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In an era where Silicon Valley’s conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it’s strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today’s tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X’s openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a

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AI slop submissions force Google to freeze its open-source bug bounty Google has stopped accepting new product vulnerability reports through its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program (OSS VRP), after a wave of invalid, AI-generated submissions swamped the engineers and open source maintainers who review them. The rules page for Google’s OSS VRP states that “as of October 1, 2026, we are no longer accepting product vulnerabilities submitted to t

Image via Getty / Futurism While much of the wealth-owning world is positively smitten by the financial promise of large language models (LLMs) and the data centers necessary to power them, one major tech investor is sounding the alarm. Roger McNamee, a career tech financier who made successful bets on companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, recently penned an ominous essay in The Guardian, warning that the AI industry is set to collapse. By the

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images When your boss insists you to start using AI for your job, do you cave to their demands, or resist using the tech? The reality is that if you’re in a position where you have to ask, you may be doomed either way. We suggest you learn from the experience of Kevin Cantera, a man from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who “willingly embraced AI for work” after he and his colleagues were encouraged to u

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Scientists are a skeptical bunch — it’s in the job description. But when it comes to AI, researchers are growing increasingly mistrustful of the tech’s capabilities. In a preview of its 2025 report on the impact of the tech on research, the academic publisher Wiley released preliminary findings on attitudes toward AI. One startling takeaway: the report found that scientists expressed less

r/opensource bans AI projects, and solo devs go down with them Moderators of r/opensource, Reddit’s catch-all forum for open source software, have barred any project that “uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI.” Moderator Wolvereness announced the rules in a post over the weekend. A project now has to be at least a year old and actively maintained, carry an OSI license, have an existing community and “subjectively 3+” contributors. The poster needs

AI slop is piling up highest on the biggest open-source projects The maintainers of large open source projects are taking the worst of the AI slop. In a Linux Foundation survey of 234 open source contributors and maintainers, people running projects with more than 50 contributors estimated that close to a third of the code changes landing in their queue are low quality or AI-generated. Those maintainers now worry more about burning out than about the code

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images With so many puff pieces out there about what AI can do, it’s rare to see a story about what it can’t do. And as some researchers tell it, AI is falling terribly short at what many of us find to be one of the easiest tasks of all: getting into arguments on social media. First spotted by Ars Technica, a team of researchers from Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the US recently released a p

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Alex Wong / Getty Images; Chesnot / Getty Images A major shake up appears to be taking place at Meta. According to new reporting from the Financial Times, the company’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is planning to leave his position there and start his own AI startup. It’s a genuinely startling decision. LeCun, who joined Meta in 2013, is a towering figure in the AI industry. A Turing Award winner, th

Getty / Futurism In the almost exactly three years since the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a tidal wave of AI slop has turned large swathes of the internet into an almost unrecognizable hellscape. Text carelessly generated by a large language models has invaded countless industries, from lawyers citing cases that were hallucinated by an AI to insipid lyrics crooned by chart-topping country music artists that don’t actually exist in real life. The world of jo

Stolen AI access leaves companies with cloud bills of up to $1 million Criminals who break into corporate cloud accounts are using the stolen access to run AI models at the victim’s expense, in some cases racking up more than $100,000 in charges in a single day, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant researchers have found. Usage chart showing LLMJacking generating a spike in API requests (Source: Google) In 2026, Mandiant responded to severa

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP via Getty Images; Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty Images; Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images Are AI companies incentivized to put the public’s health and well-being first? According to a pair of physicians, the current answer is a resounding “no.” In a new paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, physicians from Harvard Medical School and Baylor College of Medicine

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images for WSJ. Magazine Innovators Awards This summer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved heaven and earth to recharge his company’s lagging AI division, spending billions of dollars to poach top talent across the industry. But it sounds like he’s already falling out with the man he hired to spearhead Meta’s renewed AI efforts, Alexandr Wang. According to new reporting from th

Getty / Futurism According to a fresh study by the Pew Research Center, 64 percent of teens in the US say they already use AI chatbots, and about 30 percent of those who do say they use it at least daily. Yet as previous research has shown, those chatbots come with significant risk to the first generation of kids navigating the intense new software. New reporting by the Washington Post — which has a partnership with OpenAI, it’s worth noting — details a tr

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Grammarly is being accused of “necromancy” after users discovered a feature for reviewing manuscripts with AI versions of real professors — some of whom have already left this mortal coil. The issue was first flagged by Verena Krebs, a medieval historian and Ruhr-University Bochum professor. On Sunday, Krebs shared a screenshot showing the “Expert Review” tool allowing users to pick histo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Tax season, that dreaded time of year, is upon us. But if you were hoping that newfangled AI tech could help you file the laborious paperwork — and perhaps find a way of saving you a few bucks — think again. After testing several four leading AI chatbots, the New York Times found that all of them struggled to pick and fill out the correct forms, fumbling key calculations. In all, the bots