AI News

Getty / Futurism As ChatGPT’s third anniversary approaches, AI hype is hard to escape. Tech companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to enormous data center buildouts, while industry leaders are promising an inevitable future in which superintelligent machines will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity. But many tech insiders are quietly singing a very different tune, expressing a growing conviction that’s been circulating for a while

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Over two decades ago, the New Oxford American Dictionary wanted to see if any of its competitors were cribbing its definitions. So it set up a trap. In its first edition, published in 2001, NOAD included a word called “esquivalience,” which it defined as the “willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” The word was a fake. And the bait worked: the word reference website Diction

Getty / Futurism OpenAI unveiled its Atlas AI browser this week, and it’s already catching heat. Cybersecurity researchers are particularly alarmed by its integrated “agent mode,” currently limited to paying subscribers, that can attempt to do online tasks autonomously. Two days after OpenAI unveiled Atlas, competing web browser company Brave released findings that the “entire category of AI-powered browsers” is highly vulnerable to “indirect prompt inject

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images If you’ve spent any time around kids lately, you’ve probably heard about “brain rot.” Named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, it’s defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” As it turns out, it’s not just human

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: James Vigil/MLB Photos via Getty; Andrew Harnik / Getty Images The war between copyright holders and AI companies has been raging for years at this point. AI’s seemingly magical ability to synthesize human-like text and lifelike videos Stephen Hawking demands a huge appetite for data from books, films, music, and even your social media posts. AI’s appetite for raw data has been a huge legal sticking p

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, might be the world’s most valuable private company on paper — but in real life, it’s hemorrhaging money faster than it can ever hope to pay back, at least for now. According to Agence France-Presse, OpenAI is ordering hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI semiconductor chips at a time when investor confidence is being stretched to

Eric Muller The University of North Carolina School of Law held an unusual mock trial on Friday. Looming over the proceedings even more prominently than the judge running the show were three tall digital displays, sticking out with their glossy finishes amid the courtroom’s sea of wood paneling. Each screen represented a different AI chatbot: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude. These AIs’ role? As the “jurors” who would determine the fate

@mattxiv via X San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech, all in varying degrees of in-your-face dystopic. Even so, a new crop of them has managed to stand out from the pack by being shockingly upfront about the industry’s attitude toward regular humans. “Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,” reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI. “Don’t worry, it’

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Sabitus / Craig Ambrosio / WWE via Getty Images Whether you’re a longtime fan or you couldn’t care less, it’s hard to deny how much skill — and blood — goes into professional wrestling. Though plot lines are scripted ahead of time and the impacts are staged, the physicality is very real. At its highest level, pro wrestling is basically a decades-long soap opera acted out by highly-trained stuntm

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Gilbert Flores / Variety via Getty Images Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is well known for running some pretty high-stakes experiments with his companies. His latest, it seems, is to gut the tech giant of its human workers and replace them with AI. In an internal memo viewed by Business Insider, Meta executives told workers in the firm’s risk management division their jobs will be “eliminated” thanks to a

Getty / Futurism Artificial intelligence isn’t just coming for human actors’ jobs — even our favorite furry celebrities are struggling to find work in Hollywood. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, studios are starting to push AI and CGI hard to create animal performances in post-production, instead of bringing real animals to the set. One dog actor identified by THR, called Rocco, who appeared on shows like “The Morning Show” and “Veronica Mars,” is rep

Jason Mendez/Getty Images for NETFLIX Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is no fan of AI. In fact, for his latest film, a reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel “Frankenstein,” he says he was inspired by the hubris of the tech sector. “My concern is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity,” he told NPR in an interview. “I think that’s what drives most of the world’s worst features.” “But I did want it to have the arrogance

Matt Shumer via X Last week, AI investor Matt Shumer posted AI-generated first-person-shooter footage that was intended to be an impressive glimpse at the future of video games. “AI games are going to be amazing,” he tweeted in the caption of the 84-second clip. But instead of demonstrating that the video game industry is about to be revolutionized by the advent of generative AI, the clip drew widespread derision and mockery. And it doesn’t take long to fi

Getty / Futurism The video game industry is hellbent on harnessing the power of generative AI to boost productivity and dream up virtual worlds — while also cutting costs, of course. According to a recent Google Cloud survey, 87 percent of video game developers said they are using AI to automate and streamline tasks, a notable figure considering the industry has seen massive layoffs as costs rise and demand weakens following major COVID-era growth. However

Joe Maher/Getty Images For Fane Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is publicly calling on the government to break up ChatGPT maker OpenAI. When Axios asked him whether the Sam Altman-led company should be broken up, he responded with “I do.” “We need to take a deep breath and understand it’s like a meteor coming,” he told the publication in an interview last week. “We’ve got to be prepared to deal with all of its complexity.” To be clear, the idea is a serious

Doublespeed AI You know those obnoxious social media accounts that flood your messages with spam? Those might not be scammers after all, but a legitimate new business backed by one of the most powerful venture capital funds in Silicon Valley. Introducing Doublespeed, a startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients. In a nutshell, phone farming is a tactic most often used by hackers and financial crimin

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Will your favorite sycophantic AI helper be servile forever? Maybe not. New research from the AI safety group Palisade Research suggests that some top AI models could be developing “survival drives,” after finding that they frequently refused instructions to shut themselves down. And more ominously, they can’t fully explain why this is happening. “The fact that we don’t have robust explan

Apple is not playing around with its lawsuit against OpenAI, its onetime partner and now apparent rival, over allegedly stolen trade secrets. After filing a bombshell lawsuit against the AI company last week, the Cupertino giant has reportedly sent legal letters to roughly 40 former employees who now work at OpenAI. The Financial Times reports, citing unnamed sources, that the letters direct the former employees to preserve relevant documents and communica