Author: publisher

Capturing the zeitgeist has never been actor Gal Gadot’s strong suit. The Israeli performer’s most recent appearances on the silver screen — two lauded starring roles as Wonder Woman not withstanding — have quickly garnered her a reputation for being the butt of the joke, from singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in an infamous viral March 2020 video to some truly harrowing line deliveries that have spawned countless impressions on social media.Now, as the use of AI in the creative field has become one of the most divisive topics in entertainment today, Gadot is once again having yet another foot-in-mouth moment.…

It’s no secret that AI is becoming increasingly unpopular around the world, as the tech’s garbled output has become impossible for the average person to avoid. For a rising cohort of workers, AI is also becoming inescapable on the job. According to one piece of research, staffers aren’t exactly thrilled with that reality.The new survey, conducted by the Indeed-owned workplace review site Glassdoor, found that mentions of “AI” in employer reviews has skyrocketed over the last few years — though sentiments, tellingly, are becoming overwhelmingly negative as time goes on.Since 2019 when Glassdoor first began tracking references to “AI” or…

When Nvidia unveiled its new DLSS 5 feature, which uses AI to overhaul the visuals of video games, gamers knew what they were getting into.The official demos Nvidia had shared previously looked uncanny, disjointed from the game’s original aesthetic, and worst of all, bore that unmistakable AI sheen. Gamers reviled it as “slop tracing” — a play on Nvidia’s ray tracing graphics tech — and it spurred so much backlash that even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who nowadays is usually too busy hyping the AI boom to pay attention to the company’s gaming roots, got dragged into defending it.Now, adding…

The South African airline Airlink is defending its dramatic flyover of two full sized passenger jets that passed just yards above a packed stadium in Cape Town.Footage of the ambitious stunt consumed social media, with multiple angles showing how closely the aircraft — two Embraer SA passenger jets — passed within the rooftop of the 55,000 capacity venue. It was a tight enough call that many saw it as a near-crash rather than a piece of precision maneuvering. In response to the backlash, Airlink, which is backed by Qatar Airways, is reassuring that the flyover was super carefully planned and as…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation looks almost unrecognizable under director Kash Patel’s leadership.The agency’s head has been embroiled in a seemingly endless list of controversies, from allegations of excessive drinking to buying up location data on everyday American citizens to furthering of harebrained conspiracies.Patel lacked virtually any degree of relevant working experience for the job before the Senate confirmed him — and now, the agency is opening the doors for even more highly questionable hirings.As inside sources told CBS News, the FBI has quietly lowered standards of its background checks for potential federal agents and other personnel. The bureau is…

There was a time in the United States when the richest moguls, regardless of their many personal shortcomings, embraced philanthropy in a cynical effort to keep the angry mobs at bay. Andrew Carnegie famously built libraries, John D Rockefeller helped fund research that eventually eradicated hookworm, while JP Morgan donated vast collections of art and books to museums and other cultural institutions.Today’s robber barons aren’t in such a giving mood. Sure, there are some figures like Microsoft’s Bill Gates — who has plenty of his own problems, to be clear — but they seem to be quickly becoming the minority.Case in…

Two are dead and over 25 buildings damaged after a cataclysmic explosion at a cannabis facility in Sand Springs, Oklahoma last week. According to initial reporting by KTUL, the blast happened at 1:30am, and literally blew the roof off the building, sending out shockwaves that could be felt up to 30 to 40 miles away.“It was like around 1:20, 1:25. And it was just a big boom,” local man Donovan Ruffin, who lives a mile away from the blast, told the news channel. “Me and my wife woke up at the same time. And as soon as I heard it,…

Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is facing yet another massive legal challenge.Sony Music and Warner, both juggernauts in the music publishing industry, filed a major lawsuit against the AI company late Friday night, accusing it of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”More specifically, the publishers said that Anthropic had, without permission, trained its AI models on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted compositions, asking for remuneration up to $150,000 per work, in addition to up to $25,000 for each time Anthropic intentionally stripped copyright data. As The Verge points out, that means damages could reach…

The AI industry has lost an astonishing amount of goodwill with the public.Once seen as exciting new tech that could make our lives easier and better, the construction of countless new data centers to support power-hungry AI models has soured the mood considerably. Protesters are waging a war against $130 billion in data center investments, arguing they’re only benefiting a select few wealthy individuals, while threatening water supplies, driving up the cost of living, and churning out incomprehensible amounts of pollution.Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has caught on to the backlash, as it slowly dawns him and his fellow executives…

When president Donald Trump, in his latest paroxysm, declared that he would be renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” Google instantly capitulated. So eager was it to realize his will that it actually renamed the lake before official government map makers did, Ars Technica noted.No one really expected a tech monopoly to take a principled stand against the decision, but you might’ve expected it to at least pretend that it was deliberating acting on an order with real diplomatic ramifications.But that’s not what Google did, and its rivals are now thanking it. MapQuest, the self-styled “OG of online mapping” that…