AI News

Getty / Futurism CEOs have eagerly grabbed onto AI as a tool to make offices more efficient, and often to reduce headcount via brutal layoffs. There’s a problem, though: the workers who remain often say they now have to fix a flood of error-ridden AI-generated “workslop” that’s burdening them, paradoxically, with more work than ever. All this pointless busywork to correct AI-generated output results in hidden costs for companies that embrace the tech, acco

Getty / Futurism It doesn’t take much to impress an AI chatbot. Tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have long garnered a reputation for being ludicrously sycophantic. Despite AI companies publicly promising to address the problem, researchers recently found that the bots still have a strong tendency to flatter and affirm in response to virtually any kind of prompt. In the latest preposterous example of this impulse, philosophy YouTuber and writer Jonas Čeika “sent

Dean Purcell/New Zealand Herald via Getty Images/Futurism As it turns out, all it takes to turn a cash-bleeding company into the New York Stock Exchange’s latest obsession are three magic words: “pivot to AI.” In a baffling announcement today, struggling tech bro shoe company Allbirds said that it was closing a $50 million deal that “will enable the Company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure” — under the new name, “NewBird AI,” of course. P

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images There’s a strange dynamic emerging around artificial intelligence. Research has shown that young people — who are typically the first adopters of new technology like MP3 players and the internet — are actually the most skeptical of AI. In fact, many teens seem to have deep concerns over AI chatbots rotting their frontal lobes. A new study out of Drexel University shows just how self-aware

Getty / Futurism In November, Anthropic revealed that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group had exploited its Claude AI’s agentic capabilities to infiltrate dozens of targets around the world. It was trivially easy to get around Anthropic’s AI guardrails, with the hackers simply pretending to work for legitimate cybersecurity organizations — highlighting how woefully unprepared we are for powerful AI models that could accelerate the discovery of serious

Elon Musk may have yet another day in court, at least if the NAACP has anything to say about it. The oldest civil rights organization in the United States has named Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, in a new lawsuit, alleging that the turbines powering its “Colossus” data center violate the Clean Air Act of 1970. For months, xAI has used 27 unpermitted gas turbines — each about the size of a bus — to power the data center used to run the chatbot Grok. The pract

Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Allbirds Tech bro sneaker company Allbirds made a huge splash yesterday when it announced a baffling pivot to AI infrastructure — news that was met with a mix of incredulity and ridicule. The company’s blindsiding metamorphosis into what it’s calling “NewBird AI” had investors leaping from their office chairs, sending shares surging by over 700 percent on Wednesday. That’s despite Allbirds’ core business being at death’s door

First Line Films Hollywood actors have been ringing the alarm bells over an industry that’s seemingly hellbent on replacing them with AI. And the general public appears to be on their side. Last year, a talent studio drew enormous and near-universal backlash after announcing the creation of an AI-generated “actress.” Even recently deceased Hollywood movie stars are fair game. During an ongoing industry trade show in Las Vegas, filmmakers behind an upcoming

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images On Tuesday evening, we published an original interview with a researcher who had recently coauthored an intriguing study about the effects of AI on users’ cognition. A news site called National Today quickly sprang into action: by ten o’clock that night, it had published a piece that was obviously a reworded version of our story, including a direct quote from the interview we’d conducted.

Getty / Futurism The public outrage over the tech industry’s obsession with AI is starting to boil over — and the pitchforks are coming out. Most recently, a man allegedly lobbed a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house. Days earlier, a councilman in Indianapolis said that somebody had fired a dozen bullets at his house, with a handwritten note reading “No Data Centers” left on his doorstep. A similar story is playing out across swathes of rural

While Google’s AI may no longer recommend eating rocks or confidently telling users to put glue on their pizza, even cutting-edge AI chatbots remain staggeringly incompetent at dispensing medical advice. In a new study published this week in the journal JAMA Network Open, researchers asked 21 frontier large language models (LLMs) to “play doctor” when confronted with realistic symptoms that an actual patient could feasibly ask about. The results painted a

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Most tech industry products are easily accessible by the US government. Ring Doorbells have given the Los Angeles Police Department warrantless access to their customers’ camera footage. The FBI can extract your iPhone’s metadata to peep the content of your Signal messages. Google will happily comply with administrative subpoenas issued by Department of Homeland Security apparatchiks. A n

Getty / Futurism For years now, a thriving cottage industry in China has been offering families the opportunity to speak to an AI clone of their deceased loved ones — for a monthly fee, of course. But what if the surviving member of the family isn’t clued in to the fact that they’re speaking with an AI representation, rather than their actual loved one? According to the South China Morning Post, which quotes reporting from a Chinese news outlet called Litc

Amazon’s Fire HD 8 Tablet is an affordable on-the-go entertainment tablet with a large, lightweight screen for reading, watching shows and movies, gaming, browsing, and more. It also offers up to 13 hours of battery time, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, expandable to 1TB via microSD, and additional AI features, such as Writing Assist, Webpage Summaries, and Wallpaper Creator. Right now, the Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet is just $80, down from its regular $130. T

An AI-generated drug showed early signs of potentially slowing aging, according to a new study out today in Nature Biotechnology, possibly taking the first small step towards using AI to cure all the diseases tech companies companies keep talking about. The new study centers on rentosertib, a drug from Insilico Medicine, an AI drug discovery and development company. From the onset, Insilico said it created rentosertib with the aim of both treating patients

Paul Schrader is best known for his work as the screenwriter of the American cinematic classics Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, films that, in the hands of director Martin Scorsese, serve as studies of the dark, violent corners of masculinity pulled out by alienation and ego. Unfortunately, without a more discerning eye involved, Schrader’s late career has been more bad impulses than warnings about them. Look than further than his relationship with AI. Schrad

Decart would have been kind of a funny company for Anthropic to buy, which is why it was newsworthy when Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was looking to do so. Last month, I wrote that Bloomberg’s initial reporting on this story was “one of those anonymously-sourced Bloomberg articles you can’t help but suspect might exist solely to help out one or another side in an ongoing negotiation,” and I finished by saying, “the deal could still crumble.” So what h

Muse, Meta’s new agentic AI platform will currently let you use 100 million tokens per week for free, according to a Threads post by Mark Zuckerberg. If you have no frame of reference for these kinds of usage limits, that might not mean much. Let me just tell you, it’s a lot. In July, it emerged that Meta was looking to go into business as a cloud provider for other companies. Critics at the time said it was a sign that Meta had overbuilt data centers. A p