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Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images In 2026, Google’s AI is embracing that oldest and noblest of internet traditions: sponsored content. Over the weekend, Google released a tiny memo on its Ad & Commerce Blog, announcing a new type of sponsored content marketers can purchase, the Washington Post observed. This new type of ad will be featured in Google’s “AI mode” — the AI chatbot which users can open on the side of a Google

Getty / Futurism 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. At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.” “I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, ev

Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images / Futurism Wikipedia has signed training deals with a host of major AI companies, helping it recoup some of the exorbitant costs it accrued from being relentlessly pillaged by data scrapers. The companies include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and France’s Mistral AI. As part of the series of deals, revealed Thursday by Wikipedia’s operator the Wikimedia Foundation, the AI developers are joining Wikimedia’s E

Getty / Futurism For years now, AI companies, including Google, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, have insisted that their large language models aren’t technically storing copyrighted works in their memory and instead “learn” from their training data like a human mind. It’s a carefully worded distinction that’s been integral to their attempts to defend themselves against a rapidly growing barrage of legal challenges. It also cuts to the core of copyright law it

Getty / Futurism The use of generative AI for creative purposes has spawned a major countermovement. From game developers reeling from a wave of criticism for using the tech to artists staging mass protests against AI, the backlash against what’s being hailed as a technological revolution grew massively last year. In a startlingly literal example of this growing fury, a University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate student was detained after ripping “artwor

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI data centers on the East Coast are gobbling up so much juice that nonprofit grid operator PJM may be forced to enact rolling blackouts on its customers during both heat waves and exceptionally cold weather just to protect the grid’s integrity. These blackouts would impact a staggering 67 million people in 13 states, according to The Wall Street Journal, which will no doubt fan more ang

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Does Microsoft hate books more, or its own workers? It’s hard to say, because The Verge reports that the multitrillion dollar giant is gutting its employee library and cutting down on digital subscriptions in favor of pursuing what’s internally described as an “AI-powered learning experience” — whatever in Clippy’s name that’s supposed to mean. Seriously, we wish we could explain to you w

Michael Buckner/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images For years now, actors have rung the alarm bells over the AI industry planning to sell their likeness and voices — either with or without their consent — and hence threatening to put them out of work. Beyond a major 2023 strike by Hollywood actors fueled by these concerns, we’ve already seen actors take matters into their own hands, like when Scarlett Johansson threatened to sue OpenAI over a Chat

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As corporate consolidation and ideological capture continue to wreak havoc on journalism across the world, some might be wondering if the dire media landscape could get any worse. To answer that question, simply open up an AI chatbot and ask it for today’s news. In a fascinating experiment fit for 2026, Jean-Hugues Roy, a journalism professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal, decid

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI models are now everywhere, from hospitals to churches. The astonishing thing is that even AI experts still don’t know exactly what’s happening inside these black box models, even as they’re being deployed in the highest-stakes settings imaginable.The latest strategy to figure it out: studying them like biological systems. For example, MIT Tech Review reports, scientists at Anthropic ha

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI models are being unleashed into schools across the world, in a massive experiment on kids with uncertain results. Now, fresh research provides a clue about the tech’s effects on children’s education, and it’s not promising. According to a new study from Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, AI poses profound risks to children’s social and intellectual development — an

Getty / Futurism We have it on good authority that next year is not 2027. That authority, of course, is Google’s horribly inaccurate AI Overview feature. By now, you’re probably well aware that the search engine’s AI-generated summaries are plagued with hallucinations. But you’d think after years of being unleashed on the unsuspecting public, they might be a little better. Fat chance, it turns out. Ask Google’s incredibly trustworthy AI model “is 2027 next

stclairashley via Instagram Elon Musk’s Grok AI kicked off a massive scandal over the past month when users started using it to digitally undress both adults and even children, triggering a widespread outcry and wave of criticism. The fallout led Musk’s social media platform, X, to announce that it was implementing “technical measures” to prevent users from using the AI to undress real people or place them in revealing clothing like bikinis — once again hi

Getty / Futurism From a young age, many children have been instructed by their parents to be polite to smart assistants. Particularly following the advent of Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, children are often encouraged to use words like “please” and “thank you,” with the hopes of instilling manners. But when it comes to AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there might be some tangible benefits to being rude and even insulting them. As detailed in a yet-t

Getty / Futurism Will the slow anaconda crush of AI mean the end of journalism? It’s hard to imagine it completely eliminating the profession outright, unless the machines end up enslaving humanity à la the “Matrix” films. There will always be nosy gumshoes meddling in everyone’s affairs. But major media companies are in dire straits, and their executives aren’t sounding too cheerful about the future, which could hold in store the end of the traditional ne

Getty / Futurism You know the old adage “don’t believe everything you see on the internet”? In the age of AI, it’s never been more relevant. Late in December, Denver Bronco’s beat writer Cody Roark was surprised to learn he was dead, leaving behind a 5 year old child. As far as he knew, he had never fathered a child, and was very much still alive. Yet that’s not what the post on Facebook claimed. There, an image shared by the page “Wild Horse Warriors” fea

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images While AI companies continue to command the global economy and pour billions of dollars into building data centers, it’s still not even clear that their products can deliver on one of their core premises: increasing productivity. One big skeptic of the tech’s economic promises is vice president and principal analyst at the global market analytics firm JP Gownder, who says we’re simply “not

Sarco The inventor of a controversial suicide pod is making sure his device keeps up with the times by augmenting it with AI tech — which, we regret to inform you, is not merely some sort of dark joke. “One of the parts to the device which hadn’t been finished, but is now finished, is the artificial intelligence,” the inventor, Philip Nitschke, told the Daily Mail in a new interview. Named the Sarco pod after the ancient sarcophagus, the euthanasia chamber

Getty Images / Donald Iain Smith Is the AI industry racing towards a point where the tech’s progress stalls out or slows to a crawl? Many experts, including one of the field’s foundational figures, seem to think it’s possible. “There is a clear possibility that we will hit a wall, that there’s some difficulty that we don’t foresee right now, and we don’t find any solution quickly,” Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, told The Guardian. “And that

Getty Images / Noel Hendrickson Microsoft is hellbent on stuffing Windows 11 with AI — and many feel that this is coming at the expense of the operating system’s usability. That aggrieved sentiment now seems more vindicated than ever, after Microsoft rolled out a new update that prevented users from shutting down their PCs — a core functionality that there should be zero excuses for not working. The patch, released on January 13, was the first security upd