AI News

Reddit / Futurism Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content — with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation. As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits. The suite o

Shutterstock / Futurism If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone. Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time —

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s no secret that data centers have become a massive sore point for a vast swathe of the American electorate. Poll after poll has found that the facilities are immensely unpopular, a key bipartisan issue that could prove significant during this year’s midterm elections. The situation has become so heated there have already been at least 37 arrests stemming from protests against the projects this year. Broadly speaking, critics tak

JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images) Even as they promise AI will supercharge productivity, tech leaders are sending a clear message: any efficiency gains won’t help individual workers. During a podcast appearance last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t “expect AI” to lead to a shorter four-hour work week. He argued that workers are “secretly” going to be “happy” about being “much busier” and working even harder thanks to AI — a bizarre and ou

Shutterstock / Futurism A quiet war is playing out in rural communities across the country. City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Americans are starting to see through the promises of tech companies and the local politicians they’ve wooed, realizing that the advantages of hosting a resource-hogging data center in the neighborhood are slim. Yet tech giants are finding creative

Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today’s parent company USA Today Co (formerly Gannett) was partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize “actionable intelligence” on its audience. According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.” The largest newspaper’s new partnership with th

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/Futurism Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just dumped a lengthy manifesto on his utopian vision for an AI “superintelligence”-driven future. Called “The Future is for Everyone,” it’s so breathlessly optimistic about the technology that it ends up belying something that’s, instead, incredibly dystopian. But among all the deranged things he shared in the 6,500 word document, it’s Zuckerberg’s promise about how AI will unlock so much

Shutterstock / Futurism As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids. A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to th

Pacifico Energy / Futurism Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in

Shutterstock / Futurism German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month. Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off. The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding

Google / Futurism Since its earliest days, Google’s homepage has been iconic in its simplicity: a central text box and a big button labeled “Search.” That’s now changing. As anticipated, many users are reporting that the “Search” button is no more, replaced by three buttons for various AI features: “Create images,” “Ask about files,” and “Brainstorm.” These are placed next to the lingering “I’m feeling lucky” button, which survived the chopping block. A se

Earl Aguila Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting

Shutterstock / Futurism In light of plummeting public support for its widespread automatic license plate readers, surveillance company Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities across the US. The company even drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to spy on other vehicles, as 404 Media reported this week. Citizens are increasingly disgusted by the company’s presence on public streets, opting to hack down the cameras

A color-treated photo of a medical student looking at a smartphone. It’s no secret that doctors across the world are using AI tools to do stuff from taking notes to looking up questions. But what about the next generation of doctors still in training? According to two medical professionals on the ground, the situation is looking pretty alarming. With AI being used by med students, “the danger is not just deskilling but never-skilling,” write Simar Bajaj, a

Taylor Hill/Getty Images/Futurism Following a growing string of high-profile departures, OpenAI has lost its head of ethics at arguably the worst time possible. As the Financial Times reports, Chloé Bakalar left her post as the AI ethics lead in July, less than a year after joining the company and without any accompanying announcement. Interestingly, her LinkedIn still claims she’s employed at the firm. There currently is no replacement lined up, suggestin

Facebook / Futurism We bring you this dispatch from the AI slop dungeon known as Facebook: fake, AI-generated podcast bros are currently racking up views on Mark Zuckerberg’s first social network by doling out “relationship advice,” mostly in the form of banal screeds about how men are failing women. The videos are designed to resemble the short video pullouts popularized by the practice known as “clipping.” But rather than snip short videos from real podc

Shutterstock / Futurism With the rise of agentic models, why stop at using chatbots to look up answers? Some students are directing AI agents to “take” entire online courses for them, letting the software run in the background while they focus on better uses of their time, like doomscrolling on their phone or gaming. The New York Times unpacked the trend in a recent story, and it’s a testament to how extreme AI-enabled cheating has become, but also of the

Adam Lyttle via X Behold the final boss of tech-brained overprotective dads. Worried about his son talking to strangers on Roblox, he used AI to create a clone of the game so he could construct a false reality where all the players his son talks to are AI — without telling the poor kid. “I vibecoded a safer Roblox for my son,” began the dad, Adam Lyttle, in a now viral post on X. “The game is populated with recordings of other play throughs (giving the ill

Shutterstock / Futurism Saber, the developer behind the upcoming Rideshare “Stimulator” video game, is being accused of replacing its writers with AI. The accusation was made Tuesday by Stella Sacco, who says she was fired back in December 2023 while the game was still under development. “I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development,” Sacco wrote on Bluesky. “All the passenger voices were AI too,” she added.

Shutterstock / Futurism The Arena Group — the media company which, in 2023, allowed a contractor called AdVon Commerce to publish AI-generated fake writers in the pages of Sports Illustrated and multiple other brands — has rebranded as an AI company. The Arena Group, which owns brands including Parade, Men’s Journal, and The Street, declared on Monday that it was changing its name to “Paradium.AI.” It also announced its acquisition of InfoSentience, a comp