AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Gabe Ginsberg / Getty Images Stan Lee, an icon of the comic books world, died in 2018. But tell that to ElevenLabs, the AI voice synthesizing firm. On Wednesday, the company announced that it signed a new deal with the famed Marvel writer’s social media brand, Stan Lee Universe, allowing it to replicate his appearance and voice using AI — meaning that Lee will still be giving cameos beyond the grave,

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s no secret that YouTube is overrun with AI slop. It’s made gestures towards reining in the flood of chintzy AI imagery, and now it’s signaling that it’s getting a little more serious about enforcing its own (still relatively lax) standards on videos made with the tech. On Wednesday, the Google-owned platform announced changes to how it would start labeling AI-generated content. The most noticeable update is that the labels will

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s no secret that many of the world’s top CEOs are obsessed with AI. By pursuing lofty goals of complete AI automation, these executives have created one of the largest financial bubbles in recent memory while transforming the job market into a barren wasteland, with little to show for their efforts so far. As the top tech companies have yet to find a way to turn AI into a profitable venture, those decisions to go all-in on AI are

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Earlier this year, Anthropic started rolling out its latest Mythos AI model to a select number of organizations as part of a deliberately slow and careful launch. The goal was to give them a fighting chance to address any cybersecurity lapses in their code. Anthropic warned that Mythos was powerful enough to blast holes in their defenses with ease. Months later, Anthropic cofounder Chris

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Anyone who’s sat through this year’s NBA playoffs has probably noticed: the basketball league has a big problem with its referees. There’s the poor flopping management for starters, where players try to exaggerate or fabricate physical contact with opposing teams in order to draw penalty calls. Flopping has become something of an epidemic over the 2026 playoffs, with certain suspects flai

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As the Australian software firm WiseTech lays off thousands of employees in a pivot to AI, its CEO Zubin Appoo has become the target of violent threats, the company says. Richard White, WiseTech’s founder, revealed the news in an email to the company’s staff on Sunday, the Financial Review reported. White said the company had already been facing “several serious and deeply concerning inci

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Companies that fell head over heels for AI are experiencing a rude awakening. Costs to access powerful AI tools are soaring, forcing company leaders to ask some difficult questions. As Axios reports, the early warning signs are already here, with Microsoft planning to remove its Anthropic Claude Code licenses after opening up access to the tool just six months ago, reportedly for financia

Serene Lee / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images; Futurism At its I/O conference last week, Google made it abundantly clear it’s looking to leave behind the Search pages of yore, featuring hyperlinks to online content — and replacing them with a reimagined and AI-powered “intelligent search box.” Instead of links, Google is looking to push users down an AI chatbot rabbit hole. That’s despite the tech’s glaring shortcomings, which the company has yet

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Ishika Samant / Getty Images When it comes to excuses from the front office, Jets fans have heard it all. The beleaguered New York franchise continues to hold the longest playoff drought of all major-league men’s sports teams, a situation which has been blamed on everything from management and coaching to players and locker room culture. Fans have likewise heard all the promises of hare-brained scheme

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Taylor Hill / WireImage; Shutterstock Earlier this month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with jeers when he brought up AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona. Just days earlier, footage of real estate executive Gloria Caulfield being booed at her commencement speech at the University of Central Florida after mentioning AI went viral online. “What happened?” Caulfield as

Shutterstock / Futurism Tech founders and CEOs are all rapidly adopting AI, deploying it across their companies and personally using it to handle emails and other busywork. But Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup accelerator Y Combinator and one of the most venerated names in Silicon Valley, has already grown tired of the tech’s influence. When he receives pitches that are AI written, it’s such a turn off that he now closes them on sight. “A lot of the e

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Steve Granitz / FilmMagic; Max Cisotti / Dave Benett / WireImage via Getty Images; Shutterstock Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s unsettling blockchain-based side gig seemingly got its Mars all confused. Let’s back up. The company, previously called Worldcoin and now simply called World, is developing software designed to verify the “humannesss” of people by scanning their eyeballs, a bizarre ventur

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Jorge R. Gutierrez, the animator behind the beloved animated film “The Book of Life,” is enraging his fans after seemingly selling out to AI. At a conference held by Amazon MGM Studios on Wednesday, he unloaded a gushing encomium to the tech after announcing that he’d be working with the Amazon studio to create an AI-generated animated series called “Punky Duck.” (A shared still from the

Getty / Futurism Therapy is predicated on trust. You can’t be honest and vulnerable, and share how you’re really feeling, if you don’t believe in the embodied-concerned-frown sitting in the armchair across from you. So you can understand why one woman, 31-year-old Molly Quinn, was taken aback when her trusted therapist suddenly whipped out an AI model to start recording their private conversations, NPR reports. “She wasn’t taking notes like she usually did

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Last year, California State University signed a $17 million deal with OpenAI to provide its over half a million students and faculty with ChatGPT Edu, an education-focused version of the company’s flagship chatbot. It was a statement move for both parties: OpenAI clinched the largest public university system in the country, and CSU secured bragging rights for being pioneering adopters of

Long exposure photograph of a man's face blurred as he moves and screams. On April 10, 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media to announce that his company was preparing to launch an exciting new feature. “A few times a year I wake up early and can’t fall back asleep because we are launching a new feature I’ve been so excited about for so long,” Altman declared in an early morning X-formerly-Twitter post. “Today is one of those days!” Hours later,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock AI companies have long relied on armies of data labelers, whose job it is to annotate, tag and classify text, images and videos to train AI models. It’s not exactly a flashy occupation, with some saying they’re forced to watch privacy-invading footage. Others argue they’re being forced to dig their own graves by training models capable of doing their old jobs. Other job opportunities in t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Angry parents aren’t the only ones railing against the proliferation of AI in schools. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teacher’s union in the United States, has now launched a major campaign calling on schools to keep AI and hardware like iPads out of elementary classrooms. In a buzzy speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, AFT president Randi Weingarten un

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images TV personality and businessman Kevin O’Leary is looking to construct a mammoth data center facility more than twice the size of Manhattan in Utah’s broader Salt Lake City region. As Slate reports, the megalomaniac plans for the “Stratos Hyperscale Data Center” would see dozens of data center buildings, research facilities, and even worker housing be constructed across 40,000 acres of unin

Shutterstock / Futurism Ever regret picking up everyone’s tab after getting the check? Something like that is probably going through the mind of the CFO of an unnamed company which reportedly racked up half a billion dollars in Claude usage fees in a single month. The bonkers figure comes from new reporting by Axios on how organizations that rapidly adopted AI are now reckoning with its exorbitant costs, which are mounting in tandem with skepticism over th