AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Can companies seize your private property to build data center infrastructure? According to legal scholar Aaron Walayat at the University of Dayton, it’s certainly a possibility. In a new piece for The Conversation, Walayat warns that power companies in states like George and Pennsylvania have been considering the use of eminent domain — the government’s prerogative to seize land without

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Alexander Fedosov / Shutterstock Meta’s camera-equipped AI glasses have quickly turned into a massively controversial accessory. They’ve been used by all kinds of charlatans and brutes to harass strangers, from pickup artist “manfluencers” filming themselves approaching strangers to juvenile pranksters recording members of the public without their consent. Consequently, the backlash to Meta’s “pervert

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Fake AI-generated doctors and health gurus have taken over Facebook and Instagram, sharing unproven medical advice and peddling dubious supplements. A recent New York Times investigation into the phenomenon reviewed hundreds of these ads, finding that they tend to follow a loose formula to draw people in. The AI videos usually feature AI avatars that present themselves as credible figures

Getty Images / Westend61 The tech overlords pushing the AI boom are quickly wearing out what little welcome they had. You may have noticed big-name AI labs pushing new commercials lately. Meta’s new 60-second ad spot insists that the “future is for everyone,” even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth eclipses the GDP of Hungary. Anthropic’s new commercial for Claude assures viewers that there’s “hope in hard questions,” seemingly embracing the disco

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock A trove of chat logs and projects created with Anthropic’s Claude — some including sensitive personal and company information — have been left exposed to Google, making them them searchable to anyone on the web. Many of the materials appear to have been made public when Claude users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the chatbot’s “share” feature

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images); Shutterstock The “singularity” is here — according to Sam Altman, who we’d wager has an ulterior motive behind promoting this claim. The OpenAI CEO harbingered this sea-changing paradigm shift on a podcast over the weekend. “We are now, like, in the singularity,” Altman said on the latest episode of “Relentless,” as spotted by Business Insider. Definitions vary, but th

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock If you’re among the millions of US citizens against power-hungry data centers going up in your town, you may want to be careful about how you exercise your First Amendment right to protest. Last week, high school physics teacher Lux Claridge was hauled out of a public meeting by four police officers for the baffling crime of clapping in support of an anti-data center speaker. During the p

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Last week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI issued what seems like a frightening memo about an “unprecedented cyber incident” involving cutting-edge AI models breaking loose and hacking another company. As the AI lab tells it, a group of next-generation AI models — including one that hasn’t even been disclosed to the public yet — had busted out of their secure testing environment and into a productio

Igor Kyrlytsya via Shutterstock / Futurism The infamous dead internet theory was originally a conspiracy that posited that the vast majority of the internet was run by bots and thinking machines. Most accounts you saw online were really bots masquerading as people — all part of some nefarious scheme to control humankind by keeping us isolated and divided. That last part is far-fetched, but the core of the idea — that bots outnumber humans online — is inexo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Earlier this month, we brought you the story of a data center in the sleepy Michigan town of Dowagiac. Beset by the 30 megawatt tech facility, residents in the otherwise quiet burg were forced to live under the relentless screech of a massive cooling operation, prompting a lawsuit over excessive noise. At the time, footage from a TikTok video — showing volume readings reaching 60 decibels

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Wally Skalij / Getty Images; Shutterstock Back in the mid-2000s, Mark Zuckerberg had a pretty awesome product: a site called Facebook, which was still widely loved and not polluted with endless ads and scams. The interceding years have been hard on Zuckerberg’s empire. From a disastrous, multibillion-dollar foray into a pandemic-era virtual reality world nobody wanted to step a foot into to effectivel

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Shutterstock OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has some bad news to share: AI will never lead to a shorter work week — despite having already ushered in the singularity, in his dubious telling. During an appearance on the “Relentless” podcast, the billionaire reflected that “somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour work week at mass scale in society,” despite tech “promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Things just keep getting worse for BuzzFeed. On Monday, the struggling media company announced the layoffs of 180 employees, or about a third of its entire workforce, in the latest sign of its decline since its unexpected pivot to AI. The cuts, according to the New York Times, affect employees at its news site HuffPost, BuzzFeed’s film and TV studio, and the recipe publisher Tasty. “We’ve

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock As dozens of cities across the US are forced to scrap their plans to build power-hungry data centers, some civic leaders are no longer asking. According to new reporting by Fortune, the state of Georgia’s for-profit utility company, Georgia Power, is looking to demolish and pave over some 30 homes — and 330 parcels of land — that currently block the route of a 1,000 mile transmission line

Shutterstock / FotoField The business world has quickly learned that there’s such a thing as using too much AI, as they get slammed with outrageous token bills. Now, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is warning of another way that embracing AI could doom a business. In an interview Sunday, Nadella cautioned against sharing too much information, ranging from proprietary data to the prompts entered, with a third-party AI model. Instead, he recommended that busines

Getty Images / Futurism By now, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t broadly familiar with the AI heavyweights and their flagship models. OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, Google has Gemini. But what does Amazon have? Not a whole lot, it turns out. Unlike its competitors in the tech megacorp scene, Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name. And that’s not likely to cha

Shutterstock / Victor Tangermann It only took them three and a half years, but the powers that be at OpenAI have apparently directed ChatGPT to start refusing requests to copy a specific author’s style, Ars Technica reports. And it’s causing an absolute meltdown among “writers” who had grown accustomed to using the chatbot to churn out stories. Word spread quickly on the r/WritingWithAI subreddit, where one person using ChatGPT to write an entire novel mad

Meta / Futurism Meta knows its AI-powered camera equipped spectacles are widely seen as “pervert glasses.” And though it professes to be cracking down on creeps using them to record people without their consent, whatever measures it’s taking clearly aren’t working. After Meta announced this month that it would ban users using the glasses to film themselves harassing strangers, a recent investigation by Oligarch Watch still found hundreds of these videos on

Dominic Dudley / Shutterstock / Futurism It may already feel like a distant memory, but Cambridge Analytica was once implicated in one of the biggest social media scandals in history. Back in March 2018, journalists at The Observer and The New York Times revealed that the little-known data analytics firm had improperly harvested the Facebook data of tens of millions of users without their consent. Owned by billionaire Robert Mercer and operated by Donald T

Shutterstock / Futurism Perhaps more so than any other social media platform, LinkedIn has been inundated with lazy AI-generated brainrot content. It has become the AI slop “punching bag,” a repository of painful engagement bait being spewed out by an army of bots who seem at times to mainly be lobbing business platitudes at one another. Just last week, Substack CEO Chris Best took aim at the Microsoft-owned career site when he announced the launch of an A