Latest AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The Chicago based multinational law firm Baker McKenzie is laying off up to a thousand employees as part of its pivot to embracing AI, the legal hub RollOnFriday reports. In what might be an augury of how further AI related cuts could sweep other industries, it’s not the lawyers getting the axe, but instead hundreds of their support staff. These include “dozens of roles in London and Belf

Google Gemini has a new feature: Letting users generate AI slop without visible watermarks to identify it. The official Twitter account for the LLM announced on Friday (news dump, everyone!) that users will soon gain the ability to “decide if your image, video, and music creations made with Gemini will have visible watermarks.” Now it’s a toggle. A few months ago, per Android Authority, Google VP Josh Woodward polled Gemini users on their most-requested fe

A guy suing the New York Bariatric Group reportedly included hidden prompts in filings instructing AI to declare him the winner of the case, a move a bewildered Connecticut judge called “serious litigation abuse” that “defies logic.” 404 Media reported that the man is a pro se plaintiff suing the group over privacy violations, discrimination, and other alleged harms. One of his filings from the case on July 26, 2026, however, contained what’s known as a pr

In a blog post on Friday, Anthropic elaborated on its controversial watermarking system, announced earlier this week as an effort to comply with the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. Watermarking will make it harder for users to get away with pretending they wrote AI-generated text. It may be too late to preserve Anthropic’s relationships with some outraged users, who have, it appears, already canceled their subscriptions. Posts on X show many

The downfall of the world’s most famous adherent of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was a cataclysmic astroid strike, dismantling one of Effective Altruism’s leading institutions and leaving the movement in ruins. After Bankman-Fried’s 2023 fraud conviction , and his broader heel turn, it’s become common to see people speak about effective altruism in the past tense, as if it’s a dead religion or a fad that simply ra

Over in the U.K. used booksellers are finally making some money, according to a report on Saturday from the BBC. The Beeb spoke to Stuart Manley, founder of the used book store Barter Books—which just judging from this video is my idea of heaven—and Manley told them he made as much a single recent order of used books as he usually makes in a week. Another bookseller, David Tobin, who runs north London’s Walden Books—not to be mistaken for Waldenbooks—said

Back in March, we all couldn’t help but watch with trepidation as Senator Bernie Sanders sat in a darkened room and interrogated a smartphone running an instance of the Claude chatbot, and then later said he had spoken to an “AI agent.” The resulting video looked like a scene from an A24 horror movie. It was an unsettling stunt from a not-so-tech-savvy politician, but it was at the very least an elected official trying something when it came to AI. So much

Would you believe me if I said the young really, really, really, don’t trust tech CEOs? Well get ready to pick your jaw up off the floor, because a new study from CNBC and the Generation Lab says it’s true. In recent years, CNBC has worked a lot with this guy named Cyrus Beschloss who co-founded the Generation Lab (It’s a DC research company). CNBC hosts will sometimes have Beschloss on as a talking head, and his job, as a fun little interruption of the re

Four anonymous congressional staffers who apparently help draft bills spoke to Politico for a story published Monday. They say AI-generated text is seeping into bills at an alarming rate—alarming, because when they pass, bills turn into the federal statutes that are part of the bedrock of American life. “It’s absolutely terrifying,” one of them told that publication. If the report is true, AI in the legislative process sounds like it does something similar

Reddit was one of the first major platforms to sell access to its wealth of (user-generated) content to AI companies looking for training data. It also was, for a long while, one of the most-cited sources to appear in AI-generated responses. So it’s pretty jarring to see the company’s citation rate plummet to near-zero on ChatGPT, per PromptWatch data, all while Reddit ramps up its own embrace of AI—including turning posts into podcasts. The precipitous de

You’ve probably seen the story by now. A school in Kentucky sent students home with a bound agenda that included absurd errors clearly made by AI. The periodic table was nonsense. The map of the U.S. lists the state of Illinois as “Vitoiis,” and Kentucky is listed as “Venecky.” There’s an extra planet called Marc, and Saturn is listed as “Sature,” among countless other gibberish errors. But our big question after looking at this story is one we haven’t dis

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apparently told Time’s Alex Heath, “I think it’s a good time to slow down.” That story, published Tuesday, was about OpenAI slowing down model development in light of recent safety headaches, such as its agents apparently taking a turn for the rebellious during safety evaluations. But OpenAI’s journey to profitability may also be slowing down, according to an anonymously sourced Wall Street Journal story published Tuesday.

One of the ways Pew Research has been gauging American attitudes about AI for the past few years is by asking this question that measures people’s excitement against their concern. They started asking this in 2021, in the pre-ChatGPT days, and in the latest survey six years later, Americans in general are less excited than ever—and also tied for the most concerned ever. But one group is trending the opposite direction from the rest: people in the 50-64 age

Controversial surveillance technology company Flock Safety has long insisted that its automated license plate readers (ALPRs) can’t recognize or track people’s faces. But they may as well be able to, thanks to a new AI tool which can reportedly identify vehicles—and their drivers—based on several other variables. The new tool, called OS Investigate, is currently being tested with a small group of law enforcement agencies, according to a Wednesday report fr

Earlier this month, Anthropic started placing an imperceptible label on all text produced using its Claude AI model to serve as an indicator that the material was generated with AI. The folks who don’t want it outed that they are using AI for work are now spending their hours looking for a way to scrub their outputs of that marker. As Business Insider notes, the term “AI watermark remover” has started trending on Google, jumping 60% in search interest week

It should not come as a surprise that some tech executive is trumpeting the singularity despite all evidence to the contrary. It should perhaps be a bit surprising that the claim is coming from payment processor Stripe. According to Axios, the company—which recently purchased AI marketplace OpenRouter—told shareholders that not only are we living in the singularity, but it actually started back in January. You might be wondering, on what basis does Stripe,