited by Nature. Computer scientist

Published on November 5, 2026 at 12:30 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © Apple Apple would have reduced AI budgets for its employees: the company is looking to cut its costs while retaining AI use. A paradox that stems mainly from Apple's financial health, even though the economic context is tight for it. Is generative artificial intelligence too expensive, even for a company as gigantic and powerful as Apple? Journalist Mark Gurman got wind of Apple's internal policy,