AI News

Getty / Futurism Donald Trump’s bid to cash in on the AI data center boom seems to have sprung a leak before it even left the harbor. The company, Fermi America — the “master developer” of the “President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus” — is apparently flailing wildly as it tries to nail down fundamentals like steady revenue and cooling infrastructure. According to Axios, the Trump-branded firm has yet to even secure a commercial te

Capcom / Futurism That new, unapologetically derivative open world game or umpteenth shooter sequel you’re currently addicted to? It was almost certainly made with a little help from AI, according to Google Cloud’s global director for games Jack Buser. In an interview with Mobilegamer.biz, Buser claimed that pretty much every major video game studio is using the tech behind the scenes, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. “I think what players don’t

Getty / Futurism An eyebrow-raising trend has emerged this year: tech leaders rating their employees’ productivity based on the number of AI tokens they use. The trend, ribbingly dubbed “tokenmaxxing,” has sparked discourse for symbolizing the Silicon Valley’s unbridled infatuation with using AI as much as possible — and, quite literally, at all costs. But what’s so far been a free or at least low-cost ride could be coming to a screeching halt. Setbacks pl

Getty / Futurism Last month, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma became the first Indigenous nation to officially ban data center construction from its land. When a tech startup approached Tribal leaders asking them to sign a nondisclosure agreement along with a letter of intent to construct a data center on Seminole territory, the Tribal Council unanimously shot them down, voting 24 to 0 to instead enact a permanent data center moratorium. The Seminole Nation

Getty / Futurism The military and intelligence contractor Palantir has been embroiled in nonstop controversy during Trump’s second term. It’s been directly involved in the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, an effort that’s been implicated in numerous deaths. The company has even been linked to US airstrikes that leveled a school in Iran, killing over 120 schoolchildren. Last week, the Peter Thiel-cofounded company poured fuel on the fi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images It may be the beginning of the end for the global legions of C-drama fans. iQIYI, the Chinese streaming service known for its massive library of Asian films and TV shows, is anticipating that AI will create the majority of its content in just five years, Bloomberg reports. In an interview at iQIYI’s annual content showcase, CEO Gong Yu presented a sweeping AI vision so divorced from the c

Hollywood has been “cooked” for years now, according to AI fanatics, yet movies still remain largely human-made, and nothing even close to an AI-generated blockbuster has hit the silver screen. Even certain filmmakers have also been guilty of overselling the tech’s capabilities. Take “Avengers: Endgame” director Joe Russo, who enthused in an interview with Collider that there would be a fully AI movie within “two years” — exactly three years ago. Perhaps R

Getty / Futurism There’s a new link in the food chain of tech startups. Founders are realizing that they can make an extra buck by selling off the digital remains of their dead companies in the form of their employees’ Slack messages and emails. And now, there’s a whole ecosystem of decomposers that specialize in helping them make that happen, Forbes reports. Getting quality training data is half the battle with building an AI model, and fresh sources are

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Workers across the US have had it with the prognostications of AI taking over the world. And their unions — or what’s left of them, anyway — are taking notice. Last week, the leaders of some of the largest trade unions in the US came together for a conference with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Axios reports. Together, they presented a united opposition against tech companies pushing AI

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The new courtroom gotcha? Check whether your opponent left in brainless AI hallucinations, and tattle on them to the judge. This is precisely how the prestigious Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which boasts clients including Donald Trump, was recently humiliated. On Saturday, Andrew Dietderich, the cohead of the firm’s restructuring group, apologized to federal judge Martin Glen

Getty / Futurism The advent of generative AI continues to undermine the very concept of copyright, from entire books shamelessly ripping off authors to tasteless AI slop depicting beloved characters going viral on social media. The sin is foundational: all today’s popular AI tools were built by pillaging copyrighted material without permission. Even software isn’t safe. As 404 Media reports, a new tool dubbed Malus.sh — pronounced “malice,” to give a subtl

Getty / Futurism AI isn’t all chatbots and meme generators. According to a new study published in the journal Science, it can also serve as a fountain of misinformation — and all it takes is for someone to turn open the spigot. The new research examines the scale at which AI, namely large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents, can be used to manipulate opinions on a “population-wide level.” The researchers point to a specific threat in the form of A

Getty / Futurism The advent of large language model-based writing tools have given lazy or unconfident writers incredible new shortcuts that can spit out everything from glossy work emails to crispy school papers. The problem, of course, is that bosses and teachers around the world quickly got wise to the phenomenon — and as a result, any text that feels too tidy and polished has started to arouse suspicion. Now, in an effort to reintroduce some of the mes

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As if air travel in the United States wasn’t cursed enough, the Trump Administration wants to ease the burden of air traffic scheduling with the help of some private-market AI solutions. US Department of Transportation secretary Sean Duffy — the same guy who was briefly in charge of NASA, weirdly — recently confirmed that the government is working on integrating AI software into the air t

Getty / Futurism A recent survey found that millions of Americans are asking AI chatbots for medical advice, often instead of consulting human doctors. That’s despite researchers continuing to find severe flaws plaguing large language model-based tools that can purportedly offer summaries of medical records and dole out health advice based on simple text prompts. For one, hallucinations remain a massive unsolved problem, from AI models generating detailed

Alex Wong/Getty Images/Futurism In February, an 18-year-old named Jesse Van Rootselaar killed eight people and herself — while wounding dozens more — in a rampage that started at her home and continued at a high school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Investigators later learned that Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account had been flagged and banned by OpenAI’s staff for describing “scenarios involving gun violence” — many months before the massacre took plac

Getty / Futurism A news website with apparent links to OpenAI is using AI agents that pose as flesh-and-blood reporters to get quotes from human experts — and many of its articles discuss the AI industry, pushing pro-AI arguments and attacking the tech’s critics. At least, that’s according to a provocative new investigative piece from The Midas Project’s Model Republic. The links to OpenAI are circumstantial yet eyebrow-raising; we reached out to the Sam A

Getty / Futurism Mindlessly unleashing AI agents to take over employees’ jobs can be pretty costly, it turns out. Some companies are learning the hard way that paying for the incredible volume of AI agent requests is costing more than what they’d pay their human employees, Axios reports. AIs can perform all sorts of tasks, ranging from the rote to the complex. But one of the most popular ways it’s being used in the workplace is to generate mountains of cod

Getty / Futurism Late last year, Anthropic had its AI model, Claude, run a large vending kiosk in the Wall Street Journal’s offices. It didn’t take long for the experiment to go off the rails. After being given a starting balance of $1,000, the AI ordered a PlayStation 5, several bottles of wine, and a live betta fish — questionable purchases that inexorably drove it into financial ruin. Now, the company has upped the ante, creating a Craigslist-like class

Heather Ainsworth for The Washington Post via Getty Images Enticed by cheap land, abundant resources, and massive tax breaks, tech companies are gobbling up land in small, rural communities like never before for their inconvenient real-world infrastructure. One humble burg in Northeastern Pennsylvania is inundated with so many data center proposals, in fact, that the facilities could soon make up a staggering 14 percent of the town’s surface area. In the b