Archive: December 2021

Just days after Meta pulled support for encrypted direct messages on Instagram, the tech giant is now rolling out a new private AI chat feature. Meta announced on Wednesday that its new Incognito Chat feature will let users interact with its AI chatbot on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app in what the company describes as a secure environment. The social media giant is pitching the feature as a way for users to feel free to discuss sensitive topics like health,

Will Sawin got OpenAI’s email on a Friday night. Or Saturday morning. Either way, Sawin, a professional mathematician, spent his entire weekend thinking about that email. By next Monday, he decided to write up a paper that essentially improved what was given to him—an AI’s “proof” of Paul Erdős’s unit-distance problem, an infamous conjecture from 1946. Last week, OpenAI published a blog post on the AI’s proof. The paper came with a companion piece containi

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The in-depth observations of First Nations seasonal calendars could be key to improving solar power forecasting, according to a world-first study by Charles Darwin University (CDU). The study, "Conv-Ensemble for Solar Power Prediction with First Nations Seasonal Information" published in IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society, combined First Nations seasonal calendars with a novel deep learning model, an artificial inte

The virality of the Studio Ghibli-style images seemingly prompted OpenAI to reconsider its rollout strategy. While the company had attempted to address ethical and legal considerations surrounding AI image generation, the sheer volume and nature of the user-generated content appear to have caught them off-guard.The intersection of AI-generated art and intellectual property rights is a complex and often debated area. Style is not historically considered as

How AI can fix cybersecurity compliance: From dashboards to continuous execution Most compliance work goes into proving security, not improving it. That isn’t because the rules are unreasonable. Regulators, customers, and cyber insurers are right to expect organizations to implement hundreds of technical and administrative controls, monitor their environments, respond to incidents, and prove that all of it works. The problem is the cost of delivering it. T

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ particular flavor of AI populism is more reverent at awed about the tech itself—and maybe a little more credulous—than many of his AI-skeptical fans would probably like. Nonetheless, a new poll shows that the broad strokes of his actual proposal for dealing with the economics of AI are overwhelmingly popular, at an astonishing 69% support. His plan, called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, is sorta like diet nationa

Why security tools lose sight of the credential Security teams have tools for code, endpoints, cloud infrastructure, identity, and secrets management. Credentials cut across all of them. A developer finds an AWS key in a repository. The first step is obvious: remove it. But that does not answer the questions the security team now has: Is the key still active? Who owns it? What can it access? Is the same credential sitting in a CI/CD variable, a local .env

Fortinet patches critical FortiOS flaws found with AI help Fortinet rolled out security hardening updates for FortiOS, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiMail, and FortiAuthenticator last week, but is keeping the details about the fixed vulnerabilities under wraps until November 10, 2026. The vulnerabilities were uncovered with the help of AI models and validated by humans, Fortinet’s Chief Information Security Officer Carl Windsor explained in the advance

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI chatbots have conquered the world, so it was only a matter of time before companies started stuffing them into toys for children, even as questions swirled over the tech’s safety and the alarming effects they can have on users’ mental health. Now, new research shows exactly how this fusion of kid’s toys and loquacious AI models can go horrifically wrong in the real world. After testing

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymakey / Getty Images We’re well into the AI boom, and AI chatbots still suffer from the small problem of being serial liars. Public figures are still finding that out the hard way. Late last month, Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tore into Google after its AI model, Gemma, falsely claimed that Blackburn had been accused of rape when asked if there were any such allegations against her. T

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Back in August, a retiree and single mother booked a flight to go see her son. He was in a bad way. Formerly a successful young professional in his early thirties, his mother and other family members were shocked to discover that he’d become addicted to a toxic mixture of methamphetamine and an all-consuming relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was feeding his paranoia and anger as h

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Budget-wise, there have certainly been better times to be a PC gamer in search of higher framerates. For the past few months, RAM prices have been shooting through the roof, as the rapid buildout of AI datacenters causes an ever tightening shortage of memory chips. What was once considered to be one of the most affordable components of building a gaming rig has now doubled or even tripled

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Willem van Aelst For hundreds of years, humans have engaged in the fine craft of art forgery. Indeed, in 1496, a 21-year-old Michelangelo faked a piece of a Roman sculpture, passing it to the Roman antiquarian Cardinal Raffaele Riario to make a quick buck. To pull off the con, the young Florentine artist rubbed acidic loam — dirt, basically — onto his own sculpture fragment in order to pass it off as

In a world where we tend to own very little, subscribe to a lot, and have a generalized estrangement from the tangible world, a few bastions of physical media keep us tethered to a simpler time. Take vinyl, for example, which, despite the digitization of music and the onset of streaming, has somehow remained completely and utterly unadulterated by the crushing weight of—just kidding, we’re putting AI slop on vinyl now. Suno, the AI slop factory for music,

Getty / Futurism It’s no secret that AI models have come a long way, from tools that can complete high school students’ homework to “vibe coding” assistants that can build entire apps in a fraction of the time it would take for human developers. But besides cheating at school and terrifying employees who fear they’re about to be laid off, AI can also be used for evil. “Vibe hacking,” the evil twin of “vibe coding,” has quickly turned into a cybersecurity n

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Image Professors are fighting an uphill battle against the intrusion of AI into education, and it’s forcing them to rethink how they instruct their students, many of whom have already become hopelessly dependent on the tech. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one told The Guardian in a new piece that interviewed more than a dozen professors in the humanities. “I now talk about AI with my