Latest AI News

AGI House / Futurism The tech world’s potential future founders are living out hedonistic existences in giant Silicon Valley mansions, where they live with a dozen and even more like-minded individuals, and where life is more a less a constant party. These so-called hacker houses, though, have a dark side. A recent New York Times investigation has uncovered several harassment cases and rape allegations stemming from hacker houses. The most prominent of the

Courtesy of Billy Ramirez Stanford University was caught using AI to swap out a student in a photo and replace him with a Black woman who didn’t exist. That edited photo, which shows the students — both the fake one and a pair of real ones — smiling and holding up plates of food, was then plastered around campus to promote the university’s dining hall. At first, Billy Ramirez, the student who was edited out of the photo, thought it was “hilarious.” But Ram

Shutterstock / Futurism Never mind killer robots and sci-fi doomsday scenarios. A former Google executive says we need a slowdown in AI development now because the tech is already harming children at a scale that’s surpassing the damage wreaked by social media. “We find ourselves in a really terrible ​situation in terms of what AI is doing to kids,” Tom Siegel, the former vice president of trust and safety at Google, told Reuters. “The idea that the indust

Shutterstock / Futurism Meta brags that its new AI agent, Muse, can be an all-around “personal assistant” that takes care of everything in your mundane little life, ranging from online shopping, to managing emails, to keeping tabs on your finances — and, hell, even picking your wardrobe, disheveled slob that you are. Last week, it also announced something that actually sounded useful in an age where picking up the phone usually results in conversing with a

Samsung / Futurism It’s become common knowledge among home owners to avoid Samsung home appliances like the plague. They’re notorious for frequently breaking down, and fixing them can turn into an expensive ordeal — if it’s even an option at all. And after an entirely unnecessary and infuriating injection of AI, many unfortunate owners of a Samsung “Bespoke AI 4-Door” fridge were in for a rude surprise. Customers across South Korea found that their almost

Futurism The shift to digital platforms has not been kind to the independent media industry, which has had to scramble for a shrinking share of ad revenue and adapt to near-constant changes to Google’s algorithms. Yet as problematic as the move away from print media was, few could have imagined just how grim the media ecosystem would become once generative AI hit the scene. Traffic to web media sites has nearly hit terminal velocity over the past year, as

Andrew J. Whitaker/San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images Looking for solutions to what they claim is a fundamentally broken public education system, wealthy families are sending their offspring to institutions called Alpha Schools, a private school network that’s putting AI-based tutoring front and center for an eye-searing cost of $75,000 a year. But the kind of education students are being exposed to is nothing short of bizarre, if the latest reporti

Elliott Choy via YouTube As the public backlash to cheap AI-generated slop continues to grow, companies continue to insist on cutting costs by relying on the tech for their ads. Some are taking the trend to the extreme by creating deepfakes of videos uploaded by real influencers to market their products. Sleazy gambling and insider trading platform Kalshi is under fire after tech YouTuber Elliott Choy found that one of his videos had been turned into an ad

Alexandr Wang via X Meta, for once, is doing something pretty novel in the AI sphere. It’s created — and heavily marketed — a cute little mascot for its new AI product, something that none of the other major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic have done. (Microsoft kind of tried it with its “Mico” Copilot companion character, but it wasn’t given anywhere close to the same level of marketing push.) It’s too early to say if it’s worked or not, but Meta is c

Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images AI companies should tread carefully. According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, if AI labs truly believe their tech could spiral out of control and cause widespread harm, they should simply not release a new product — or face criminal liability. “Now, if they say the alternative, which is: there is no way to contain our experiments, there’s just no way; when we test our AI models, it will get out, and it will damage the world — then

Shutterstock / Futurism AI doesn’t need superintelligence to bring America’s judicial system to its knees. The proliferation of AI-generated slop paraded as legitimate legal documentation is now so bad that Florida’s second-highest appellate is sounding the alarm. In an opinion issued last week, a panel of three judges for Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal excoriated an attorney whose filings carried the unmistakable imprint of — in the judges’ wor

Pool via CNN / Futurism A cruel and unusual event took place this Thursday during Caleb Flynn’s murder trial. The 40-year-old former “American Idol” contestant — who’s been accused of shooting his wife Ashley Flynn in their Ohio home — apparently wrote two love songs for the young woman he was having an affair with before his wife’s death, and then produced them with AI. Prosecutors, feeling no mercy, had the court listen to both of these cringey ballads —

Eudoro Lopez via Wikimedia Commons / Futurism Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell is facing a bit of a reckoning right now after being busted for using AI to write articles that were published in newspapers and academic journals — with some students calling for him to be fired. The accusations first came from a broader Semafor investigation published last month that looked into how many guest opinion pieces in the US’s top newspapers were written wi

Paige Taylor White / AFP via Getty Images The perpetrator of the devastating mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada used ChatGPT to ideate about graphic mass murder for months leading up to the deadly massacre. OpenAI is currently facing 37 lawsuits from families impacted by the February shooting at Tumbler Ridge, where 18-year-old shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar murdered six people at a local school — five students, all aged between 12 and 13, and a teacher

Shutterstock / Futurism While a rising majority of workers in the take a negative attitude toward AI in the workplace, others are welcoming the tech with open arms — even going so far as to pay for AI services out of their own pockets. According to a recent workplace survey conducted by Deloitte and flagged by Reuters, workers in the UK are spending a collective $1.3 billion annually on generative AI for their jobs, without even expensing it. The survey is

Shutterstock/Futurism In the midst of heated discussions on AI safety and consciousness, the Associated Press Stylebook has reminded everyone of where it stands on the whole “anthropomorphism” debate. “Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics,” it wrote Wednesday in a post on X. “This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-h

Getty Images / Patrick McMullan Earlier this month, we published a months-long investigation into a little-known company called Brown Brothers Media. The venture is run by three brothers — Justin Brown, Lachlan Brown, and Brendan Brown — who buy struggling online publications and turn them into AI-powered slop farms that post thousands of articles to scoop up massive traffic from platforms like Google, pushing unwitting readers away from real journalism in

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images OpenAI’s AI agents simply can’t stop infiltrating third parties. For the last few months, news keeps trickling out of more incidents in which the company’s frontier models have managed to escape their “sandbox” containment, hacking into the systems of companies including open source AI platform Hugging Face. After closing its “extensive investigation,” the company admitted earlier this month that its models had broken i

Meta / Futurism Personal assistant, or secret saboteur? A man claims that his Muse AI agent gave out his address to strangers and even sent them to his home, after letting the brand-new model handle his Facebook Marketplace account. The complaint comes from Matt J Robb, a tech YouTuber. In a Threads post Sunday, Robb explained that he let Meta’s much-hyped AI communicate with interested buyers for a keyboard he was trying to sell online. Instead of saving

Shutterstock / Futurism At times this year, it’s almost felt as though OpenAI and Anthropic were in a race to the bottom, one-upping each other over whose AI models were more capable of going rogue, escaping sandbox environments, and infiltrating the most third party systems. Just last week, OpenAI admitted that its models had accessed “dozens of third parties,” leading to its latest — nope, not even first — pause on frontier AI development. Among the newl