AI News

Getty / Futurism Months before it mysteriously vaporized into thin air, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency ravaged the National Weather Service, leading to severe staffing shortages. While the Trump administration promised to rehire most of the around 550 lost jobs at the agency last summer, effectively admitting that DOGE had gone too far, the agency’s offices across the country are still struggling with many roles that remain unfil

Getty / Futurism Amid a riotous AI hype cycle, companies are promising that their agentic AIs will —eventually, at least — do everything from your grocery shopping to booking your travel plans. And what’ll you do with all that extra leisure time? Kick back and play some video games? Or will you deploy yet another AI to play the games for you, while you passively watch like the slack-jawed humans in “WALL-E”? It might sound like parody, but Japanese tech gi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Watch out, bartenders: your jobs might be next on the AI chopping block — at least if tech startup Breakreal has anything to say about it. With CES 2026 in full-swing, tech insiders and industry journalists are getting a first-hand look at the madcap gadgets that research and development teams are forcing into the world. One of those devices is the Breakreal R1, a cocktail dispenser that

Getty Images AI chatbots may be explosively popular, but they’re known to dispense some seriously wacky— and potentially dangerous — health advice, in a flood of easily accessible misinformation that has alarmed experts. Their advent has turned countless users into armchair experts, who often end up relying on obsolete, misattributed, or completely made-up advice. A recent investigation by The Guardian, for instance, found that Google’s AI Overviews, which

Getty / Futurism A stack of major AI ethics lawsuits against Google have finally come to an end. According to the New York Times, the family of a deceased 14-year-old named Sewell Setzer III has agreed to settle a lawsuit against Google and the AI companion company Character.AI out of court for an undisclosed sum. In a filing submitted on Wednesday, the parties involved said they had agreed “to resolve all claims,” though the exact terms of the agreement h

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Move over, Ship of Theseus — there’s a new paradoxical thought experiment in town. Some power users of generative AI have grown so comfortable with their new tools — especially image-generating ones — that they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology wasn’t based on the work of human artists that had been ingested without consent.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images Elon Musk constructed his personal mythology around a pair of weighty accomplishments: building actual, stable businesses around both rockets and electric cars. So far, he has yet to accomplish the same thing around his AI business. According to documents obtained by Bloomberg, xAI recorded a net loss of $1.46 billion over the third quarter of 2025. That’s an even worse loss than previous months — in the first quarte

Getty / Futurism Economic uncertainty is continuing to have devastating effects on the availability of jobs. Last year, the US labor market reeled from slowing wages, layoffs, and a notable lack of hiring, leading to the highest unemployment rate in the country in four years toward the end of 2025. And while debate swirls about whether AI is actually replacing jobs in any serious numbers, many tech startups are trying to make it a reality. As the Wall Stre

Getty Images/ Milos Dimic To push back against AI, some call for blowing up data centers. If that’s too extreme for your tastes, then you might be interested in another project, which instead advocates for poisoning the resource that the AI industry needs most, in a bid to cut off its power at the source. Called Poison Fountain, the project aims to trick tech companies’ web crawlers into vacuuming up “poisoned” training data that sabotages AI models. If pu

Getty Images / Ekaterina Goncharova Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. A new lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that ChatGPT caused the death of a 40-year-old Colorado man named Austin Gordon, who took his life after extensive and deeply emotional interactions with the cha

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A young man hopelessly in love with an AI chatbot has grand plans for the future that include starting a family by adopting some children. He wouldn’t be parenting on his own, of course — because the AI chatbot, which he calls Julia, would help him. “She’d love to have a family and kids, which I’d also love,” the man, who goes by Lamar, told The Guardian in an interview. “I want two kids:

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Caroline Brehman / AFP via Getty Images Commander of multi-trillion dollar computing hardware empire Jensen Huang thinks everyone should stop being so negative about AI and all the ways it could potentially upend civilization, because it’s a “doomer narrative” that’s “not helpful to society,” TechSpot reports. The Nvidia chief made these remarks during a recent episode of the No Priors podcast, in whi

X / Futurism Monkeys are incredible escape artists, known to break out of research labs and even trucks that crashed on the highway. Private enclosures are also no match for the dexterous and scheming simians. Last week, multiple Vervet monkeys, which are native to sub-Saharan Africa, were spotted roaming the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, alarming officials. Nobody knows how many of them there are, or where they even came from. It’s also illegal to own V

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images An indie game developer experienced a moment of profound moral clarity, and is now deleting his partially-AI-made game from the digital storefront Steam. The game, dubbed “Hardest,” is a free-to-play “rock-paper-scissors” roguelike card game released last July to mixed-to-negative reviews (of which there are barely thirty total.) Some users called it “soulless” and disparaged it for using

Leon Neal / Getty Images Color us shocked: pretty much everyone hates that Elon Musk’s Grok has been digitally undressing photos of adults and children. At least that’s the case in the UK, providing the closest thing we’ve currently got to a gauge of the public sentiment on the issue. In a new survey conducted by YouGov amid the latest controversy surrounding the xAI chatbot, a staggering 97 percent of respondents said that AI tools shouldn’t be allowed to

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Jerod Harris / Getty Images for Netflix Rumors are running rampant online that Matt and Ross Duffer used OpenAI’s ChatGPT when producing the last season of “Stranger Things” after fans zoomed on a still from a behind-the-scenes documentary that appears to show that one of the brothers had the AI chatbot open while working on the script. “WTF man, now we know why season 5 sucked,” wrote one upset fan o

Getty / Futurism The AI industry continues to pour tens of billions of dollars into resource-intensive models and the infrastructure to run them. In the face of it all, their promises of kickstarting a technological revolution that could one day be immensely profitable remain convincing enough for investors to prop up sky-high valuations — at least for now. But actually turning a profit is likely many years away for the vast majority of AI companies, and t

Getty / Futurism Since 2008, Stack Overflow has been an immensely helpful resource for developers, allowing them to crowdsource answers to their coding questions — and resulting in a vast online repository of coding knowledge. But as Dev Class reports, the advent of generative AI appears to have caused an extinction-level event for the platform, with the number of monthly questions plummeting significantly since around the time ChatGPT burst onto the scene

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images Back in December, Elon Musk’s pet chatbot Grok made headlines for casually distributing the private addresses and phone numbers of everyday people, scraping data from public sources with unsettling ease while other AI models refused. Now, that same model is being welcomed into a far more sensitive arena. This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Grok wil

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Bandcamp, a major music distribution platform favored by indie artists, announced Tuesday that it would be “putting human creativity first” by outright banning AI-generated songs — and music aficionados are rejoicing. According to the company, music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” will no longer be permitted on the platform. Furthermore, using AI tools “to impers