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AI has turned the act of looking for a job into an abysmal and endless source of frustration. Applicants are using the tech to stuff keywords into their resumes and cover letters, while generating a flood that’s burying recruiters. Meanwhile, HR departments are using AI to make sense of it all as perfectly suitable applicants slip by unnoticed.Making matters even worse are deepfaked AI avatars conducting early rounds of interviews, in a slap in the face to job seekers who often struggle to get in touch with an actual human at a company that’s currently hiring.Beyond sending a clear signal…

A Vanity Fair interview with Sam Altman nearly went sideways when the OpenAI CEO was confronted about a suicide linked with ChatGPT.In the interview published Monday, Mark Guiducci, an editor with the magazine, asked Altman if he knew who Laura Reiley was. When Altman said he didn’t, Guiducci explained that she was a mother who wrote an essay in the New York Times last year about how her daughter took her own life after speaking with ChatGPT.But before he could continue, Altman’s publicist immediately tried to shut down Guiducci’s line of questioning.“Mark, we have two minutes left,” the publicist said…

Hikers keep getting stranded after consulting AI chatbots for potentially life-saving — or life-threatening — advice.Just last month, three outdoor enthusiasts had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers in California’s Cascade Range after Google’s AI advised them to “bring far less food and water than their group required,” turning their planned eight-hour ascent into a “multi day ordeal.”Yet despite officials pleading with the public not to take the advice of hallucinating large language models, their warnings keep falling on deaf ears.Most recently, a 16-year-old boy had to be rescued from the base of a massive and steep rock formation,…

The “fair use” doctrine under the US Copyright Act of 1976 allows for copyrighted materials to be used for purposes like criticism, journalism, and research. Whether something is deemed fair use depends on several factors, including how transformative it is, how much of the work is used, and whether the reproduction alters the market value of the original. It’s the keystone of the AI industry’s legal defense in a litany of ongoing lawsuits filed by rightsholders, who are accusing tech companies of unlawfully using their intellectual property to train their AI models.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long maintained that the…

Last week, a 28-year-old employee at an anti-plague institute in the Siberian city of Irkutsk died at a regional hospital just two days after mysteriously falling ill.Her unusual occupation drew an international media frenzy, sparking fears over another pandemic. The news sounded just a bit too much like the opening to a cheesy medical horror movie, with US secretary of state Marco Rubio saying that the US is “watching and monitoring” the case “closely.”Former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx called the death “particularly concerning,” saying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are “very much aware and…

August of 2026 was the hottest on record for Africa and North America, resulting in the second-warmest August in the recorded history of planet Earth.Driven by extreme heat, over 62,000 wildfires have burned more than 9 million acres across the United States alone across the past year — well over the 10-year average for the quantity of fires and the average number of acres burned, according to the US National Interagency Fire Center.That’s the backdrop against which one of the most important climate lawsuits of the 21st century proceeds to the US Supreme Court. As climate journalist Clark Mindock reported…

Why shell out for the mundane headshots by a school photographer when you could supercharge your kids’ portrait with the power of AI?That’s a calculation more and more parents are making these days, choosing to tap into generative AI tools like ChatGPT to fast-track school picture day. According to Fast Company, parents are taking to social media to brag up how much AI saved them on their children’s’ school print package — usually in the range of $25 to $60 per.One TikTok from influencer Carlie Bond showed off the hack: first, parents take some phone pictures of their children standing…

With mounting pressure on AI labs to curb the many real-world harms their products cause consumers, it’s never been clearer that they’re monitoring users’ conversations.Just ask Carli Michelle Heller, a woman arrested in Bonita Springs, Florida after allegedly telling Anthropic’s chatbot Claude about her plan to “shoot up” a nearby sheriff’s office.According to WINK News, Heller was charged with making a written threat of violence — a second-degree felony in Florida — after Anthropic’s internal monitoring software flagged her chat logs for human review. After being viewed by a human employee at Anthropic, WINK reports, the company determined that Heller’s…

Meta’s platforms have become an abominable cesspit of AI slop, ranging from violent child abuse to ultra-patriotic engagement bait.We could go on and on about Meta’s dismal failure to moderate its platforms. More telling is where it does focus its efforts: the company apparently has set its sights on the LGBTQ community after censoring the accounts of two gay bars in Austin, Texas. Both of the Instagram and Facebook accounts of the bars, Oilcan Harry’s and Rain on 4th, were flagged and censored. As Chron reports, pictures of drag queen performers were being marked as “inappropriate,” with the company threatening…

With the release of Meta’s buzzy Muse AI agent, there’ve been plenty of concerns over the amount of privacy and control Meta wants you to cede so it can serve as your “personal assistant.It seems that even its own employees are worried. Before launching the AI agent, engineers found a security vulnerability that could’ve allowed Muse users to break into Meta’s own databases and services and access other people’s sensitive information, 404 Media reports.Such a hack would be disastrous. Meta asks users to let Muse control everything from their bank accounts to their emails. The vulnerability was fixed in a…