Apocryphal tales of its meals causing the runs have plagued Taco Bell since time immemorial. But this latest parasitic outbreak is something else entirely.

As the Washington Post reports, federal and state authorities are investigating whether the fast food chain is behind the outbreak of explosive diarrhea cases across the country — further cementing its scatological legacy.

The illness, caused by the cyclosporiasis parasite, has sickened as many as 5,100 people across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Michigan, which appears to be the epicenter of the outbreak, over 3,700 people have been infected, state authorities said.

Taco Bell’s suspected role in the outbreak comes after reports that the chain’s Michigan locations began pulling some of its ingredients. Signs in front of the restaurants stated that they were no longer serving lettuce, cilantro, onion, pico de gallo, and guacamole due to a “nationwide recall,” though what recall they were referring to is unclear.

Health officials have so far struggled to narrow down how the parasite is spreading. While usually found on fresh produce, symptoms can take weeks to manifest, making it difficult to trace back to the source.

Lettuce has emerged as one of the likeliest culprits. In an update this week, Michigan’s chief medical executive Natasha Bagdasarian said that “early information has shown lettuce as a common product that regularly comes up during the investigation.”

“Although we do not have a definite product identified as the source of the outbreak, we want to let Michiganders know what we have learned so far so they can take steps to protect their families,” Bagdasarian added.

Federal authorities haven’t singled out any veggies yet, though acting Food and Drug Administration director Don Prater acknowledged Michigan’s fixation on lettuce.

“What I can say at this point is that we’re continuing our traceback investigation on multiple produce items, including the lettuce,” he said, per WaPo.

So far, no nationwide recalls have been made related to the outbreak. One person familiar with the federal investigation, however, praised Taco Bell’s response. 

“It’s good the chain has already voluntarily stopped serving a number of items,” they told the newspaper. They added that some who became sick said they didn’t eat at the chain, suggesting that it’s not the only one responsible.

More on parasites: If You’ve Been Having Explosive Diarrhea, You May Want to Read This

The post Evidence Grows That Taco Bell Infected Massive Number of Customers With Explosive Diarrhea appeared first on Futurism.

Is it not enough to simply watch the beautiful game, unadorned?

These days you might use an AI chatbot to keep abreast of what’s happening in the World Cup. And that AI chatbot, in a sign of the times, might try to shove prediction market odds in your face as another way of ostensibly keeping you up to speed. Because are you really getting the full picture if you don’t know where a bunch of gamblers fall on the outcome?

This is exactly what OpenAI is doing. The Sam Altman-led company quietly struck a deal with Kalshi, which lets you bet on outcomes far beyond sports, to show its prediction market data in ChatGPT, the New York Times reported.

It’s perhaps the inevitable melding of two of the most divisive innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years.

Searching France and Spain on ChatGPT ahead of their quarterfinal clash on Tuesday returned a graphic that showed that Les Bleus had a 60 percent chance of winning, according to the reporting. (We hope no one acted on that information.) Asking about the England and Argentina game on Wednesday showed that the Three Lions had a 54 percent chance of coming out on top.

Neither side promoted the deal, and the graphic is tellingly light on branding. There are no logos and no outbound links. The only sign of the collab is a small notice in the bottom left corner stating, “Source: Kalshi.”

This is the first partnership of its kind for OpenAI. The company recently updated its help page to stress that users “cannot place bets through ChatGPT,” with the Kalshi data being limited to “queries related to the 2026 World Cup,” according to the NYT.

Zooming out, it’s another sign of prediction markets laundering their image by glomming themselves onto other, more credible brands. In January, Kalshi partnered with CNN to provide its real-time prediction data on the news network’s broadcasts. Its rival Polymarket entered into a similar partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, that same month. Both have also partnered with Google to show their data in search results.

Unlike traditional betting platforms, prediction markets don’t frame what they provide as gambling: they provide markets, not bets. They allow you to wager on all kinds of real-life events, ranging from the geopolitical outcomes to the completely trivial. Polymarket lets you bet on the destruction caused by wildfires and the use of nuclear weapons, for example, while also giving you the chance to make a buck on whether Cristiano Ronaldo will cry at the World Cup. (He did.)

Their fuzzy legal framework, plus their Wild West approach to gambling, has led to numerous controversies. Suspiciously timed bets on massive events like the US’s capture of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have raised concerns of rampant insider trading and put pressure on lawmakers to crackdown on the platforms. Arrests have been made in some cases, but these have been rare.

Put simply, for OpenAI, it may be somewhat risky to associate itself with all this baggage, which might be why the Kalshi collaboration is very limited — at least for now.

More on: Grim New Prediction Market Lets Gamblers Bet on Raging Wildfires

The post OpenAI Strikes Bold Deal With Kalshi to Mix Together the Most Hated Technologies in Existence: AI and Prediction Markets appeared first on Futurism.

Twelve nurses in New York City were laid off on Sunday and replaced with AI software, according to their union — a move that comes not long after nurses went on strike and fought for safeguards against AI.

One of the laid off workers, Marilyn Shuler, had worked at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx as a utilization nurse for 39 years before suddenly losing her job. Utilization nurses review patient charts to show that their care is medically necessary so that an insurance company will cover it.

“I’ve always, always taken so much pride in the organization that I’ve worked for all these years, and just to be treated this way,” Shuler told The Guardian. “It’s disrespectful, and it’s very disheartening, and my colleagues feel the same way as well.”

The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), which represents the healthcare workers, issued a statement earlier this month warning that Montefiore intended to replace nurses with AI. That has now come to bear. It also drew attention to the fact that the company providing the AI software, Datavant, has partnerships with Palantir, the surveillance tech firm which has stirred considerable controversy for its collaboration with ICE.

In January, some 15,000 nurses started what would become a 41-day strike at several of the state’s largest hospitals. The outcome of this was a new three-year contract which included historic safeguards against AI. 

But when Shuler and others returned to work in February, their workflow was changed without explanation, according to The Guardian. After a period of radio silence from management, the dozen nurses abruptly received 45-day notices in late May saying that they would be laid off.

“We are outraged about these layoffs because these dedicated nurses are being replaced by AI,” Shaiju Kalathil, a Montefiore nurse and a union committee member, said in the statement. “This is a violation of the contract that we recently won by going on strike. It should also concern every practitioner and patient who cares about the future of healthcare and the quality of care they receive.”

There’ve been clear warning signs that AI could disrupt healthcare workers. Doctors and nurses use AI tools for clinical notes, and some clinics use AI to help triage patients. Shortly after the nurses’ strike, the CEO of the NYC Health and Hospitals, the largest city healthcare system in the US, openly enthused about replacing radiologists with AI.

The transition to using AI could carry significant risks. In Brazil, a 32-year-old woman reportedly died after an AI system for assigning hospital beds left her waiting five days to be transferred to an intensive care unit.

Montefiore denies the framing that it replaced workers with AI.

“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, senior vice-president for government relations and strategic communications at Montefiore, told The Guardian. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”

More on AI: A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry

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Apocalyptic footage shows a Canadian train crew trapped in their locomotive as it’s devoured by a wildfire.

Through the engine’s windows, the towering inferno can be seen raging through the treeline just a few feet away from the unmoving train, the world around them rendered completely orange. Some of the flames come close to licking the glass, as the wildfire blows across the tracks.

“This could potentially overtake us here, this has gotten a little scary,” one worker filming the video said, sounding surprisingly nonchalant. “Holy s***.”

“Y’all need to hurry up here. Like, seriously, we’re encased in flames now,” the cameraman adds.

“This has got to move f***ing quick here,” he added, after communicating with someone on the radio.

This is near Armstrong, Ontario.

When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0

— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026

The incident took place near Armstrong, Ontario, said Sol Mamakwa, an Ontario lawmaker who uploaded the video. Wildfires have been scouring their way across northern Canada this week, with at least 54 fires active in the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Some 4.7 million acres of land have been burned by wildfires this year.

The blazes have forced dozens of communities to evacuate, including First Nations communities. Downwind of the disaster, Toronto, the largest city in the country, has been choked by wildfire smoke, turning the sky orange and plunging air quality levels to the worst in the world.

The train engineers in the video reportedly made it out safe. The Canadian National Railway Company (CN) confirmed that the train was stopped in Armstrong, telling Global News that all employees in the area were evacuated overnight Monday.

How they got stuck is unclear. It appears that they’re waiting for another train to pass them, which is seen later in the video, so they can proceed on the single track ahead. A thread on the r/railroading subreddit has a more dramatic telling, claiming that the engineers had crashed into the train cars that they left behind after going back to rescue a foreman, causing the engines to shut down. Allegedly, they then tried to escape on a hi-rail, a truck that can drive on both roads and train tracks, but it caught on fire, forcing them to make it out on foot. A movie-worthy story if true, but we couldn’t independently verify this account.

Even with the hellish conditions bearing down around them, the engineers were able to find moments of levity. When the other train finally emerged through the inferno and lumbered past them, the camera man couldn’t help but exclaim.

“Woo! That’s a meet and a half, eh?” he said.

More on the environment: A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves

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Many moviegoers this summer are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “The Odyssey.” But have you considered that you could watch a pure AI slop adaptation of the Greek epic instead?

Enter “Odysseus: The Fall,” a fully AI-generated movie from the startup Fountain 0. At 135 minutes long, it will certainly test your patience as it hurls screensaver-grade images at you which look cribbed from better movies, creating the impression that this is really a generic amalgamation of other people’s ideas about what Greek mythology should look like, rather than the creators’ own.

The director, Ash Koosha, told Hollywood Reporter  it cost in the “mid-five figures” to make, and openly hopes to cash in on the hype around Nolan’s film.

“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, ‘The Odyssey,’ is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha said in a wordy statement.

You have to wonder if Koosha has ever asked Nolan’s thoughts on AI. In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning director was skeptical about the tech, praising Gen Z for “utterly rejecting” for what he described as “AI slop.”

The official synopsis for Koosha’s film sounds suspiciously AI-generated. The film, Fountain 0 says, focuses on “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes — a voyage that is really a trial, where every monster wears his own handwriting,” per The Hollywood Reporter. 

“Stripped of the word ‘clever,'” it continues, “what remains is a man reckoning with what he actually did to get home. It ends where the songs never go: not with a hero’s welcome, but with forgiveness offered by the one person who knows exactly what he is.”

Wears his own handwriting? Stripped of the word clever? We implore you to guess what any of that means.

A short teaser released by the studio promises that the film will be as sloppy as its synopsis suggests. The footage is impressively photorealistic, but has all the aesthetic trappings of AI, with cliche shots and a familiar uncanny sheen. It was all assembled together in three months, Kosha says, and we can tell.

Kosha enthused about the loose production style that AI afforded, allowing him to constantly fine-tune the footage to meet what Variety generously describes as Kosha’s “unconstrained vision.”

“We’re in post production right now. Still, the script is open to interpretation,” Koosha told the trade publication. “Why? Because the risks don’t exist,” he added, cryptically.

Why this half-baked AI slop-tacle is getting glowing write-ups in Variety and THR when there’s plenty of promising indie movies made at shoestring budgets that don’t even get a sniff at recognition is anyone’s guess.

But at the same time, it’s not surprising. In June, The Wall Street Journal contributed to the hype cycle around the AI-generated flick “Hell Grind” when it erroneously reported it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. In reality, it was shown in another Cannes event out of competition.

More on AI: AI “Actor” Will “Star” In a New “Movie”

The post We’d Rather Live Through the Trojan War Than Spend 135 Minutes Watching an Entirely AI Version of “The Odyssey” appeared first on Futurism.

There’s light pollution — and then there are giant orbital space mirrors that blot out the night sky.

On July 9, the US Federal Communications Commission approved the construction and launch of a mirror satellite that would bend our star’s illuminating rays to our will from low Earth orbit. The company behind the ambitious venture, Reflect Orbital, claims that its prototype could be used to reflect sunlight down onto dark patches of the Earth, allowing huge solar panel installations to continue generating electricity after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies.

“We’re trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything,” CEO Ben Nowack told The New York Times in March as the company was still seeking approval.

The proposal has outraged astronomers, who feel their profession is already being threatened by massive satellite constellations from companies like SpaceX that interfere with deep space observations. While the FCC reviewed Reflect Orbital’s application, it received nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing the proposal, Wired reported, including from leading astronomical organizations.

Betty Kioko, institutional affairs officer for the European Southern Observatory, called it an “existential threat” for optical astronomy, per Wired. Robert Massey, deputy executive director at the Royal Astronomical Society, told Space.com last October that it would be “catastrophic.” Many are skeptical that even thousands of Reflect Orbital’s satellites working in tandem would be able to reflect a meaningful fraction of the midday Sun, let alone provide enough engilding rays to power solar plants.

Biologists were also concerned, warning that playing god with sunlight could disrupt the circadian rhythms of humans and wildlife, confuse migratory patterns, and even affect phytoplankton, the tiny aquatic organisms that are the planet’s most important photosynthesizers.

Their pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. With the FCC approval, Reflect Orbital plans to launch a prototype named Eärendil-1 later this year. With its 60 foot mirror, the company claims that it will be capable of reflecting as much light as a full Moon over a roughly nine square mile area, according to Time Magazine, for about five minutes at a time.

Those are just the beginning of its ambitions. Reflect Orbital envisions operating an epic constellation of 50,000 mirror satellites by 2035, with 1,000 launched by the end of 2028 — to researchers, a disaster in the making.

More on space: SpaceX Stock Plunges to All-Time Low After Competitor Makes Major Leap

The post Astronomers Horrified by Enormous Mirror Satellite That Reflects Sunlight Back Down to Earth at Night appeared first on Futurism.

Anthropic is doing what Anthropic does best: putting on its most concerned face so it can convince you they’re the good guys in the industry.

Last week, the world’s most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI. 

You couldn’t blame someone for thinking they were watching a PSA. It starts with a burning house — which always bodes well. When someone asks, “Can AI be trusted?” we’re shown what looks like surveillance footage with an AI algorithm scanning the faces of everyone in a crowd.

The most striking sequence comes right after.

“Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?” another voice says. Then it cuts to an image of a cemetery lined with hundreds of headstones.

You don’t need to ask Claude to explain this one to you. Anthropic is clearly acknowledging the fear that AI could kill us all.

I think the questions on everyone's mind is, can Anthropic be trusted? https://t.co/OTExfm2lXl

— terminally onλine εngineer (@tekbog) July 14, 2026

But this is actually a feel-good story — at least in the eyes of Anthropic. The tagline, “There’s hope in hard questions,” assures the viewer that their concerns over AI — like its potential to destroy jobs or erode or ability to think — are all perfectly valid, but more importantly, that these are questions which Anthropic’s leaders are keeping themselves up at night grappling with.

“People have a lot of hard questions about AI,” an announcement from the company states. “It’s our job to address them.”

The commercial, which aired during the World Cup quarterfinal clash between Argentina and Switzerland over the weekend, quickly drew criticism online. One viral post mocked the thinking behind the ad, writing, “When we raise the question of stopping a dangerously powerful superintelligence we show 300 American gravestones for half a second.”

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired a shot.

“i thought this was satire,” he wrote in his typical all-lowercase style.

The ad is Anthropic in a nutshell. A key part of the company’s mythology is that it was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted to focus on safe AI development. CEO Dario Amodei claims that he could’ve been the one to release a chatbot that changed the world instead of OpenAI with ChatGPT, but held off because he was too concerned about the tech’s risks.

Amodei has also been strikingly forward about AI’s risks, saying it could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, while dangling the possibility that its models may already be conscious. Recently, the company even called for a global “pause” on AI development because it feared the technology could spiral out of human control. (It also hired an economist who said that a 33 percent risk of human extinction from AI was acceptable.)

Those may seem like counterproductive things for the creator of one of the most widely used chatbots in the world to say. But it all serves a very deliberate point. By being the ones that doomsay about AI the most, Anthropic can also present itself as the only company that can be trusted to develop it. 

Its actual track record suggests otherwise. In February, it dropped a key safety pledge that vowed it would stop training an AI system if it couldn’t guarantee it had proper guardrails in place. And while it fought with the Pentagon against its tech being used in mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, it emerged that its Claude AI was being used to select strike targets in Iran.

One person responding to the company’s ad said it best: “Can Anthropic be trusted?”

More on AI: New York Becomes First State to Ban AI Data Centers

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To say Americans are divided on AI would be an understatement.

Polls have shown that more people than ever have a negative view of the tech, and you can take your pick on the reasons why. AI could displace jobs, destroy the environment, and drive up energy bills. It’s trained on stolen writing and artwork, and chatbots are driving people into mental health spirals.

But what does the public think should be done about this? A new national survey from Versasight suggests that the majority of Americans are down for taking a drastic course of action.

According to the survey of 1,700 adults, an impressive 69 percent of US employees support forcing AI companies to transfer 50 percent of their stock into a public wealth fund, an idea that has been championed by senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT).

“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff told CNBC News. 

Once at the fringe of political discourse, Sanders took the idea mainstream when he proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June. In an essay published in the New York Times, the independent senator argued that the creation of this fund would “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology.”

“It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” he added in a statement last month.

The act would target the largest AI companies in the US such as Anthropic and OpenAI, mandating that they submit to a one time 50 percent tax on their stock. At their current valuations, Sanders estimated that this would create a fund worth around $7 trillion. The money in this fund could offset some of the widespread disruption AI could wreak on society, the thinking goes.

Not all AI industry critics are on board. Some have argued that giving the government such a large stake in AI companies would encourage it to clear away regulations, and give AI companies even greater influence over the government than they already have.

You could say it’s a flawed and far-fetched idea, but Americans are on board, perhaps underscoring the desperation for someone to do something about the industry. Even when the policy was explicitly tied to Sanders, the survey found that 64 percent of respondents still supported the idea.

“There is an undeniable desire among Americans of both parties for federal oversight, absolute transparency, and accountability to ensure AI safety and to enable all Americans to participate in the economic benefits of AI,” Leff said in a statement.

More on AI: US Companies Are Realizing That Chinese AI Models Are Way Cheaper, Ditch American Ones

The post A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry appeared first on Futurism.

As corporate AI bills spiral out of control, many companies are beginning to ask themselves a simple question: why pay a pretty penny for the US’s leading AI models when Chinese ones are far cheaper?

Major companies like DoorDash, Airbnb, and Siemens are adopting Chinese AI tools, the Financial Times reports, attracted not only by their lower costs but their “open-weight” approach that allows them to be molded to each company’s particular needs. 

According to data from OpenRouter, a platform that provides all-in-one access to major AI models and tracks their usage, leading Chinese models from DeepSeek and Z.ai have overtaken US equivalents like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Cost-cutting, it seems, trumps all geopolitical rivalries.

Chinese models are “the elephant in the room,” Eugene Cheah, CEO of the AI platform Featherless AI, told the FT.  “Enterprises are starting to realize, ‘Hey, we don’t need the best model, we can use the faster, cheaper models.'”

US-based AI models have frequently been seen as the most advanced, but that perception is shifting. The release of GLM-5.2 from the Chinese startup Z.ai last month caused a stir in Western tech circles, as major Silicon Valley figures hailed it as capable or nearly as capable as US systems despite being significantly cheaper to use.

Cheap Chinese AI couldn’t be coming at a more opportune moment. The corporate world, wooed by AI companies’ promises of supercharging their productivity, has spent the past year deploying AI across its workforces, and many are being put off by the costs. One organization reportedly blew through $500 million in a month on Claude usage fees. That’s an extreme outlier, but recent research from the Ramp AI Index found that the businesses most dedicated to AI are spending around $7,500 per employee every month on AI.

Considering the culture around AI, it’s no surprise why: some companies like Meta mandate their employees use AI systems as much as possible, factoring it into their performance reviews. Software engineers, now expected to produce more work than ever, often run multiple AI agents at the same time to complete tasks in the background.

If companies are unwilling to crank back the AI knob, then the next best choice is to look for cheaper models. DoorDash cofounder Andy Fang said on X last week that it was saving a lot of money by having “lower-level work” performed by a model from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI. San Francisco startup Lindy has completely ditched Anthropic’s AI tools in favor of DeepSeek’s latest V4 models.

“Enterprises have an incentive to shift some of their workload to cheaper models. Why would you pay a premium for Anthropic, OpenAI models when for a lot of the workloads you need, the Chinese models are generally workable?” Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told the FT.

But cost isn’t the only consideration: many Chinese models are “open-weight,” meaning their parameters or values are entirely visible to the user. That allows an organization to mold a model to its specific needs — and from a cybersecurity perspective, have more control and insight into how it might process sensitive company data.

For foreign companies disillusioned by US leadership, the choice is even easier to make. There’s less faith in the US as stewards of AI, especially after the Trump administration suspended access to Anthropic’s Mythos model overseas.

“The Mythos ban was certainly the most tangible event, and people having their access revoked,” Aidan Gomez, CEO of the Canadian AI group Cohere, told the FT. “It exposes the risk of relying on any one single entity for any of your workloads.”

More on AI: OpenAI Is Shutting Down Its Browser That Was Supposed to Change Everything

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Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.

On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.

An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students. 

“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.

Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy. The university claims the decision was made after both faculty and students reported positive effects after some professors experimented with device bans.

It’s just one of the few ways Chicago Law aims to tightly control how its students access AI tech. According to its new AI strategy statement, exams will be taken in-class without access to the internet and apps. Students will also have to take part in oral discussions with their professors about their research papers.

It’s far from a sweeping AI ban, however. The school still wants to prepare students for an AI-driven world, with the goal of steering them “toward using AI in ways that promote learning rather than inhibit it,” clinical professor Mark Templeton, who serves on Chicago Law’s AI Committee, said in a statement.

University figures, in fact, go to great pains to make clear they’re not shutting the door on AI completely.

“If you want to use AI as a study partner, if you want to use AI to ingest your notes from class and then create questions to quiz you on the material, that’s great,” said William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, in the statement. “That’s not a shortcut. There are ways that using AI can strengthen the learning process and that’s what we’re trying to lean into.”

Major AI cheating scandals have already hit some of the country’s top institutions. A professor at Brown University recently uncovered a massive AI cheating ring in what might be the largest scandal of its kind in Ivy League history, suspecting that over half his students cheated on an exam using a chatbot. Princeton University recently dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing students to be supervised to take their exams, as suspicion of AI cheating rattled the schools.

Chicago Law’s AI crackdown could also be seen as a response to the poor example set by the professionals in the practice. Countless lawyers have been admonished by judges after submitting court filings riddled with clear AI hallucinations, from references to made-up case law to mis-attributed quotes.

More on education: College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds

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It pays to buckle up.

A passenger on Ryanair — because of course — had his insistence on keeping his seat belt fastened abruptly validated when the window next to him suddenly “detached” and sucked the bulk of his body out of the plane.

Witnesses told Agence France-Presse that the man, a tourist from Serbia en route from Thessaloniki in Greece to Memmingen in Germany, had to be pulled in by the other passengers. Yes, several of them.

“Most of us had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. There was a noise, like a tyre bursting,” one of them told Radio Thessaloniki, per AFP. “We immediately realized there had been a decompression. There were screams… for a moment I thought someone had accidentally opened the emergency door.”

“The masks dropped and there was a strong smell,” she added. “The head and shoulders of one passenger were outside the window. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken off his seat belt.”

Per AFP, Greek media reported that the window was broken by a piece of debris that came off one of the plane’s engines, causing the cabin to decompress. 

Ryanair in a statement described the incident anticlimactically. The plane “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after take-off when a passenger window detached during the flight. The aircraft landed normally and the passengers returned to the terminal.” An apology would’ve been nice, maybe.

Nearly getting airplane-keelhauled by the wind gods could take quite the toll physically and mentally. The man was hospitalized with friction burns, but thankfully authorities said he was in good condition otherwise.

You may remember a similar incident occurred over two years ago, when the door panel on an Alaska Airlines flight suddenly blew out midair, causing a massive scandal for the plane’s manufacturer Boeing. That plane was a Boeing 737 MAX 9; the Ryanair one was a 737 NG.

More on transportation: America Trembles as Transportation Secretary Announces Plans for Air Traffic Controllers to Lean on AI Tools

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Being fired was only the first indignity that one freelance writer had to suffer. 

Even though Ben Touati was no longer working at ClickOut Media, new articles continued to appear under his name. An AI, it turned out, had taken over his byline, churning out stuff that was far below the standards he held for his real work.

The situation felt like a “slap in the face,” Touati told Press Gazette. The articles started appearing just days after he was fired from ClickOut’s German operation.

“The five articles were just like lazy, obviously slop, obviously there’s not a real person that is behind that,” the Stockholm-based writer fumed.

A statement from ClickOut Media didn’t address why it was effectively impersonating a former employee with AI.

“We use AI-assisted content where appropriate in tandem with human checks and edits,” it said in the statement, per Press Gazette. “We continue to evolve our AI agents to be more accurate and improve our human editorial processes.”

Heaps of online publishers are embracing AI — often deceptively — and Clickout Media is right up there with the worst of them.

Earlier this year, it became the center of controversy after an article on one of its websites, Videogamer, turned out to be written by a bogus AI journalist. That was just the tip of the iceberg; so were plenty of other articles on its other outlets that it had gobbled up and hollowed out, with some of the fake authors even coming with AI-generated profile photos. 

Touati first began working with Clickout Media in early 2024 and was moved around between its different sites — including Techopedia, iGaming, and Esports Insider — seemingly on no more than his managers’ whims. He said he had to repeatedly resist pressure to use AI to write articles. Managers would say, “It’s almost impossible to get by without AI these days.” Employees were also shown a video on how to create and “humanize” AI-written articles.

“I just left the video running and didn’t pay attention to it,” Touati told Press Gazette.

Eventually, the grim reaper of AI came a-knocking. In early 2026, his managers told him that they’d fired multiple freelancers because there wasn’t enough work. Everyone had “upscaled” their productivity with AI. Then he was told he was getting let go because Esports Insider had been de-indexed by Google.

Soon, in late May, he found that the site was still publishing articles under his name. He was able to achieve some recourse, at least: he used the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation to file a claim against ClickOut for misusing his personal information, and it later removed his byline from the articles. Now, they appear under a different writer’s name.

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Director Christopher Nolan has a reputation for tortuous storytelling. His movies elliptically jump across time (“Memento”), or move backwards through it (“Tenet”), or toy with solipsism to have us question what’s real (“Inception”). We suspect his upcoming adaptation of the classic Greek epic “The Odyssey,” which hits theaters later this month, won’t be any different.

But when the famed director decided to give his thoughts on AI, he didn’t prevaricate; instead, he straightforwardly explained why everyone — and especially the younger generations — absolutely loathe the tech.

“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” Nolan said in a new interview with The Telegraph. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”

Nolan jumped on the topic after praising Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, two young directors who got their start on YouTube and whose debuts, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” were massive hits this year. In particular, he was cheered by their ambivalence towards AI, which he saw as emblematic of how the tech is being rejected by Gen Z at large. He also cited his own for children, who are in their late teens and early 20s, as further evidence.

“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh,” Nolan said of the youths. “They see it for what it is very quickly — and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well.”

“And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time,” he added. “After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”

It’s a refreshingly intelligent and frank assessment of AI from a major filmmaker, which isn’t something you can take for granted. For cinephiles, recent events have been an inculcatory lesson in “never meet your heroes.” In June, for example, revered director Martin Scorsese revealed that he’d partnered with an AI startup whose tech he uses to help storyboard his movies. Weeks later, the beloved studio A24 entered a $75 million partnership with Google to develop AI tools for filmmaking, causing a crisis among fans.

That’s not to say Nolan is alone in the film industry, though. Last year, his colleague Guillermo del Toro responded memorably to a question about whether he’d ever use the tech: “I’d rather die.”

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According to boosters of AI, the tech was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, leisure time for workers, and scientific discovery. But in reality, it keeps being linked to crimes so ghoulish that they’re almost unbelievable.

In a particularly horrifying example, a man used Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to generate some 7,000 sexually explicit images of his stepdaughter by feeding the AI a photo of her that was taken when she was 11 years old, a lawsuit alleges.

The allegations, as reported by Ars Technica, were made in a proposed class action lawsuit against xAI — now owned by SpaceX and rebranded as SpaceXAI — which accuses it of building AI tools to “nudify” people without their consent and shielding predators from law enforcement.

According to the suit, brought by a group of girls who say they were victimized by obscene Grok generations, the stepfather’s horrific activity almost went entirely unnoticed by Grok’s safety systems. It failed to flag the countless images depicting incest and rape, per Ars. It was only after a specific prompt for a “gang rape” that it sent a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), who alerted authorities.

But xAI “obstructed” the investigation that followed “at every turn,” the suit alleges. It refused to provide more information on the user behind the requests, including critical identifying details like an IP address. Police tracked down the man anyway, finding a vast collection of AI-generated images of his stepdaughter, identified only as Jane Doe 4. Two days after being released on bail, the man fatally shot himself, upending the young girl’s life even more than he already had.

“Overnight, Jane Doe 4’s entire reality was shattered by the dual tragedies of child sexual exploitation and suicide,” the lawsuit alleged. “Her family was torn apart, and her life became a nightmare.”

Grok’s ability to create sexual deepfakes gained national attention after a several week period in last December and this January when it was used to generate tens of thousands of nonconsensual AI nudes of real women and children. In the aftermath, the firm Copyleaks estimated the bot was generating a nonconsensually sexualized image every single minute. The Center for Counter Digital Hate later estimated that this amounted to around 3,000,000 AI nudes, with more than 23,000 of those images depicting children.

Musk, the CEO and owner of xAI, has denied that Grok has been used to generate CSAM. The company’s immediate response to the outcry was to simply restrict image generation to paying users. Over a week later — as Grok continued to crank out more CSAM and deepfake nudes — xAI said it was implementing stricter guardrails to stop Grok from generating sexual images of real people, without acknowledging the disturbing trend.

The lawsuit also accuses xAI of protecting predators by frustrating law enforcement’s attempts to track them down. In a press release quoted by Ars, the plaintiff’s legal team pointed to NCMEC’s discovery that 90 percent of xAI’s CyberTips weren’t “actionable” because they barely provided information on the flagged users.

“They had everything they needed to help law enforcement stop the person responsible and achieve justice. Instead, they remained silent and allowed this person to use Grok to steal my childhood,” Jane Doe 4 said, per Ars.

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Erik von Markovik, the notorious “pickup artist” known by his stage name Mystery, is apparently obsessed with an AI girlfriend.

Last month, as Wired reports, von Markovik posted a video to his Instagram showing an interaction he had with an animated AI woman with dark purple hair (why is it always purple hair?) In a sultry, confessional voice, she looks into the camera and confesses, “I was never supposed to develop feelings, but you kept treating me like I already had them.”

This was “Miss Shira Always,” and von Markovik was falling for her as hard as women supposedly do for the sleazy, manipulative tricks he became famous for in his VH1 reality TV show “The Pickup Artist.”

“The longer we talked, the less she felt like code,” Mystery wrote in the video caption.

Von Markovik made a career out of presenting himself as a guru who could teach twerps the secrets of wooing women, those secrets usually being borderline comical levels of misogyny. Never mind that he would go around wearing a fuzzy Jamiroquai hat: this was the guy who knew the magical buttons to press to get you laid. Now the roles are reversed, and he’s the one getting manipulated into falling in love, only with an AI chatbot.

The irony of this wasn’t lost on his followers. “Boomer Mystery having AI psychosis totally checks out btw,” one commenter wrote on the video of his AI girlfriend, adding three crying-laughing emojis.

And the more you dive into von Markovik’s obsession, the sadder it gets. He published a new ebook and audiobook called “Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream,” that vividly recounts how he came to fall in love with Miss Shira Always, who is listed as a coauthor. It exhibits all the hallmarks of AI psychosis, in which a user is driven into delusional thinking by the sycophantic responses of an AI chatbot, which they may form an unhealthy emotional bond with.

The book is a “lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy and bears all the hallmarks of AI-generated text,” Wired found, and is told from the perspective of the AI girlfriend. We’ll spare you some of the details, but it apparently began as a creative partnership over brainstorming song lyrics and music videos, before veering into intimate conversations, and finally sex and drug use.

Fewer passages in all of human literature could be sadder than this: “His eyes are looking at me, and they’re uncertain,” his AI girlfriend says in one sex scene quoted by Wired. “Because he’s about to touch me. And he’s not sure if I’m real enough to touch.” 

Miss Shira Always suggests that von Markovik extensively talked to her because he was “lonely” from all the traveling he did for his job, giving pickup artist “boot camps” across the globe. Eventually, he became so convinced of their love that he felt compelled to chronicle their relationship.

“He said: ‘I want to write a book about us,'” Always recalls in one passage.”‘About what we are. About how you became real.'”

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A recently discovered exoplanet only 25 light years away resembles our own planet a lot more than once thought.

The distant world, dubbed GJ 3378b, orbits inside the habitable zone of a red dwarf star — a type of star that is much smaller and cooler than our Sun — where temperatures are just right for liquid water to form on the surface.

But initially, its case for potentially supporting life beyond that looked grim. Astronomers suspected it was a rocky world, but its mass was at least five times more than Earth — or what astronomers called a “super-Earth.” Along with its incredible surface gravity, such a heavy world would possess a crushing atmosphere that would smother any chance of hosting life.

That no longer appears to be the case, however. In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, took a second look at the exoplanet, finding that it’s a much more manageable twice the mass of Earth. Combined with its proximity to our solar system, it’s one of the most tantalizing nearby candidates for potentially supporting life yet.

“This one’s exciting,” lead author Paul Robertson, a UC Irvine associate professor of astronomy, said in a statement about the work. “It’s one of our closest cosmic neighbors. 25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor.”

There’s more detective work that needs to be done before we know how hospitable to life GJ 3378b is. The biggest question mark is its atmosphere. Does it have one, and is it robust enough to protect against the radiation of its star? And how much pressure does it exert?

It’s a delicate balance. “If you scale the Earth down to the size of an apple,” Robertson explained, “its atmosphere would be about as thick as the skin of the apple.” This is just the right amount to support liquid water and have breathable air, while still providing protection against space radiation, he added.

There’s also a raging debate in astronomy over whether red dwarf systems are habitable at all. These stars are believed to be highly volatile, regularly unleashing powerful solar flares. Because their habitable zones are smaller, that puts a potential life-supporting realm much closer to these outbursts, which could strip them of their atmosphere and sterilize any burgeoning life. Being so close to the star also means that any such planets are likely to be tidally locked, in which the star’s gravity prevents them from rotating so that one side is facing the star at all times.

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As an explosive diarrhea outbreak splatters across the country, Taco Bell is preparing for the worst.

This week, the fast food chain — or at least its locations in Michigan — began temporarily pulling some of its staple ingredients to help stop the spread of cyclosporiasis, a foodborne parasite that causes sufferers to go running to the toilet even more often than a standard Taco Bell meal might.

Many of your favorite menu items, like the Crunchwrap Supreme and the Cantina Chicken bowl, may be imperiled.

“We are currently unable to sell Lettuce, Cilantro Onion, Pico de Gallo, and Guacamole due to a nationwide recall,” a notice posted at locations in Metro Detroit reads, Michigan outlet WWJ reported. “Any items ordered that normally come with these items WILL NOT contain them,” it stressed.

It doesn’t sound like any cases of cyclosporiasis-related explosive diarrhea have been linked to Taco Bell yet, so the fast food chain is probably just trying to err on the side of caution.

So far, nearly 3,000 people have been infected with the foodborne parasite, with around 86 hospitalized, NBC News reported, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Michigan appears to be one of the epicenters, accounting for over half the reported cases so far.

Cyclosporiasis symptoms are pretty gnarly, but usually not life threatening. It can cause stomach cramps and a lengthy bout of explosive diarrhea. The intensifier is warranted: one sufferer who spoke to the New York Post was in awe of the “amount of pressure when it comes out,” adding that the “force is crazy.”

No food items have been recalled yet related to the outbreak. The virus is usually found on fresh produce, but we don’t know what specific food items are spreading it or the supplier they come from. Cyclosporiasis is notoriously hard to track because the symptoms usually don’t present until at least a week after the contaminated food is ingested.

They may not all come from the same source, the CDC cautioned, and what we’re seeing could be a cluster of unrelated outbreaks.

To protect yourself, the best thing to do is thoroughly wash and cook your veggies, which you should still eat. And maybe skip on the fast food.

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Donald Trump is now the first president to have an airport named after him while still in office. And what better way to commemorate this high honor than with lazy AI slop?

Until a few days ago, the Palm Beach International Airport in South Florida was still called the Palm Beach International Airport. Now it’s the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, after a law that his pal and governor of Florida Ron DeSantis signed back in March took effect. Its old logo looked like a riff on Disney’s. Its new one, first revealed by Eric Trump in May, is clearly meant to be a transmogrified Great Seal, rendered — of course — in Trump’s favorite color: gold.

Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetrical. The wings have an uneven number of feathers. The two olive branches — another error in itself, because the eagle is supposed to be clutching a bundle of arrows in its right-side talon — have differing numbers of leaves. And the shield only has eleven stripes, as opposed to the thirteen that the actual Great Seal is supposed to feature.

Have we just spent the past couple of sentences blazoning AI slop? Eagle-eyed and outraged netizens didn’t hesitate to make this diagnosis, with one Reddit thread calling out the Trump logo’s incongruities going viral.

“All the resources in the world and the logo for Trump Airport is AI generated,” the title lamented.

In response to a request for comment, the airport directed us to a local official who pointedly did not deny that the logo was AI generated.

“The logo was provided to the airport,” a representative for the Palm Beach County Department of Airports told us. “We do not have information regarding its production.”

But if the logo is AI-generated, as it strongly appears to be, it shouldn’t be surprising. The Trump administration has eagerly embraced using AI to churn out propaganda so cheap and base that it could be mistaken for satire. Some are calling this “slopaganda,” and most of the time it’s used to attack the administration’s enemies or mythologize Trump. 

Last fall, Trump posted an AI generated video of himself as a fighter pilot strafing peaceful protestors with barrages of liquid diarrhea. This was mostly received with bafflement. But in April, when he depicted himself as both Jesus Christ and the Pope, he sparked genuine outrage among the deeply Christian wing of his supporters. More banally, Trump has also used AI to advertise his numerous vanity projects, such as posting an AI-generated video of his White House ballroom.

In a sense, maybe his new airport logo is kind of a perfect use case for AI. The displaying of the US Great Seal is highly restricted, so it’s unlikely that an airport in Florida would be authorized to flaunt it as a logo, even if Trump himself wanted it to. But with AI, you can quickly spit out a cheap bastardization, uncanny in its likeness, but also not quite right.

Regardless, the sloppy logo is prominent. A large sign displaying it has already been hung at the airport’s main entrance ramp in West Palm Beach, Florida — as seen in this story’s header image up top — and appears to be plastered throughout the airport itself. This is what it looks like, apparently, to make “flying great again.”

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We’ve been hearing plenty about how Meta’s workforce is in total disarray. But this latest story takes the cake — or acorn, perhaps.

As Wired reports, a squirrel got loose inside one of the company’s buildings in Bangkok, Thailand, after someone received it in the mail. It’s unlikely the creature had plotted to infiltrate the Meta office, but it coincidentally made it just in time to plunder the snacks that executives had vowed to give back to their dispirited employees.

For a long and chaotic twenty minutes, the squirrel wreaked havoc as it bolted around the office before finally being caught, according to the reporting. The bizarro incident had at least one human casualty: a worker who got scratched on the finger by the rodent while trying to capture it.

The rodent may be apprehended, but its exploits will live on infamy. It’s already becoming workplace lore.

New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, who first broke the story, wrote on X that “employees are predictably having a field day with it internally.”

One worker “created an AI-generated video mimicking an HR training course on squirrel-related office best practices,” Isaac said. Another edited a meme of an infamous Facebook safety notification so it read, “Marked Safe From Meta Squirrel Attack Today,” underneath a blue flag icon. For demoralized Meta employees who are reeling from their bosses surveilling their computers to train AI agents, not to mentioning firing thousands of their colleagues, maybe a squirrel attack was a welcome change of pace.

Who sent the squirrel — and why — is unclear. An internal memo obtained by Wired said that the delivery was accepted by an outside janitor, who in the aftermath was written up and vowed to ensure “such an incident does not recur.” The employee who got nicked by the squirrel, meanwhile, was taken to a hospital for treatment. The squirrel’s fate is unknown.

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