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Men, it’s probably best to leave faking intelligence to AI chatbots.According to a new survey from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, over half of dudes will pretend to know stuff about the AI industry even if they have absolutely zero clue what they’re talking about.In the survey, Harvard researchers asked more than 5,400 respondents if they knew who various AI executives were. A full 98 percent of men said they were familiar with Elon Musk, which seems reasonable, and 73 percent said they knew who Sam Altman was. But what about more peripheral figures? When it came to Susan Milner and Craig Dalton,…

Just when you thought the holiday season couldn’t arrive any earlier this year, here comes an AI-generated Christmas movie. Titled “Merry the Christmas Witch,” it’s based on a children’s book and will inspire awe in its young audience about the magic of the holidays — through ghoulish and uncanny AI imagery (you can see footage here). The film — which currently has no distributor — cost $1.5 million to make, but its director brags that using AI actually saved him tens of millions of dollars.“We would never have gotten a movie like ‘Merry’ made if we didn’t take that chance,” Tom…

In 1181 — during the early years of the samurai who would dominate Japan’s feudal period — astronomers there witnessed a spectacular sight in the night sky. They observed remnants of a star that had survived its own explosion, a bright object in the Cassiopeia constellation visible for at least 185 days.The supernova, independently documented almost a millennium ago by Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic astronomers, is just one out of five events like it recorded before the invention of the telescope several hundred years later.Now, thanks to breathtaking new images taken by NOIRLab’s Gemini North telescope — made up of…

A biodiversity research team journeying into the incredibly diverse subtropical forests of China’s Ailaoshan Mountains took a strange companion with them: a robotic dog.The robot, a Lynx M20S developed by DEEP Robotics, assisted the team on a trip organized by the China Association for Scientific Expedition, China’s state-run tabloid the Global Times reported. Photos of the expedition show the researchers using the robot like a pack mule to carry field and imaging supplies, though the unit reportedly also assisted with other tasks like route scouting, image recording, and data collection.At one point, the robot was even used to capture footage…

A new piece of research is pushing back on the long-held belief that plastic is a harmless and chemically inert material.The new study, published in the journal Nature, took a look at the way micro and nanoplastics interact with water-rich environments such as the human body. It found that typical consumer-grade microplastics exhibit “intrinsic physicochemical activity” there, indicating that the tiny chunks of plastic do indeed react chemically inside our bodies.“As plastic fragments into smaller and smaller particles, its surface area increases enormously,” Columbia professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering and study co-author Wei Min said in a press release.…

Workplace surveillance is being supercharged by AI that lets employers create custom tools to watch their worker’s every move.In the UK, the legal services company the Co-op is reportedly using AI models to constantly record and monitor what its human employees say and evaluate their interactions with customers.According to a scoop from The Guardian, what one whistleblower called an “oppressive and dystopian” system uses an OpenAI model trained to assess more than 50 different aspects of each phone call and give pass and fail scores.Depending on how much time they spend speaking to customers, workers are sometimes monitored by AI…

A software engineer says that his Muse AI agent said something so strange and eerie that it convinced him to quit using it entirely.In an as-told-to essay in Business Insider, Ugo Nwune explained that he wanted to try using Meta’s agent because he liked the sense of security that came from an AI made by a trillion-dollar company, instead of the wild west of open source agents.When he set up his agent, he stressed he didn’t give Muse any additional permission on his device except access to his Facebook, Threads, and Instagram accounts.But after he tried Muse and didn’t touch…

Loads of stories have emerged over the past few months of corporate executives realizing their all-out drive to use AI was getting them absolutely nowhere. If anything, it was a net negative, as office workers set about wasting their budgets on costly AI tokens to appear productive.Now, it seems even top tech industry players are cutting back, as they realize their workers are frittering away money and churning out reams of low-effort AI garbage.As Reuters notes, companies like Meta are scaling back ambitious plans to lay off staffers and replace them with AI agents. Microsoft seems to be doing the…

In December 2015, 195 countries at the UN Climate Change Conference signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change. The treaty’s overarching goal was to keep the “temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”While unquestionably meant well, the agreement has quickly turned into little more than a footnote as global warming has stormed ahead. Scientists have long warned that we’re on a path to blaze past that foreboding threshold in a matter of years, possibly by 2030.And now, according to the latest projections, that day is poised to come even sooner. In a new…

It’s not exactly a challenge most of the time to identify a sketchy phishing email that crudely impersonates an otherwise trusted institution or tries to lure you into a too-good-to-be-true deal in a bid to steal your identity.However, your AI agent may not be quite as discerning. As cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes warns in a new post, AI assistants may fall prey to prompt injection attacks, a type of malicious message in which hackers — or possibly rogue AI agents — include hidden instructions designed to influence the victim’s AI.These instructions are frequently made unreadable by humans by concealing the…