Latest AI News

America.gov / Futurism Sitting US head of state Donald Trump still insists that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him, his supposed defeat a con job by scheming Democrats. His flagship chatbot, though, has other ideas. This week, Trump launched America.gov, an AI-powered website designed to retrieve all the information you need from the federal government through a chatbot. Though his administration has worked tirelessly to reshape the feder

Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP via Getty Images It’s hardly a secret that president Donald Trump is addicted to AI slop, but his proclivity for being wooed by the tech apparently doesn’t end there. Trump is also, according to new reporting from TIME magazine, absolutely enthralled by Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. Whereas your average user might turn to the infamously foul-mouthed AI — which briefly identified itself as “MechaHitler” — to win an online argument or crank

Shutterstock / Futurism As the AI race reaches white-hot temperatures, big tech companies are caught up in a heated race to build as many pollution-belching and power-sucking data centers as they can. And while the Trump administration is largely clearing their way by easing environmental rules for the polluting facilities, other governments are less inclined to give companies a pass. As Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire fo

Meta The AI industry’s data centers aren’t belching pollution, driving their neighbors bonkers with screeching noise, and using up vast amounts of power and water. They’re also allowing companies to exploit tax breaks to save billions of dollars on their federal tax bill. As the New York Times reports, Meta is writing off its enormous, multibillion-dollar data center construction projects as “pilot models,” a Reagan-era tax credit originally intended to su

Shutterstock / Futurism As programmers make more and more use of generative AI in the workplace, their responsibilities are quickly transitioning from creating new products from scratch to babysitting a large language model that cobbles together code. It’s gotten to the point where some engineers are no longer able to make sense of the code being spat out by an AI, as chip optimization software company Infinity founder Jeremy Nixon told Business Insider. T

AliExpress / Futurism You can buy practically anything these days on the internet — especially when it’s being shipped straight from China, the beating heart of global manufacturing. It doesn’t matter how macabre the object in question is. If it has a price, there’s a company willing to sell and even advertise it to you on social media. One Reddit user found that out the hard way after spotting an Instagram ad for a “pet incinerator” on the Meta-owned plat

Shutterstock / Futurism Let’s get this out of the way: AI models don’t have feelings, and they’re certainly not “alive.” So what does it mean when someone’s accused of building an “AI torture chamber?” Apparently, it means that they must be stopped at all costs. On X — where else — alarm grew this week among AI “welfare” types over someone’s recreation of an experiment researchers conducted to explore “pain” signals in different LLMs. In the pre-print stud

Shutterstock / 88-Studio Last month, Futurism published an investigation into a company called Brown Brothers Media, which has attracted tens of millions of page views per month by acquiring struggling news sites and turning them into AI-powered content mills. (One of the brothers behind the company, we also reported, has extensive ties to Ghislaine Maxwell, the incarcerated collaborator of deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.) Brown Brothers Media achie

Shutterstock / Futurism The credit rating firm Egan-Jones hears all the serious talk about an AI murder spree apocalypse and raises a mundane, financial one. In a commentary bluntly titled “It’s Over,” the firm proclaimed that AI is about to obliterate the collective hyperstition and capitalist long con commonly known as “the economy.” “AI has advanced so far that the complete disruption of the economy is all but certain, and firms that sell expertise by t

A collage of screenshots of AI-generated videos uploaded to Facebook. Actual footage of warfare is horrific enough. But now that AI slop floods every social media feed on the web, we get to experience the trauma and propaganda of war regurgitated from the bowels of generative AI, all in a cynical search for likes and follows. When generative AI was in its infancy back in 2024, we covered the rise of pandering ultra-patriotic slop on social media. Those pos

Shutterstock / Futurism Recently unredacted legal documents and depositions in the New York Times’ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed something extraordinary: executives knew full well of the destructive powers of AI when they rushed to launch products featuring the tech in the wake of the explosive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Internal Microsoft documents quoted by the newspaper’s lawyers warned of an ugly reality now playing out across the ent

Shutterstock / Futurism There’s no AI company in the world more obsessed with the idea that their models may be conscious than Anthropic. According to new reporting from the New York Times, the company has for months been wining and dining religious scholars across the world in secret, NDA-secured meetings to convince them that AI models think and feel, too. Anthropic even reportedly went after the most iconic of all religious leaders: the Pope. Christophe

Shutterstock / Futurism Cybercriminals who appear to be Chinese hackers pretended to be Anthropic researchers and former government officials in a scheme to obtain information about American AI development, according to a report from the Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm Proofpoint. Per the report, the allegedly China-aligned hacking group, dubbed “TA419,” impersonated AI industry professionals and even an ex-White House staffer to target “AI policy expert

Amazon / Futurism The tech industry has largely failed to win over the public when it comes to AI. Data centers have become a hot-button topic, with the vast majority of Americans — in a still-growing bipartisan cohort — now openly opposing them. Meanwhile, panicking executives are desperately trying to pivot the messaging to shore up some support, in last-ditch efforts that aren’t proving fruitful. As such, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman pleaded in a

Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t afraid to throw humanity under the bus to build his dreams of a society powered by AI. During an interview with Politico’s new podcast Decoded, he laid it all out: that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” That, in Altman’s view, is what sets the ChatGPT maker apart from the competition — most notably Anthropic, which ha

Shutterstock / Futurism Meta’s platforms have become an abominable cesspit of AI slop, ranging from violent child abuse to ultra-patriotic engagement bait. We could go on and on about Meta’s dismal failure to moderate its platforms. More telling is where it does focus its efforts: the company apparently has set its sights on the LGBTQ community after censoring the accounts of two gay bars in Austin, Texas. Both of the Instagram and Facebook accounts of the

Meta / Futurism With the release of Meta’s buzzy Muse AI agent, there’ve been plenty of concerns over the amount of privacy and control Meta wants you to cede so it can serve as your “personal assistant. It seems that even its own employees are worried. Before launching the AI agent, engineers found a security vulnerability that could’ve allowed Muse users to break into Meta’s own databases and services and access other people’s sensitive information, 404

Shutterstock / Futurism With mounting pressure on AI labs to curb the many real-world harms their products cause consumers, it’s never been clearer that they’re monitoring users’ conversations. Just ask Carli Michelle Heller, a woman arrested in Bonita Springs, Florida after allegedly telling Anthropic’s chatbot Claude about her plan to “shoot up” a nearby sheriff’s office. According to WINK News, Heller was charged with making a written threat of violence

Shutterstock / Futurism Why shell out for the mundane headshots by a school photographer when you could supercharge your kids’ portrait with the power of AI? That’s a calculation more and more parents are making these days, choosing to tap into generative AI tools like ChatGPT to fast-track school picture day. According to Fast Company, parents are taking to social media to brag up how much AI saved them on their children’s’ school print package — usually

Shutterstock / Futurism The “fair use” doctrine under the US Copyright Act of 1976 allows for copyrighted materials to be used for purposes like criticism, journalism, and research. Whether something is deemed fair use depends on several factors, including how transformative it is, how much of the work is used, and whether the reproduction alters the market value of the original. It’s the keystone of the AI industry’s legal defense in a litany of ongoing l