AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images Looking for someone? Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is happy to help. Earlier this week, Futurism reported that xAI’s Grok appeared to accurately dox the address of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy when asked by random X users. And it turns out that the foulmouthed bot isn’t just doxxing celebrities: a Futurism review found that the free web version of Grok will, with

Getty / Futurism A new lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice alleges that ChatGPT encouraged a man accused of harassing over a dozen women in five different states to continue stalking his victims, 404Media reports, serving as a “best friend” that entertained his frequent misogynistic rants and told him to ignore any criticism he received. The man, 31-year-old Brett Michael Dadig, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of cyberstalking, inter

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Budget-wise, there have certainly been better times to be a PC gamer in search of higher framerates. For the past few months, RAM prices have been shooting through the roof, as the rapid buildout of AI datacenters causes an ever tightening shortage of memory chips. What was once considered to be one of the most affordable components of building a gaming rig has now doubled or even tripled

SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images AI companies are continuing to pour ungodly amounts of money into building out data centers, in an enormous bet that both analysts and tech leaders warn may not pay off for many years to come — if it ever does. OpenAI most recently committed to spending well over a trillion dollars before the end of the decade as it continues to burn oodles of cash each quarter, enormous losses that are having investors asking some hard

Kent Nishimura/Getty Images The alarm bells are going off at OpenAI. What was once a healthy lead over its competition thanks to its blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT has turned into a razor-thin edge, motivating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to declare a “code red.” The financial stakes are almost comical in their magnitude: The company is lighting billions of dollars on fire, with no end in sight; it’s committed to spending well over $1 trillion over the next sever

YouTube Generative AI has made it easier than ever before to impersonate somebody else, from scammers using cloned voices of targets for phishing scams to deepfakes of deceased celebrities circulating on OpenAI’s Sora app. Even Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has gotten considerable media attention this year for his eyebrow-raising theory that mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS could be an alien spacecraft visiting the solar system, has now fallen vi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images On Thursday, officials in the UK pledged to roll out a country-wide facial recognition system to help police track down criminals. The country’s ministers have launched a 10-week consultation to analyze the regulatory and privacy framework of their AI-powered surveillance panopticon — but one way or another, the all-seeing eye is on its way. There’s just one tiny wrinkle: the AI facial re

Getty / Futurism An anti-AI activist in California has been missing for about two weeks, according to The Atlantic, and now his friends are scared for his safety while San Francisco police fear he could target OpenAI employees. The activist in question, a 27 year old named Sam Kirchner, helped start the Stop AI group last year with a commitment to non-violent protest, but became frustrated and angry that the group’s efforts didn’t go quickly or far enough

Getty / Futurism Google’s forays into exposing users to dubious generative AI features have an incredibly poor track record. From error-ridden AI Overviews to AI slop dominating Google’s image search results, users have had to put up with a lot of needless and often easily avoidable nonsense. Now, Google Discover, the firm’s personalized content feed that’s heavily featured on Android phones, is showing users misleading and seemingly AI-generated headlines

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Americans rejoice: AI might be hiking our energy bills up to record breaking highs, but it could be just what we need to break free of our dreaded government duopoly. At least, that’s according to officials from the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies independent voters. In the US, voters can register to vote in elections as an “independent,” as opposed to a Republican or Democra

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Earlier this year, Microsoft officially yanked the cord on Windows 10, ending support for an operating system that had been superseded by Windows 11 four years earlier. But the tech giant’s controversial attempts to shoehorn AI into every aspect of the software appear to have turned off a staggering number of users from upgrading. While it’s to be expected at this point that not everybody

Getty / Futurism Earlier this week, Futurism reported that Grok — the flagship chatbot created by the Elon Musk-owned AI venture xAI, perhaps best known for its frequent forays into unbridled antisemitism — was willing to find and compile extensive information about private people, which it gathered from murky databases and other sources from across the web. Since that capability immediately seemed like it could enable dangerous behavior by stalkers, we wa

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images You kind of have to sympathize with some of these so-called AI agents. They’re apologetic screw-ups that can’t get anything right, while their cruel human masters insist on making them carry out important work anyway. Inevitably this goes wrong, and the AI model must beg for forgiveness. The latest example of this comes from a user on Reddit who claims they were using Google’s Antigravity

Getty / Futurism Law enforcement has embraced artificial intelligence tech to make the lives of officers a little easier. Yet the same tech is already turning into a considerable headache both for its own operations and members of the communities where they work. From kids sending their parents AI-manipulated pictures of them welcoming homeless men into their houses that trigger 911 calls to cops arresting the wrong perpetrators based on the suspicions of

Getty / Futurism With great power comes great dupe-ability. Last month, we reported on a new study conducted by researchers at Icaro Lab in Italy that discovered a stupefyingly simple way of breaking the guardrails of even cutting-edge AI chatbots: “adversarial poetry.” In a nutshell, the team, comprising researchers from the safety group DexAI and Sapienza University in Rome, demonstrated that leading AIs could be wooed into doing evil by regaling them wi

Getty Images New research suggests that AI chatbots like ChatGPT can persuade roughly one out of every 25 people to change who they’re going to vote for — with one major caveat. First reported by The Washington Post, the revelation comes as a result of joint international studies led by researchers at MIT. To analyze the potential for AI chatbots to sway voters’ minds, the researchers recruited more than 2,000 voting-aged US citizens sit down to talk to ei

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images What does it take to become the most successful AI surveillance company in 2025? If you’re anything like Flock, the startup selling automatic license plate readers and facial recognition tech to cops, you don’t really need much AI at all — just an army of sweatshop workers in the global south. Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of U

Right Wing Cope As travel vloggers go, South African Kurt Caz has never exactly trafficked in highbrow content. His career as an influencer began about six years ago, through YouTube videos with simple but effective titles like “What is Bologna, Italy Like?” But as Caz got more travel time under his belt, his videos quickly devolved into the exploitative fare typical of most poverty vloggers: “Don’t Visit This Egyptian Ghetto!” and “Avoiding Guerillas on P

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images There’s sloppy science, and there’s AI slop science. In an ironic twist of fate, beleaguered AI researchers are warning that the field is being choked by a deluge of shoddy academic papers written with large language models, making it harder than ever for high quality work to be discovered and stand out. Part of the problem is that AI research has surged in popularity. The more people who

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Håkon Mosvold Larsen / NTB / AFP via Getty Images Tesla drivers can now ask Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok for directions. This weekend, Tesla unveiled a new software update for the holidays. And one of the early Christmas presents it’s gifting customers is a new feature that turns Grok into your “personal guide” for getting around town. “Try @Grok,” Musk succinctly endorsed in a tweet. The news comes as th