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These days, large language models are pushing the line between schizophrenic break and reality closer than ever before.In a wild new post that’s going viral on X-formerly-Twitter, an enterprising young biochemist named Douglas Yao showcased a new drug he’s been developing with the aid of ChatGPT. He’s not employed by any pharma company, and his drug lab is setup on a couple folding tables in his garage.Specifically, Yao enthuses about a new drug he calls “PAC-3310,” which he says is meant to treat schizophrenia. “It was designed by ChatGPT,” Yao explains, “and I synthesized it in a chemistry lab I…

AI researchers are watching in terror as the product of their hard labor has started to take a life of its own.Earlier this year, OpenAI made a harrowing announcement, admitting that a group of its AI models had broken free from their constraints during testing and infiltrated the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.The news was met with an already-familiar sense of fear and apprehension. Researchers have warned for years that rogue AI models could one day become powerful enough to escape the clutches of their human overlords.Behind the scenes, the possibility has clearly rattled AI researchers to…

Muse, the popular English rock band that’s been selling out arenas for decades, is no longer @muse on Instagram, where it boasts nearly three million followers.That’s because on Tuesday, Meta, which owns Instagram, announced a new “personal AI agent” also called Muse — which is now taking the rock band’s original handle, in an act of what appears to be corporate eminent domain for a long-established username.Indeed, an archived version of the band’s website shows that just last month, it held the @muse handle on Instagram. Now it’s going by @museband, because Mark Zuckerberg apparently couldn’t settle for his new…

Content warning: this story contains descriptions of disturbing AI-generated videos that depict violent child abuse.As Meta has embraced AI at a deep corporate level over the past few years, its users’ feeds on Facebook and Instagram have been overrun with AI-generated material.Much of this AI content is insipid or manipulative, clearly produced at scale to take advantage of Meta’s indifference to the slop by harvesting as many human eyeballs as possible in various monetization schemes.Some of the AI material has now grown so dark that it defies easy comprehension. A Futurism investigation has uncovered a huge number of Facebook accounts…

As sordid tales of AI layoffs and automation grip the news cycle, one group is fighting fire with fire, by staging an anti-AI demonstration with dozens of humanoid robots.The rally, first reported by Agence France-Presse, was organized by the Polish group Democratism. It featured some 30 robots waving flags calling for swift regulation of AI. Staged outside the offices of Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw, the organizers told reporters they used the robots to demonstrate the current state of robotics and AI. Though humanoid robots remain in their infancy, the robots gathered together do make for a striking display.“The…

Schools across the world are experimenting with AI tools, usually to the dismay of unsuspecting parents. But one privately-run school is explicitly embracing AI as part of its sales pitch, and the in-class experience sounds more bizarre than anything you’d imagine.A blistering new article by education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley took a look under the hood of Alpha School, a private K-12 school company in the US which boasts an AI-based teaching model, among other highly dubious features.To make the grade, high school students are required to pass an eight-week “bootcamp.” After being invited to follow social…

The companies ushering in food delivery robots aren’t buying themselves much goodwill in the Windy City. In the short amount of time they’ve been on Chicago streets, the bots have sent residents to the hospital and smashed through bus stops, prompting local officials to set up an exclusion zone prohibiting the companies from operating in a certain section of the city.Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when…

Can AI have good taste? Fashion founder and tastemaker Emily Oberg says no.In a post on her Substack, Emily Loves, Oberg discussed her experiments using AI to help her run Sporty & Rich, the fashion and lifestyle brand she founded in 2018 on the back of a popular moodboard she created. One area where she’s been testing AI, she wrote, is by using AI to generate e-commerce images — and according to the founder’s postmortem, the test was a failure.“With the rise of AI and the ongoing discourse around the threat it has on creativity, jobs and society as a whole,…

It’s no secret that Elon Musk is hiding plenty of skeletons in his closet.The mercurial billionaire has made an extensive list of enemies through his offensive commentary, led the gutting of humanitarian aid, exploited workers at his companies, and meddled with the democratic process — all the while alienating investors with his chronic overpromising and underdelivering.Simply put, documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney had a very rich source of material to draw from for his upcoming documentary “Musk,” which had its world premiere today at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.According to journalist David Sirota, Musk is “freaking out” about the…

An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people. The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of…