down on ai

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images The nascent AI industry has attracted untold hundreds of billions of dollars in investment over the past few years, but it’s still operating in a near-total regulatory vacuum. That’s not to say it’s had no negative impact. The tech has been linked to a wave of mental health breakdowns, suicides and even murder — and that’s without getting into allegations about the secto

MAXIM SHEMETOV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images China’s government might have some lofty ambitions for AI, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to let the tech run roughshod over the country. According to Nikkei Asia, the People’s Republic has recently begun tightening regulations around AI-generated misinformation, as part of what it’s calling the “Clean Up the Internet: Rectifying the Abuse of AI Technology” campaign. Like in other countries unleashing AI, China ha

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s no secret that YouTube is overrun with AI slop. It’s made gestures towards reining in the flood of chintzy AI imagery, and now it’s signaling that it’s getting a little more serious about enforcing its own (still relatively lax) standards on videos made with the tech. On Wednesday, the Google-owned platform announced changes to how it would start labeling AI-generated content. The most noticeable update is that the labels will

Shutterstock / Futurism Spotify, like pretty much every other digital platform, has been grappling with a torrent of low-quality AI-generated content flooding its streaming service. The deluge has resulted in cheap-and-fast AI-generated music infiltrating algorithmic playlists and even charting. The slop has led to artists — including dead musicians — being impersonated by AI-powered squatters. “The low-effort content you see where it’s mass-produced, it’s

Shutterstock / Futurism Frontier AI labs are seemingly in a race to melt the impressionable minds of underage users into a puddle. For years now, we’ve watched individuals under the age of 18 become obsessed with social AI companions, an alarming trend that has already had catastrophic consequences, from chatbots encouraging them to engage in self-harm to even being implicated in a series of deaths. And that’s without getting into the growing wave of evide