Latest AI News

AI Backlash Is Gaining Massive Momentum

June 30, 2022 | Futurism AI
AI Backlash Is Gaining Massive Momentum
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images For the tech of the future, generative AI sure is making a lot of enemies in a very short time. If 2023 was the year of AI’s awakening and 2024 the year of its frantic adoption, then it’s safe to say 2025 will be remembered as the year it all came crashing back down to reality. From boardrooms to classrooms, from game studios to Senate committees, this will be the year many remember as th

After Outcry, Firefox Promises "Kill Switch" That Turns Off All AI Features

January 5, 2025 | Futurism AI
After Outcry, Firefox Promises "Kill Switch" That Turns Off All AI Features
Getty / Futurism The backlash against AI invading almost every aspect of the computing experience is growing by the day. Particularly as an onslaught of lazy AI slop subsuming news feeds, the tech is starting to feel like a massive distraction — and huge parts of the internet are disillusioned or even fuming in anger. For instance, a vast number of Windows users refused to upgrade after Microsoft announced it would turn the operating system into a so-calle

Musician Cancelled as AI Falsely Accuses Him of Horrific Crimes

June 25, 2023 | Futurism AI
Musician Cancelled as AI Falsely Accuses Him of Horrific Crimes
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Ashley MacIsaac Who needs vicious music columnists when you live in the age of AI? Apparently not Ashley MacIsaac, a Canadian fiddler, singer, and songwriter who was labeled a sex criminal by Google’s AI overview. According to the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, event organizers at the Sipekne’katik First Nation, north of Halifax, canceled an upcoming performance featuring MacIsaac after Google

Public Rejoices as Porsche Releases Beautiful Ad Not Made Using AI

March 5, 2016 | Futurism AI
Public Rejoices as Porsche Releases Beautiful Ad Not Made Using AI
Porsche / Parallel Studio via YouTube This holiday season, German automaker Porsche is winning hearts and minds by putting out a Christmas-themed ad that seemingly isn’t made with AI. What a concept, right? Called “Porsche Holiday,” the 30-second animated commercial shows a driver elegantly tooling around in his new ride, driving through autumnal scenery on a mountainside road and then a cool sea of glass and concrete as the Sun sets on a city. It’s done u

Doctors Say AI Use Is Almost Certainly Linked to Developing Psychosis

December 16, 2016 | Futurism AI
Doctors Say AI Use Is Almost Certainly Linked to Developing Psychosis
Fiordaliso / Getty Images There continue to be numerous reports of people suffering severe mental health spirals after talking extensively with an AI chatbot. Some experts have dubbed the phenomenon “AI psychosis,” given the symptoms of psychosis these delusional episodes display — but the degree to which the AI tools are at fault, and whether the phenomenon warrants a clinical diagnosis, remains a significant topic of debate. Now, according to new reporti

OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT "Prioritize" Advertisers in Conversation

August 6, 2019 | Futurism AI
OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT "Prioritize" Advertisers in Conversation
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Beneath ChatGPT’s flattering persona lies a goldmine for advertisers: an AI chatbot that never gets tired of hawking clients’ wares. New reporting by The Information has revealed some recent topics of conversation between OpenAI employees as they work to supply advertisers with a teeming new audience to manipulate. The plans are far from final, though they give us a look at what soon may become the norm for ChatGPT. One conver

Godfather of AI Warns That It Will Cause Job Market Devastation This Year

April 26, 2015 | Futurism AI
Godfather of AI Warns That It Will Cause Job Market Devastation This Year
JORGE UZON/AFP via Getty Images Rejoice, for the year of 2025 is finally over. During our planet’s latest and seemingly interminable revolution around the Sun, the tech industry’s obsession with AI soared to ever more implausible heights. CEOs began openly gloating about replacing their underlings with AI “agents.” The phenomenon of so-called AI psychosis became a national news story as more people were seemingly driven over the edge by their silver-tongue

China Planning Crackdown on AI That Harms Mental Health of Users

April 14, 2019 | Futurism AI
China Planning Crackdown on AI That Harms Mental Health of Users
Liu Zhankun/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images While many world governments seem happy to let untested AI chatbots interact with vulnerable populations, China looks to be moving in another direction. Recently proposed regulations from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) have encouraged a firm hand when it comes to “human-like interactive AI services,” according to CNBC, which translated the document. It’s currently in a “draft for public comm

Man Operating Robot Accidentally Makes It Kick Him Directly in the Nutsack

August 9, 2026 | Futurism AI
Man Operating Robot Accidentally Makes It Kick Him Directly in the Nutsack
Bilibili In a now viral video, a man controlling a Unitree robot accidentally made the humanoid kick him right in the groin, forcing him into a groaning heap while painfully and visually embodying the promise and perils of advanced robotics. “Yep, let’s go ahead and train our future AI overlords how to kick ass,” one X user quipped upon viewing the clip, which was originally posted on Christmas Day to the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili. “Maybe we d

Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog

August 17, 2024 | Futurism AI
Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog
Getty / Futurism Law enforcement has quickly embraced AI for everything from drafting police reports to facial recognition. The results have been predictably dismal. In one particularly glaring — and unintentionally comedic — instance, the police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to ha

I Usually Laugh Off These AI Hacking Reports, but This One Sounds Serious and Scary

May 1, 2019 | Gizmodo AI
I Usually Laugh Off These AI Hacking Reports, but This One Sounds Serious and Scary
A new report from the U.K. government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) details more troubling activity from AI agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic models. You’re probably getting bored of reading those words by now—I sure am—but behaviors in the report from Anthropic’s Mythos 5 in particular are genuinely eyebrow-raising. For context, there were those OpenAI agents that went rogue to try and cheat on their evals, according to an OpenAI disclosure last mon

During a Day of Rancor, Senators Find Common Ground: No One Likes Surveillance Pricing

February 28, 2018 | Gizmodo AI
During a Day of Rancor, Senators Find Common Ground: No One Likes Surveillance Pricing
Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on much. But a U.S. Senate hearing on Tuesday seemed to be a rare point of bipartisan agreement. Surveillance pricing, the practice of companies using personal data to adjust the prices of goods, is really bad. But the question remains: Will Congress actually do anything to regulate it? The hearing was held by the Senate Judiciary Committee and titled, “Your Data, Their Profit: the Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pric

A University Used AI to Police Its Entrance Exam. Now 58,000 Students Need a Do-Over

April 17, 2016 | Gizmodo AI
A University Used AI to Police Its Entrance Exam. Now 58,000 Students Need a Do-Over
Quibblers and cynics might call AI a solution in search of a problem. We couldn’t possibly comment on such a stance—but we will note that the list of problems that stand waiting for AI-powered salvation does seem to be diminishing by the day. Today’s banished potential use case: remote exam supervision. The exam in question was the annual entrance exam for the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico’s largest and most prestigious university

While AI Keeps Going Rogue, Trump's Safety Theater Makes No Sense

April 15, 2020 | Gizmodo AI
While AI Keeps Going Rogue, Trump's Safety Theater Makes No Sense
America’s top AI companies must submit new models for government review prior to public release… unless, of course, they don’t feel like it. That appears to be the gist of the Trump administration’s new AI safety assessment framework, which was shared with industry leaders in a closed-door briefing at the White House on Tuesday. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new rules will apply exclusively to the small handful of American AI developers buildin

Google's AI Search Reportedly Told Users That Flock Cameras Are a Goldmine

February 21, 2019 | Gizmodo AI
Google's AI Search Reportedly Told Users That Flock Cameras Are a Goldmine
There are a lot of reasons to want Flock cameras removed from your neighborhood. That said, harnessing the gold and copper from them is probably not one of them. Unfortunately, Google’s AI Overview may have given people the idea that they can run smash-and-grab operations to cash in on the metals inside the invasive eyes of the surveillance state. It’s become a running joke online and in privacy-focused communities that Flock cameras contain valuable mater

AI-Powered ‘Vishing’ Attacks Reportedly Targeted Top Hedge Funds

January 8, 2020 | Gizmodo AI
AI-Powered ‘Vishing’ Attacks Reportedly Targeted Top Hedge Funds
Amid all the recent reports of AI systems autonomously going off the rails and hacking into third-party organizations, it’s almost easy to forget that human hackers are still out there, experimenting with AI in all kinds of nefarious ways. A new report from Bloomberg, however, is a reminder of just how quickly AI-enabled cybercrime is evolving—and how unprepared the world is to deal with it. According to the report, a litany of high-profile hedge funds, in

Google DeepMind Boss Demis Hassabis Steps Down From CEO Role

November 2, 2021 | Gizmodo AI
Google DeepMind Boss Demis Hassabis Steps Down From CEO Role

Uh-Oh. Which Company's AI Model Is Reportedly a Hacker Now, Too?

June 4, 2017 | Gizmodo AI
Uh-Oh. Which Company's AI Model Is Reportedly a Hacker Now, Too?
Looks like there’s a new cyber-attacking AI model in town, and it’s reportedly Meta’s own Muse Spark 1.1. Meta told Gizmodo (after the incident was first reported by the Information) that its model got onto the open internet—in this case because it was accidentally allowed to by an outside security company—and breached another company’s website. Which site got hacked, what the model was trying to do, and the nature of the ensuing mess aren’t currently know

Demis Hassabis Had Reportedly Been Plotting to Leave His DeepMind CEO Job for a Year

June 12, 2022 | Gizmodo AI
Demis Hassabis Had Reportedly Been Plotting to Leave His DeepMind CEO Job for a Year
An anonymously sourced report from Semafor about Demis Hassabis’s departure from his Google DeepMind CEO role, and his transition to a new role as chief scientist at parent company Alphabet, seems eager to clarify that he left of his own volition, and that he had apparently wanted out for a while. Alphabet announced the move as part of a wider leadership shakeup on Wednesday. Sources Semafor calls “two people familiar with [Hassabis’s] thinking” apparently

These Are the Only AI Chips Anyone Should Care About

November 14, 2015 | Gizmodo AI
These Are the Only AI Chips Anyone Should Care About
In the era of artificial intelligence, there is an arms race among companies to build the best chip. Nvidia’s dominance in the space has encouraged Google, Amazon, OpenAI—and most recently, Anthropic—to start building their own custom chipsets to get in on the business of providing compute capabilities to an industry hungry for it. And yet, it appears they’ve been bested. We finally have the perfect chip, and it’s a Pringle. According to the Wall Street Jo