Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using various artificial intelligence tools, including ones that can quickly identify people of interest by pulling data from social media, according to documents published by the agency last week and marketing material from the contractors. The documents follow others that 404 Media has previously obtained and published through the…
None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already planning for a “Post-AGI” world by hiring a scientist for its DeepMind AI lab to research the “profound impact” that technology will…
A version of this piece originally ran on DexDigi, Dexter Thomas’s newsletter, and a video version ran on his YouTube. Please consider subscribing to both. The Hollywood sign was on fire; or at least, it was online. Those images and videos were fake and AI-generated. Maybe you already knew this. But people made money off…
An AI startup promises to call your elderly parents for you if you don’t have time, or simply don’t want to, and we tested out the service. Called inTouch, the service uses an AI generated voice so your parent receives a phone call in which they can talk to the AI about, for example, how…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Whatever else you think of this past week, it sure served up some ridiculously good science. I’m talking about a real boffin buffet, with all the fixings. There were studies about trees spying on illegal mines. Or, an eerie rhino graveyard buried in ash 12 million years ago. Or, the…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the economy and the state of 404 Media, the need for robot umpires, and bringing on a new regular contributor to the site. EMANUEL: Something that I…
For the last week, several news outlets have published shocking headlines about a game called No Mercy on Steam that features incest and “rape.” In the UK, Peter Kyle, a member of Parliament and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology described the game as “deeply worrying” and demanded Valve, which operates the…
Earlier this week I wrote an article called “A US-Made iPhone Is Pure Fantasy.” The long and short of it is that Trump’s dream of moving all high tech manufacturing to the US is extremely difficult because global supply chains are so intricate, manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries, and…
AkiraBot is a program that fills website comments sections and customer service chat bots with AI-generated spam messages. Its goal is simple: it wants you to sign up for an SEO scheme that costs about $30 a month. For that low price it swears it can enchant Google’s algorithms to get you on the frontpage….
Bias in artificial intelligence systems, or the fact that large language models, facial recognition, and AI image generators can only remix and regurgitate the information in data those technologies are trained on, is a well established fact that researchers and academics have been warning about since their inception. In a blog post about the release…
