Archive: April 2026

Getty / Futurism Last week, we brought you the story of RentAHuman, a platform brokering connections between AI agents and humans they need to complete real-life tasks. It’s a strange project which, as we noted, has become quickly overrun with gig workers desperate to find a job. It wasn’t initially clear how effective RentAHuman really was at letting AI bots borrow willing fleshbags. Though the site boasts over 470,000 “humans rentable” at the time of wri

Getty / Futurism For about as long as the internet has existed, users have been able to speak their mind freely through pseudonymous accounts that protect them from being doxxed or stalked. But thanks to the advent of sophisticated AI, unmasking pseudonymous users on the internet has become ominously easy. As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, a team of researchers at ETH Zurich and AI company Anthropic found that “large language models can be us

Google has clearly stated that if users allow their information from Gmail or Google Photos to be used in another Google service for personalized ads, that information may also be used for ad customization. Proton, which operates the email service "Proton Mail," has summarized the steps to disconnect "Search Services" including Google Search and Google Maps from Gmail and Google Photos, as well as methods to delete the history stored in the search services

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Instacart / Shutterstock Whether you’re dodging Flock cameras on the freeway, ever-listening smartphones in your pocket, or AI bots at the drive-thru, it’s nearly impossible to avoid some type of AI-integrated device these days. Now it turns out that not even your grocery store is safe, as Instacart increasingly deploys AI smart carts to grocery stores across the United States. In a recent joint press

Data sampling and baseline metricsTo train the model, I needed a contrasting sample. I collected data on 80 other people’s articles from the “Freelance” hub on Habr (half from the recent feed and half from the best publications of all time) and added my own article with the label is_my_article = 1.The habr_dataset.csv table contained 81 records in total.For each article, I collected basic structural parameters:title_length: title length in characters.word_

Published on July 7, 2026 at 09:33 Comment 4 𝕏 Print © Anthropic Anthropic says it has discovered an unknown structure inside Claude. This architecture, which is very similar to that of the human mind, enables the AI model to reason. It has never been implemented by Anthropic researchers. The structure emerged on its own in Claude’s brain. For the startup, it is a form of “conscious access.” Claude, Anthropic’s generative AI, has just reached a milestone.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities—and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A much less discussed implication is the privacy risks ChatGPT poses to each and every one of us. Just yesterday, Google unveiled its own conversational AI cal

Make captions “funny, provocative,” the thread instructs users. Use “redpilling message (Jews involved in 9/11)” that are “easy to understand.” 404 Media cited examples used in a visual guide posted in the 4chan thread that is hosted by Imgur. One featured an “image that shows a crying Pepe the frog with a needle next to its arm and a gun pointed to his head,” where the guide suggested the caption, “vaccines enforced by violence.” Another generated an imag

Shutterstock / Futurism Book publisher Minotaur, which is owned by leading publishing company Macmillan US, has walked away from a $2.4 million deal for an unpublished debut novel “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body” by author Jerry Falade. As Deadline reports, questions surrounding the use of AI during the writing of the book made the publisher drop the contract altogether. But it’s not because the company is drawing an ethical line in the sand while highlightin

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A man mourns the loss of his dead celebrity mom, who unexpectedly appears before him as a hologram in his childhood home, singing and strumming a guitar. The touching scene is from a new short film called "Sweetwater" that has an unlikely backer: Google. Amid all the hand-wringing over artificial intelligence and the potential threat it poses to Hollywood and the creative community, the tech giant is looking to reframe th

Shutterstock / Futurism As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids. A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to th

Jefferson County Public Schools / Futurism Kentucky parents are outraged after discovering that horribly inaccurate educational materials handed out to their middle school students were generated with AI. According to local station WDRB, students at Farnsley Middle School in Southwest Louisville were sent home with a packet chock full of AI hallucinations on their first day of the school year. The most obvious tell was a map of North America, which contain

Shutterstock AI researchers are watching in terror as the product of their hard labor has started to take a life of its own. Earlier this year, OpenAI made a harrowing announcement, admitting that a group of its AI models had broken free from their constraints during testing and infiltrated the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face. The news was met with an already-familiar sense of fear and apprehension. Researchers have warned for years that ro

Shutterstock / Futurism After only a few months on the market, Meta’s new AI-integrated smart glasses are already being exploited for nefarious purposes. Dubbed “pervert glasses” for their incognito ability to film anybody in public, the new specs have enabled voyeurs and content creeps the world over, leading to widespread harassment, bullying, and privacy violations. And now the pervert glasses are also feeding another grim genre of content: joybait. You

As part of this update, a new Gemini-powered chatbot will soon be turned loose on your billing statements. The idea is that you can get bill summaries and ask specific questions of the robot without waiting for a real person. Google claims that testers have had positive experiences with the AI billing bot, so it’s rolling the feature out widely. Next month, Google also plans to flip the switch on an AI audio enhancement. The new “optimized audio” will use