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Earlier this month, we published a months-long investigation into a little-known company called Brown Brothers Media. The venture is run by three brothers — Justin Brown, Lachlan Brown, and Brendan Brown — who buy struggling online publications and turn them into AI-powered slop farms that post thousands of articles to scoop up massive traffic from platforms like Google, pushing unwitting readers away from real journalism in the process.The growth of the Brown brothers’ empire, we found, has been powered by extraordinary acts of dishonesty and manipulation. As it fired virtually all its writing staff after the release of ChatGPT, it…

Smart glasses have been shrouded in controversy for quite some time now. They’ve earned the moniker of “pervert glasses” for allowing creeps to spy on unsuspecting strangers, while sketchy facial recognition software generates fear of a dystopian surveillance state. Meta’s even been hit with a lawsuit for allowing contracts to see users’ intimate moments.The smart glasses world just can’t catch a break. Now, gadget maker Inmo had to recall its Air3 smart glasses because the left arm can “overheat during extended use, posing a risk of serious injury or death due to burn hazard,” according to an official notice by…

In the midst of heated discussions on AI safety and consciousness, the Associated Press Stylebook has reminded everyone of where it stands on the whole “anthropomorphism” debate.“Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics,” it wrote Wednesday in a post on X. “This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.”This didn’t go over well in the world of AI experts and adherents, whose nerves, shall we say, were collectively struck by what they characterized as a “completely insane”…

Silicon Valley has apparently become so rife with seedy characters that tech workers are now distributing a spreadsheet of “over a hundred” alleged sexual predators in the industry, the New York Post reports.The list isn’t publicly available, but is said to contain “prominent investors and businessmen,” according to the paper’s sources, and is a way of warning others.“Some of them were very prominent names, you know? People who were famous investors,” one up-and-coming woman in tech told the Post. “Businessmen who were in the scene, I had seen them at parties before.”The list, on top of names, is said to…

For the past few weeks, Elon Musk has been throwing a tantrum — and throwing around legal threats — over Alex Gibney’s “hit piece” documentary about him that’s set to release next month.Now, as if following his lead, pretty much all of the major social media sites are refusing to run ads for the movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter.The platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook — are unwilling to accept paid advertising for the film. And of course so is X, the site owned by Musk himself.The stonewalling has reportedly taken distributor Bleecker Street by surprise, with the company…

While a rising majority of workers in the take a negative attitude toward AI in the workplace, others are welcoming the tech with open arms — even going so far as to pay for AI services out of their own pockets.According to a recent workplace survey conducted by Deloitte and flagged by Reuters, workers in the UK are spending a collective $1.3 billion annually on generative AI for their jobs, without even expensing it. The survey is based on responses from 25,000 workers across the continent, which Deloitte calls the “largest study of workplace GenAI use conducted in a single…

Venus is often called the Earth’s “evil twin” since they’re roughly the same size, formed in the same inner part of the solar system, and happen to be neighbors as well — although, as suggested by that moniker, Venus is horrendously inhospitable to life as we know it compared to our home planet.The similarities may run even deeper than previously known. Scientists have previously suggested that Venus once had a moon orbiting it, which met its demise when an enormous object impacted with it. Other researchers believe its current lack of moons — beyond several trojan asteroids that don’t directly…

Gambling addicts aren’t the only ones being taken for a ride by prediction markets. As gambling platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi become have more popular than ever before, financial criminals are also using prediction markets to unleash fraud and graft on an unprecedented scale.According to the Wall Street Journal, this phenomenon was identified as far back as February, when a payment processing company contracted by Polymarket flagged a massive rise in bets made with stolen debit cards.Essentially, fraudsters began by plugging stolen financial information into the prediction market to make wagers. If they won, the perpetrators would then withdraw the…

Earlier this year, it was widely reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was trying to get its hands on $20 million worth of electric shock gloves — discreet compliance devices designed to do exactly what it sounds like: electrocute anybody who gets in their way.Now, it seems ICE is trying to add to the arsenal of dystopian techno-gadgetry, through the procurement of AI-integrated robot dogs.That’s according to ABC News, which viewed a federal procurement notice showing ICE is planning to spend up to $2 million to procure a number of SPOT robots from Boston Dynamics.Equipped with extendable arms and 360-degree cameras,…

Despite many years of development and enormously complex AI systems that took monstrous amounts of money to train, self-driving cars are still finding themselves stumped by relatively simple obstacles.Seriously. They unexpectedly stop in the middle of highways, smash through traffic barriers, get bamboozled by construction blockades, and plow into floodwaters.For those placing bets, it appears that even a cutting-edge AI model won’t fare any better. For a new project, three computer scientists loaded frontier AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, xAI’s Grok 4.6, and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1, into the brains of a Toyota Corolla to see if they could…