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Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell is facing a bit of a reckoning right now after being busted for using AI to write articles that were published in newspapers and academic journals — with some students calling for him to be fired.The accusations first came from a broader Semafor investigation published last month that looked into how many guest opinion pieces in the US’s top newspapers were written with AI. One of Schnell’s columns in The Washington Post, when put through the widely-cited AI detector Pangram, came up as 100 percent AI-written. The article’s topic, in a detail rich with irony,…

A cruel and unusual event took place this Thursday during Caleb Flynn’s murder trial.The 40-year-old former “American Idol” contestant — who’s been accused of shooting his wife Ashley Flynn in their Ohio home — apparently wrote two love songs for the young woman he was having an affair with before his wife’s death, and then produced them with AI.Prosecutors, feeling no mercy, had the court listen to both of these cringey ballads — complete with cliche soft piano riffs, soaring anthemic choruses, and awful teenage diary lyrics — in what is perhaps the most mortifying punishment that can be inflicted on…

Ask any crypto bro for the digital equivalent of the gold-standard, and they’ll likely tell you about Tether — though a recent raid by the Department of Justice is throwing that characterization into question.Fresh reporting by the Financial Times revealed that the US Department of Justice has seized millions of dollars from a collection of bank accounts and crypto wallets linked to the finance tech company Tether Limited.The company is famously the issuer of the “stablecoin” Tether, a digital currency meant to maintain a relatively stable value based on the exchange rate of the US dollar. The company Tether was…

AI companies should tread carefully. According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, if AI labs truly believe their tech could spiral out of control and cause widespread harm, they should simply not release a new product — or face criminal liability.“Now, if they say the alternative, which is: there is no way to contain our experiments, there’s just no way; when we test our AI models, it will get out, and it will damage the world — then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down,” Huang said in an interview with the New York Times’…

AI doesn’t need superintelligence to bring America’s judicial system to its knees.The proliferation of AI-generated slop paraded as legitimate legal documentation is now so bad that Florida’s second-highest appellate is sounding the alarm.In an opinion issued last week, a panel of three judges for Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal excoriated an attorney whose filings carried the unmistakable imprint of — in the judges’ words — “AI slop.”That assessment, first reported by Reuters, came along with a notice that the offending attorney might be referred to the Florida bar for discipline, as well as a warning that the kinds of…

Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI infrastructure project is in major trouble in New Mexico, as a pivotal data center project appears to be shriveling on the vine.Early on Thursday, the AI company Oracle sent out a notice of “force majeure” to the Blue Owl Capital, the lender backing a massive hyperscale data center critical to the president’s ambitious AI project, Bloomberg reported.Typically reserved for unexpected catastrophes like the outbreak of war, natural disaster, or massive social upheaval, Oracle invoked force majeure in order to shield itself from financial liability over the project’s failure to secure certain development permits.Zooming out, the…

When you’re building out an experimental AI-powered insurance company, it’s probably best to stick with the business fundamentals — and leave the fancy espresso to the baristas.That’s the lesson being learned by the brain trust at Corgi Insurance, a frenetic insurance startup grabbing headlines for its excessively strict workplace culture, social media gaffs, and most recently it’s bizarre strategy to smother San Francisco in coffee shops operating 24/7.Unfortunately for Corgi, those latter dreams have lost their buzz. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the insurtech venture has recently laid off employees tasked with establishing Corgi-branded cafes across the city. The…

It feels like SpaceX’s Starship development has been in a bit of a holding pattern as of late.The company’s most recent launch in July, which was its thirteenth full-scale test in almost three and a half years, saw the spacecraft successfully deploy 20 operational satellites. But only ten out of its Super Heavy booster’s 13 Raptor engines relit during its landing, causing it to make a hard impact and explode.Now the space company is looking to finally stick the landing. This coming Monday, the company is planning to launch its fourteenth test flight, “pending regulatory approval.” The plan is to…

With so much hype about the future of AI safety, it can be easy to overlook the harms AI is causing in the here and now. On the consumer side, the impact generative AI has on the developing mind is becoming increasingly clear: students are losing critical thinking skills as chatbots become cognitive crutches, spurning human friends in favor of AI companions, and even turning to self-harm when their AI-relationships go awry.Few tech executives have acknowledged these urgent harms. Instead they’re choosing to push a narrative around the hypothetical threat of a runaway “superintelligence” which humans can no longer control.…

Meta, for once, is doing something pretty novel in the AI sphere. It’s created — and heavily marketed — a cute little mascot for its new AI product, something that none of the other major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic have done. (Microsoft kind of tried it with its “Mico” Copilot companion character, but it wasn’t given anywhere close to the same level of marketing push.)It’s too early to say if it’s worked or not, but Meta is trying to meme its mascot Jolly — which looks somewhere between a Labubu and a Fall Guys bean — into becoming…