AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock David Foster Wallace once asked readers to “consider the lobster,” in his famous essay about the ethics of boiling the creatures alive. But new tech brings new horrors, and perhaps Wallace, if he were alive today, would instead be writing about biohacking lobster brains so they can be taken over by an AI agent. Because that’s exactly what a group of young tech founders in San Francisco ha

Shutterstock / Futurism Researchers at the British AI security startup Mindgard found that a simple prompt spurred ChatGPT to drop its most basic safety guidelines, in another example of how the guardrails surrounding even the most popular AI models can easily be circumvented. Specifically, according to reporting from the BBC, they coaxed OpenAI’s model to generate gruesome photorealistic scenes depicting gore and sexual content. Mindgard’s technique only

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Jon Putman / Anadolu via Getty Images; Shutterstock Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers while bombarding its competitors’ AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism. Internally known as “Cannes,” the project, run by Meta contractor Covalen, targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI chatbots using th

Meta / Tag Hartman-Simkins for Futurism Last month, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta became embroiled in a major controversy after Wired found that it had discreetly included facial recognition tech in the software of its lineup of popular smart glasses. The camera-equipped spectacles had already become a privacy lightning rod, with users secretly recording strangers, often without their consent — earning the spectacles the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses.”

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Do you like kicking back and watching some sports after a long day? Do you like AI? Would you like more AI-generated content in your sports? You might not have much of a choice — at least if Itai Epstein, vice president of new ventures at WSC Sports, has anything to say about it. At the Microsoft AI Tour Tel Aviv 2026, Calcalist reports, Epstein bragged that his company is blazing new ter

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proudly touted his company’s $7.3 billion Fairwater data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, as the “world’s most powerful AI data center,” connecting “hundreds of thousands” of power-hungry chips “into a single seamless cluster.” However, local residents aren’t even remotely as enthusiastic about the facility cropping up in their neighborho

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Shutterstock Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is struggling to keep his AI team together. As morale is hitting rock-bottom, his company is heavily relying on its competitors’ AI models to build out its own in-house tools. And despite the many billions of dollars the company has spent in its flailing efforts to keep up in the AI race, even Zuckerberg himself is

Tilly Norwood If you’ve been following AI’s inroads into the movie biz, you’ll already know that Tilly Norwood is the AI “actor” that the tech-focused studio Particle 6 keeps trying to make into a thing, but has so far only succeeded in universally infuriating actual performers, not to mention moviegoers. Now, it’s taking its biggest gamble yet by having Tilly Norwood lead her own movie, Particle 6 announced Monday — which will surely be what finally catap

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock If AI doesn’t drive you into a mental breakdown, then at least it’ll find a way to make you lose your marbles at work. As one beaten-down employee confessed in a recent Fortune piece about how the tech is reshaping workplace dynamics, she’s now resigned to asking an AI to interpret and respond to her boss’s nonsensical dispatches, because she suspects those were written with AI, too. “‘I

Shutterstock / Futurism Last month, the Trump administration forced AI company Anthropic to withdraw its most powerful Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models, citing “national security” issues. The government had gotten wind that Fable 5’s internal safety guardrails could be circumvented or “jailbroken,” in major vulnerabilities that spooked officials. Anthropic itself has long warned that its latest models are adept at spotting cybersecurity vulnerabilities that

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Tech companies are running hot, with Wall Street investors sustaining multi-trillion dollar valuations despite subdued earnings. Companies heavily invested in AI are particularly challenged on that front, thanks to heavy data center spending that isn’t yet — and may ever — result in sizable profits. The gap between those companies’ valuations and their ability to actually make money conti

Shutterstock / Futurism Planning your next getaway? You’d be wise not to trust the advice of an AI chatbot — even if they’re explicitly designed to draw on the testimonies of real travelers. As The Guardian reports, an AI tool from Tripadvisor designed to summarize the reviews of hotels and other locations on its platforms routinely glosses over some of the horrifying complaints that guests have made about their stays. The AI described one hotel in Cape Ve

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images; Shutterstock Anthropic, the self-avowed moral center of the AI industry, has been caught spying on its users. As Ars Technica reports, a security researcher last week uncovered spyware-like code in the company’s Claude Code AI model designed to collect data on Chinese users without detection. The researcher, known by the pseudonym “Thereallo,” found that the code was hi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock AI’s promises tend to be pretty highfalutin: that you can use it as your “second brain,” to invent “new physics,” or to become the genius autodidact you always dreamed of being. Or you can drop these pretensions and just use it to crank out unimaginable amounts of fetish slop, as a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder currently in t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Crypto marketplace Coinbase is under fire after sending out an AI-generated breaking news alert that Norway’s national men’s soccer team had clinched a spot in the quarter finals of the ongoing FIFA World Cup by beating Brazil 3-2 — before the game even started. While Norway did eventually beat Brazil — with a final score of 2-1, contrary to what Coinbase’s AI claimed — the glaring error

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock The head start that the US companies enjoyed in the AI race is quickly vanishing. Chinese competitors are now nipping at their heels, and it’s causing a wave of anxiety in the American sector. Over a year ago, DeepSeek spurred an existential crisis — and a mass stock selloff — in the US tech industry when it released a competitive AI model created for a fraction of the cost of the leading

Shutterstock / Futurism The massive surge of fossil fuel-powered data centers cropping up across the country are emitting an enormous amount of pollution, a pulsing indication that we’re headed in the wrong direction in the midst of a climate crisis. The extent of the this polluting activity is confounding. As climate action group Floodlight found in a recent investigation spotted by Wired, Texas has become the epicenter of the United States’ current obses

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock We’ve been hearing plenty about how Meta’s workforce is in total disarray. But this latest story takes the cake — or acorn, perhaps. As Wired reports, a squirrel got loose inside one of the company’s buildings in Bangkok, Thailand, after someone received it in the mail. It’s unlikely the creature had plotted to infiltrate the Meta office, but it coincidentally made it just in time to plun

Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump is now the first president to have an airport named after him while still in office. And what better way to commemorate this high honor than with lazy AI slop? Until a few days ago, the Palm Beach International Airport in South Florida was still called the Palm Beach International Airport. Now it’s the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, after a law that his pal and governor of Florida Ron DeS

Shutterstock / Futurism As the World Cup enters its final stages, soccer-themed AI slop is proliferating on X-formerly-Twitter. Sure, it’s no secret that X has suffered some major brain drain under the Musk regime. But the latest deluge of World Cup drek is so ridiculous, it makes the app’s crypto scammers look like Pulitzer finalists. First spotted by Out Sports, the deluge of AI engagement bait mostly revolves around semi-erotic scenarios playing out in