AI News

Shutterstock / Futurism Psychiatrists and other researchers are still working to understand the phenomenon known as “AI psychosis,” in which users of chatbots enter into delusional mental health crises following intensive use of the tech. A new paper proposes an intriguing new way to understand AI-fueled delusional spirals — and the chatbot-embedded design features that may reinforce unreality. The paper, coauthored by psychiatrists from King College Londo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock With trillions of dollars on the line, it should come as no surprise that tech companies are spending gobs of cash on the upcoming US midterm elections. What is surprising is the scale of electoral financing, as certain newly-founded AI super PACs are now spending more on candidates than the candidates are spending on themselves. According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, political

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC; Shutterstock Meta’s controversial program that spied on its employees’ computers has backfired spectacularly. Though its chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth assured that the data it collected would be “tightly controlled,” the company is now pausing the tracking program after sensitive employee information was leaked internally, according to reports from Business Insider

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock A lot of ink has been spilled on the programmers who got replaced by AI agents. But it doesn’t sound like it’s a whole better for the ones who avoided getting the axe, either. According to Deedy Das, a partner at the VC firm Menlo Ventures, the rapid embrace of AI tools is tearing companies apart by creating a “class divide” between brainless vibe coders and experienced engineers. The vet

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images; Shutterstock According to DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature, US President Donald Trump passed away earlier this month from rabies. As the AI feature explains, Trump was apparently predeceased by Vice President JD Vance, who also died from the incurable virus. In fact, if you click the article it cites as evidence — which looks like it was published by a local West Virginia b

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock There’s something grating about finding out that the customer service representative on the other end of the line is an AI agent, not an actual human. If it hasn’t happened to you, it’s certainly happened to someone you know. Industries leaders warn that AI could wipe out entire categories of human jobs — and customer service agents have frequently topped the list, indicating there’s plen

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock For years, Japanese investment group SoftBank has been all-in on the AI gold rush. In early 2025, mere weeks into his second term as president, Donald Trump announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, dubbed Stargate, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son proudly watched on inside the Oval Office. Over the proceeding year and a half, snowballing AI hype has sent

Futurism / Nickelodeon / Paramount Voice actors have been waging a fierce battle with the entertainment industry over training AI to synthesize their voices, effectively allowing them to reproduce their likenesses in perpetuity. Not even underage performers are safe from the encroaching tech. As Deadline reports, the owner of “Peppa Pig,” US entertainment juggernaut Hasbro, is now asking child actors of the beloved children’s animated TV series to surrende

A color-treated photo of a group of angry protestors yelling. The shockingly unpopular drive to pepper the United States with massive AI data centers isn’t just driving up electricity prices, wasting huge amounts of water, and reviving heavy-polluter power stations — it’s also making life more expensive for the average American. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the data center boom is driving a “third wave of inflation” which — following president Donal

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock As Europe bakes in the throes of a deadly heatwave, residents living near the continent’s largest data center in Slough, a town just west of central London, UK, are enduring extreme temperatures. As The Guardian reports, the enormous facility ten miles from London Heathrow is making the sweltering heat even more unbearable, with local residents likening the experience to something “pinchi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Tada Images / Shutterstock Ford just admitted that it scrambled to rehire former employees and find new technicians after its AI systems simply weren’t good enough. “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” the automaker’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering Charles Poon to

Image via Threads An unbalanced stalker posed as an unwitting man’s fiancé, claiming they had a child together. To sell the act — and live out her obsessive fantasy — she used AI to edit images that showed them going on dates together, and even that she was pregnant with his child. And she was doing this for years. It’s a saga that’s somehow even more bizarre than it sounds. The man, pseudonymously identified as Luke, had no idea that there was a woman out

Shutterstock / Futurism For tech companies racing to be the king of the AI hill, there are few things more precious than raw, original data. To keep the large language models underlying our favorite AI chatbots up to date, tech companies have to feed them reams of fresh inputs. As one study found, the amount of data being used to train AI has doubled every nine months since 2010 — exponential growth which may soon hit a wall as stores of clean data run cri

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic; Shutterstock It’s 2026 and we’re still getting new “Toy Story” movies. In fact, we’re now on “Toy Story 5” — and the original was released in 1995, some 31 years ago. How long can Disney and Pixar keep this madness up? It’s a thought that’s crossed the mind of Tom Hanks, the voice behind series’ rootin’ tootin’ protagonist Woody. In a recent Entertainment Weekly int

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock After giddy business executives, cops are emerging as some of the AI industry’s most devoted disciples. Police officers are increasingly using AI-integrated tools on the job, though not without courting significant controversy. The error-prone nature of large language models has left law enforcement operations in a scramble, resulting in hallucinated police reports, evidence fabricated wi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Under all the bluster of AI hype lies a real conundrum: companies are charging out-of-this-world prices for a tool that still can’t match the value of a competent human. As AI companies and their financial backers continue to dump billions of dollars into AI development, the consequences of that basic contradiction are spilling out into offices and shops throughout the US. The fintech fir

Shutterstock / Futurism Anyone who saw the blockbuster sci-fi film “Project Hail Mary” will remember Rocky, a creature unlike anything we’ve seen on Earth. The five-legged alien is composed of a rock-like material, hence its nickname, and comes from a fictional planet where temperatures and a high-pressure ammonia-dominant atmosphere has driven evolution in a radically different direction (still, he’s a cool guy.) The idea of such different yet conscious b

Shutterstock / Futurism There’s no doubt that the broader public has turned against AI in a serious way. In the United States, a YouGov pol found that three-quarters of Americans think AI should be more heavily regulated, an anxiety shared across the political aisle, the Economist observed. The US populace is likewise increasingly fearful of the economic impacts of AI, especially as powerful tech companies pour money into state and federal elections. As th

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock A lawyer was working at a legal tech startup when her boss’s fascination with AI began to veer from enthusiastic to downright obsessive. First he started using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate his Slack messages and emails. Then he mandated AI use for all employees. “He called a company-wide meeting to announce that from then on, we had to discuss with the AI prior to all meetings or before c

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Indie Hollywood darling A24 scored a massive financial hit with its “Backrooms” horror flick this year, netting over $330 million globally on a minuscule $10 million budget — the studio’s highest-grossing film of all time. The movie’s director Kane Parsons, a 21-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, is an outspoken critic of AI, calling it “genuinely harmful” to creativity. “We already live