Archive: September 2025

Is it a little ironic that someone who plays other people professionally is leading the charge in protecting people’s identities in the age of artificial intelligence? Sure, but it’s not like anyone else is doing anything about it. On Tuesday, multi-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett announced the release of the Human Consent Registry, a new tool designed to help people control their likeness and how it can be used by AI systems. The tool, which is b

Early leaks about President Trump’s executive order on AI made it sound like a crackdown that would have forced companies to let the U.S. government vet AI models for safety before they could be released to the public. But it didn’t take long for those behind the scenes to signal what was really coming: voluntary vetting. The executive order he signed on June 2 asks companies to submit their new models for government oversight. Tech companies should, prett

Amazon Web Services data center is seen on Aug. 22, 2024, in Boardman, Ore. Credit: AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File President Donald Trump's plan to boost artificial intelligence and build data centers across the U.S. could speed up a building boom that was already expected to strain the nation's ability to power it. The White House released the "AI Action Plan" Wednesday, vowing to expedite permitting for construction of energy-intensive data centers as it look

ANA announced on November 13 that some functions of its reservation system were experiencing issues, making it possible that services such as reservations could not be used. The customer service hotline is also experiencing high volume, and phone lines are difficult to get through. The cause and expected recovery time have not been disclosed. On the same day, at midnight, ANA had just started its domestic line time sale. ANA's announcement Had just started

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The warning signs are piling up for anyone still working as a software engineer in 2026. In a recent episode of former Airbnb guy Lenny Rachitsky’s tidily-named audio show, “Lenny’s Podcast,” the creator of one of the most acclaimed AI coding tools, Boris Cherny, reaffirmed his belief that there are dark days ahead for the world’s software developers. “I think by the end of the year, ever

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Lionel Hahn / Getty Images Amid its pivot to AI, the Washington Post is abandoning the traditional fix-priced subscription model. According to new reporting from Washingtonian, the once-venerable newspaper will now be setting readers’ subscription rates based on an AI-driven algorithm that interprets their personal data, mirroring controversial schemes used by services like Uber, Ticketmaster, and air

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain OpenAI will roll out a new ChatGPT feature in December 2025, allowing verified adults to generate erotic text and engage in romantic or sexual conversations. Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like Replika and Grok already do this, but OpenAI's entry marks a turning point. The company frames this as "treating adults like adults." But it's a commercial strategy to keep users talking and paying. OpenAI burned through mo

Witness its $30 billion bet on OpenAI in early 2025 or its announcement in February that its SB Energy subsidiary would spend $33 billion on a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power plant. If you can’t be first, be biggest, I guess. That philosophy apparently spilled over into procurement, where orders were also supersized. Starting about two years ago, SoftBank reportedly put down deposits on more than 13 gigawatts of turbines, almost 50% more than it needed. The

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images The overwhelming backlash against Nvidia’s new DLSS 5 feature that uses AI to yassify video games has clearly rattled CEO Jensen Huang, who’s now insisting that he actually hates AI’s horrible and homogenous aesthetic as much as gamers do. “I think their perspective makes sense and I can see where they’re coming from, because I don’t love AI slop myself,” Huang

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A year ago today, AI giant Anthropic’s Chief Information Security Officer, Jason Clinton, made a bold pronouncement: within the next year, AI-powered employees will begin traipsing around the virtual innards of big companies around the world. Speaking to Axios in 2025, Clinton said these AI entities would have their own “memories,” as well as specialized roles within companies, which of c

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Ever stumble across an online “news article” that just doesn’t feel quite right? You may be onto something. A joint investigation by The Florida Trib and the KCRW podcast Question Everything found that a so-called “independent, locally owned digital news publication” dubbed the South Florida Standard was in reality an AI-generated Potemkin village staffed entirely by fake writers. The wri

Shutterstock / Futurism If you Google “SCP-565” — an iconic entry in the collaborative fan fiction universe known as the “SCP Foundation” — the company’s AI Overviews describes the nonexistent entity as though it were entirely real, without a single acknowledgement that it’s a piece of online horror fiction. “SCP-565 (also known as ‘Ed’s Head’) is an anomalous, ambulatory human head that behaves like a coral crab (Carpilius convexus),” the AI feature blovi

We’ve known for a while now that machine learning was important to the palm rejection technology on the iPad when using a Pencil. Apple We’ve known for a while now that machine learning was important to the palm rejection technology on the iPad when using a Pencil. Apple It’s used for live translation in iOS 14. Apple It’s used for live translation in iOS 14. Apple AI is behind the automatic positioning of home screen widgets. Apple AI is behind the automa