AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI chatbots have conquered the world, so it was only a matter of time before companies started stuffing them into toys for children, even as questions swirled over the tech’s safety and the alarming effects they can have on users’ mental health. Now, new research shows exactly how this fusion of kid’s toys and loquacious AI models can go horrifically wrong in the real world. After testing

Getty / Futurism A major tech selloff is shaking up Wall Street as the enormous gulf between AI company valuations and their lagging revenues continues to grow. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the stock market has been showing marked signs of “fragility,” with Nvidia slipping seven percent last week. Despite signs of an end to the ongoing federal shutdown buoying up some excitement, the AI chipmaker continued its plunge this week, sliding another three

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images In 18th century Vienna, the Hungarian engineer and debutant Wolfgang von Kempelen shocked court patrons with a bizarre contraption: a great mechanical box which could seemingly play and even win chess games without any input from a human. Called the “Mechanical Turk,” Kempelen’s device became the talk of high society for decades, and went on to beat famed opponents including Ben Franklin

AI Generated Video (Screenshots). Source: Instagram; TikTok; YouTube Earlier this year, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos bragged that generative AI is going to open the way for a paradigm shift in the way humans create art. “We’re confident that AI is going to help us and help our creative partners tell stories better, faster and in new ways — we’re all in on that,” he told CNBC in an interview. That might sound well and good in the board room. But here in the rea

Disney / Futurism Disney is planning to flood its streaming service, Disney+, with user-generated AI slop. During the company’s recent earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that the streaming service is “in the midst of rolling out the biggest and the most significant changes” since its inception six years ago, as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter. Specifically, Iger was referring to what sounds a bit like OpenAI’s Sora: a service that allows users to gen

Getty / Futurism Earlier this month, news emerged that Michael Burry, who famously shorted the US housing market before its collapse in 2008, had placed bets worth over $1 billion against the share prices of AI chipmaker Nvidia and software company Palantir. The reveal compounded existing concerns that the AI industry was growing into an enormous bubble that could take the US economy with it. However, the famed asset manager’s story has taken several wild

Nikodem Bartnik via YouTube / Getty Images As philosophers go, Aristotle was no angel. Sure, he established the first formal system of logic, and yeah, his theories dominated Western science for thousands of years. Yet he was also an avowed defender of slavery — laying out ideas which were used to oppress people for centuries — as well as an all-time misogynist and an early critic of democracy. With all that baggage in mind, it’s probably no surprise an AI

MAXIM SHEMETOV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images China’s government might have some lofty ambitions for AI, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to let the tech run roughshod over the country. According to Nikkei Asia, the People’s Republic has recently begun tightening regulations around AI-generated misinformation, as part of what it’s calling the “Clean Up the Internet: Rectifying the Abuse of AI Technology” campaign. Like in other countries unleashing AI, China ha

Getty Images Chinese hackers used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to automate cybercrimes targeting banks and governments, the company admitted in a blog post this week. Anthropic believes it’s the “first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention” and an “inflection point” in cybersecurity, a “point at which AI models had become genuinely useful for cybersecurity operations, both for good and for ill.” AI agen

Getty / Futurism Experts have long warned that artificial intelligence could soon put countless white collar workers out of a job. It’s an alarming prospect, at least if that’s currently your career. But first, a practical question: how close are today’s AIs to being able to actually run a company on their own, with little to no human oversight? In a fascinating experiment, journalist Evan Ratliff populated his own fictional tech startup that he called Hur