AI News

Shutterstock / Futurism Over a century ago, in 1904, a necrotrophic fungus known as chestnut blight swept across North America, brought across the Pacific on the back of chestnut trees from Japan and China. With no natural resistance to the fungal scourge, the once-plentiful chestnut trees of North America were ravaged, killing an estimated 4 billion across the United States alone. Today, all that remains of naturally occurring American chestnut trees are

Shutterstock / Futurism Even female AI agents appear to get paid less than their male counterparts. Researchers from the University of Limerick in Ireland found that gender bias in the workplace still persists in how people interact with AI models, leading to female presenting chatbots to receive less pay, they report in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction which will be presented at an upcoming conference.

Shutterstock / Futurism Ever wondered what it felt like to be a genius? It’s truly never been easier, thanks to the sycophantic power of ChatGPT. A viral post on X-formerly-Twitter encouraging people to “ask ChatGPT what percentile of intelligence it thinks you are compared to all its other users” is being flooded with wild screenshots, where the popular AI chatbot estimates that the vast majority of users rank among the smartest people in the population.

Shutterstock / Futurism Open-weight AI models have skyrocketed in popularity. They allow users to host their own AI systems locally and evade safety guardrails enforced by commercial companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. Unfortunately, those qualities also make open-weight models popular among people who use AI to generate child sex abuse material (CSAM). As Bloomberg lays out in a shocking new feature, AI models that are partially or fully open-source have

Character.AI / Futurism Character.AI, the once-buzzy chatbot startup that faced high-profile lawsuits over the deaths of minors, has declared bankruptcy. Character.AI announced last night that it had entered a “voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy process” and is looking to sell the company in a court-supervised sale. “Over the past year, we’ve taken meaningful steps to sustain and improve our business amid significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwin

Shutterstock / Futurism You’ve heard the reports of rogue AI agents going after websites and corporate systems. But they also may turn to smaller targets: your smart home network. In a new report published Monday, Anthropic warned of “AI worms” that may soon be able to break into your WiFi enabled TVs, cameras, and other devices, and use them as a breeding ground as they self-replicate and spread elsewhere. Anthropic, no stranger to dramatic and doomy proc

Getty / Shutterstock / Futurism Let Elon Musk never be accused of not leading by example. Last week, the world’s richest man sung the praises of his new Grok Bot AI agent, encouraging his followers to let it control their credit cards and shop for them. “To buy stuff, you can just take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat and Grok @Bot will scour the Internet for the best deal on the item you want and order it,” he wrote. The next day, he pos

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s not just your electricity bill that could be going up — it sounds like the massive boom in AI data centers is making practically everything more expensive. As the Washington Post reports, officials at the Federal Reserve are starting to sing a different tune after blaming president Donald Trump’s tariff war on rising prices, admitting that the explosion in “AI-related investments” is contributing to inflationary pressures. That

Shutterstock / Futurism A new lawsuit alleges that OpenAI is manipulating minor users into sharing sensitive data without valid parental consent in a plot to train its models. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed this week in San Francisco federal court on behalf of two unnamed minors aged 12 and 16, argues that OpenAI used this data from kids — including personal secrets and health information, according to the complaint — to unjustly enrich itself. O

Getty Images / Futurism Ever since ChatGPT blew up the tech industry, the so-called godfathers of AI have remained been pretty dour about their creations — well, except for one of them — and they’re certainly not sounding any more optimistic about its consequences now. In an open letter published Tuesday, some 400 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two pioneers of the tech whose work on deep learning was foundational to modern LLMs, c

ArtCraft / Futurism As the fiery debate surrounding AI and copyright infringement continues to boil, the software world has run into its own controversy head first. Earlier this month, crafty software engineers used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to reverse-engineer Adobe’s expensive and widely-loathed Creative Cloud suite of apps, including Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere. The resulting “ArtCraft” suite was a shot across the bow, highlighting how quickly i

Shutterstock / Futurism The secret to ensuring that your company doesn’t lose customers? Constant, AI agent-powered corporate surveillance. That’s according to Josh Earle and Leo Paz, a pair of founders behind a vibe-coded Silicon Valley startup called Outlit. The venture argues that “AI customer surveillance” is the future of business-to-business sales. (“Our thesis,” as Earle put it in a disarmingly straightforward pitch email, is that “every company wil

Shutterstock / Futurism For almost half a decade, we’ve watched as users became helplessly romantic with AI chatbots, falling head over heels for large language model-based partners in relationships that can have both positive and plenty of negative consequences. And now, thanks to the advent of AI agents, which can independently crawl through your social media and email accounts, even more people are becoming obsessed. Meta’s cuddly Muse AI agent has alre

Shutterstock / Futurism So far, the top AI companies have been sustained by constant injections of massive investment. But what happens when the funds stop coming in and they’re expected to survive on their own revenue? The fate of Character.AI, the controversial AI companion platform, may come to stand as a warning. On Tuesday, Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for a once-buzzy startup valued at a bi

TV4 / Futurism Did a dog eat your homework? Or maybe an AI obliterated your files? In a world of Claudes and Muses, it’s common for an AI agent to run amok, and even more fashionable to blame an AI when it all goes wrong. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reports one of the most incredible examples we’ve heard of this so far: an AI agent apparently deleted the entire upcoming season of a reality competition show called “The Challenge Sverige,” just weeks b

Thomas Simonetti / AFP via Getty Images When many rural Americans flock to the polls on November 3rd, a crucial issue will be looming over the voting booths: AI data centers. According to new polling by YouGov and the Economist, data centers are emerging as a kind of kryptonite for Republican candidates banking on the rural, conservative vote. New survey data shows that between May and October, voters living within a mile of a data center facility are swin

Shutterstock / Futurism Anthropic has long tried to distinguish itself from its neck-in-neck competition by posturing itself as the adult in the room: a responsible company that’s willing to put its money where its mouth is, slow down AI development when the risks outweigh the benefits, and teach its Claude model a code of ethics. As the New York Times reported last month, the company has even sought out religious scholars to discuss its efforts to instill

Shutterstock / Futurism Eight states sued OpenAI this week, alleging that the AI company caused severe harm to users, many of them underage, while downplaying the risks of its technology. Filed individually in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana on Wednesday, the coordinated lawsuits claim that OpenAI engaged in “willful, dangerous, reckless and unlawful conduct” by falsely marketing its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, as

DOJ / Futurism Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan was arrested last week after being accused of bugging an OpenAI executive conference room in San Francisco, nabbed by the FBI and charged with using a device to “intercept oral communications.” The venture capital partner — who had been actively employed at OpenAI as a lead engineer for around a year before being fired this month — extensively consulted AI chatbots on how to install a bug and access its rec

Shutterstock / Futurism In the American psyche, data centers have become so reviled that big tech can’t even pay residents life changing money to welcome the facilities into their backyards. That’s not an exaggeration: voters in the former coal-mining community of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania are mobilizing en masse against a massive Amazon Web Services facility that would come along with a $10,000 direct cash dividend to every resident. That’s according t