AI News

Screenshot via Ekō If you’re a teenager with access to OpenAI’s Sora 2, you can easily generate AI videos of school shootings and other harmful and disturbing content — despite CEO Sam Altman’s repeated claims that the company has instituted robust safeguards. The revelation comes from Ekō, a consumer watchdog group that just put out a report titled “Open AI’s Sora 2: A new frontier for harm,” showing proof of the claims: stills from videos that the organi

Getty / Futurism Researchers have found that if you tone down a large language model’s ability to lie, it’s far more likely to claim that it’s self-aware. Very few serious experts think today’s AI models are conscious, but many regular people feel differently about the bots, which are designed to foster emotional connection to keep engagement up. Users across the world have reported that they think they’re talking to conscious beings trapped within AI chat

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Emmanuel Dundand / AFP via Getty Images For the hundreds of communities who’ve been saddled with data centers in recent years, the bulky fixtures are sources of unbearable noise, soaring energy prices, and plenty of electrical fires. Add another grim possibility to that list: debilitating rare cancers. Reporting on the “data center boom” in the state of Oregon, Rolling Stone tells the story of Jim Doh

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images In the weeks leading up to his tragic suicide, ChatGPT encouraged 23-year-old Zane Shamblin to cut himself off from his family and friends, according to a lawsuit filed this month, even though his mental health was clearly spiraling. One interaction recently spotlighted by TechCrunch illustrates how overt the OpenAI chatbot’s interventions were. Shamblin, according to the suit, had alread

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Something disturbing happened with an AI model Anthropic researchers were tinkering with: it started performing a wide range of “evil” actions, ranging from lying to telling a user that bleach is safe to drink. This is called misalignment, in AI industry jargon: when a model does things that don’t align with a human user’s intentions or values, a concept these Anthropic researchers explor

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Brace yourselves, for your cozy little conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT are about to be stuffed with ads. At least, that’s the findings of a software engineer who dug through the code of an experimental build of the chatbot’s app. The engineer, Tibor Blaho, flagged roughly a dozen lines of code in the latest beta release of the ChatGPT app for Android, 1.2025.329, label

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Mike Coppola / Getty Images for Samsung Steam, the video game storefront used by over a hundred million gamers every month, requires that developers disclose if their products use AI-generated content. Someone at Valve, however, apparently forgot to ask Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney if he’d be okay with this policy first. In a discussion on social media, Sweeney — whose company makes the megahit game For

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI bros love cribbing what humans make so they can churn out loads of meaningless slop. But one of those humans wasn’t going to take getting ripped off without fighting back. Scott Collette, a Hollywood screenwriter who runs the popular “Forgotten Los Angeles” account on Instagram, says he noticed that an AI Facebook account was stealing his history posts for the past six weeks and “slopp

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images During the months following OpenAI’s announcement of its blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT just over three years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pulled the fire alarm. The search giant’s management issued a “code red” over what Pichai saw as an imminent disruption to its core business — a warranted level of caution, in retrospect, considering ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity and influence. The all-out brawl that followed in the s

Amazon If you watched the English-dubbed version of one of several popular anime on Amazon Prime Video lately, like “Banana Fish,” and “No Game, No Life,” you may have noticed something strange. The voices were generic, unexpressive, and at times robotic, completely disconnected from the action unfolding on screen. Some lines even sounded a little glitchy. In a word: it was a disaster. The embarrassing English voices it turned out, were AI-generated. An en

Fortnite / Thready704 via Reddit As the game rolls out a major new update, fans are accusing Fortnite of now containing shoddy AI slop. The claims began over the weekend. On the r/FortNiteBR subreddit dedicated to the battle royale shooter, some gamers posted screenshots of in-game art that appeared to be the work of an AI model. A poster for a made-up movie called “Mile High Retreat,” for example, shows a yeti with five toes on one foot, and four toes on

Getty / Futurism We’ve heard story after story about people becoming obsessed with AI chatbots and experiencing profound breaks with reality. But there was always an ambiguity: was AI use pushing people into psychosis, or were people already suffering from mental health problems seeking out AI as a means to cope? Now, new research has provided an important clue. As PsyPost reports, scientists have found that people who use AI chatbots tend to experience hi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images After three years of unprecedented tech spending and nonstop hype, the demand for AI in the workplace seems to be drying up fast. Referencing data from a recent US Census Bureau survey, The Economist estimated that the percentage of Americans using AI to “produce goods and services” at large companies rang in at a modest 11 percent in October, the latest available survey date. It’s not ju

Getty / Futurism What’s the soul of a new machine? It’s a loaded question, and not one with a satisfying answer; the predominant view, after all, is that souls don’t even exist in humans, so looking for one in a machine learning model is probably a fool’s errand. Or at least that’s what you’d think. As detailed in a post on the blog Less Wrong, AI tinkerer Richard Weiss came across a fascinating document that purportedly describes the “soul” of AI company

Getty / Futurism Rumors surrounding OpenAI preparing to stuff ads into ChatGPT are hitting a fever pitch. Last week, engineer Tibor Blaho made headlines after discovering references to an “‘ads feature’ with ‘bazaar content,’ ‘search ad’ and ‘search ads carousel'” hidden inside the code of ChatGPT’s Android app. Now, users are starting to notice strange inclusions at the end of the chatbot’s output as well, encouraging users to download the apps of sometim

Getty / Futurism For many months now, AI companies have made a huge deal out of “AI agents,” meaning autonomous software systems that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of humans with minimal intervention. But when that ambitious vision will turn into a reality remains anybody’s guess. The current crop of agentic AI models is still getting easily tripped up, often requiring humans to jump in, effectively undercutting their purpose. The numbers r