AI News

Some of the worst freaks to walk planet Earth are using Elon Musk’s Grok to “unblur” the faces of women and children in the latest Epstein files, as documented by the research group Bellingcat. A simple search on X, Musk’s social media site where Grok responds to user requests, shows at least 20 different photos that users tried to unredact using the AI chatbot, the group found. Many of the photos depicted children and young women whose faces had been cove

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Amazon / Getty Images What if the biggest threat to your safety and privacy isn’t a person, but a device millions of Americans have installed in their homes willingly? That’s the contention of tech critics at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who say Amazon’s Ring doorbell devices constitute a “surveillance nightmare” — what they’re calling the largest civilian surveillance panopticon in the history

Getty Images / SrdjanPav Congratulations, office workers. Most of what you do at your cozy desk jobs will soon be automated with AI, according to the extremely questionable projections of Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. That’s because AI models, as Suleyman claims in an interview with the Financial Times published Wednesday, are on the verge of achieving “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks.” “So white collar work where you’

Getty / Futurism One of the core promises of the AI industry is that its tools can automate work for you and perform entire tasks without intervention. Oftentimes, however, the stuff that today’s AI will do on your behalf is less than helpful — or even so comically harmful that you’d be better off just doing a task yourself. A developer learned this lesson the hard way when using Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork model, which was seen as being so potentially d

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images OpenAI is finally sunsetting GPT-4o, a controversial version of ChatGPT known for its sycophantic style and its central role in a slew of disturbing user safety lawsuits. GPT-4o devotees, many of whom have a deep emotional attachment to the model, have been in turmoil — and copycat services claiming to recreate GPT-4o have already cropped up to take the model’s place. Consider just4o.chat, a service that expressly mar

Futurism When Elon Musk’s social media platform X, recently rolled into xAI, got bought by Musk’s space company SpaceX, it was becoming part of what’s now being considered a trillion-dollar empire. I mean, who are we kidding? It was owned by the world’s richest man in the first place. It’s the personal playground of Grok, an AI model so supposedly-advanced that it can also-supposedly probe the nature of reality itself. It’s a fount of Citizen Journalism. I

Getty / Futurism Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he’s not sure whether his Claude AI chatbot is conscious — a rhetorical framing, of course, that pointedly leaves the door open to this sensational and still-unlikely possibility being true. Amodei mused over the topic during an interview on the New York Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast hosted by columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat broached the subject by bringing up Anthropic’s system card for its latest mode

Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images When Meta announced it would strip its failed VR goggles division for parts, the bet was simple: funnel that money into sleek, AI-powered smart glasses instead. Emboldened by the product’s early success, the company is now working on rolling out a massive facial recognition feature across its entire smart glasses platform — a launch which involves timing the announcement with political drama to min

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 A mere two years ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the idea of stuffing his company’s blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT with ads as a “last resort.” But as the company recently announced, users will be pestered by ads after all — an early sign of desperation as the company continues to lose billions of dollars every quarter. The decision hasn’t sat well with insiders. This week, OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig declared in a New York Times essay

Futurism As Microsoft continues to force AI features onto users of its Windows operating system and other crucial software, glaring issues keep cropping up. Executives have promised to turn the platform into an “agentic OS” to the dismay of many users, with CEO Satya Nadella boasting that much of the company’s code is now being written by AI — while condemning those who use the newly-minted pejorative “Microslop.” While new bugs in an operating system soft

X / Futurism Text-to-video generating tools have made tremendous leaps in a few short years. We went from a horrifying clip of actor Will Smith’s contorted face temporarily merging with a bowl of spaghetti in 2023 to a far more realistic clip of him enjoying a plate of pasta — including a soundtrack of unnerving squelching and chomping sounds — a mere two years later. Now, TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance has once again upped the ante with the latest versi

Getty Images In December, Anthropic red teamers and business journalists at the Wall Street Journal teamed up in a bold test of the company’s AI model, Claude. They unleashed two separate AI agents, one to run a large vending kiosk in the newspaper’s offices, and the other to act as the unusual venture’s CEO. The experiment didn’t exactly go as planned. After being put in control of a starting balance of $1,000, the AI ended up ordering a PlayStation 5, se

The US government deployed xAI's Grok to give dietary advice -- and it's giving some eyebrow-raising advice. “Use Grok to get real answers about real food.” Until very recently, that was the message on the Trump administration’s just-launched website for its new protein-centric dietary guidelines, RealFood.gov, which was announced in a Super Bowl commercial starring Mike Tyson. And what better harbinger to spread the good word than xAI’s Grok, Elon Musk’s

Getty / Futurism The internet is so overrun with AI that anywhere you go, you run the risk of accidentally stepping into a puddle of slop. If only there were a gallant gentleman always at hand to drape their coat over these muddy obstacles so you could avoid ruining your day. It’s not quite on that level, but some netizens are proposing a new term to call out AI slop so other people can avoid wasting their time — or to just make fun of the person peddling

Getty Images / Trevor Williams The question that’s stumping top AI researchers isn’t about consciousness or doomsday scenarios. After interviewing dozens of developers at companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, Amelia Miller found it was this: should AI “simulate emotional intimacy?” One chatty researcher at one of the top AI labs “suddenly went quiet,” recalled Miller, who studies AI-human relations, in an essay for The New York Times — and then,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images By the time the public harassment started, a woman told Futurism, she was already living in a nightmare. For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related t

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US military had used Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot for its invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro. The exact details of Claude’s use remain hazy, but the incident demonstrated the Pentagon’s prioritization of the use of AI, and how tools available to the public may already be involved in military operations. And when Anthropi

Getty / Futurism Two researchers are warning of the devastating psychological impacts that AI automation, or the threat of it, can have on the workforce. The phenomenon, they argue in a new article published in the journal Cureus, warrants a new term: AI replacement dysfunction (AIRD). The constant fear of losing your job could be driving symptoms ranging from anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, and loss of identity, according to the authors, which can manifest e

Getty / Futurism Over the last couple of months, the AI industry’s obsession with building out costly data centers has sent the price of RAM skyrocketing, turning a simple computer upgrade into a costly investment. And while there are some early glimmers of hope, with RAM prices now falling across the pond, the next AI price hike could affect a different component instead: hard drives. During a recent company earnings call, Irving Tan, the CEO of hard driv