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Little love has been lost between writers and the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have ripped off their life’s work without permission, incurring countless copyright infringement lawsuits in the process — while creating a product that’s often putting them out of work.So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when renowned author Dave Eggers was invited to OpenAI’s headquarters in the Bay Area, he had some choice words for the roughly 200 attendees. As he recalled in an interview with the Financial Times, Eggers was invited after he excoriated CEO Sam Altman for gushing over an AI-generated short…
Does anyone expect the food they’re ordering to look exactly like it does on the menu? Of course not. But we do expect that the pictures we’re seeing should at least be somewhat based in this reality.On this issue, the customers have spoken. In San Francisco, a new restaurant has incurred the ire of hangry locals for using outlandish AI-generated images of its “food,” San Francisco Gate reports, putting a fresh-from-the-oven twist on false advertising. The backlash is so heated that the eatery, Grind & Unwind, was even defaced with graffiti.Vandalism is a bit much, but it’s easy to see…
Earlier this summer, socialite Kylie Jenner appeared in a series of ads promoting Meta’s controversial smart glasses.The camera-adorned and AI-enabled spectacles, a collaboration with global eyewear juggernaut Ray-Ban, have been at the center of a discussion over personal privacy and surveillance so heated that many owners are now too afraid to be seen in public while wearing them.Critics say they’re far too easily abused to prey on unsuspecting victims, even garnering them the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses.” Wired also found in June that Meta silently added a facial recognition system to its glasses’ software — yet another privacy nightmare…
AI-generated sexual content is rapidly remaking young people’s lives as they confront sex and dating — and the effects are as sweeping as they are poorly understood.That’s according to a new survey from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, in which researchers dug into how youth are interacting with these new technologies. What they found suggests that the proliferation of this kind of content — and the harm it’s already causing — demand urgent attention.The nationally representative survey drew on insights from 1,314 teenagers aged 13 to 17, as well as additional data from interviews and focus groups, and defines AI-generated sexual…
Most of the nation may want nothing to do with Taylor Farms and its shredded iceberg lettuce, which was recalled in dozens of states for potentially being contaminated with a parasite that turns your bowels into a garden hose.Not so for the Amazon-owned Whole Foods, which is either hoping to capitalize on the controversy or proceeding as if nothing happened. Over the weekend, we noticed that one of the grocery retailer’s locations in New York City was selling Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg at a steep 50 percent discount — which, from an optics point of view, is absolutely extraordinary.Is this an…
On Thursday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX was forced to call off the latest launch attempt of its enormous Starship spacecraft. According to the almost-trillionaire, several engines failed to start, unintentionally serving as the perfect metaphor for the company’s persistent Wall Street woes.While a scrub of a rocket launch isn’t exactly anything out of the ordinary, it was the first attempt following the company’s blockbuster IPO last month. At first, SpaceX’s stock rocketed to an all-time high of $225 by mid-June, buoyed by plenty of pent-up investor enthusiasm. But ever since, the company has struggled to recapture that early unbridled optimism. Shares…
Last week, a Chinese-made large language model called Kimi K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI, burst onto the scene.The open-weight model impressed with early benchmark results, trading blows with some of the most advanced closed-weight ones being developed by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic — and at a fraction of the cost.Much like Chinese competitor DeepSeek’s AI model upending Silicon Valley in early 2025, Kimi-K3 sent shockwaves across the industry. A major sell-off roiled the tech-heavy Nasdaq, with the S&P 500 slipping after the unveiling.For top closed-weight AI labs, it was the perfect storm. Executives are already balking…
Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker. Case in point, OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone — even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.That massive gulf was observed in a new analysis from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, first flagged by AdWeek, which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90 percent.…
In a stunning reversal on Sunday, the Food and Drug Administration said that lettuce samples from Taylor Farms did not, after all, test positive for the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which is behind the rising outbreak of explosive diarrhea sweeping the nation.Health officials have been racing to control the intestinal infection, which fortunately is not deadly, but can cause weeks of violently watery diarrhea.By Saturday, the FDA said it had found traces of the parasite in shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms — one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers — only to change its mind just one day later.“To be…
The world has been obsessed with what Gen Z is or isn’t doing. They’re not having sex, apparently. They don’t go out. And let’s not forget drinking: for the young twenty-somethings to forgo damaging their livers and brains by imbibing poison as prolifically as their predecessors clearly shows a lack of respect — and that they don’t know anything about having a good time.But it appears that in the end, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. New research from beverage retail research group IWSR shows that Gen Z are now catching up on boozing like a friend knocking…