AI News

Getty Images While workers in the western world agonize over what seems to be an impending job apocalypse, their Chinese counterparts are winning in pitched legal battles against AI automation. Last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese court ruled that companies can’t use AI as an excuse to fire workers. The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech c

Mikala Compton/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images Across the entire country, small rural communities are standing up to the rise of AI data centers, saying the enormous facilities threaten to suck water supplies dry and send electricity prices soaring. It’s become such a contentious issue that many Americans are doing something that often feels impossible in the contemporary political landscape: setting aside their often steep differences in po

Getty / Futurism Earlier this year, Anthropic unveiled a preview version of Mythos, its upcoming AI model that it claimed was simply too dangerous to make available to the wider public. As part of an early access program, the company allowed around 50 businesses and organizations to test it out, saying it was giving them a fighting chance to get ahead of a potential cybersecurity crisis in the making. According to Anthropic’s own researchers, Mythos is pow

Getty / Futurism In theory, using an AI model to churn out a bunch of code for your software company sounds like an awesome idea. A ruthless boss can cut down their workforce and save on paying their salaries and healthcare. Or they can keep the employees, and force them to crank out even more code with an AI. Either way, it’s an efficient cost-cutting dream. But reality is beginning to set in. Businesses are racking up huge AI usage bills they didn’t expe

Getty Images / Witthaya Prasongsin If you can’t beat ’em, tax ’em. AI slop is as certain as government levies these days, infecting every corner of the internet and increasingly intruding on real life. It’s not going away, and surely any attempts to ban the stuff will be futile. So what should we do about it? Well, why not institute a “slop tax?” proposes technologist Mike Pepi in an essay for The Guardian. Such a tax would “restore balance to what has her

Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images In February, Meta contractors in Kenya told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten that the company required them to review disturbing and sensitive footage captured by its Ray-Ban AI glasses. Some reported seeing wearers naked or using the toilet. Another saw a man’s wife undressing in their bedroom, after he left the glasses on a table, the joint investigation found. Other footage they reviewed included en

Getty / Futurism Earlier this month, we got a glimpse of the harrowing conversations that Florida State University school shooting suspect Phoenix Ikner had with ChatGPT before his deadly massacre. Ikner asked the chatbot how to turn off the safety switch on his weapon, what ammo to use, and even where to find the most people to kill on the university’s campus — horrific queries highlighting how some are already using AI to plan and perpetrate unconscionab

Getty / Futurism YouTube has a serious slop problem. The platform has been inundated with lazy AI-generated footage, from pseudo-educational videos explicitly aimed at toddlers and preschoolers to fake movie trailers. It’s become such a wasteland that some channels are starting to curate their playlists as being “no AI,” in an apparent effort to lure in users who’ve become fed up with the trend. And despite YouTube battling the slop in a largely symbolic g

Getty / Futurism There’s a pretty sizable list of things an AI assistant should refuse to help you with. Is engineering a doomsday pathogen one of them? Evidently, not every AI company thinks so. According to new reporting by the New York Times, at least one frontier AI model gave a scientist viable instructions for how to both engineer a deadly pathogen and weaponize it in a massive bioterror attack. Luckily for us, the scientist, David Relman, isn’t tryi

Getty / Futurism Over the past year or so, a bizarre phenomenon has emerged: people start talking with AI chatbots about delusions or conspiracies and get sucked into mental health crises that doctors are calling “AI psychosis.” The results can be grim. We’ve seen mainstream AI implicated in numerous suicides, involuntary commitment and even murder. Though most of the scrutiny has focused on OpenAI and Character.AI, a recent study by researchers from the C

CCTV Earlier this year, TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance released the latest version of its Seedance AI video generating tool. Impressively photorealistic footage of Will Smith battling a ferocious spaghetti monster or Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise engaging in hand-to-hand combat sent Hollywood into a frenzy, highlighting ongoing concerns over the status of human creativity in the age of AI. It’s not just Hollywood struggling to adapt to a new reality. As the N

Getty / Futurism Mark Zuckerberg is following a path paved by fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet: laundering his untold billions through a health research prestige project. Called the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub — his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, is also involved — the foundation’s stated long-term mission is to “cure and prevent all disease through AI-powered biology, frontier research, and state-of-the-art technology.” True to those enor

Don Arnold/Getty Images/Futurism The famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins may have coined the word “meme,” but lately it feels like he’s becoming one. In a new essay for UnHerd, he describes his experience chatting with Anthropic’s Claude — or “Claudia,” as he starts to call “her” — becoming convinced that the machine is conscious. There was a spark of companionship between them, he believed, that warmed the scientist’s cold, curmudgeonly heart. “I

Getty / Futurism Approaching half of new podcasts appear to be AI slop. Of the 10,871 new podcast feeds created in the past nine days, 4,243 of them, or 39 percent, have signs of being AI-generated, data from the Podcast Index cited by Bloomberg last week showed. “It’s absurd,” Dave Jones, who runs the Podcast Index, said on his own show last week, per the outlet. Podcasts, before the intrusion of AI, were already a sloppy medium. They’re designed to be li

Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images There’s unrest brewing in the world of vibe-coding startups. Apple is blocking AI coding apps on the App Store, sparking complaints among AI companies that believe the tech giant’s rules are outdated and draconian, the Financial Times reports. Apple’s resistance here could remain a huge roadblock for the AI industry, as coding tools have become one of the most popular — and potentially profitable — use cases for AI.

Getty / Futurism Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been implicated in not just one but two mass shootings over the past year or so. Both perpetrators extensively used the chatbots to extensively plan their crimes, reigniting a heated debate over t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Despite a massive campaign by some of the wealthiest companies in the world to push AI as the cure-all for society’s problems, regular working-class people remain resentful of the technology at best, and downright petrified at worst. At a contentious county commission meeting in Box Elder, Utah, for example, sheriff’s deputies held irate community members back after three county commissio

Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch Outspoken venture capitalist and major Trump backer Marc Andreessen, whose controversial “techno-optimist manifesto” in 2023 set the tone for a years-long AI boom cycle, doesn’t appear to know how the tech actually works. In a lengthy “custom prompt” he shared in a Monday tweet, the billionaire seemingly tried to show off his AI skills — only for the internet to mercilessly mock him for it. “You are a world class

AlexKnight via X It may finally be starting to dawn on Microsoft that shoving AI in its loyal customers’ faces at all costs might not be the right move. Among gamers, who have watched the AI industry’s run on computer hardware make PC components horrendously unaffordable in a matter of a year or two, AI has turned more into a derogatory slur than a selling point. Microsoft’s Xbox CEO Asha Sharma appears to have taken this new reality to heart, announcing i

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images On Tuesday, OpenAI threw a party for the release of GPT-5.5 (it was the fifth of May and the fifth month of the year, you see.) If celebrating with a bunch of tech bros sounds like the opposite of a good time, you’ll not be swayed from your position by the news that CEO Sam Altman consulted the non-human entity of the hour to plan its own party — producing, in Altman’s o