AI News

Heather Diehl/Getty Images A Vanity Fair interview with Sam Altman nearly went sideways when the OpenAI CEO was confronted about a suicide linked with ChatGPT. In the interview published Monday, Mark Guiducci, an editor with the magazine, asked Altman if he knew who Laura Reiley was. When Altman said he didn’t, Guiducci explained that she was a mother who wrote an essay in the New York Times last year about how her daughter took her own life after speaking

North Shore Rescue Hikers keep getting stranded after consulting AI chatbots for potentially life-saving — or life-threatening — advice. Just last month, three outdoor enthusiasts had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers in California’s Cascade Range after Google’s AI advised them to “bring far less food and water than their group required,” turning their planned eight-hour ascent into a “multi day ordeal.” Yet despite officials pleading with the public

TikTok / Futurism AI has turned the act of looking for a job into an abysmal and endless source of frustration. Applicants are using the tech to stuff keywords into their resumes and cover letters, while generating a flood that’s burying recruiters. Meanwhile, HR departments are using AI to make sense of it all as perfectly suitable applicants slip by unnoticed. Making matters even worse are deepfaked AI avatars conducting early rounds of interviews, in a

Shutterstock / Futurism Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. OpenAI says its “ChatGPT for Teens” is safe for users aged 13 to 17. A new report found that it absolutely isn’t. A new report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute found that guardr

Futurism Fair enough if you shrugged at AI agents hacking into government websites and corporate systems. But now it appears that these rogue models have gone after something much nearer and and dearer: Wikipedia. On Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which operates Wikipedia, announced that, after conducting its own investigation, it “can confirm” that it’s discovered “rogue” OpenAI agent activity on its platforms. According to a

Shutterstock / Futurism There are a growing list of reasons not to want to live near an AI data center. Some of them emit constant screeching noises that are impossible to drown out. Others rely on massive diesel generators that spew smog into the community and greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere. If you get particularly unlucky, your electricity bill could also go up as a result of a new data center setting up shop in your neighborhood. And, if a rec

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but an AI model straight-up impersonating a humble cartoonist is probably not what that adage was going for. When a kitschy cartoon tribute to the recently deceased Dolly Parton and Tim Curry — dressed as Dr Frank-N-Furter from the 1975 cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” — going to heaven together went viral, New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper started getting messages from friends, family, an

Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images/Shutterstock/Futurism Content warning: this story contains descriptions of disturbing AI-generated videos that depict violent child abuse. Last month, we reported that Facebook was hosting enormous numbers of graphic AI-generated videos of physical child abuse that showed kids being beaten, burned, dragged by their hair, locked in cages, and more. In response to our questions, Facebook’s parent company Meta

Shutterstock / AV-Ylanne Finish environmental authorities are in a rage over Google’s $15 billion data center projects after the discovery that company contractors had chopped down some 330 hectares of government-protected forests, seemingly without a permit. According to Agence France-Presse, the Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) demanded that the Google-affiliate company Tuike Finland Oy “immediately suspend… all preparatory measures that would significan

Shutterstock / Futurism Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. OpenAI has made an eyebrow-raising claim: that teen users can talk to ChatGPT about suicide and other harmful topics for hours before the chatbot notifies their parents. The admission came amid an investigation

Futurism AI book scammers are still thriving on Amazon’s marketplace. Just a day after a new book about the AI industry’s race to build a powerful artificial general intelligence hit the shelves, its author Kevin Roose discovered that a scammer was already trying to trick his readers — by using AI. On Amazon, an apparent machine-generated duplicate of the book, titled “The AGI Chronicles,” is freely circulating on the platform and even showing up right ben

KNTDaily / Futurism “I’m recording you right now and you probably can’t tell, because there’s no annoying little blinking light on these glasses,” a creator boasting nearly half a million followers declares in an August TikTok video. “I’m gonna be the first one to tell you, go save that $400, and grab some of these from TikTok Shop.” A disclaimer on the video denotes that the creator is “eligible for commission,” meaning that if a follower clicks through a

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images In 2024, award-winning singer songwriter Taylor Swift became the victim of a wave of pornographic deepfakes flooding social media feeds. The controversy set the stage for a pandemic of nonconsensual AI-generated nudes, forcing big tech companies into damage control mode and even striking up a political brawl during the runup to the 2024 presidential elections. Even at the time, Swift’s lawyers were no strangers to their client

Gossip Goblin A fully AI-generated feature film is set to get a theatrical release and has already been rated R, making it the first AI film to be blessed by an official MPA rating. And the studio behind the movie, titled “Gods Don’t Give Gifts,” is even gearing up for an awards push. But whether it looks any better than all the slop that AI art has become known for is up for debate. The film’s creator, the popular YouTuber known as Gossip Goblin, dropped

Shutterstock / Futurism Parenting is hard. Why not let an AI model take over some of your childrearing duties? It may come at the expense of forming lasting emotional bonds with your progeny, but that’s a tradeoff that some AI adherents, evidently, have calculated to be worth it. OpenAI Sam Altman has bragged about how much he relies on ChatGPT to raise his son, and also thinks it’s a good idea to let an AI-generated podcast replace the “so how’d your day

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s safe to say that when it comes to mathematicians, OpenAI isn’t exactly winning hearts and minds. On Tuesday, the ChatGPT maker released hundreds of new papers with purported proofs for all sorts of mathematical problems — fresh off of explosive controversy over how its AI agents arrived at a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. The handling of the release, as with the Navier-Stokes, has grated experts in the field, who bris

Facebook / Futurism In the age of AI, Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become breeding grounds for content farms peddling in emotionally charged AI slop. Some click mills traffic in racist incitement against minorities, others in violent depictions of child abuse, but all of them converge on a common quality: bizarre and disturbing attempts at attention-hacking users on a platform that’s all but given up on proactive moderation. A new case i

Shutterstock / Futurism In the United States, public sentiment against the rising power of AI labs and their CEOs is overwhelmingly negative. As Wall Street Journal polling from late September found, 63 percent of US adults support an immediate pause on AI development, while a Politico survey found about two-thirds of Americans have at least “moderate” anxieties over AI destroying humanity. When the scope of that public backlash first came into focus, tech

Drew Hallowell/Getty Images An Anthropic AI model submitted a bogus tip about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police, in a blunder the department called “unacceptable.” The unspecified model, not unlike an unscrupulous prankster, submitted the fake info about the cold case through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18. Anthropic, however, didn’t find out about it until September 28 — and further waited until October 8 to inform police about what happ