best ai generative tools 2026

Getty / Futurism If you had all the money in the world at your disposal, would you still be using ChatGPT? As part of a recent report, first spotted by Inc. Magazine, financial holdings company JPMorgan asked 111 billionaire clients how they make use of artificial intelligence. Their answers range from down-to-earth to absolutely absurd, forcing us to wonder if some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet could be suffering from AI-induced delusions. G

Companies are spending more on AI governance and getting less control Companies are increasing their cybersecurity budgets, with AI security and governance the top priority for additional spending, followed by cloud security, according to DNSFilter’s The Cost of Shadow AI report. Some 74.5% of respondents reported a larger cybersecurity budget than 12 months earlier. Asked where their next incremental security dollar would go, 40.3% named AI security and g

87% say their AI controls need to work better The AI running inside large companies has stopped waiting for permission. Across five categories of AI, from chatbots to process automation, more than half of 3,600 business decision-makers say the systems their teams use can act within defined rules without routine review, or finish whole processes with no human approval. 87% of those same respondents say their organization needs a better way to approve, monit

Generative models aim to replicate realistic outcomes across various contexts, from text generation to visual effects. While much progress has been made in creating real-world simulators, the application of generative models to virtual environments like financial markets remains relatively untapped. In a new paper MarS: a Financial Market Simulation Engine Powered by Generative Foundation Model, a Microsoft Research Asia research team introduces MarS, a fi

YouTube Generative AI has made it easier than ever before to impersonate somebody else, from scammers using cloned voices of targets for phishing scams to deepfakes of deceased celebrities circulating on OpenAI’s Sora app. Even Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has gotten considerable media attention this year for his eyebrow-raising theory that mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS could be an alien spacecraft visiting the solar system, has now fallen vi

Getty / Futurism Earlier this week, Futurism reported that Grok — the flagship chatbot created by the Elon Musk-owned AI venture xAI, perhaps best known for its frequent forays into unbridled antisemitism — was willing to find and compile extensive information about private people, which it gathered from murky databases and other sources from across the web. Since that capability immediately seemed like it could enable dangerous behavior by stalkers, we wa

Illustrative diagram of the processing of a deep research agents response into the eight metrics of the DeepTrace Framework. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2509.04499 Artificial intelligence may well save us time by finding information faster, but it is not always a reliable researcher. It frequently makes unsupported claims that are not backed up by reliable sources. A study by Pranav Narayanan Venkit at Salesforce AI Research and colleagues fo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Disney / Getty Images Famous copyright tyrant Disney is now bending over for the AI industry and signing away its precious intellectual property. On Thursday, the entertainment conglomerate announced a new licensing agreement with OpenAI that will allow it to use Disney’s iconic characters and properties to generate clips on Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app that lets you deepfake friends and celebr

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Willem van Aelst For hundreds of years, humans have engaged in the fine craft of art forgery. Indeed, in 1496, a 21-year-old Michelangelo faked a piece of a Roman sculpture, passing it to the Roman antiquarian Cardinal Raffaele Riario to make a quick buck. To pull off the con, the young Florentine artist rubbed acidic loam — dirt, basically — onto his own sculpture fragment in order to pass it off as

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

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

Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2505.04831 Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have experienced a meteoric rise in usage over the past three years because they can help you with a wide range of tasks. Whether you're writing Shakespearean sonnets, debugging code, or need an answer to an obscure trivia question, artificial intelligence (AI) systems seem to have you covered. The source of this versatility? Billions or even trillions of textual data poi

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A new study has revealed that the displacement of skilled workers by technology began nearly two decades ago—well before the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that have sparked widespread concern over jobs becoming automated in the future. Published in the Socio-Economic Review, the research shows that leading sectors in the so-called "knowledge economy"—including finance, tech, and professional services—hav

Enterprise artificial intelligence investment is unprecedented, with IDC projecting global spending on AI and GenAI to double to $631 billion by 2028. Yet beneath the impressive budget allocations and boardroom enthusiasm lies a troubling reality: most organisations struggle to translate their AI ambitions into operational success.The sobering statistics behind AI’s promiseModelOp’s 2025 AI Governance Benchmark Report, based on input from 100 senior AI and

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI’s use in the legal sphere is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s the sobering sense of disappointment that set in after a team building an AI chatbot for Alaska’s court system actually tested it and found out it was a hallucinating disaster, NBC News reports. The chatbot, dubbed the Alaska Virtual Assistant, was designed to help people handle forms and other procedures invol

Getty / Futurism Months before it mysteriously vaporized into thin air, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency ravaged the National Weather Service, leading to severe staffing shortages. While the Trump administration promised to rehire most of the around 550 lost jobs at the agency last summer, effectively admitting that DOGE had gone too far, the agency’s offices across the country are still struggling with many roles that remain unfil

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Move over, Ship of Theseus — there’s a new paradoxical thought experiment in town. Some power users of generative AI have grown so comfortable with their new tools — especially image-generating ones — that they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology wasn’t based on the work of human artists that had been ingested without consent.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images An indie game developer experienced a moment of profound moral clarity, and is now deleting his partially-AI-made game from the digital storefront Steam. The game, dubbed “Hardest,” is a free-to-play “rock-paper-scissors” roguelike card game released last July to mixed-to-negative reviews (of which there are barely thirty total.) Some users called it “soulless” and disparaged it for using

Getty / Futurism Since 2008, Stack Overflow has been an immensely helpful resource for developers, allowing them to crowdsource answers to their coding questions — and resulting in a vast online repository of coding knowledge. But as Dev Class reports, the advent of generative AI appears to have caused an extinction-level event for the platform, with the number of monthly questions plummeting significantly since around the time ChatGPT burst onto the scene

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Bandcamp, a major music distribution platform favored by indie artists, announced Tuesday that it would be “putting human creativity first” by outright banning AI-generated songs — and music aficionados are rejoicing. According to the company, music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” will no longer be permitted on the platform. Furthermore, using AI tools “to impers