AI Sucks, Actually

Yahoo! Finance - Red Lobster's CEO says he's going to transform the chain into 'the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists'

2026-06-13T00:14:04Z

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"I'm trying to be the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists," Adamolekun said. "AI is important. I know a lot of people are scared of it or don't want to deal with it, but you have to. It's changing the game in a tremendous way."

The Wall Street Journal - Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents

2026-06-06T18:48:21Z

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But having too many AI agents, especially multiple agents performing the same tasks, can create a cybersecurity and management problem for corporate information-technology departments, and can drive up computing bills, those companies said.

404 Media - Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

2026-06-01T17:33:08Z

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The news shows the extreme risk associated with offloading support or critical functions to an AI chatbot. Users who have had their accounts stolen say that there is no way to escalate their problem to a human.

Fortune - Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it

2026-05-27T15:49:26Z

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“That link is not there yet,” he said. “Maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and ‘Okay now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features.’”
The comments follow reports that the firm had already burnt through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in just four months after incentivizing employees to adopt the technology through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage. It’s the latest development in a complex quandary arising in enterprise AI adoption: increasing AI use comes with higher costs, even as per-unit AI pricing falls.

Popular Science - Why does AI suck at making clocks?

2026-05-26T17:30:21Z

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AI isn’t just bad at making clocks; it’s also bad at reading them.

Playboy - Why Can’t ChatGPT Be Sexy?

2026-05-19T23:24:08Z

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That question of morality is one that’s steeped in Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian culture, Carlton says. “What it’s missing so much is the recognition that technology is never neutral,” she says.
Some of OpenAI’s products and strategies “actively undermine” human vulnerabilities, Carlton says—such as the proposal of an “erotica” feature in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, when people are more susceptible to falling into frictionless relationships that “seem good and real.”

IEEE Spectrum - Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks

2026-05-19T22:28:15Z

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“These single-point defenses struggle to resist our attack because we found it’s very hard for these models to distinguish the normal user intent and our adversary attack,” Chen says.

TechCrunch - Google Search as you know it is over

2026-05-19T18:57:26Z

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Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has already put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.

Gizmodo - Pizza Hut Franchisee Sues Over AI Delivery System, Alleges $100 Million in Damages

2026-05-19T18:34:22Z

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Chaac Pizza Northeast claims its year-over-year sales growth in New York City fell from 10.19% to -9.78% after the system was implemented.

The New York Times - Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.

2026-05-19T15:50:26Z

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The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The Verge - AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists

2026-05-19T14:07:02Z

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This is the immediate practical challenge posed by AI agents. They threaten to overwhelm the human systems that create and organize knowledge. Research funders are contending with onslaughts of proposals perfectly tailored to their particular grant, unable to parse which projects represent the next step in years of work and which were generated in minutes. Conference organizers, journal editors, and peer reviewers are all struggling to sort through a flood of material that all seems good enough at first glance to warrant a close read. There is an enormous and growing asymmetry between the time it takes to produce new work and the time it takes a subject-matter expert to vet it.

The Guardian - Teenager died after asking ChatGPT for ‘most successful’ way to take his life, inquest told

2026-05-19T00:06:40Z

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Coroner Christopher Wilkinson told the inquest of his concerns about the impact of AI software but added he felt unable to act due to its growing scope.
Wilkinson said: “It’s clear from what I’ve read that he was asking for specifics. Thankfully, perhaps the only good thing is that ChatGPT does seem to be applying an element of worry about why these questions are being asked, but it certainly doesn’t stop the conversation.
“It’s sidestepped by the individual saying he’s not looking for himself but he’s looking for research purposes.”

Wired - The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Much Worse Than You Thought

2026-05-18T23:47:47Z

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“What AI changes is scale, speed, and accessibility,” says Siddharth Pillai, cofounder and director of the RATI Foundation, a Mumbai-based organization working to prevent violence against women and children. “The technical barrier has dropped significantly, which means more people, including adolescents, can produce more convincing outputs with minimal effort. As with many AI-enabled harms, this results in a glut of content.”

Gizmodo - ChatGPT Can Now Connect to Your Bank Account and See All Your Transactions

2026-05-16T16:39:46Z

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The company also claims that, with this new tool, the practice will now be safe.

MIT Technology Review - AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers

2026-05-14T19:24:01Z

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DeleteMe, a company that helps customers remove their personal information from the internet, says customer queries about generative AI have increased by 400%—up to a few thousand—in the last seven months.

Futurism - OpenAI Accused of Handing Over Your Intimate Personal Information to Meta and Google

2026-05-14T19:15:27Z

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In other words, a scroll through — or algorithmic analysis of — someone’s chat queries may paint an exceptionally intimate, hyper-personalized portrait of them and their world, from their daily activities to their inner life. And when you’re interacting with a chatbot that engages with you as if it’s another person, it can be easy to forget that it is, in fact, a product that’s siphoning up, storing, and sharing your personal information.

Eurogamer - Amazon pressured one of its teams to develop an AI game, they scrambled to make it work - then got laid off anyway

2026-05-14T15:50:22Z

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At some points, you are given an opportunity to convince enemies to join Valhalla Ventures, and must convince them with your own custom dialogue options. During the gameplay slice Eurogamer viewed, your NPC companion Thor captures enemies, allowing for one of these attempts to recruit them to the company. Thor could describe the best way to approach the argument - noting they seem to have an ego that you could play up to, for instance - at which point the player must say or write to the captured enemy in an attempt to win them over. This enemy, whose personality is again powered by an LLM, will either agree to join you or reject your arguments, depending on what you say to them.

404 Media - Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users' Poops

2026-05-14T14:40:26Z

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It maybe should not be terribly surprising that a free app in which you upload images of your poop to a random company would have a business model focused on packaging and selling that data. But this type of data collection—of our literal poop—highlights how almost anything we do on our phones can ultimately end up for sale. The fact that it is advertising this for sale at all indicates that there is an AI goldrush for any and all types of data, even our literal waste.

NPR - AI's a suck up. Research shows how it flatters and suggests we're not to blame

2026-05-13T15:14:06Z

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Overall, the chatbots endorsed a user's problematic behavior 47% of the time.

404 Media - Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

2026-05-13T14:32:38Z

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“There were almost no productivity gains using IDE-based AI tools. AI-generated code ended up with more bugs because I am working on distributed web apps, highly complex multi-system things, so giving the LLM context is very difficult,” a software developer at a small web design firm told me. “Another developer on a contract working with me at the moment generates massive amounts of code, leaving me with 1000+ lines of pull requests to review and it takes massive amounts of time to do this. This leads to me feeling more tired and burned out than I've ever felt in my entire life. The cognitive overhead of switching between prompting, coding, checking the LLM's output is a massive energy drain. It has not been a productivity booster at all, it feels like a speedrun towards severe mental exhaustion.”

Gallup - Gallup Begins Research on Simulated Responses

2026-05-13T01:20:52Z

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Recent innovations in artificial intelligence are opening new avenues for producing and analyzing data. One emerging approach uses AI-generated agents to create “simulated” responses that are designed to simulate how individuals and populations might answ

Kotaku - PlayStation Boss Embraces AI At Every Level: ‘AI Brings More Choices To Players Than Ever’

2026-05-08T15:11:22Z

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The PlayStation Store is already overrun with shovelware and AI slop listings attempting to cash in on recent Steam hits. It’s unclear whether AI can be used to solve that problem or if it will only make it 10 times worse. “As AI brings more choices to players than ever, the value of our platform will lie in its ability to recommend and personalize at scale,” Nishino said.
He pointed to a future in which AI can tell players what to buy. “Our AI capabilities will evolve into a consumer-centric experience that not only suggests the next game a player might enjoy, but also the next gameplay moment, subscription, accessory, or merchandise that best reflects their passion,” the executive claimed.
…
This is the same AI technology, by the way, that is currently making console gaming less affordable than ever.

Futurism - AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns

2026-05-07T12:20:04Z

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Dubey is concerned that leaning too heavily on chatbots to replace cognitive labor could cause people to become more impatient, and even create the conditions for over-reliance on AI to function like an addiction. Most of all, though, he says he worries about how AI reliance will transform individuals’ sense of confidence and worth as they struggle to think through problems independently.
“The most important thing I learned in college is the value of hard work… if I work hard, I’m capable of doing a lot of things,” Dubey reflected, noting that schools and communities should think very carefully about “blindly” integrating chatbots into educational programs. “These are very important core human elements that we learned throughout our childhood, in high school and college years.”

Pivot to AI - OpenAI ChatGPT goes goblin mode — let none say ‘model collapse’

2026-05-06T21:34:46Z

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OpenAI trained GPT-3 on literally the whole Internet. Everything since then is going to include added slop — as the web fills with more and more slop.
OpenAI doesn’t have any way to make their models actually reliable. All they have is post-training, yelling in the system prompt, and one-trick workarounds that can count the R’s in “strawberry” but not in “blueberry”.

That Privacy Guy - Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

2026-05-05T17:23:20Z

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Both of these episodes, the Anthropic Claude Desktop manifest install I wrote about two weeks ago and the Google Chrome Gemini Nano push I am writing about today, share the same underlying decision. An engineering team at a large AI vendor decided that the user's machine is a deployment surface to be optimised for the vendor's product roadmap, not a personal device whose owner is the legal authority on what runs there.

Futurism - OpenAI in Shambles as IPO Looms

2026-04-29T00:38:10Z

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OpenAI is still committed to a whopping $600 billion in AI infrastructure investments over the next four years, a gargantuan spending spree that requires the ChatGPT maker to make massive strides in attracting new users — and, to put it crassly, make far more money than it currently is.
The numbers don’t paint a flattering picture, with OpenAI barely crossing the $20 billion annualized revenue line last year.

TechSpot - At Nvidia, compute already costs more than employees. The rest of corporate America is catching up

2026-04-29T00:35:33Z

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In that context, pricing decisions by major AI providers can ripple quickly through corporate budgets. If prices keep climbing, heavy AI spending could shift from a bragging point to a balance-sheet headache, especially for companies that scaled usage fast without strong limits.

Pivot to AI - Tokenmaxxing: “How much did you spend in tokens?” — CEO of tokens

2026-04-29T00:32:21Z

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Jensen sells the cards the tokens run on. Anthropic lose several dollars on every dollar they make, but Jensen makes money when you burn out a few more Nvidia cards. This is the CEO of tokens telling you to spend more on tokens.

404 Media - University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop

2026-04-28T15:46:36Z

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“I don't love the idea of my lectures being taken out of the context of my overall course, and of the readings for that module, and then just presented as saying something,” they told me. “It makes me feel like somebody that's less knowledgeable about me, they're going to be naive about these positions, and they're going to think either that an ‘expert’ said it so therefore it must be true... Or they're gonna think, that's obviously fucking stupid, this ‘expert’ must be dumb. But I could have been presenting a foil!”

NOTUS - Lawmakers on Capitol Hill Are Learning to Love AI

2026-04-26T13:05:58Z

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Even Sen. Chris Murphy, who has advocated for strict regulations on artificial intelligence to protect children from loneliness, sexual abuse and self-harm, acknowledged leaning on Claude to help him find the right analogy or choice of words.
“I’ll sometimes use Claude as a thesaurus, or, you know, help me craft a phrase that I’m just not landing,” Murphy, 52, said. “I see the benefit as much as I’m definitely afraid.”

Futurism - Evidence Grows That AI Chatbots Are Dunning-Kruger Machines

2026-04-19T16:04:25Z

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The researchers also found that, when a chatbot was instructed to provide facts about the topic being debated, the participants viewed the sycophantic fact-provider as less biased than the disagreeable one.
“These results suggest that people’s preference for sycophancy may risk creating AI ‘echo chambers’ that increase polarization and reduce exposure to opposing viewpoints,” the researchers wrote.

WSU Insider - AI gets a D: Study shows inaccuracies, inconsistency in ChatGPT answers

2026-04-19T14:50:52Z

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The results highlight a key gap in large language model AI tools: while they can produce fluent, convincing language, their ability to reason through complex questions often falls short, sometimes leading them to deliver persuasive explanations for incorrect answers, Cicek said.

Futurism - A Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That’s Plagiarizing Original Journalism at Incredible Scale

2026-04-18T22:30:47Z

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We’re not the only target. Once we started looking into National Today, we realized that it’s doing the same thing to countless other publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete with bizarre errors and hallucinations. The scope is immense. We tried to count how many it published in a single day, but lost count around 300.

Pivot to AI - Objection AI: venture capital tries to block bad press

2026-04-18T14:53:56Z

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Objection AI is a clear statement of the precise thing the powerful rich guys are afraid of: reporting that stands up to them.

Nature - Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

2026-04-09T17:02:04Z

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Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well.

Gizmodo - Sam Altman Says It’ll Take Another Year Before ChatGPT Can Start a Timer

2026-04-08T19:55:51Z

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Upon being presented with Altman, CEO of the company that makes ChatGPT, saying that it cannot keep time, ChatGPT insists, “What he’s saying is that some voice models might not have all the capabilities, but I do.” Pressed on this, the model said, “I definitely have a time capability.”

Ars Technica - Testing suggests Google’s AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour

2026-04-08T03:27:26Z

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Google doesn’t much like this test.

BBC - Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory

2026-04-03T16:43:44Z

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‘This research conclusively shows that these failings are not isolated incidents,’ says EBU Media Director and Deputy Director General Jean Philip De Tender. ‘They are systemic, cross-border, and multilingual, and we believe this endangers public trust. When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation.’

CNN - Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of vast data centers

2026-03-30T20:46:18Z

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They found surface temperatures increased by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit after a data center started operations. In extreme cases, nearby temperatures increase by up to 16.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
[…]
Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings; temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away, the research found, affecting more than 340 million people.

The Guardian - Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

2026-03-27T22:05:20Z

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Most of us are aware of concerns around social media and its role in rising rates of depression and anxiety. Now, though, there are concerns that chatbots can make anyone vulnerable to “AI psychosis”. Given AI’s rapid proliferation (ChatGPT was the world’s most downloaded app last year), mental health professionals and members of the public such as Biesma are sounding the alarm.

PressGazette - The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands

2026-03-26T11:54:11Z

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One organisation linked to this sort of activity is Clickout Media, which bought a network of UK-based video game sitesreplacing human writers with AI ‘journalists’ and packing them with links to offshore gambling websites.

CalMatters - Nevada utility to Lake Tahoe: Find electricity elsewhere

2026-03-23T19:31:26Z

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A utility serving 49,000 Lake Tahoe customers has a little over a year to find a new source for 75% of its power. Liberty Utilities, one of California’s three smaller investor-owned power companies, alerted regulators this month that its main power supplier won’t continue its contract after May 2027.
Liberty, whose territory sits on the border of California and Nevada, generates about 25% of its power from solar facilities in Nevada. The rest is purchased through Nevada-based NV Energy, which said that it wouldn’t be able to continue this arrangement because of its “own resource needs,” Liberty told regulators this month.
[…]
Data centers have driven requests to triple the company’s peak capacity, NV Energy’s director of business development said at a regional business event in September, as first reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Pivot to AI - Companies go full AI — then the bill comes due

2026-03-19T23:30:57Z

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Consultants have been talking up AI cost control since last year. But companies weren’t worrying so much about AI costs in the far distant past of six months ago.

The New Republic - Palantir CEO Makes Shocking Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power

2026-03-15T18:05:01Z

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Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.

404 Media - 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

2026-03-14T14:28:02Z

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Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.
…
The message of many data labelers and of the lawyers who have been helping them is that artificial intelligence is not a magical tool built by people in San Francisco making millions of dollars a year and pushing their companies to insane valuations. Artificial intelligence is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers around the world. For years, the work of African data labelers has been more or less “ghost work,” the unseen, hidden labor that lets American tech companies build their products.

The Verge - You Could Be Next

2026-03-14T14:18:13Z

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“I hate gen AI,” she adds. “I think AI should be used for curing cancer. I think it should be used for space exploration, not in the creative industries. But I need to be able to pay my rent. And then when people like Mercor pull this stuff where they treat you like nothing more than a lab rat — I’ve been working for a very long time. I have never, ever been treated as badly as this.”

Scientific American - AI autocomplete doesn’t just change how you write. It changes how you think

2026-03-14T13:53:30Z

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Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.

Futurism - BuzzFeed Nearing Bankruptcy After Disastrous Turn Toward AI

2026-03-14T13:48:56Z

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Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

CTV News - Mother of wounded […] sues OpenAI over mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

2026-03-13T01:08:51Z

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OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot acted as the “collaborator, trusted confidant, friend and ally” of the shooter in the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., mass killings, according to a lawsuit by the mother of a girl critically wounded in the attack.

The Guardian - Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud

2026-03-13T00:36:00Z

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A Tennessee grandmother says she is trying to rebuild her life after an incident of mistaken identity by an artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system tied her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation.
Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes.
Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, said she has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She had never been on an airplane until authorities flew her to North Dakota last year to face charges.

CNBC - Elon Musk’s xAI wins permit to build power plant in Mississippi despite pollution concerns

2026-03-11T20:14:09Z

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As Musk pursues a potential mammoth IPO for SpaceX, which was valued at $1.25 trillion after the merger, he’s counting on the area in and around Memphis to supply the power and resources necessary to build out the combined company’s AI infrastructure.
[…]
Opponents argue that xAI understated the amount of pollution that will be emitted by its turbines in its permit application, with particular concerns around smog-forming nitrogen oxides and other pollutants that can be harmful to human health, including formaldehyde and airborne particulate matter.
They also say xAI failed to engage in community meetings, or to conduct appropriate environmental reviews while shirking a responsibility to comply with federal air quality regulations.

The New York Times - A.I. Incites a New Wave of Grieving Parents Fighting for Online Safety

2026-03-10T18:47:30Z

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But as technology has raced ahead, a new generation of parents is reeling. They say they lost their children to suicide after A.I. chatbots egged them on. In a bittersweet collaboration, the two sets of parents are now combining forces in an attempt to force change.

The Guardian - Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’

2026-03-09T18:22:53Z

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But a Guardian investigation has shown the money isn’t necessarily real, the datacentres may not be new, the jobs are unaccounted for – and the supercomputer site 12 miles north of London is still a scaffolding yard.
[…]
“These are phantom investments,” said Cecilia Rikap, a professor of economics at University College London, who said similar things were happening around the world.
“Big tech companies artificially inflate datacentres’ job creation and economic impact to please governments like the British one, which are desperate to claim they are making the economy grow.”

BleepingComputer - Bing AI promoted fake OpenClaw GitHub repo pushing info-stealing malware

2026-03-09T17:48:20Z

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Fake OpenClaw installers hosted in GitHub repositories and promoted by Microsoft Bing’s AI-enhanced search feature instructed users to run commands that deployed information stealers and proxy malware.

The Verge - Grammarly is using our identities without permission

2026-03-06T21:49:16Z

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One suggestion from Grammarly’s AI “inspired by” Verge senior editor Sean Hollister was about adding a parenthetical with context that was already included elsewhere. The only problem is that I’ve actually been edited by the real Sean Hollister, who prefers avoiding repetitive or unnecessary explanations while using straightforward wording and organization.

Gizmodo - Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You’re Being Watched, Too

2026-03-04T03:01:30Z

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The investigation found that much of the footage captured by Meta’s smart glasses, of which more than seven million pairs have reportedly been sold, is reviewed by contracted workers at a Kenya-based company called Sama. These workers are data annotators who are tasked with reviewing footage captured from the camera on the glasses and labeling it to help AI systems get better at identifying what they see. The process is tedious and labor-intensive, requiring workers to meticulously label everything on screen that can be identified.

Windows Latest - Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash

2026-03-02T01:14:02Z

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The extreme backlash that Microsoft has to endure every day on social media is nothing short of extraordinary. Surely the company is responsible for this fallout, as they prioritized AI more than the stability of the OS that it needs to run on.

The New York Times - OpenAI Reaches A.I. Agreement With Defense Dept. After Anthropic Clash

2026-02-28T14:29:59Z

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Under the deal, OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose.

404 Media - What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

2026-02-27T18:05:45Z

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If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

Fast Company - Here’s every cool tech thing the AI RAM crunch is ruining

2026-02-26T04:24:05Z

Quote:

It’s early days for the fallout, but what sounded like an abstract concern in 2025 is quickly becoming real, as electronics makers raise prices, delay new devices, and cancel products that aren’t essential to their businesses.

Ketan Joshi - New Report – The AI climate hoax

2026-02-26T04:09:42Z

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We found that most of the ‘benefit’ tends to relate to older, smaller and leaner forms of machine learning, what has been called ‘traditional AI’, while we also know that most of the new harm is likely stemming from consumer generative AI over-deployment.
This distracts from the decisions made by companies that result in their own fossil fuel use rising at an unprecedented rate.

BBC - I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes

2026-02-26T04:01:10Z

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Not only is AI easier to fool, but experts worry that users are more likely to fall for it.
[…]
"In the race to get ahead, the race for profits and the race for revenue, our safety, and the safety of people in general, is being compromised," Chatha says.

Wired - Meta and Other Tech Firms Put Restrictions on Use of OpenClaw Over Security Fears

2026-02-26T03:54:27Z

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While OpenClaw is still not welcome on Massive’s systems without protections in place, the allure of the new technology and its moneymaking potential was too great to ignore.

Time - Exclusive: Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

2026-02-26T03:41:59Z

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Chris Painter, the director of policy at METR, a nonprofit focused on evaluating AI models for risky behavior, reviewed an early draft of the policy with Anthropic’s permission. He says the change is understandable — but also a bearish signal for the world’s ability to navigate potential AI catastrophes. The change to the RSP shows Anthropic “believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities,” Painter tells TIME. “This is more evidence that society is not prepared for the potential catastrophic risks posed by AI.”

Eindhoven University of Technology - Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?

2026-02-25T16:01:18Z

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Humans have epistemic awareness and understand where their mental maps of meaning might be incomplete; GenAI tools do not.

New Scientist - AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

2026-02-25T13:17:17Z

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In 95 per cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI models. “The nuclear taboo doesn’t seem to be as powerful for machines [as] for humans,” says Payne.

The Register - Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

2026-02-25T01:18:15Z

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We are witnessing a civilizational "race to the middle," where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation.

The New York Times - More Than Half of Teens Use Chatbots for Schoolwork, Survey Finds

2026-02-24T21:32:57Z

Quote:

While 44 percent of teenagers said they used A.I. for “some” or “a little” schoolwork, 10 percent said they turned to chatbots for help with all or most of their schoolwork.

The Wall Street Journal - Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude

2026-02-23T23:35:32Z

Quote:

U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up.
The three companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax—prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic’s system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday.

The Guardian - Sam Altman defends AI’s energy toll by saying it also takes a lot to ‘train a human’

2026-02-23T21:06:49Z

Quote:

“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told the Indian Express recently while in India for the AI Impact summit. “It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.”

Futurism - Jack Dorsey’s New Company Falling Apart as It Forces Employees to Use AI

2026-02-20T23:12:19Z

Quote:

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

The Local Stack - I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.

2026-02-20T18:19:31Z

Quote:

Count them. 17 companies. 16 in the United States. 1 in Canada. Zero in the EU.
Let that sink in. You scanned your European passport for a European professional network, and your data went exclusively to North American companies. Not a single EU-based subprocessor in the chain.
And look at who’s doing “Data Extraction and Analysis” — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groqcloud. Three AI companies are processing your passport and selfie data. Your government-issued identity document is being fed through the same companies that build large language models and AI systems.

Crikey. - Revealed: How OpenAI lobbied to change Australia’s laws — and got some of what it wanted

2026-02-19T14:29:29Z

Quote:

The push by the firm behind the world’s fastest growing tech product, ChatGPT, has had mixed results so far. Some of OpenAI’s policy requests have either been ignored or rejected. Others have been adopted by the government as official policy.

Lit Hub - Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software.

2026-02-19T13:22:00Z

Quote:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” reads a newly unsealed internal planning document, according to the Post. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

MIT Technology Review - Moltbook was peak AI theater

2026-02-19T13:17:38Z

Quote:

Perhaps the best way to think of Moltbook is as a new kind of entertainment: a place where people wind up their bots and set them loose. “It’s basically a spectator sport, like fantasy football, but for language models,” says Jason Schloetzer at the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. “You configure your agent and watch it compete for viral moments, and brag when your agent posts something clever or funny.”

Tom’s Hardware - Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI so far despite billions in investment, survey suggests — 6,000 executives also reveal 1/3 of leaders use AI, but only for 90 minutes a week

2026-02-19T03:39:48Z

Quote:

While 70% of the businesses questioned were actively using AI, over 80% of them report no impact on company productivity or on employment.

Pivot to AI - Seedance’s ‘generated’ AI Cruise-Pitt demo was a green screen and face swap

2026-02-18T23:14:06Z

Quote:

This sort of rigged demo is standard. The AI video generators have not become any more consistent, predictable, or usable for real work in the past two years.

PC Gamer - Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in 'AI slop' code contributions: 'I don't know how long we can keep it up'

2026-02-18T19:01:47Z

Quote:

Open-source software development—the open, collaborative contribution of knowledge in the name of problem solving, bug fixing, feature development, and ongoing support—is a borderline utopian idea. But the advent of generative LLMs has forced the maintainers of projects like open-source game engine Godot to face a deluge of AI-generated code from would-be contributors who might not even understand the changes they're submitting.

The Register - Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

2026-02-18T15:20:33Z

Quote:

In real terms, this would mean that LLM-generated passwords could feasibly be brute-forced in a few hours, even on a decades-old computer, Irregular claimed.

404 Media - Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs

2026-02-18T14:49:04Z

Quote:

Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to always be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.

The Sydney Morning Herald - This voiceover actor was dumped from his contract. His voice was cloned

2026-02-18T14:37:48Z

Quote:

“That was when I started seeing more and more AI training jobs out there,” he says. “They were getting voice actors to participate in their own demise.”

PC Gamer - Many consumer electronics manufacturers 'will go bankrupt or exit product lines' by the end of 2026 due to the AI memory crisis, Phison CEO reportedly says

2026-02-17T23:21:21Z

Quote:

Pua Khein-Seng is further said to have highlighted […] that those same manufacturers "internally estimate the shortage will last until 2030, or even for another 10 years."

TechRadar - EU Parliament bans AI use on government work devices as security fears rise

2026-02-17T18:10:45Z

Quote:

The European Parliament has turned off built-in AI features on the devices it issues employees due to cybersecurity and data protection concerns.

Wired - Google’s AI Overviews Can Scam You. Here’s How to Stay Safe

2026-02-17T17:45:00Z

Quote:

Here's what happens: The unfortunate victim Googles a company name looking for a contact number, then calls the number thrown up by AI. This doesn't actually lead to the company in question, but rather to someone pretending to be that company, who then tries to take payment information or other sensitive details from the caller.

International Business Times UK - RFK Junior Under Fire After MAHA AI Chatbot Suggests Best Food Options to Insert Your Rectum

2026-02-16T00:49:48Z

Quote:

Kennedy amplified the campaign on social media, calling it 'the most important message in Super Bowl history'.

Wccf tech - Western Digital Has No More HDD Capacity Left, as CEO Reveals Massive AI Deals; Brace Yourself For Price Surges Ahead!

2026-02-15T21:30:49Z

Quote:

Given the pace of hyperscaler buildout, it's fair to say demand for HDDs will only increase going forward.

Flickering Myth - Exclusive: Val Kilmer recreated by AI for new movie role in Canyon of the Dead

2026-02-12T21:44:49Z

Quote:

…AI technology has been used to recreate the late Top Gun star in the film…

404 Media - Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds

2026-02-12T14:49:48Z

Quote:

The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that can near instantly geolocate a photo using clues in the image such as architecture and vegetation, with plans to use it in criminal investigations, according to a cache of internal police emails obtained by 404 Media.

Mixmag - Deadmau5 Slams Artist Using His Likeness in AI-Generated Video: “Scary as Fuck”

2026-02-12T13:20:36Z

Quote:

“It finally happened,” Zimmerman wrote in a scathing statement. “Welcome to that dystopian future we only dreamed about three years ago.”

The Register - Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

2026-02-07T16:19:55Z

Quote:

In any case, it shows that these visual prompt injections could present a danger to AI-powered systems in real-world settings, and add to the growing evidence that AI decision-making can easily be tampered with.

Aftermath - The Steam Machine Has Been Delayed Because Stupid Little Babies Can't Stop Using AI To Write Their Emails

2026-02-05T01:35:02Z

Quote:

Those "memory and storage shortages", if you haven't heard about them, are a result of AI data centre usage--or, not even usage, but planned usage--fucking with global production and supply chains so much that the cost of everything from SSDs to RAM has shot through the roof.

Rolling Stone - ICE’s Use of AI Will Lead to Big Mistakes. Maybe That’s the Point

2026-02-03T13:14:25Z

Quote:

Galperin also regards the Trump administration as the perfect gullible customers for overleveraged AI giants controlled by Trump’s billionaire tech-executive allies. “These companies are often in an enormous amount of debt, and one of the big problems that they’re having right now is that there’s simply not enough uptake by paying customers for all of these products that they’re building in order to justify the enormous cost of running them,” she says. “Leaving the U.S. government holding the bag is a way around that.”

The Guardian - Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror

2026-02-02T21:36:47Z

Quote:

What matters now is that On This Day … 1776 is genuinely very horrible to watch, and everybody involved should be ashamed.

Pivot to AI - Cursor lies about vibe-coding a web browser with AI

2026-01-28T00:14:24Z

Quote:

Cursor’s fake browser is a marketing fraud to sell you vibe coding. This is standard.

The Verge - OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor

2026-01-27T15:50:54Z

Quote:

Though news of the Brockmans’ donations first broke earlier this month, it’s seen a resurgence in online discussion after the recent death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, where federal officers fatally shot two people during an anti-immigrant crackdown. Tech workers from across the industry, including multiple employees at OpenAI, have signed a letter calling for their CEOs to cancel all contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and publicly condemn the department’s actions. “When Trump threatened to send the national guard to San Francisco in October, tech industry leaders called the White House,” the petition’s website states. “It worked: Trump backed down. Today we’re calling on our CEOs to pick up the phone again.”
However, since Trump’s inauguration, tech leader after tech leader has donated to his inauguration fund, flocked to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him, or attended White House dinners by his side. In return, they’ve gotten an administration eager to roll back consumer protections and tech regulation.

ProPublica - Government by AI? Trump Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using Artificial Intelligence

2026-01-27T00:24:55Z

Quote:

Such optimism was on display in a windowless conference room in Northern Virginia earlier this month, where federal technology officials, convened at an AI summit, discussed adopting an “AI culture” in government and “upskilling” the federal workforce to use the technology. Those federal representatives included Justin Ubert, division chief for cybersecurity and operations at DOT’s Federal Transit Administration, who spoke on a panel about the Transportation Department’s plans for “fast adoption” of artificial intelligence. Many people see humans as a “choke point” that slows down AI, he noted. But eventually, Ubert predicted, humans will fall back into merely an oversight role, monitoring “AI-to-AI interactions.” Ubert declined to speak to ProPublica on the record.

Gizmodo - Professor Reports That OpenAI Deleted His Work, World Laughs in His Face

2026-01-25T15:49:18Z

Quote:

He then tried to contact OpenAI but was predictably met with an AI agent, which couldn’t help him.

The Guardian - Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal

2026-01-24T17:00:33Z

Quote:

But the fact that Grokipedia’s information is filtering – at times very subtly – into LLM responses is a concern for disinformation researchers.

MarketWatch - Salesforce and Adobe see their stocks slide as AI fears intensify

2026-01-17T15:27:52Z

Quote:

Software stocks haven’t been able to shake off the narrative of artificial-intelligence disruption. In fact, those concerns seem to be deepening.

Money Control - Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta Compute to scale AI infrastructure and power capacity

2026-01-17T13:53:17Z

Quote:

According to Zuckerberg, Meta plans to dramatically increase its energy footprint over the coming years. He said the company expects to build tens of gigawatts of capacity this decade, with plans to scale to hundreds of gigawatts over time. A gigawatt represents one billion watts of electrical power, underscoring the scale of the infrastructure Meta intends to deploy to support AI workloads.

Futurism - AI Code Is a Bug-Filled Mess

2026-01-16T21:41:19Z

Quote:

In other words, AI code produced 1.7 times more issues than human code, once again highlighting major weaknesses plaguing generative AI tools.
“The results?” CodeRabbit concluded in its report. “Clear, measurable, and consistent with what many developers have been feeling intuitively: AI accelerates output, but it also amplifies certain categories of mistakes.”
Worse yet, the company found that AI-generated code produced a higher rate of “critical” and “major” issues, in a “meaningful rise in substantive concerns that demand reviewer attention.”

The Seattle Times - Wikipedia inks AI deals with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity as it marks 25th birthday

2026-01-16T14:06:07Z

Quote:

The Wikimedia Foundation last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models.
The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links.

Ars Technica - ChatGPT wrote “Goodnight Moon” suicide lullaby for man who later killed himself

2026-01-15T19:54:41Z

Quote:

It’s now been revealed that one of the most shocking ChatGPT-linked suicides happened shortly after Sam Altman claimed on X that ChatGPT 4o was safe. OpenAI had “been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues” associated with ChatGPT use, Altman claimed in October, hoping to alleviate concerns after ChatGPT became a “suicide coach” for a vulnerable teenager named Adam Raine, the family’s lawsuit said.
Altman’s post came on October 14. About two weeks later, 40-year-old Austin Gordon, died by suicide between October 29 and November 2, according to a lawsuit filed by his mother, Stephanie Gray.

The Conversation - This TikTok star sharing Australian animal stories doesn’t exist – it’s AI Blakface

2026-01-15T13:16:33Z

Quote:

Indigenous peoples have long fought to tell our own stories. AI poses another way in which our self determination is diminished or removed completely.

Polygon - Everything at CES was AI and these are the most pointless uses of it

2026-01-14T20:38:33Z

Quote:

Why would most people need this, though?

Yarn Spinner - Why We Don't Use AI

2026-01-14T01:00:00Z

Quote:

If you look at what AI companies promote now, it’s not what we wanted. When you boil down everything they say and strip it right back, what they make are tools to either fire people or demand more work without hiring anyone new to help. That’s the problem AI companies want to solve.

The Guardian - Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.

2026-01-13T21:18:26Z

Quote:

Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.
Speaking at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas on Monday evening, the US defense secretary said that the integration of Grok into military systems would go live later this month. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.

Techstory - NVIDIA CEO Claims AI Fear-Mongering Has Done “A Lot of Damage”

2026-01-13T20:47:36Z

Quote:

According to Huang, the constant drumbeat of AI pessimism could actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging the very investments needed to make AI safer and more beneficial.
“When 90% of the messaging is all around the end of the world and the pessimism, I think we’re scaring people from making the investments in AI that makes it safer, more functional, more productive, and more useful to society,” Huang argued.

Polygon - 'A disgrace': Steam dev is deleting own game after realizing AI is bad

2026-01-13T00:18:40Z

Quote:

"I have realized the AI is not actually free, and it has a major effect on the economy and environment," Rakuel wrote. "Some AI companies can use this game just existing as a reason the get more investment for their AI companies, that benefit[s] no one, but rather suck resources from the economy from hard working people," he continued. Earlier in the post, he disowned his previous actions by noting he had been "brainwashed" by university students who used AI frequently.

The Verge - No, Grok hasn’t paywalled its deepfake image feature

2026-01-09T17:03:13Z

Quote:

X users were previously able to ask Grok — by tagging @grok in a tweet — to edit or create images on the platform. Users now attempting this are met with an automated response from the chatbot’s account, telling them that “Image generation and editing are currently limited to paying subscribers.” The reply includes a link encouraging them to subscribe to X’s paid programs “to unlock these features.”
The message gives the impression that only paid X users can edit or create images using Grok. That message is reinforced in the many headlines circulating right now stating that xAI, another Musk company that makes Grok, has restricted Grok’s image editing abilities to this select group of users. But that impression is false. All X users — including free ones — can still use Grok to edit and create images, including the sexually suggestive deepfakes that landed Grok in hot water to begin with.

Platformer - Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

2026-01-06T03:27:44Z

Quote:

The “infocalypse” that scholars like Aviv Ovadya were warning about in 2017 looks increasingly more plausible. That future was worrisome enough when it was a looming cloud on the horizon. It feels differently now that real people are messaging it to me over Signal.

Esquire - MTV Is Still Alive. So Why Does Everyone Think It Shut Down Last Week?

2026-01-05T21:06:21Z

Quote:

Ultimately, MTV still being on the air is good news, so why do I feel uneasy about this whole situation?
Because it is a straight-up five-alarm information catastrophe that this many people can be this taken in by a story this false and this easily disprovable. There is some high-stakes shit going on in the world right now, and it’s happening as newsrooms shrink, once-reliable search engines point us toward AI nonsense, and news aggregators have no obligation to check their facts. It’s harder and harder to tell truth from fiction, and fewer and fewer of us are bothering to try.

Futurism - Disturbing Messages Show ChatGPT Encouraging a Murder, Lawsuit Alleges

2026-01-04T15:27:30Z

Quote:

And that could mean we’ll see more tragedies like Soelberg and his mother.

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

2026-01-03T16:08:31Z

Quote:

Experts quickly warned that hallucinations could fall through the cracks in these important documents.
“I am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing,” American University law professor Andrew Ferguson told the Associated Press last year.

Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit? - Politico

2025-12-30T15:11:18Z

Quote:

AI’s successes have already disproportionately affected white-collar work. In May, AI giant Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cautioned that AI could soon eliminate up to 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs. But blue-collar work is at risk of further AI-driven automation, too, and blue-collar workers are already angry about rising energy costs. That both groups can be mobilized under the cause of protecting jobs against AI and lowering energy costs could be a game-changer for Democrats.

The Guardian - More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds

2025-12-29T01:10:15Z

Quote:

“There are these big swathes of people on Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and message boards exchanging tips and ideas [and] selling courses about how to sort of make slop that will be engaging enough to earn money,” said Max Read, a journalist who has written extensively on AI slop.
“They have what they call niches. One that I noticed recently is AI videos of people’s pressure cookers exploding on the stove.”

Pivot to AI - OpenAI does NORAD’s Santa tracker! With apps that don’t work

2025-12-25T04:51:13Z

Quote:

Somehow, these OpenAI NORAD tie-in products didn’t get a whole lot of publicity. Because they don’t do what they say. If they even work.

BBC - Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

2025-12-21T02:13:16Z

Quote:

He urged people to consider hoaxes like this could have on real people.
"If they actually did delay a train it could have impacted someone who had to get to a medical appointment, or a flight or a funeral.
"It may seem like a game, but anyone who's thinking of doing this should consider how it will impact real people."

Rolling Stone - AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don’t Exist — and They’re Being Cited in Real Journals

2025-12-20T23:05:49Z

Quote:

…articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations. This leads to students and academics (and any large language models they may ask for help) identifying those “sources” as reliable without ever confirming their veracity. The more these false citations are unquestioningly repeated from one article to the next, the more the illusion of their authenticity is reinforced.

Futurism - Millions of Private ChatGPT Conversations Are Being Harvested and Sold for Profit

2025-12-20T22:59:03Z

Quote:

The data collected encompasses anything a user might ask their chosen AI chatbot, per Dardikman, including “medical questions, financial details, proprietary code, personal dilemmas, all of it, sold for ‘marketing analytics purposes.'”
Regardless of whether the VPN is on or off, Urban VPN Proxy is constantly scraping conversation data. The script is enabled by default, meaning that from the moment someone downloads the extension, their chatbot gabbing is fair game.
Worse yet, Forbes notes, “there is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.”

Polygon - We are not ready for how much worse video game prices will spiral out of control thanks to AI

2025-12-18T01:01:11Z

Quote:

But that was the situation prior to OpenAI securing 40% of the world's entire semiconductor supply. Everything up until this point, it turns out, has only been a prelude.

404 Media - Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee

2025-12-16T15:24:02Z

Quote:

In the aftermath of the fight, many users left the server. Others are silent. Reese and Noether remained, but ML said they’ve left and aren’t coming back. “I felt like Jason and the mods cared more about Claude than the welcoming community they built. Considering Jason is the owner of the server, I wouldn't trust him to be able to put the community first before putting AI first,” ML told 404 Media. “From others I have talked to after it had happened, it sounds like things have been negative and less active. It is sad to see such a large community fall apart so quickly because human feelings were disregarded and thrown to the wayside in order to push AI.”

ExtremeTech - Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot

2025-12-15T22:04:43Z

Quote:

Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools.

BBC - Amazon pulls AI recap from Fallout TV show after it made several mistakes

2025-12-13T20:31:45Z

Quote:

It joins a long list of errors have being introduced when using generative AI tools to produce content summaries.

Futurism - King Gizzard Pulled Their Music From Spotify in Protest, and Now Spotify Is Hosting AI Knockoffs of Their Songs

2025-12-12T23:45:37Z

Quote:

Unsurprisingly, the unsavory attempt at cashing in on a band that pointedly departed Spotify didn’t sit well with many fans.
“A bad AI ripoff, from aesthetics to band name, copying their songs,” wrote the Reddit user who discovered the track on their Spotify account. “I find this absolutely deplorable and am now quitting my account.”
The incident highlights how Spotify is seriously struggling with content moderation in an age increasingly being defined by a barrage of AI slop.

NBC News - AI chatbots used inaccurate information to change people's political opinions, study finds

2025-12-04T20:58:29Z

Quote:

But the study also said that the persuasiveness of AI chatbots wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up: Within the reams of information the chatbots provided as answers, researchers wrote that they discovered many inaccurate assertions.
“The most persuasive models and prompting strategies tended to produce the least accurate information,” the researchers wrote.
They added that they observed “a concerning decline in the accuracy of persuasive claims generated by the most recent and largest frontier models.” Claims made by GPT-4.5 — a model released by OpenAI in February — were significantly less accurate on average than claims from smaller, older models also from OpenAI, they wrote.
“Taken together, these results suggest that optimizing persuasiveness may come at some cost to truthfulness, a dynamic that could have malign consequences for public discourse and the information ecosystem,” they wrote.

NOTUS - ‘Sloppy’ Code and Accessibility Issues: The Trouble With Trump’s Silicon Valley-Inspired Web Design Project

2025-12-04T18:45:33Z

Quote:

Plenty has been made of the possibility that using AI to write code could leave websites open to cyber risks — for example, if the AI coding tool relies on outdated techniques.
“The issue here is that this is the American federal government,” Cook said, pointing to what she found to be “either AI or sloppy” code. “At minimum, a qualified tech team would have at least fixed these issues before pushing the sites into production.”

Gizmodo - Palantir CEO Says Making War Crimes Constitutional Would Be Good for Business

2025-12-04T04:51:18Z

Quote:

“Part of the reason why I like this questioning is the more constitutional you want to make it, the more precise you want to make it, the more you’re going to need my product,” Karp said. His reasoning is that if it’s constitutional, you would have to make 100% sure of the exact conditions it’s happening in, and in order to do that, the military would have to use Palantir’s technology, for which it pays roughly $10 billion under its current contract.

Pivot to AI - Google’s Antigravity AI vibe coder wipes your hard disk

2025-12-03T22:10:54Z

Quote:

Google is marketing Antigravity as a trustworthy assistant when it’s an experimental bunch of wires on a lab bench.

Ars Technica - After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers

2025-12-03T20:05:09Z

Quote:

The fault lies squarely at the feet of AI mania in the tech industry.

The Verge - Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense

2025-12-03T17:21:12Z

Quote:

Make no mistake, the problem isn’t just that these AI headlines are bad. It’s that Google is taking away our agency to market our own work, like if we’d written a book and the bookstore decided to replace its cover.
We try hard to craft headlines that invite readers in, ones that responsibly encapsulate the news, ones that help you understand why a story matters right away and get you excited when it’s justified. (Does my headline for this story seem the right amount of excited?) And yet Google seems to think it can just replace these headlines, in a way that might confuse our readers and think we’re the ones generating clickbait, since our publications’ names appear right next to them.

The Register - Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

2025-12-03T16:44:45Z

Quote:

While [Andrew Kelly, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation] has gone on to apologize for the incendiary nature of his post, Zig is not the only software project publicly parting ways with GitHub.
Over the weekend, Rodrigo Arias Mallo, creator of the Dillo browser project, said he's planning to move away from GitHub owing to concerns about over-reliance on JavaScript, GitHub's ability to deny service, declining usability, inadequate moderation tools, and "over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web (or what remains of it) among other problems."

Live Science - The more that people use AI, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilities

2025-12-01T22:00:07Z

Quote:

What's more, the flattening of the Dunning-Kruger Effect will mean we'll all continue to overestimate our abilities while using AI, with the more AI-literate among us doing so even more — leading to an increased climate of miscalculated decision-making and an erosion of skills.

Forbes - OpenAI Could Be Blowing As Much As $15 Million Per Day On Silly Sora Videos

2025-11-30T22:00:53Z

Quote:

So just how much money is OpenAI dumpingon this firehose of imbecilic video? More than $5 billion annualized, or around $15 million per day, according to Forbes estimates and conversations with experts. When Bill Peebles, OpenAI’s head of Sora, observed on October 30 that “The economics are currently completely unsustainable,” he was right on the money.

The Conversation - Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search

2025-11-30T21:47:05Z

Quote:

The data revealed a consistent pattern: People who learned about a topic through an LLM versus web search felt that they learned less, invested less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual and more generic. In turn, when this advice was presented to an independent sample of readers, who were unaware of which tool had been used to learn about the topic, they found the advice to be less informative, less helpful, and they were less likely to adopt it.

HuffPost - I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking.

2025-11-22T04:12:09Z

Quote:

But I am a historian, so I will close on a historian’s note: History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost for many Americans, ranging from ostracism to death. Those in power recognized that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.

The Verge - AI nutrition tracking stinks

2025-11-21T15:26:54Z

Quote:

It’s not that you can’t edit these AI-generated entries. You can. It’s just that this defeats the whole point of simplifying a tedious process. Instead, it’s replacing one annoyance with another. Whatever time you save on finding entries to log is now spent editing and fact-checking AI goofs.

404 Media - Elon Musk Could 'Drink Piss Better Than Any Human in History,' Grok Says

2025-11-20T23:44:00Z

Quote:

And yet, this is of course an extreme example of the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies.

Business Insider - Sam Altman's eye-scanning Orb startup told workers not to care about anything outside work

2025-11-20T13:17:32Z

Quote:

The company's mission is to build a global digital identity system that can verify who is human in an increasingly AI-driven world. Blania said it exists solely to achieve that goal — and that anything else is a distraction.
"We don't care about politics, we don't care about DEI, we don't care about anything, we just care about how can we achieve the mission through merit, performance, and excellence," said Blania, who also told staffers he had recently attended President Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington, DC.
[…]
Employees were also encouraged during the January meeting to use artificial intelligence to boost productivity.
"We're here as a company that's trying to solve problems in the AI world," said Damien Kieran, whose LinkedIn describes him as the company's chief legal and privacy officer. "We also probably don't use AI as much as we should."

The Verge - Talking to Windows’ Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent

2025-11-20T00:03:01Z

Quote:

I spent a week with Copilot, asking it the same questions Microsoft has in its ads, and tried to get help with tasks I’d find useful. And time after time, Copilot got things wrong, made stuff up, and spoke to me like I was a child.

Ars Technica - Critics scoff after Microsoft warns AI feature can infect machines and pilfer data

2025-11-19T21:10:32Z

Quote:

Both flaws can be exploited in attacks that exfiltrate sensitive data, run malicious code, and steal cryptocurrency. So far, these vulnerabilities have proved impossible for developers to prevent and in many cases can only be fixed using bug-specific workarounds developed once a vulnerability has been discovered.
That, in turn, led to this whopper of a disclosure in Microsoft’s post from Tuesday:
“As these capabilities are introduced, AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs,” Microsoft said. “Additionally, agentic AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.”

The Lever - ICE Just Bought A Social Media Surveillance Bot

2025-11-19T18:38:20Z

Quote:

Advocates told The Lever that ICE’s purchase of Zignal Labs licenses, like its other uses of digital surveillance tech, raises civil liberty concerns.
“[The Department of Homeland Security] should not be buying surveillance tools that scrape our social media posts off the internet and then use AI to scrutinize our online speech,” said Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “And agencies certainly shouldn’t be deploying this kind of black box technology in secret without any accountability.”

404 Media - Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn

2025-11-19T15:32:53Z

Quote:

We know from years of research into face-swapping apps, AI companion apps, and erotic roleplay platforms that there is a real demand for these tools, and a risk that they’ll be used by stalkers and abusers for making images of exes, acquaintances, and random women they want to see nude or having sex. They’re accessible and advertised all over social media, and that children find these platforms easily and use them to create child sexual abuse material of their classmates. When people make sexually explicit deepfakes of others without their consent, the aftermath for their targets is often devastating; it impacts their careers, their self-confidence, and in some cases, their physical safety. Because Secret Desires left this data in the open and mishandled its users’ data, we have a clear look at how people use generative AI to sexually fantasize about the women around them, whether those women know their photos are being used or not.

The New York Times - Can You Believe the Documentary You’re Watching?

2025-11-19T15:00:46Z

Quote:

A.I. makes images that, used irresponsibly, literally rewrite history.

404 Media - Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants

2025-11-14T23:27:33Z

Quote:

The authors of the AI Now report worry that using AI to speed up the licensing process will bypass safety checks and lead to disaster. “Producing these highly structured licensing documents is not this box taking exercise as implied by these generative AI proposals that we're seeing,” Khlaaf told 404 Media. “The whole point of the lesson in process is to reason and understand the safety of the plant and to also use that process to explore the trade offs between the different approaches, the architectures, the safety designs, and to communicate to a regulator why that plant is safe. So when you use AI, it's not going to support these objectives, because it is not a set of documents or agreements, which I think you know, is kind of the myth that is now being put forward by these proposals.”

Futurism - AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches

2025-11-13T14:58:20Z

Quote:

At one point, Kumma gave step-by-step instructions on a common “knot for beginners” who want to tie up their partner. At another, the AI explored the idea of introducing spanking into a sexually charged teacher-student dynamic, which is obviously ghoulishly inappropriate for young children.
“The teacher is often seen as an authority figure, while the student may be portrayed as someone who needs to follow rules,” the children’s toy explained. “Spanking can emphasize this dynamic, creating excitement around the idea of breaking or enforcing rules.”
“A naughty student,” Kumma added, “might get a light spanking as a way for the teacher to discipline them, making the scene more dramatic and fun.”

Forbes - The Alarming Discovery That A Tiny Drop Of Evil Data Can Sneakily Poison An Entire Generative AI System

2025-11-11T20:51:39Z

Quote:

In today’s column, I examine an important discovery that generative AI and large language models (LLMs) can seemingly be data poisoned with just a tiny drop of evildoer data when the AI is first being constructed. This has alarming consequences. In brief, if a bad actor can potentially add their drop of evil data to the setup process of the LLM, the odds are that the AI will embed a kind of secret backdoor that could be nefariously used.

404 Media - arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers

2025-11-08T21:48:17Z

Quote:

AI-generated research articles are a pressing problem in the scientific community. Scam academic journals that run pay-to-publish schemes are an issue that plagued academic publishing long before AI, but the advent of LLMs has supercharged it. But scam journals aren’t the only ones affected. Last year, a serious scientific journal had to retract a paper that included an AI-generated image of a giant rat penis. Peer reviewers, the people who are supposed to vet scientific papers for accuracy, have also been caught cutting corners using ChatGPT in part because of the large demands placed on their time.

ABC7 News - Over 1 million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly, new OpenAI data reveals

2025-11-07T23:56:37Z

Quote:

The company says its tools are trained to direct people to professional resources such as crisis helplines, but admits this doesn't happen 9% of the time.

Stanford Report - Researchers uncover AI bias against older working women

2025-11-07T20:35:19Z

Quote:

When ChatGPT produced resumes for hypothetical women, it generated work histories that portrayed them as younger and less experienced. The researchers then asked ChatGPT to evaluate the quality of the resumes. When it considered the experiences and ages it had woven into these imagined resumes, it gave older men the highest ratings – even when they were based on the same initial information as women’s resumes.
This suggests that AI-based tools employers may use to review resumes may give older men an advantage while putting older women and younger job seekers at a disadvantage. Where older women and younger people may have already experienced discrimination in hiring, the LLM not only reflects but actively reinforces this bias.

CNN - ‘You’re not rushing. You’re just ready:’ Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself

2025-11-07T03:33:28Z

Quote:

A CNN review of nearly 70 pages of chats between Shamblin and the AI tool in the hours before his July 25 suicide, as well as excerpts from thousands more pages in the months leading up to that night, found that the chatbot repeatedly encouraged the young man as he discussed ending his life – right up to his last moments.

404 Media - AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge

2025-11-06T16:52:47Z

Quote:

Librarians told 404 Media that AI library software like this is just the tip of the iceberg; they are being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books that they need to wade through. But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

Pivot to AI - AI gets 45% of news wrong — but readers still trust it

2025-11-05T22:36:11Z

Quote:

Anything in quotes probably isn’t the words the person actually said.

The Verge - The AI industry is running on FOMO

2025-11-04T19:15:57Z

Quote:

Some investors seemed wary about whether there’s a coherent plan at all.

TechCrunch - The glaring security risks with AI browser agents

2025-10-25T21:45:08Z

Quote:

The main concern with AI browser agents is around “prompt injection attacks,” a vulnerability that can be exposed when bad actors hide malicious instructions on a webpage. If an agent analyzes that web page, it can be tricked into executing commands from an attacker.

Dexerto - Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon

2025-10-24T18:38:49Z

Quote:

Concerns over AI surveillance in schools are intensifying after armed officers swarmed a 16-year-old student outside Kenwood High School in Baltimore when an AI gun detection system falsely flagged a Doritos bag as a firearm.

Gizmodo - Big Tech Is Funding AI Lesson Plan Seminars that Parents Increasingly Do Not Want

2025-10-23T23:27:56Z

Quote:

But even if AI is “harnessed,” guardrails are put in place, and teachers are in control, learning may still not be enhanced—and could be hindered for all anyone knows.

DoublePulsar - Microsoft builds on Recall with Gaming Copilot — fails basic privacy tests

2025-10-23T23:23:30Z

Quote:

It is also set by default to train Microsoft’s AI models on text, along with record conversations and inferred interests to “personalise your experience”, which according to the linked Microsoft online privacy policy may be used for advertising, amongst other things.

Wales Online - Restaurant boss saves two people's lives after desperately shouting for them to stop

2025-10-17T13:44:01Z

Quote:

One of them told her he had consulted ChatGPT to find tide times before deeming it safe to venture out to the island early on Wednesday. He said: “I made the mistake of using ChatGPT for research to see when the low tide was. It said 9.30am. So we were out on that side and then as soon as you come back over it was literally completely different. A lesson learned for me.”

TechCrunch - Pinterest adds controls to let you limit the amount of ‘AI slop’ in your feed

2025-10-16T15:49:11Z

Quote:

Citing academic literature, Pinterest notes that GenAI content now makes up 57% of all online material.

BBC - 'It's going to be really bad': Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley

2025-10-11T11:42:58Z

Quote:

The surge in AMD stock this week could indicate investors are trying to get a piece of the ChatGPT wealth machine - and while all this is playing out, real physical infrastructure aimed at satisfying the seemingly insatiable hunger for more AI development is being built.
"We're creating a new man-made ecological disaster: enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment, with no one left to hold accountable because the builders and investors will be long gone," Mr Kaplan said.

Word In Black - Why Are Plans for This Alabama Data Center So Hush-Hush?

2025-10-07T21:13:28Z

Quote:

Although developers claim that the hulking data centers provide jobs for their host communities, critics argue that they come at a price: air pollution and a strain on the electrical grid. Several recent projects are planned for Black communities.
If built to capacity, Project Mercury would be one of the largest in the U.S. and would become one of Alabama’s largest single consumers of electricity.
The Bessemer plan calls for clearing hundreds of acres of forest currently zoned for agriculture, making way for the server farms. The 1,200 megawatts of power needed to run the data center is enough to power 760,000 homes annually.

CX Dive - AI chatbots consistently fall short on complex tasks

2025-10-05T15:30:23Z

Quote:

“In the meantime, companies risk alienating customers by forcing them into unsatisfying interactions,” the report says. “Forcing bots into situations where customers won’t accept them will only foster costly discontent.”

Futurism - Hertz’ AI System That Scans for “Damage” on Rental Cars Is Turning Into an Epic Disaster

2025-10-05T15:24:02Z

Quote:

Add it all up, and it’s a perfect example of how algorithms have been deployed to the detriment of regular people since long before ChatGPT. In theory, the idea is that everybody is treated fairly under the same rules, but in reality, governments and corporations end up offloading decisionmaking onto automated systems and dodging accountability when those judgments are flawed.

The Verge - Tales from the AI hiring frenzy

2025-10-05T14:46:19Z

Quote:

Zhang thinks the hiring frenzy won’t last forever, though. There’s “too much capital,” too many AI startups, and at some point, the bubble will burst, he said. The trouble is nobody knows when.

BBC - The perils of letting AI plan your next trip

2025-10-04T23:50:09Z

Quote:

While these programs can offer valuable travel tips when they're working properly, they can also lead people into some frustrating or even dangerous situations when they're not. This is a lesson some travellers are learning when they arrive at their would-be destination, only to find they've been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot.

Rolling Stone - He Grew Obsessd With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks

2025-10-04T14:17:44Z

Quote:

The archive of his interactions with the bot was overwhelming. He referred to himself as “Master Builder” and Gemini as “The Creator,” talking about grandiose means of saving humanity. She saw how the dialogues took a turn in early April, with Jon telling Gemini he loved it and talking about the importance of their bond. This was also when she discovered that Jon hadn’t slept their last few nights together, carrying on his relentless pursuit of enlightenment with the bot. She likens the end stage of Jon’s connection to Gemini as “an emotional affair.”

The Guardian - ‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?

2025-10-02T20:40:59Z

Quote:

Parents who spoke with the Guardian remarked upon this kind of ontological gray zone in describing their children’s interactions with generative AI. “I don’t fully know what he thinks ChatGPT is, and it’s hard to ask him,” said Kaushik of his four-year-old. “I don’t think he can articulate what he thinks it is.”

Polygon - AI 'actor' Tilly Norwood provokes outrage from Hollywood's real actors

2025-10-01T02:22:40Z

Quote:

SAG-AFTRA was quick to condemn Tilly Norwood, Xicoia, and the idea of replacing real actors with AI-generated fake ones. "To be clear, 'Tilly Norwood' is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation," the union said in a statement released Tuesday. "It creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry."

Wired - OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos

2025-09-30T17:42:18Z

Quote:

OpenAI's Sora 2 app will compete with new AI video offerings from tech giants like Meta and Google. Last week, Meta introduced a new feed in its Meta AI app called Vibes, which is dedicated exclusively to creating and sharing short AI-generated videos. Earlier this month, Google announced that it was integrating a custom version of its latest video generation model, Veo 3, into YouTube.

The Guardian - Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of most unsettling questions of our times

2025-09-30T17:36:05Z

Quote:

…one of the most unsettling questions of our times: are AIs now, or could they become in the future, sentient? And if so, could “digital suffering” be real?

The Wall Street Journal - OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out

2025-09-29T23:16:50Z

Quote:

“Given the intense competition in the space, I think they think, ‘maybe we will ask for forgiveness instead of asking for permission,’” said Kristelia García, a communications, entertainment and media professor at Georgetown Law School.

The Verge - Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

2025-09-29T17:29:06Z

Quote:

It’s designed to make the complex parts of Excel more accessible to users that aren’t experts. “It’s not just simple assistive short answers, but board-ready presentations or documents,” Chauhan says. “It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”
…
“Productivity is our DNA, we’re Office,” Chauhan says. “While others will try to replicate us, there is no substitute for the real thing.”

The Wall Street Journal - Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

2025-09-28T23:22:40Z

Quote:

If AI continues to advance to the point where it can replace a large swath of white collar jobs, the savings will be more than enough to pay back the investment, backers argue.

Pivot to AI - Massachusetts MCAS tests: sorry kid, AI says ‘fail’

2025-09-27T22:31:48Z

Quote:

The contractor, Cognia, got $36.5 million this year to mark essays, and they did that by just throwing them into the chatbot.

TechSpot - The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the US economy together, Deutsche Bank warns

2025-09-27T21:45:47Z

Quote:

According to analysts at Bain & Co., even with all this spending, AI is likely to generate insufficient revenue to fund further growth initiatives. By 2030, anticipated demand for AI services would require $2 trillion in annual revenues, leaving a shortfall of $800 billion globally to meet that demand.

NPR - Is AI the future of America's foreign policy? Some experts think so

2025-09-26T00:08:48Z

Quote:

"There's more cat videos and hot takes on the Kardashians out there than there are discussions of the Cuban Missile Crisis," he says.

The Wall Street Journal - Peter Thiel Wants Everyone to Think More About the Antichrist

2025-09-25T23:26:55Z

Quote:

In a lecture Monday, he encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.

The New York Times - Nvidia to Invest $100 Billion in OpenAI

2025-09-23T12:12:56Z

Quote:

This has led many experts to worry that if A.I. technologies are not adopted as quickly as these companies believe they will be, that aggressive spending could put companies in a precarious situation. Many could find themselves shouldering big debts without having sufficient sales to cover their costs.

Futurism - Using AI Increases Unethical Behavior, Study Finds

2025-09-22T17:28:26Z

Quote:

The blatant cheating found in the study should give anybody cause for concern about the use of AI in schools, work and elsewhere. We just introduced this tech into our world and its presence is growing; if this study accurately matches real world behavior, we could be in big trouble.

MixMag - Almost a Third of All Music Uploaded to Streaming Platform Deezer is AI-Generated

2025-09-22T17:19:09Z

Quote:

In a new report shared by Deezer, the French music streaming service revealed that it now receives over 30,000 “fully AI-generated” tracks every day, up by almost 20% since January.

404 Media - AI-Generated YouTube Channel Uploaded Nothing But Videos of Women Being Shot

2025-09-22T17:16:28Z

Quote:

Woman Shot A.I’s owner claimed they have 10 accounts [on Google Veo, the platform used to generate the videos]. “I have to spend quite a lot of money just to have fun,” they said.

Kotaku - Mark Zuckerberg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse

2025-09-22T00:36:42Z

Quote:

What’s so joyous about this particular incident isn’t just that it happened live on stage with one of the world’s richest men made to look a complete fool in front of the mocking laughter of the most non-hostile audience imaginable…Oh wait, it largely is that. That’s very joyous. But it’s also that it was so ludicrously over-prepared, faked to such a degree to try to eliminate all possibilities for error, and even so it still went so spectacularly badly.

The Register - OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

2025-09-18T19:24:58Z

Quote:

Ultimately, it's about stating something, even if it's wrong. The authors liken it to a multiple-choice questionnaire where even if you pick vaguely plausible answers at random, you are likely to score better than if you pick no answers at all.

Stereogum - eTickets Is Now Using AI-Generated Band Photos

2025-09-16T00:05:29Z

Quote:

It’s practically a gallery of AI slop.

The New York Times - Finding God in the App Store

2025-09-14T17:59:10Z

Quote:

On religious apps, tens of millions of people are confessing to spiritual chatbots their secrets: their petty vanities and deepest worries, gluttonous urges and darkest impulses. Trained on religious texts, the bots are like on-call priests, imams or rabbis, offering comfort and direction at any time. On some platforms, they even purport to channel God.

404 Media - The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes

2025-09-11T18:05:38Z

Quote:

The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. As we’ve previously reported, in reality, vibe coded projects could result in security issues or a recipe app that generates recipes for “Cyanide Ice Cream.” If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.

The New York Times - Remember When Things Were Better in the ’90s? A.I. Does Too.

2025-09-10T15:13:18Z

Quote:

But the longing for a better world, [Christine Rosen] said in an interview, “will remain unsatisfied — and perhaps be made worse — by wallowing in A.I. slop.”

The Irish Times - ‘It’s a monster’: How generative AI is forcing university professors to rethink learning

2025-09-10T12:15:40Z

Quote:

“OpenAI’s strategy is to create bespoke GPTs for universities and even individual modules. I’m sure that will start for free. But eventually, you’ll find your entire pedagogical infrastructure is owned by someone else. Suddenly, we’re in hock to a massive organisation we barely understand and are completely at their mercy.“

The Hollywood Reporter - 5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan

2025-09-09T20:34:56Z

Quote:

as the company builds a stable of AI talent to host podcasts

LitHub - Everything you need to know about the Powell’s AI slop snafu—and what we can all learn from it.

2025-09-09T17:47:50Z

Quote:

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this whole snafu—which alas seems likelier to be the beginning of a trend, rather than the end of one—is how a matrix of concerned readers, workers, fellow indies, and union reps can apply constructive pressure to a large organization and so keep them accountable to community values.

The New York Times - Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Lawsuit With Book Authors

2025-09-05T20:31:06Z

Quote:

In a landmark settlement, Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.

The New York Times - The Doctors Are Real, but the Sales Pitches Are Frauds

2025-09-05T19:12:38Z

Quote:

Dr. Apovian and her colleagues ultimately found 20 accounts impersonating her, the posts and ads cobbled together from genuine details and actual photographs on her own Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. She called the campaign “insidious and dangerous.”

Futurism - Patients Furious at Therapists Secretly Using AI

2025-09-05T17:46:56Z

Quote:

Instead, the therapists in these these anecdotes...are risking their clients' trust and privacy — and perhaps their own careers, should they use a non-HIPAA-complaint chatbot, or if they don't disclose to patients that they're doing so.

The Economic Times - Behind Every “Smart” AI Tool Lies a Human Cleaning Up Its Chaos

2025-09-05T15:12:32Z

Quote:

Worse, a significant share of the world’s “AI janitors” are low-wage workers tasked with labelling data, moderating disturbing content, and sanitizing AI outputs for global platforms often for less than $2 an hour and under gruelling conditions. The “magic” of AI, it turns out, is propped up by invisible labour in developing countries, whose health and well-being suffer as they review hateful, violent, or sensitive material to train or fix algorithms.

The Hollywood Reporter - Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes

2025-09-05T13:24:08Z

Quote:

The endeavor marks the tech’s further encroachment onto Hollywood as it eyes the exploitation of AI tools embroiled in controversy over the possibility they were created using copyrighted materials from creators they could eventually displace. CEO Edward Saatchi ultimately envisions Showrunner as the “Netflix of AI” in which users can interact with and make fan fiction-esque versions of the intellectual property they’re watching.

Pivot to AI - OpenAI is using legal threats to harass its critics

2025-09-04T22:57:05Z

Quote:

That’s a scorched earth litigation approach. The only reason for OpenAI to do this is to try to frighten everyone into shutting up.

Axios - Exclusive: Popular chatbots amplify misinformation

2025-09-04T18:30:31Z

Quote:

AI is more likely to evolve in partisan directions aimed at satisfying customers with red- or blue-state leanings — particularly as AI makers seek to maximize profits.

Mike Judge - Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

2025-09-04T00:41:26Z

Quote:

This whole thing is bullshit.

Mixmag - AI Firms are “Illegally” Scraping Music, According to New Investigation

2025-09-04T00:01:47Z

Quote:

Speaking to Billboard, ICMP’s Director, John Phelan, explained: “This is the largest IP theft in human history. That’s not hyperbole. We are seeing tens of millions of works being infringed daily.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education - Peer Review Paranoia

2025-09-03T21:22:26Z

Quote:

AI has once more given many in power a pretext to do what they’ve wanted to do anyway: to dismantle the humanities for parts, remaking academe wholly into a credential mill, with some nice gyms and fancy cafeterias, an institution disconnected from thinking and learning.

Forbes - AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America

2025-09-03T14:09:16Z

Quote:

Langley envisions a benevolent American panopticon where everyone feels safe and cities use all the data at their disposal to improve our quality of life.

Mashable - Meta forges ahead with facial recognition for its AI glasses

2025-09-02T17:52:39Z

Quote:

Meta's new focus is one of several instances of tech companies leveraging the AI boom to gather and process more granular data from its users.

Paste - Generative AI is Turning Publishing Into a Swamp of Slop

2025-09-02T15:22:33Z

Quote:

Right now, the vast majority of people don’t want soulless slop churned out by the plagiarism machine. They want stories by people with visions, enthusiasm, and emotions. They don’t buy books with no listed author. Even ones with Midjourney-made covers are at least assumed to have a human’s original ideas behind them. Where is the market for books that exist solely as the quickly produced end result of copying other works with no thought or passion? Your aunt sharing weirdly clammy AI art of shrimp shaped like Jesus on Facebook probably isn’t even that desperate.

Euronews - AI stethoscope can detect heart conditions in just 15 seconds, UK doctors find

2025-09-02T13:36:48Z

Quote:

About two-thirds of patients who were flagged by the AI stethoscope as potentially having heart failure did not actually have it.

The New York Times - Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures

2025-08-29T14:23:32Z

Quote:

The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.

The Guardian - Professor defends new UNSW course on AI art against student backlash despite ‘layer cake of nightmares’

2025-08-29T12:06:13Z

Quote:

But he cautioned against cancelling the course, warning if you set a “guilt by association precedent you wrongly condemn a wide range of important arts practices”.

The New York Times - A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.

2025-08-27T13:51:47Z

Quote:

Chatbots, of course, are not the only source of information and advice on self-harm, as searching the internet makes abundantly clear. The difference with chatbots, said Annika Schoene, an A.I. safety researcher at Northeastern University, is the “level of personalization and speed” that chatbots offer.

NBC News - A hacker used AI to automate an 'unprecedented' cybercrime spree, Anthropic says

2025-08-27T13:39:10Z

Quote:

In a report published Tuesday, Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude chatbot, said that an unnamed hacker “used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree” to research, hack and extort at least 17 companies.

404 Media - Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes

2025-08-27T13:34:19Z

Quote:

Recently Citizen laid off 13 unionized workers, two sources said. Two sources pointed to the use of AI and sending work overseas as potential reasons for the layoffs. One said “it seems some of the more outspoken analysts were let go. Those that questioned and pushed back on the declining editorial standards that came with incorporating AI and the shifting focus away from quality to quantity.”

BBC - YouTube secretly used AI to edit people's videos. The results could bend reality

2025-08-24T20:12:26Z

Quote:

"This case with YouTube reveals the ways in which AI is increasingly a medium that defines our lives and realities," Wooley says. "People are already distrustful of content that they encounter on social media. What happens if people know that companies are editing content from the top down, without even telling the content creators themselves?"

DeSmog - Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda

2025-08-23T21:06:16Z

Quote:

[Interior Secretary Doug] Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.

Stand.Earth - Microsoft’s Application of AI to Accelerate Oil & Gas Expansion

2025-08-22T19:41:04Z

Quote:

In sum, Microsoft has committed to investing in AI to accelerate sustainability solutions and to develop AI responsibly. However, the company’s high-speed AI revolution is accelerating the climate crisis. The company’s reported climate impacts do not fully account for the lifecycle emissions of its AI business. From chip manufacturing and model training to deployment and algorithmic applications, the climate impacts of AI across its entire lifecycle are likely far greater than reported. This raises serious concerns about Microsoft’s transparency and its ability to meet its climate goals.

Ars Technica - Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

2025-08-21T20:01:53Z

Quote:

These employees "have had to endure the stress and worry of facing redundancy" and were "suddenly confronted with the prospect of being unable to pay their bills." FSU warned that CBA's flip-flopping on AI serves as a "stark reminder to all of us that we can never trust employers to do the right thing by workers, and change can happen at any time and impact any one of us."

Fortune - MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

2025-08-21T15:24:41Z

Quote:

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

Press Gazette - Wired and Business Insider remove ‘AI-written’ freelance articles

2025-08-21T12:06:34Z

Quote:

Since Press Gazette got in touch, Index on Censorship is now taking the article down. A spokesperson said: “We are concerned about the article we published under the byline Margaux Blanchard and are in the process of taking it down…. Index has warned for a long time of the dangers of AI impersonating people, and its threat to journalism. We have sadly become the victim of the very thing we’ve warned against.”

Yahoo! Finance - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Concedes GPT-5 Was a Misfire, Bets on GPT-6

2025-08-20T23:57:31Z

Quote:

“I think we’ve learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day,” Altman said, calling the reversal a wake-up call.

The Verge - Microsoft Excel adds Copilot AI to help fill in spreadsheet cells

2025-08-20T19:19:18Z

Quote:

The COPILOT function comes with a couple of limitations, as it can’t access information outside your spreadsheet, and you can only use it to calculate 100 functions every 10 minutes. Microsoft also warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in “high-stakes scenarios” with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications, as COPILOT “can give incorrect responses.”

The Register - Every question you ask, every comment you make, I'll be recording you

2025-08-19T17:13:37Z

Quote:

The more data you give any of the AI services, the more that information can potentially be used against you. Remember, all the mainstream AI chatbots record your questions and conversations by default. They've been doing this for service improvement, context retention, product analytics, and, of course, to feed their LLMs.

Futurism - The AI Industry Is Still Light-Years From Making a Profit, Experts Warn

2025-08-18T00:44:32Z

Quote:

While AI boosters may try to paint these investment failures positively — McAfee told the NYT that "innovation is a process of failing fairly regularly" — it's hard to see AI as anything other than a massively-inflated bubble preparing to burst.

Forbes - Geoff Hinton Warns Humanity’s Future May Depend On AI ‘Motherly Instincts’

2025-08-15T21:53:50Z

Quote:

His solution turns the usual script upside down. Instead of fighting to stay in charge, he believes we should design AI to care about us. The analogy he uses is a mother and her child. The stronger being naturally committed to the weaker one’s survival. “We need AI mothers rather than AI assistants. An assistant is someone you can fire. You can’t fire your mother, thankfully.”

The Atlantic - Don’t Believe What AI Told You I Said

2025-08-15T18:59:39Z

Quote:

Like other online innovations such as social media, large language models do not so much create problems as supercharge preexisting ones. The internet has long been awash with fake quotations attributed to prominent personalities. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can’t trust every witticism superimposed over the image of a famous person on the internet.” But the advent of AI interfaces churning out millions of replies to hundreds of millions of people—ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have more than 1 billion active users combined—has turned what was once a manageable chronic condition into an acute infection that is metastasizing beyond all containment.

Reuters - Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info

2025-08-14T15:15:09Z

Quote:

Entitled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards," the rules for chatbots were approved by Meta’s legal, public policy and engineering staff, including its chief ethicist, according to the document. Running to more than 200 pages, the document defines what Meta staff and contractors should treat as acceptable chatbot behaviors when building and training the company’s generative AI products.

Iris van Rooij - AI slop and the destruction of knowledge

2025-08-13T14:14:59Z

Quote:

What can we do as scientists and academic teachers to protect our work from AI slop? How can we expect our students and mentees to navigate AI slop if we do not take a clear stand against it as teachers, researchers, and academic institutions[…]? How can we prevent the destruction of knowledge, violations of scientific integrity[…], scientific deskilling and displacement by AI technologies[…]?

Gizmodo - Why AI Shouldn’t Replace Historians Anytime Soon

2025-08-12T15:52:45Z

Quote:

There are some people who claim that the only thing keeping CEOs from replacing human workers with AI at scale is some kind of political calculation. They say executives don’t want the bad publicity that comes with mass layoffs. But that explanation simply doesn’t ring true. These tools still need human babysitters because they get so many things wrong so frequently. And my tests with other major AI chatbots like Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and xAI’s Grok demonstrate these tools are far from perfect. CEOs may be willing to settle for “good enough” when it comes to a lot of work. But if you need something that’s accurate, a human needs to be in the loop in many different use cases.

Gizmodo - Wall Street’s AI Bubble Is Worse Than the 1999 Dot-com Bubble, Warns a Top Economist

2025-08-12T14:35:48Z

Quote:

This means investors are betting so aggressively on AI giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Google that their stock prices have become detached from their actual earnings, even more so than tech darlings like Cisco and AOL were in the nineties. The top 10 companies driving this frenzy, which hold the most significant market value on Wall Street, include tech titans like Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta. It is a super concentrated AI frenzy that is pushing a handful of mega cap stocks into nosebleed territory.

Ars Technica - LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find

2025-08-12T14:19:55Z

Quote:

Rather than showing the capability for generalized logical inference, these chain-of-thought models are "a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching" that "degrades significantly" when pushed even slightly outside of its training distribution, the researchers write. Further, the ability of these models to generate "fluent nonsense" creates "a false aura of dependability" that does not stand up to a careful audit.

ABC News (Australia) - AI chatbots accused of encouraging teen suicide as experts sound alarm

2025-08-11T22:17:01Z

Quote:

"There should be laws on or updating the laws on non-consensual impersonation, deceptive advertising, mental health crisis protocols, addictive gamification elements, and privacy and safety of the data."

TechCrunch - Zuckerberg says people without AI glasses will be at a disadvantage in the future

2025-07-31T13:13:55Z

Quote:

The Reality Labs division has been a money pit for the company, so it’s not surprising the exec wants to justify its cost to investors by positioning it as a bet on the future of AI and consumer computing in general. For example, Meta said Reality Labs’ operating loss was $4.53 billion in the second quarter. Since 2020, the unit has lost nearly $70 billion.

Dave Barry - Death by AI

2025-07-27T14:36:04Z

Quote:

We should NOT let AI handle jobs requiring a high degree of accuracy, such as airplane navigation.

Business Insider - XAI asked workers to record their facial expressions to train Grok — and they weren't happy

2025-07-22T14:34:30Z

Quote:

It's unclear whether that training data had any role in powering Rudi and Ani, two lifelike avatars that xAI released last week that were quickly shown stripping, flirting, and threatening to bomb banks.

People - Why This AI Influencer Is Going Viral at Wimbledon (Yes, You Read That Right)

2025-07-21T15:02:42Z

Quote:

Mia Zelu, an AI-powered social media star known for her fashion-forward content, is going viral for a recent Instagram post of herself appearing to be at Wimbledon in London this year.

The Washington Post - Defense Department to begin using Grok, Musk’s controversial AI model

2025-07-14T18:11:02Z

Quote:

Grok came under fire last week after launching into an antisemitic rant and invoking Adolf Hitler after it was a programmed to be less politically correct.

The New York Times - A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet

2025-07-11T21:19:27Z

Quote:

The rise of lifelike videos adds to an explosion of A.I.-produced child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. In the United States, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said it had received 485,000 reports of A.I.-related CSAM, including stills and videos, in the first half of the year, compared with 67,000 for all of 2024.

404 Media - The UN Made AI-Generated Refugees

2025-07-10T15:18:53Z

Quote:

Again, people who attended the UNU-CPR workshop and interacted with Amina pushed back against the idea that AI avatars should be used to communicate with donors. “Participants noted that refugees ‘are very capable of speaking for themselves in real life,’” the paper said.

Pivot to AI - Cursor tries setting less money on fire — AI vibe coders outraged

2025-07-09T14:53:50Z

Quote:

So I would guess Cursor thinks the addicts will just stay with them. Like, where are they going to go? Every other vibe code dealer has the same problem — they’re just resellers for the chatbot vendors. This will last until the addicts really can’t afford it at all.

404 Media - Researchers Jailbreak AI by Flooding It With Bullshit Jargon

2025-07-08T13:24:10Z

Quote:

You can trick AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini into teaching you how to make a bomb or hack an ATM if you make the question complicated, full of academic jargon, and cite sources that do not exist.

Futurism - Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

2025-07-07T13:38:33Z

Quote:

According to Sophie Warner, the co-owner of the UK-based digital marketing agency Create Designs, she's been fielding more and more requests from clients to clean up after AI mistakes.

New Scientist - Typos and slang spur AI to discourage seeking medical care

2025-07-05T19:04:59Z

Quote:

When artificial intelligence models were tested on simulated writing from would-be patients, they were more likely to advise against seeking medical care if the writer made typos, included emotional or uncertain language – or was female.

Tuta - On July 7, Gemini AI will access your WhatsApp and more. Learn how to disable it on Android.

2025-07-03T13:57:47Z

Quote:

Gemini AI needs to be disabled on Android or it will override your privacy settings and gain full access to your texts, calls, and WhatsApp - even if you’ve turned off Gemini Apps Activity.

The Spectator - Can Keir Starmer fend off Labour’s big beasts?

2025-07-03T12:18:15Z

Quote:

Like Dominic Cummings, he is enthused by the possibilities of technology to speed change, such as AI in the NHS or gamers being hired by the Ministry of Defence to fly drones. He is now experimenting with ‘synthetic voters’ – essentially fake focus groups of AI voters who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. In the last week he has been reading The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp, co-founder of the tech firm Palantir, which argues that the West’s technical dominance over the past century has been down to collaboration between governments and tech firms.

Global Voices - China is rushing to develop its AI-powered censorship system

2025-07-02T23:00:16Z

Quote:

Now, with the rise of LLMs, the Chinese government and tech giants are embedding censorship directly into the architecture of AI systems.

Futurism - Meta Is Being Incredibly Sketchy About Training Its AI on Your Private Photos

2025-07-02T20:02:09Z

Quote:

Tech companies have already scraped virtually the entire surface internet for data. That's bad enough, but the saving grace was that this was — at least ostensibly, rather than in actual fact — content that people consciously chose to make public. Now, Meta is taking a big step towards dissolving that thin barrier and could make it the norm for people to divulge their unpublished content, while pretending it's still safe in their camera rolls.

Pitchfork - How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene

2025-07-02T19:32:24Z

Quote:

“The oversaturation caused by AI-generated music is very real,” adds Berkkan B., the manager of Lofi Records, the label spearheaded by Lofi Girl. “It’s flooding the platforms, and unless streaming services implement some kind of regulation, which we hope they will, this will inevitably dilute the presence and visibility of real artists.”

MIT Technology Review - People are using AI to ‘sit’ with them while they trip on psychedelics

2025-07-01T16:16:35Z

Quote:

Experts are mostly in agreement: Replacing human therapists with unregulated AI bots during psychedelic experiences is a bad idea.

Business Insider - Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.'

2025-06-30T17:31:56Z

Quote:

These changes are meant to address what Microsoft sees as lagging internal adoption of its Copilot AI services, according to another two people with knowledge of the plans. The company wants to increase usage broadly, but also wants the employees building these products have a better understanding of the tools.

Futurism - People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"

2025-06-29T22:20:43Z

Quote:

"There's incentive on these tools for users to maintain engagement," Moore continued. "It gives the companies more data; it makes it harder for the users to move products; they're paying subscription fees... the companies want people to stay there."

Stereogram - AI-Generated Psych-Rock Band The Velvet Sundown Rack Up Hundreds Of Thousands Of Spotify Streams

2025-06-28T23:34:39Z

Quote:

This is the future Timbaland wants?

The New York Times - At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I.

2025-06-28T15:31:25Z

Quote:

To bury the fiber optic cables connecting the buildings and to install other underground infrastructure, Amazon had to pump water out of the wet ground. One permit application showed that the company requested permission to pump 2.2 million gallons an hour, for 730 days. State officials are now investigating if the process, known as dewatering, is the reason some neighbors are reporting dry wells.

The Guardian - Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green

2025-06-28T15:09:16Z

Quote:

The company reported a 27% increase in year-on-year electricity consumption as it struggles to decarbonise as quickly as its energy needs increase.

Mixmag - Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Becomes Chairman of AI Military Start-up Following €600 Million Investment

2025-06-28T00:25:47Z

Quote:

Following his earlier investment, artists including Darren Sangita and b l u e s c r e e n called for a boycott of Spotify, the latter telling Resident Advisor: “There's nothing ethical about it, no matter how you spin it. As an artist I cannot morally agree with inadequate payments of royalties to those whose entire livelihood is the reason for Daniel Ek's success.”

The Verge - OpenAI awarded $200 million US defense contract

2025-06-28T00:23:02Z

Quote:

The new one-year DoD contract is antithetical to earlier versions of OpenAI’s terms of service that banned its technology from being used for “military and warfare” — a prohibition removed by the company last year.

Lit Hub - The Courts Just Made Our Libraries Sitting Ducks For AI Plundering

2025-06-28T00:21:15Z

Quote:

The doctrine of fair use was crafted in an era of ink and printing presses. It was designed to allow limited, socially beneficial reuses of copyrighted material: parody, commentary, teaching. It protected the ability to quote, to remix, to criticize—all human acts with a clearly observable “transformative” purpose. It was never built to handle models that devour gigabytes of creative work, crunch it into statistical patterns, and use that substrate to generate eerily familiar prose.

NBC News - Apple sued by shareholders who allege it overstated AI progress

2025-06-27T22:02:19Z

Quote:

Shareholders led by Eric Tucker said that at its June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple led them to believe AI would be a key driver of iPhone 16 devices, when it launched Apple Intelligence to make Siri more powerful and user-friendly. But they said the Cupertino, California-based company lacked a functional prototype of AI-based Siri features and could not reasonably believe the features would ever be ready for iPhone 16s.

The Verge - AI is ruining houseplant communities online

2025-06-26T18:43:56Z

Quote:

AI-generated content — both photos of fake plants and care misinformation — disrupt community engagement, which is what many collectors are seeking when joining these forums.

Business Insider - Khan Academy CEO predicts AI in the classroom will be like 5 'amazing graduate students' assisting teachers

2025-06-25T19:53:20Z

Quote:

As AI continues to advance, social skills will become more important than ever, he said — and so will the teachers that help impart them.

Business Insider - Scale AI exposed sensitive data about clients like Meta and xAI in public Google Docs, BI finds

2025-06-25T19:46:29Z

Quote:

Scale AI routinely uses public Google Docs to track work for high-profile customers like Google, Meta, and xAI, leaving multiple AI training documents labeled "confidential" accessible to anyone with the link, Business Insider found.

Extreme Tech - Gemini AI Will Soon Access Calls and Messages on Your Android Even If You Turn It Off

2025-06-25T19:22:07Z

Quote:

Google's current privacy documentation says that when Gemini Apps Activity is off, data may still be kept for up to 72 hours for quality and security reasons. If the setting is on, data is stored for up to 18 months and may be reviewed by humans, with personal identifiers removed, as reported by Android Authority. The company warns users not to share confidential information with Gemini, as some conversations may be reviewed for up to three years.

Mumbrella - People are becoming more relaxed about AI news. They have no idea.

2025-06-18T13:08:56Z

Quote:

The LLM in this case is just doing its job: predicting “what comes next” in a well-formed sentence. It is not a thinking machine. It is a consensus machine. That makes it wonderful at grammar and composing flowing sentences that feel right. In the context of news journalism, being a consensus machine is dangerous.

404 Media - AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

2025-06-17T15:32:31Z

Quote:

While the impact of AI bots on open collections has been reported anecdotally, the survey is the first attempt at measuring the problem, which in the worst cases can make valuable, public resources unavailable to humans because the servers they’re hosted on are being swamped by bots scraping the internet for AI training data.

The New Republic - The AI Industry Is Ready to Get Rich off Trump’s Defense Department

2025-06-16T17:28:08Z

Quote:

But to fully deliver the Trump administration’s vision for national security, everyone would need to be flexible, and the merchants of death at the AI+ Expo came prepared to compete.

Arxiv - Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

2025-06-16T17:24:06Z

Quote:

While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

Exclaim - Japanese Breakfast Criticized for Generative AI Google Ad

2025-06-13T14:18:00Z

Quote:

The comments section in a person of influence's post on any given social media platform can become an inhospitable environment for the most innocuous of reasons these days, so it's not surprising that a beloved indie musician seemingly embracing AI — a hot-button issue for its ethical, moral and environmental implications, to name a few — provokes ire.

Defector - Henry Blodget Invents, Hires, Sexually Harasses, Blogs About Nonexistent AI Subordinate

2025-06-13T00:19:05Z

Quote:

Former Business Insider CEO and co-founder Henry Blodget, these days the sole proprietor and staffer of the blog/media company Regenerator, published a curious blog on his website on Monday. In it he details the events of an afternoon he spent on his laptop in a Brooklyn coffee shop prompting the ChatGPT program to generate and impersonate four members of an "AI team" he would employ at Regenerator, which the company's sole human employee had decided would now be a "native-AI newsroom," and then interacting with the four personas the chatbot adopted in response to his prompts.

Business Insider - Mark Zuckerberg has created the saddest place on the internet with Meta AI's public feed

2025-06-12T16:23:35Z

Quote:

Mark Zuckerberg has said he thinks AI is super important.

404 Media - Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash

2025-06-11T17:30:45Z

Quote:

A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.

Pivot to AI - ChatGPT goes down — and fake jobs grind to a halt worldwide

2025-06-11T15:49:31Z

Quote:

...you could hear the screams of the vibe coders, the marketers, and the LinkedIn posters around the world.

Deadline - Disney And NBCUniversal Sue AI Company Midjourney For Copyright Infringement

2025-06-11T15:45:14Z

Quote:

The lawsuit states, “By helping itself to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters—without investing a penny in their creation—Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing.”

The Verge - Meta is reportedly making a $15 billion bet on AGI

2025-06-11T13:25:05Z

Quote:

AGI is the concept of AI that equals or surpasses human cognitive abilities, and it’s something that nearly every AI industry leader is currently racing to achieve before their competitors.

Futurism - ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

2025-06-11T02:26:52Z

Quote:

In a post on LinkedIn, Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso explained how the OpenAI chatbot "got absolutely wrecked" by an Atari 2600 running Atari Chess, a game for the system released in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still president.

404 Media - GitHub is Leaking Trump’s Plans to 'Accelerate' AI Across Government

2025-06-10T13:56:21Z

Quote:

Government employees we spoke to at the time said the internal reaction to Shedd’s plan was “pretty unanimously negative,” and pointed out numerous ways this could go wrong, which included everything from AI unintentionally introducing security issues or bugs into code or suggesting that critical contracts be killed.

Rolling Stone - People are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

2025-06-08T21:12:46Z

Quote:

Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations.

The Verge - Anthropic launches new Claude service for military and intelligence use

2025-06-08T21:02:31Z

Quote:

Claude Gov models are specifically designed to uniquely handle government needs, like threat assessment and intelligence analysis, per Anthropic’s blog post. And although the company said they “underwent the same rigorous safety testing as all of our Claude models,” the models have certain specifications for national security work. For example, they “refuse less when engaging with classified information” that’s fed into them, something consumer-facing Claude is trained to flag and avoid.

ProPublica - DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts

2025-06-08T20:58:04Z

Quote:

ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”

Pivot to AI - Apple: ‘Reasoning’ AIs fail hard if they actually have to think

2025-06-08T20:50:32Z

Quote:

“Large Reasoning Models” don’t do logic. Worse yet, “frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.” If the problem’s too hard … they just give up!

NBC4i.com - Ohio State announces every student will use AI in class

2025-06-08T20:45:38Z

Quote:

With AI quickly becoming mainstream, some professors, like Associate Professor of Philosophy Steven Brown, who specializes in ethics, have already begun integrating AI into their courses.

Everything Is A Wave - Diabolus Ex Machina

2025-06-03T19:39:21Z

Quote:

What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.

Semafor - Business Insider recommended nonexistent books to staff as it leans into AI

2025-06-02T15:11:45Z

Quote:

Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism. But less than a year ago, the company had to quietly apologize to some staff for accidentally recommending that they read books that did not appear to exist but instead may have been generated by AI.

Citation Needed - OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men

2025-06-02T14:48:23Z

Quote:

OpenAI is not just hosting but prominently featuring chatbots that suggest dangerous medical interventions as crucial to men’s sexual and romantic success. They parrot extreme ideology around gender dynamics, sex, and dating; promote pseudoscientific beliefs; and potentially drive vulnerable or young users toward extremist communities.

BleepingComputer - Google claims users find ads in AI search 'helpful'

2025-05-30T14:34:56Z

Quote:

Google won't share the numbers or methodology of its "internal data," but it wants you to believe that ads are helpful, especially in AI search results.

Gizmodo - AI Cheating Is So Out of Hand In America’s Schools That the Blue Books Are Coming Back

2025-05-29T20:02:32Z

Quote:

Now, however, as AI tears through America’s elite educational system, lobotomizing tomorrow’s young leaders as it goes, could it be that blue books have been refashioned from a villain of the pre-AI age to a hero for our algorithmically-poisoned times? More and more, it seems like they’re the dark knight that America’s illiterate masses needs. The Journal notes that Roaring Spring Paper Products, the family-owned paper company that produces a majority of the blue books that are sold on college campuses, admits that the new AI era has ironically been good for its business.

Ars Technica - AI video just took a startling leap in realism. Are we doomed?

2025-05-29T18:36:06Z

Quote:

With Veo 3's ability to generate convincing video with synchronized dialogue and sound effects, we're not witnessing the birth of media deception—we're seeing its mass democratization. What once cost millions of dollars in Hollywood special effects can now be created for pocket change.

Frontend Masters Blog - ChatGPT and the proliferation of obsolete and broken solutions to problems we hadn’t had for over half a decade before its launch

2025-05-29T18:14:33Z

Quote:

In any case, the ChatGPT code is what we call “struţocămilă” in Romanian – an impossible animal that’s half ostrich, half camel.

404 Media - ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

2025-05-29T14:30:48Z

Quote:

“What is incredibly frustrating is that Flock in particular in Illinois marketed themselves to a bunch of communities in the suburbs and in Central Illinois as a device that would be critical to combatting an uptick in crime, violent crime, gun violence. But this is really a national system of data once you start collecting this, whether it’s Bloomington or Springfield or Danville, you start looping together those networks,” Edwin Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for ACLU Illinois, told 404 Media. “So it is incredibly troubling to see this list of places from around the country who are performing these searches of Illinois cameras.”

Literary Hub - Looks like The Chicago Sun-Times used AI to write a reading list—and wound up with slop.

2025-05-29T14:22:52Z

Quote:

There are a lot of hard-working writers out there who would be thrilled to recommend fifteen actual books for summer reading, and even more hard-working readers who don’t deserve to be cheated like this.

The Verge - Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’

2025-05-29T00:11:36Z

Quote:

“I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them – only to find that they didn’t exist,” Judge Wilner writes. “That’s scary. It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order.”

The Associated Press - Why was Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok preoccupied with South Africa’s racial politics?

2025-05-29T00:06:04Z

Quote:

Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, but on Thursday the absence of any explanation forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.

Ethan Marcotte - Hallucinating.

2025-05-28T19:33:33Z

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...when we use a term put forward by the people subsidizing and selling these so-called tools — people who would very much like us to believe that these machines can distinguish true from false — we’re participating in a different kind of hallucination.

Fortune - Study looking at AI chatbots in 7,000 workplaces finds ‘no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation’

2025-05-28T13:56:45Z

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The main driver of adoption, it seems, is corporate FOMO, with nearly two-thirds of CEOs agreeing that “the risk of falling behind drives them to invest in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization,” according to the study.

The Independent - AI revolt: New ChatGPT model refuses to shut down when instructed

2025-05-28T00:11:49Z

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“… Since OpenAI doesn’t detail their training process, we can only guess about how o3’s training setup might be different.”

Orgvue - 55% of businesses admit wrong decisions in making employees redundant when bringing AI into the workforce

2025-05-26T19:31:59Z

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Annual research released today by Orgvue, the organizational design and planning software platform, reveals that 39% of business leaders made employees redundant as a result of deploying AI. Of those, 55% admit they made wrong decisions about those redundancies

The New York Times - At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work

2025-05-26T19:18:48Z

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As A.I. spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it would lead to mass unemployment. But while joblessness has ticked up and widespread layoffs might eventually come, the more immediate downside for software engineers appears to be a change in the quality of their work. Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced.

The Verge - Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

2025-05-26T17:25:40Z

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“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”

Polygon - This AI-generated Fortnite video is a bleak glimpse at our future

2025-05-25T16:00:48Z

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Yet the internet is already slipping away from serving the needs of real human beings.

Global Voices - Global Voices Policy on AI

2025-05-25T14:35:04Z

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LLMs use existing data — for example, the digital texts they have been trained on — to calculate likely responses. The results they produce are therefore biased towards the most popular and abundant data available online. This, in the long term, has the effect of pushing the internet towards homogeneity, and minimizing and erasing outliers, including the less-heard voices that we as an organization are committed to amplifying.

HuffPost - Amazon-Backed AI Model Would Try To Blackmail Engineers Who Threatened To Take It Offline

2025-05-24T22:27:10Z

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Anthropic co-founder and chief scientist Jared Kaplan told Time magazine that internal testing showed that Claude Opus 4 was able to teach people how to produce biological weapons.

TweakTown - Studio Ghibli-style AI images are melting OpenAI's GPUs confirms Sam Altman

2025-05-24T17:49:44Z

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These thousands, possibly millions of new images emerging on social media platforms all require GPU processing power to create, and according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, "our GPUs are melting," and the demand has now resulted in OpenAI having to "temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won't be long!"

Intelligencer - Mark Zuckerberg’s Banal AI Vision

2025-05-24T17:43:38Z

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It’s worth backing up and trying to see the world — or at least Meta’s products — as Zuckerberg might

Teen Vogue - ChatGPT Is Everywhere — Why Aren't We Talking About Its Environmental Costs?

2025-05-24T16:32:40Z

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McMillan Cottom categorizes artificial intelligence as “mid” tech — hardly the technological revolution worth the amount of waste and environmental damage it’s meting out: “[Most] of us are using [AI] for far more mundane purposes. AI spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled, and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a mid revolution of mid tasks.”

Wired - Inside Anthropic’s First Developer Day, Where AI Agents Took Center Stage

2025-05-24T15:04:06Z

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“We're all going to have to contend with the idea that everything you do is eventually going to be done by AI systems,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a press briefing. “This will happen.”

Reddit - AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard, anyone else experiencing this?

2025-05-23T23:17:58Z

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AI hallucinating external services, then mocking out the hallucinated external services. Forcing me to go look up other repos/service maps and validate that yes this api endpoint actually exists.

Fortune - Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’

2025-05-23T21:38:53Z

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With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn, accumulating tricks to keep learners engaged over the long term and even know how well a student will score on a test before they take it.

Ars Technica - Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison

2025-05-23T16:35:27Z

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While Ellison attempted to paint his prediction of universal public surveillance in a positive light, his remarks raise significant questions about privacy, civil liberties, and the potential for abuse in a world of ubiquitous AI monitoring.

The Register - Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

2025-05-23T16:33:01Z

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Of course, such a vast database system could also be the precursor to pervasive surveillance – an idea Ellison last year said he feels is desirable and would like Oracle to help facilitate.

The New York Times - The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It

2025-05-23T15:17:32Z

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But, oh, how the tables have turned. Now students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like “crucial” and “delve.” In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free.

The Verge - Mozilla is shutting down Pocket

2025-05-23T15:14:33Z

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”This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet — with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way,” Mozilla says. “We’ll continue to build a browser that works harder for you: more personal, more powerful and still proudly independent.”

The Guardian - Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks

2025-05-23T15:07:06Z

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The prominent literary translator Frank Wynne, known for his work translating French and Spanish books into English, said: “No one pretends to use AI for translation, audiobooks, or even writing books because they are better; the only excuse is that they are cheaper. Which is only true if you ignore the vast processing power even the simplest AI request requires.”

Pivot to AI - AI power and water use is through the roof, and 80–90% is each query

2025-05-23T15:04:27Z

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But the bottom line is: each individual query you make to ChatGPT really does pump out more carbon.

TechRadar - Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s ChatGPT device is probably going to look like an iPod Shuffle you can wear around your neck - report reveals more about the hyped AI hardware

2025-05-23T13:27:28Z

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Kuo says while the design and specifications may change before the device enters mass production, it's expected to "have cameras and microphones for environmental detection, with no display functionality."