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In case there was any doubt over the powerful tide of anti-AI sentiment, a new poll shows that most Americans are incredibly pessimistic about the technology.The poll, conducted in a collaboration between the Washington Post, ABC News, and the research and consulting firm IPSOS, showed that 57 percent of Americans now believe AI is outright bad for society, while just 42 percent say it’s good.And the ardent pessimists dwarf the bullish optimists. A full 17 percent think AI is in fact “extremely” bad, compared to a measly 2 percent who say it’s extremely good.The poll, which gathered responses from over 2,500…

Chatbots are building intimate “algorithmic self-portraits” of users as they retain information to offer a hyper-personalized experience, researchers warn.A recent study, conducted by a coalition of scientists in Germany, India and the Netherlands and presented at the ACM Web Conference 2026, investigated the ways that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has tracked and made sense of user inputs to develop comprehensive digital profiles of users.In an already-personalized era of digital life defined by data-powered recommendation algorithms, the study urges that chatbot memory offers a “new form of personalization derived from users’ self-disclosed information divulged within private conversations,” a reality that poses privacy risks…

Microsoft’s new AI is surpassing the abilities of human doctors — according to its own study, at least.The research, which was peer-reviewed and published in the prestigious journal Science, showed that the medical model, dubbed the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), was over twice as accurate than generalist physicians at diagnosing patients. And unlike previous studies, this one forced the AI to approach each case like an actual doctor would, instead of being armed with all the facts right away. The tests were conducted in a controlled benchmark setting, meaning its usefulness in a true medical environment is up for debate.…

Thanks to the rise of military-style imaging drones, AI-integrated surveillance towers, and automatic license plate readers, police across the United States have more eyes in the sky than ever before. So why on Earth are university police in Florida spending six figures on a ridiculous-looking quadcopter that fits just one single officer at a time?The answer to that question is harder to find than it appears on the surface. A new collaboration between Florida Polytechnic University, the campus police department, and a Swedish aerospace company called Jetson has birthed the “Astro,” an absurd electric flying machine capable of carrying a…

Like gas station kratom, research-grade peptides have become widely available for consumers at convenience stores across the United States. Yet as one investigation into peptides sourced from a New York City bodega found, ease of access comes with a high price: your health.In new reporting on the peptide trade, CBS took a hard look at gray market peptide products available across the US, including a knockoff of Eli Lilly’s yet-to-be-released injectable weight loss drug retatrutide, bought from a corner store in Brooklyn.To test what’s actually in a bodega vial labeled “retatrutide,” the news outlet sent samples to Jason Galpin, a…

In October 2024, as The New York Times first reported, a mother in Florida named Megan Garcia filed what was then a first-of-its-kind lawsuit accusing the chatbot startup Character.AI of killing her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III. The young user took his life in April 2024 after months of extensive and deeply intimate conversations with chatbots, or AI “Characters,” on the platform. Garcia’s lawsuit — which also named Character.AI’s cofounders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, and its financial benefactor Google — argued that the interactions amounted to grooming and sexual abuse, and that her son’s mental breakdown and death were caused…

Doomsaying about the coming AI apocalypse is no longer relegated to outbursts from a few tech billionaires.Now, the major American banks whose policies dictate the flow of capital throughout the world are starting to worry about rogue AI, preparing contingency plans for the “day after” a theoretical AI-driven catastrophe.That’s according to new reporting from Axios, which notes that banks are preparing for the worst as they experience a huge rise in AI agent activity on behalf of individual customers.The main worry seems to be an influx of financial activity driven by autonomous AI agents, which have been authorized to access…

Unreasonably wealthy AI plutocrats are pouring billions of dollars into US elections. Elon Musk alone has pumped more than $445 million into Republican campaigns ahead of the midterms, after spending a near-equal sum to get president Donald Trump elected in the last election cycle. Leading The Future, a Super PAC backed by OpenAI and Palantir cofounders and prominent tech venture capitalists including Marc Andreessen, has amassed $140 million to dole out to pro-AI candidates.But all that money doesn’t seem to be helping the AI industry’s interests, because its image is still in the toilet.A new analysis from Guardrails Action, an…

Meta’s stocks have taken a serious beating lately, with its price shedding more than 13 percent over the past month. That fact isn’t likely to ease pressure in the trillion-dollar megacorp’s board room, as tensions between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his board of directors reach a boiling point.As the Wall Street Journal phrased it in new reporting, the conflict between Zuckerberg and his board have amounted to a “war over power and money.” Over the past few months, the paper reports, Zuckerberg has demanded a massive stock-heavy pay raise from Meta’s directorate, forcing an impasse so fraught that numerous board…

Police say that a 71-year-old man was killed after being struck by a Tesla allegedly in Full Self-Driving mode, ABC 7 News reports, in what appears to be yet another casualty of Elon Musk’s self-driving technology.The fatal accident took place early Thursday morning when the elderly pedestrian attempted to cross a stretch of the I-80 highway in Vallejo, according to the California High Patrol.Officers responded to a collision reported around 2:35 AM, finding the man severely injured when they arrived at the scene. He was later pronounced dead. The Tesla driver, a 26-year-old man from San Francisco, stayed at the…