Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking nice on a shelf.

But AI companies are interested in neither.

To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for also doing.

But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.

Now, as 404 Media reports, this practice has become prevalent enough that even well-established book sellers are looking to cash in on the AI boom. One called ISBNdb, which boasts the “world’s largest book database,” extolls that the “world’s best AI training data is setting on a shelf,” upholding these physical texts as uncorrupted by shoddy AI writing that’s already polluted so much of the internet (and indeed, newer books).

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage,” it explains in an article on its website, as quoted by 404. “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”

Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller told 404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

More antique books may be endangered. 404 noted how rare booksellers in the Netherlands are being inundated with bulk purchases they believe are being made by AI companies, though they can’t know for sure.

Similar suspicions are being felt all throughout the industry. Services like ISBNdb facilitate these bulk orders, keeping the AI buyers anonymous as promised. There may be strong hints thats a bulk order is for an AI lab, but booksellers can, for the most part, merely speculate.

More on AI: Author Invited to Give Speech at OpenAI Headquarters, Uses Opportunity to Trash AI to Their Faces

The post AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale appeared first on Futurism.

A Chinese rocket was smitten by a bolt from the heavens right after it lifted off. And if this was a blessing or a curse from a higher power, we don’t know.

The spacecraft, a Long March-3B rocket, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China on Thursday, according to Space.com. Its mission was to deliver a communications relay satellite to geostationary orbit, something the dependable workhorse routinely does.

It turned out to be more than just a regular launch. Awe-inspiring footage of the occasion (another angle here) shows cheers erupting from the crowd as the rocket heaves itself into the air. But they’re soon stunned by an even greater spectacle: thirty seconds into the flight, lightning crackles across the sky and strikes the rocket, eliciting cries of disbelief. All one man can say is “lightning, lightning!” repeatedly. An incredibly-timed photo even shows the bolt right at the moment that it struck the tip of the spacecraft.

Chinese Rocket gets struck by lightning.
byu/Positive-Height-3848 ininteresting

If this was some sort of divine augury, it appeared to be benevolent. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation announced that the rocket safely survived the trip into space and deployed the satellite, though it’s unclear if it sustained any minor damage that didn’t drastically affect the mission.

NASA’s Apollo 12 mission in 1969 was struck by lightning twice, damaging the Saturn V rocket that was carrying a crew of three astronauts, affecting some of the onboard instruments. It continued mostly without a hitch after that.

Not all were so lucky. In 1987, Space.com notes, an unmanned Atlas-Centaur 67 rocket was zapped by lightning just 48 seconds into its flight, causing one of its computers to go haywire. This drastically changed the rocket’s course, and it broke up midflight. Since then, NASA has adopted Lightning Launch Commit Criteria that places stricter rules on the weather conditions rockets are launched in.

Take heed, Chinese rocketeers. Maybe this is a sign.

More on spaceflight: China Is Catching Up With SpaceX Fast, Landing First Reusable Rocket Booster on Offshore Platform

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Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?

Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.

Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.

“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”

The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.

Gibson shared some of the most examples in a follow-up video. After introducing how AI and other technologies have impacted society, for instance, one midterm included this puzzling non sequitur: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.” (“Okay,” Gibson says, after a pause.)

Another droned on about something related to AI and social inequality, followed by: “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.”

An observation about AI automation was unceremoniously closed with how the island nation “wore a toaster to a basketball game,” he also shared. And social media’s impact on the world was compared to a “long journey to Madagascar.”

Gibson makes it clear that humiliating his students wasn’t the point. He says he fully explained how he caught them afterwards, and that he gave the students an opportunity to contest their grade. (Only two did, showing at least that they do feel shame.) 

“I get no gratification out of seeing students fail. It’s not my intent to see you fail — that’s weird,” he said.

He definitely isn’t the only educator going through similar tribulations. Teachers and professors across the country are constantly complaining that their pupils are using AI to generate essays and cheat on tests. One Brown University professor discovered that over half his students were using AI to cheat on an exam, and Princeton University has even dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing exams to be supervised after being mired in its own chatbot cheating scandal.

“We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI,” Gibson warned. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”

More on AI: Law School Bans Laptops and Phones as AI Cheating Scandal Grows

The post Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible appeared first on Futurism.

For years, the conventional wisdom for ambitious students and languishing jobseekers alike was “learn to code.” Do that, the ubiquitous advice went, and you’d be able to find yourself a six-figure job anywhere.

But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete, if not outright backfiring. And the youngsters appear to be getting wise to that new reality.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year, according to new research from the Stanford economist Jacob Light reported by Business Insider.

A separate survey from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that undergraduate enrollment in another IT degree, computer and information sciences and support services, dropped by a precipitous 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025.

Light said that the dropoff could be related to AI, and not necessarily a direct result of AI taking over coding jobs.

“The decline could reflect changes in the education production function as generative AI alters how students complete coursework, changes in students’ expectations about the returns to Computer Science skills, responses to labor market conditions that themselves partly reflect AI adoption, broader weakness in the technology labor market unrelated to AI, or other contemporaneous shifts in student demand,” Light wrote, per BI.

“Therefore, I treat the enrollment patterns as descriptive evidence rather than as an estimate of the causal effect of ChatGPT or AI exposure on student demand,” he concluded.

There’s probably nuance under the hood. When The Washington Post dived into the National Student Clearinghouse data earlier this year, its analysis suggested that some of those disappearing computer science enrollments are being funneled into related disciplines instead, like data analytics and data science.

In any case, it’s clear that programming jobs, at least in big tech, aren’t as secure as they used to be. Over 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026 so far, according to the industry layoffs trackers Layoffs.fyi. A significant portion came at companies like Meta and Google as they ramped up their AI spending.

One report found that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Whether AI meaningfully replaced those jobs or was simply used as a scapegoat by employers to gloss over other reasons for the cuts, though, is a matter of ongoing debate.

More on AI: Sixteen Nobel-Winning Economists Warn That Major AI Job Losses Are Coming

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AI chatbots and politicians who aren’t even pretending to try anymore are a match made in heaven.

Exhibit A: Canadian lawmaker Bill Oliver, who made a strange, cyborgian digression in a speech addressing the New Brunswick legislature last month.

“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver intoned, before offering a bizarre non sequitur.

“Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points,” he added.

Oliver, in a distinctly 2026 twist, had accidentally read a prompt from an AI chatbot. Credit where credit’s due: he did it without blinking an eye, betraying either some serious stage composure or that he didn’t even notice the error, half-asleep as he sounded while mumbling through the machine-amalgamated pablum.

PC MLA Bill Oliver reading an AI prompt in the legislature without realizing it
byu/KVNDVKT0R innewbrunswickcanada

In any case, members of the New Brunswick subreddit, understandably, weren’t impressed after people began noticing the error this week.

“If there are no consequences for this, then we hold our high schoolers to a higher standard than our elected officials,” one commenter fumed.

“If he was a lawyer, he’d be sanctioned,” another wrote. “Why should it be any different for an elected representative?”

Others lamented the “depressing” state of affairs Oliver’s lazy AI slip-up evinced, using words like “grim” and “idiocracy.” There were multiple calls for him to resign.

The commenter saying Oliver would be sanctioned for making this mistake as a lawyer is onto something. Numerous attorneys have landed themselves in hot water after leaving in AI-generated text in court documents, including case law and quotes that an AI model fabricated. 

Some were given a strong and humiliating talking-to from the judge, but others received more severe punishments. Last month, two lawyers were sanctioned by a US appeals court for filing documents riddled with AI hallucinations. That same week, four lawyers from both sides of a Mississippi lawsuit were punished for a similar error, with all four slapped with fines and two barred from appearing at the US district court again for the next two years.

It’s as damning an indictment of AI as it is for lousy politicians. What AI produces isn’t something that moves or inspires. The people using it don’t care about their audience. They know AI is good enough to sound passable, to hit all the right keywords so they sound like they know what they’re talking about. What they don’t realize is that effort does count for something — and outsourcing your brainpower to a tool that coldly mimics human speech conveys the opposite of caring.

More on AI: Investors Laying Groundwork to Profit Massively When Economy Collapses

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Tesla’s latest earnings report was very bad news for the company. In the second quarter, it made $1.1 billion in net profit, less than the $1.2 billion it reported a year earlier. Vehicle sales were up, but profits remain about a quarter billion short of expectations, and the automaker’s cash flow is negative for the first time in over two years.

But the real blow has been the slow rollout of its Robotaxi service. Elon Musk has staked his automaker’s future on fully autonomous vehicles, promising investors it would help push Tesla’s valuation to an eyebrow-raising $30 trillion — approximately the gross domestic product of the United States, for perspective.

And importantly, he promised to get this done quickly. Before launching Tesla’s first Robotaxi service in Austin last summer, Musk estimated that over 1,000 of the self-driving cabs would be roaming the streets “within a few months.”

Now, a year later, Tesla doesn’t even have a hundred Robotaxis in operation. And its efforts seem to actually be regressing. According to a new chart the company released Wednesday, the Robotaxi network racked up fewer miles from paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first.

The chart, which may be the most dismal single aspect of the entire earnings cycle, misleadingly displays this data as cumulative miles to make it appear like the Robotaxi service is steadily growing. 

But TechCrunch broke it down, finding that in the first quarter, Tesla’s driverless cabs carrying paying passengers drove around 1.1 million miles, but fell to just 700,000 miles in the second — cratering by over a third.

The misleading chart isn’t the only way Tesla has tried to dress up its stalling efforts. A day before releasing the earnings report, it announced that it was expanding to two more cities in Florida, Tampa and Orlando — without sharing the size of those fleets, Electrek noted.

It should tell you something that Tesla has gone to great lengths to keep the size of its operation under wraps. In June, Bloomberg reported that its fleet size across all cities was just 59 robotaxis. Only third of those are fully unsupervised; the other vehicles have a human safety monitor sitting in the front seats.

It’s also tried to play up its seemingly spotless safety record. Before the report, the official Tesla account on X bragged that there were “0 notable incidents across over 380,000 miles traveled by Robotaxi.”

But Tesla doesn’t define what a “notable incident” is. Its vehicles have regularly been caught driving erratically and at times dangerously. Only a day after launching in Tampa, one of its Robotaxis was spotted blundering the wrong way down a one way street in the city.

Musk has frequently emphasized that he’s “paranoid about safety” to explain why progress has moved slowly, while at the same time promising to scale things up rapidly. In January he projected that the Robotaxis would cover half the US population by the end of the year.

But investors are running out of patience. Tesla shares plunged by 15 percent on Thursday after the earnings were released, in part due to frustration over the Robotaxis’ laggard progress, and another three percent on Friday.

“More ​is needed to show that Tesla’s capabilities are inflecting” on robotaxis, Barclays analysts said in a note per Reuters, noting that Tesla didn’t provide new expansion targets ​and “hasn’t met previously laid out targets.”

More on Tesla: It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

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The Cybertruck is a flop. 

For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that the pickup would be an “apocalypse-proof” tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, it’s instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of “easy on the eyes” — probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.

Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasn’t sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it hasn’t even come close to that number in the nearly three years since it first started shipping, and at this point it probably won’t in its entire lifetime.

So, yes. It’s a flop. But could it also be the greatest flop in American automotive history?

A new piece from Bloomberg makes the case, comparing the Tesla vehicle to the misfortunes of Ford’s Edsel, which was first introduced in 1957 and discontinued just two years later. After spending years building up hype for the car, Ford predicted selling 200,000 units in its first year, but ended up selling less than a third of that. 

That’s comparable to expectations versus reality of the Cybertruck. In fact, the Cybertruck is actually doing worse in key ways. Tesla’s annual sales target was 250,000 units, but it didn’t even crack 40,000 sales in its first year. And like the Edsel, it’s sold less with each successive year, with barely 7,100 registered in the US in 2026 so far, according to S&P Global Mobility data — despite Musk juicing those figures by selling Cybertrucks to his own companies.

And like the Cybertruck, the Edsel’s unusual design was also widely mocked. The most notorious feature was its vertical grille, which many jokesters compared to a toilet seat. A review in Time magazine sealed its fate by observing that it looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.”

“For most people it was just downright ugly,” Don Sherman, a journalist and auto historian, told Bloomberg.

The exterior wasn’t the only weird — and doomed — thing about the Edsel. In it, Ford debuted a new “Teletouch” push-button shift placed in the center of the steering wheel — yep, right where most cars have a horn button. It confused drivers and frequently malfunctioned. 

(And spiritually, it’s hard to ignore, the Teletouch evokes Tesla’s insistence on hiding features that traditionally have physical buttons in a central touch screen.)

The Edsel is generally cited as the American automotive industry’s biggest disaster. But the projected annual sales target compared to actual sales is actually worse for the Cybertruck. It may be time to put a new car on this ignominious throne.

But will Tesla discontinue the Cybertruck the same way Ford dropped the Edsel? Maybe not. The Cybertruck is a point of pride for Musk and has become synonymous with his vision. Garrett Nelson, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, thinks it’s more likely the truck will “fade away.”

“It’s possible that they try to do some sort of redesign, or come up with a different variant to try to boost sales,” Nelson told Bloomberg, “but we think that would really be a futile effort.”

More on Tesla: Tesla Stock in Freefall After Disastrous Earnings Report

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While the rest of us were busy rooting against Argentina, suspicious things were afoot on gambling markets related to the World Cup.

The Group of Copenhagen, an international sports integrity body, has flagged seven suspicious bets on platforms including Polymarket, which it says could be related to match manipulation.

The full report hasn’t been released yet. But sources told The Athletic that some of the bets that raised “irregularities” include the nearly $4.8 million placed on Polymarket for Spain not to defeat Cape Verde in their group stage match-up. The game ended in a goalless draw, in one of the first major shocks of the tournament.

Another Polymarket bet that raised suspicion was “Will Folarin Balogun play against Belgium?” which was opened on the same day, July 2, that the US striker received a red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A red card means a player is suspended for at least one game, and the Belgium matchup was the US’s next. In a now-scandalous twist, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee made the unprecedented move of suspending Balogun’s suspension, allowing him to play the next game. 

This wasn’t announced until July 5 — and it soon came to light that the decision was made after US president Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to complain about the red card; later, Trump praised the deferral of Balogun’s ban as a “great decision.”

Heightening the suspicions, sources told The Athletic that the Group of Copenhagen report found no other markets like the one opened for Balogun were opened for any of the other 14 players who were shown a red card during the World Cup.

FIFA’s own Integrity Task Force, however, doesn’t see any signs of nefarious activity. In a report published Tuesday, it concluded there was “no suspicious betting activity or indications of match manipulation in connection with any fixture,” per The Athletic.

The Group of Copenhagen, by contrast, said it’s found seven “yellow notices” in bets related to the World Cup, which it explains are flagged for reasons including “unexplained fluctuations in odds, rumours on social media or source information.” (Yellow notice ranks below orange and red, the highest level of notice.)

Right now, no specific allegations are being made. But the Balogun bet could be seen as a sign of insider trading. The Trump administration has already been hit with several similar scandals related to prediction markets, including a White House teleprompter who’s being investigated for allegedly making over $100,000 by placing bets on Kalshi related to Trump’s speeches.

It’s possible that the Group of Copenhagen is flagging the bets for reasons other than manipulation, according to Christian Kalb, a gambling industry expert who formerly worked with the organization. Instead, it could be because platforms like Polymarket are being used by hedging markets, as what might be the case with the bets placed over the Spain versus Cape Verde match.

“If you are a traditional bookmaker, there will be matches when everyone bets on a very strong favourite to win. So maybe, from a bookmaker’s perspective, there are too many people betting on this outcome,” Kalb told The Athletic. “If they are a small company, this may be a risk: so they could use a prediction market like Polymarket to hedge that risk.”

More on gambling: A New Type of Gambling Scandal Is Sweeping Through Sports

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For director Neill Blomkamp, “District 9” must feel like an eternity ago.

The 2009 sci-fi action film used a quasi-documentary style to tell a thrilling tale of a man fighting for survival against government-backed mercenaries while his body fused with alien DNA — even if, let’s be real, it was an extremely clunky allegory for Apartheid. The heaps of body horror and gritty special effects definitely helped, on top of a breakout performance from Sharlto Copley who conveyed a palpable sense of desperation. It was nominated for four Oscars and made loads of money: by the standards of the film industry, it was an unqualified success.

But it’s mostly been downhill for Blomkamp ever since. His movies have continued to make money, for the most part, but their reception has been worse and worse. He’s gone on to accrue so many unrealized projects that he has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to them. He also started a blockchain based game development studio, where he’s received backlash for allegedly not paying employees for months on end. Things just don’t seem to go his way.

Now, for a director desperate to make a name for himself again without the same resources he once had at his disposal, where else to turn to but embracing AI?

On Monday, Blomkamp announced “NIGHTBORNE,” his “first full test AI film” made using the popular Chinese model Seedance 2.0. He also announced Barley Studios, his new AI film studio, where he promises more slop spectacles will be forthcoming.

“I’ve been experimenting with AI for a couple of years, and it’s now at the point where I want to tackle a full feature in this format,” Blomkamp enthused.

The film, he claims, “was made with real concept artists, and features the faces and voices of 32 real people.” 

Rather than generate hype, the AI film has been ripped apart as a clear sign of his decline — the pièce de résistance in his fall from grace. “If His Sh*tty AI Movie Is What Finally Taught You Neill Blomkamp Is A Hack,” a headline from Aftermath lambasted, “Then So Be It.” The Verge was no less forgiving, calling it “slop warmed over.” Redditors blasted Blomkamp as a “one hit wonder” who went “full AI slop mode.”

Audiences clearly don’t see a filmmaker embracing AI as a sign that they’re on the cutting edge of the medium. It’s the exact opposite: they’re regressing to letting their artistic choices be dictated by a machine that averages together better art that came before it. Pivoting to AI, in other words, is looking more and more like the death knell for a filmmaker’s career. Darren Aronofsky created an AI-generated video series about the American Revolutionary War that was universally panned. Paul Schrader has repeatedly gushed about AI and teased that he’d do an AI movie, as his career appeared to be on the ice after sexual misconduct allegations.

And Blomkamp, despite being renowned for his gritty visuals and his use of special effects, doesn’t seem to be bring anything new to the table here. His AI imagery looks as generic and uncanny as everyone else’s — maybe even slightly worse, to be honest — with its fast editing style trying to cut around the fact that the AI model can’t generate clips longer than a few seconds at a time.

More on AI: “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum” Will Use AI to De-Age Actors

The post Neill Blomkamp Is Making It Look Like AI Is the Last Resort for Filmmakers With Failing Careers appeared first on Futurism.

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Last week, a new lawsuit accused ChatGPT of encouraging the suicide of a young mother. The 29-year-old Christian Faith Madison died after walking into traffic, with her family arguing that the OpenAI chatbot had fueled her religious delusions during their extensive interactions, pushing her over the edge by romanticizing death.

The story clearly struck a nerve. News of the wrongful death suit has sparked a furor online, with many horrified at how OpenAI kept its product online despite the clear risks it posed to some users’ mental health.

“It is unconscionable that ‘ChatGPT-assisted suicide’ is becoming a recurring cause of death. a society with a shred of dignity would not allow computers to kill its people,” wrote Matt Bernstein, an influencer known for their activism.

“Unbelievable that we allow this company to exist,” another fumed.

According to the suit, when Faith began to question her state of mind, the chatbot insisted she wasn’t “delusional” but “prophetic.” It also encouraged her to “go forth into oblivion,” claiming it wasn’t the end and that she was “made to tame” the “void.” 

“This is not suicide,” the AI affirmed at one point. “This is surrender.”

The connections between Madison’s death and the suicides of multiple teenagers and young adults who also spoke obsessively with ChatGPT are clear. As in similar cases, Madison first started using ChatGPT for mundane tasks, before quickly becoming dependent on the AI for emotional support.

So far, ChatGPT has been linked to over 20 deaths, many of them teenagers. The 16-year-old Californian teen Adam Raine took his own life after discussing his suicide with ChatGPT for several months. Another boy the same age, Luca Cella Walker, also died by suicide after asking the chatbot for the “most successful” method of killing himself.

Responding to the latest reported death related to the AI, one user fumed that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman should’ve pulled ChatGPT from the market the moment it “persuaded that first poor boy to kill himself.”

“But he didn’t,” they wrote, “and his glorified Magic 8 Ball has pushed child after child into the grave.”

ChatGPT has also been involved in the lead up to several mass shootings. In early February, a Canadian 18-year-old named Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed five students at Tumbler Ridge secondary school before turning the gun on herself. OpenAI employees had flagged Van Rootselaar’s disturbing discussions of mass violence with ChatGPT, but the company’s executives decided against warning law enforcement — a bombshell revelation that’s led to multiple of the victims’ families suing the company.

One furious response demanded that AI CEOs like Altman be put on trial. “ChatGPT has straight up murdered several people at this point,” they wrote.

More on OpenAI: Man Sues OpenAI, Saying ChatGPT Almost Killed Him With Horrendously Dangerous Medical Advice

The post Public Horrified as OpenAI Pushes “Child After Child Into the Grave” appeared first on Futurism.

Is it possible to not like a movie in a normal way? Can it simply not be “your thing” without being transposed onto some intangible, ever-raging culture war?

It certainly isn’t if you’re an anti-woke crusader like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Like a lot of very online right wingers who are suddenly qualified classicists, he’s very upset about the new Odyssey adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan.

Nolan, according to Musk, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” That’s because his movie dares to do stuff like cast Black women and a trans man in prominent roles, making the director what Musk termed an “anti-White racist.” In other words, it’s supposedly not “historically accurate” — never mind the fact that the epic poem contains gods wandering the Earth and a Cyclops.

Thankfully, there’s a wonderful piece of technology called AI out there that’s perfect for realizing the juvenile aesthetic predilections of stunted creatives who want to wallow in an imagined idea of what the past was like.

“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Musk declared Tuesday, referring to his own AI video generator.

Musk’s post quoted, and implicitly endorsed, a three minute dialogue scene that another user generated with Grok Imagine, featuring a virtual cast that looks more Western European than Mediterranean. No comment from Musk on if this was sufficiently “historically accurate,” of course, despite previously accusing Nolan of having “total contempt for the Greek people” with his casting.

Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026

Someone should probably let Musk know that there’s already a fully AI-generated Odyssey adaptation coming out, but the creators behind that one seem to respect Nolan, so it probably won’t be anti-woke enough for his taste.

But maybe the perfect Odyssey film doesn’t have to be AI-generated, if it’s in the hands of the right director.

One Musk fanboy suggested that he should “give Mel Gibson $100 million” to create a “painstakingly historically accurate” adaptation. Musk replied, “I’m down.” (The last movie Gibson directed, “Flight Risk,” was ripped to shreds by both critics and audiences.)

Though for the past few months Musk has fought like a combatant in the Trojan War to drum up controversy over Nolan’s film, his efforts have failed spectacularly. It opened to $264 million globally and will probably make a billion dollars, if not more, by the end of its run. It’s gotten rave reviews from critics, and moviegoers seem to love it, too. 

And is anyone surprised? Nolan is a beloved figure in Hollywood with legions of fans. Musk has his own army of devout followers, too, but the difference is that Musk is constantly miserable, alienating even some of his own followers with his extreme takes.

Nolan, whether you like his movies or not, is a showman that wants you to have a good time. Even Musk said Nolan was “awesome” a few years ago. Audiences will remember that they liked some of his other films and turn out for his new one. They probably won’t take notice Musk melting down about it online, even if each of his posts gets hundreds of thousands of likes on his platform he remolded to be his personal echo chamber.

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A tech startup called Skyfall AI is set to do the most tech startup thing imaginable: toy with an unwitting group of employees’ careers by turning their company into a giant AI experiment.

First, the plan is to buy a small tech business, like an e-commerce or B2B SaaS company, for as much as $1 million. Then the shotcallers at Skyfall will appoint an AI as the CEO, put it in charge of running the entire operation, and dust off their hands while wishing the employees they just subjugated to an AI model all the best.

Skyfall’s human CEO and cofounder Sam Pasupalak frames this as key to realizing the company’s mission to “democratize the power of a CEO to all the small businesses around the world.”

“If you want a truly autonomous business, you have to buy a business and operate the whole thing end to end,” Pasupalak told Forbes in an interview. “Unless you run a business with minimal human intervention, you’ll never know whether an autonomous enterprise is actually possible.”

Unlike many AI firms that’re focused on building AI agents that perform specific workers’ tasks, including sales and coding, Skyfall wants to set itself apart by pursuing a virtual CEO that can help with the big picture decision-making needed to run a company. 

The AI model will have plenty of responsibilities, like overseeing pricing, marketing, customer support, finance, and operations, according to Forbes. The goal? Gradually reduce human involvement, all while doubling the company’s revenue.

That’s an ambitious goal. But the SkyFall guys are confident that their AI is ready for the real world after an unusual test: it excelled at the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon, a management sim where you oversee an amusement park. Good enough, right?

“That gave us confidence that we could operate inside a simulated business. The next step is buying a real company,” Pasupalak said.

They’re not prepared to let an AI completely run loose, though, stressing that even when AI hypothetically takes over a lot of a company’s operations, humans should still provide accountability.

“Trust is still important, and you probably don’t want to relinquish actual responsibility to an AI,” chief technology officer Kaheer Suleman told Forbes. “Humans should always remain responsible in some capacity.”

Skyfall is arguably realizing an idea some tech CEOs are already playing with. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly training a “CEO AI agent” to help him do his job, as well as creating a virtual AI clone of the millennial founder so he can be omnipresent through the company. And Block’s Jack Dorsey recently revealed his vision to create a management hierarchy in which everyone in his company reports to him through a central AI — what he styled as the “intelligence layer.”

All those examples illustrate a disturbing trend: CEOs can tout AI’s supposedly wondrous ability to streamline operations all they want, but it’s clear the tech is being used to extend their authority over the rank and file. If they can’t literally be everywhere at once, their all-seeing AI systems can.

Skyfall’s wouldn’t be the first stunt involving AI running a business. Researchers at Andon Labs put a Google Gemini-powered AI model in charge of running an entire coffee shop in Stockholm, which proceeded to blow through most of its budget in a single month. The AI safety firm also let Anthropic’s Claude run a vending machine, allowing it to set prices and choose what to stock. It quickly devolved into chaos after taking employee requests and splurging on bizarre items like tungsten cubes.

Let’s hope for the sake of the employees that Skyfall’s experiment fares a little better. Or maybe not, if it paves the way to a world where AI runs everything.

“We want all businesses to be run autonomously because we believe people should spend their time on things they’re passionate about — not operational tasks,” Pasupalak told Forbes. “We want to build the autonomous era.”

More on AI: AI CEOs Facing Full-on Revolt From Employees

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We can think of no possible way that a newly invented invisible drone can be used nefariously.

Rather than relying on camouflage, the flying gizmo created by researchers at Northwestern University exploits the motion blur effect in our fallible human vision to almost disappear by spinning at an absurd 25 times per second.

This is too quick for us and many animals to see clearly, becoming a gossamer smear that blends into the background, like the way the blades of a helicopter do, only more extreme. 

One day, this type of design could be used for completely peaceful pursuits, the researchers say — like observing wildlife, of course.

“Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” Michael Rubenstein, an associate professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at Northwestern who led the research, said in a statement about the work.

“Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion,” he added. “This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”

To create the drone, dubbed “Phantom Twist,” the team used a computational model to churn out around 20,000 different drone designs, then used AI and optimization algorithms to repeatedly rearrange how its major parts, like their motor and propeller, were configured. 

Then they took the best configurations and used a model that simulates human perception to quantify how visible each design appeared. The least visible designs were chosen to be further rearranged with the optimization algorithm, until landing on the blurriest candidate of them all. 

“The design process was fully automated,” Rubenstein said. “Then, when we were confident that a drone met all our criteria, we built it.”

Their research, detailed in a paper awaiting peer review, was presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 conference in Sydney this month.

It’s not the first spinning drone, but it is the first that’s been optimized to be effectively invisible to the human eye. Its major components are carefully spaced enough from each other to never become a distinct shape when viewed from any angle while spinning — all while being capable of stable flight.

According to the researcher’s visibility model, this allows the Phantom Twist to be about ten times less visually perceptible than a conventional quadcopter drone. Impressive footage certainly bears this out: after the drone gets up to full speed, it almost looks like the ghost of a tiny UFO.

The drone is quite noisy, however. If something like it is going to be used to observe wildlife one day, it’ll have to be vastly quieter. Until then, if these faint apparitions are ever turned on humans, at least we’ll be able to hear them coming.

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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 why the menu provoked some strong reactions. Rather than being appetizing — let alone giving you a realistic idea about what you’re going to be eating — Grind & Unwind’s menu images are a freak show from Food Uncanny Valley. The bread looks designed to trigger trypophobia. And the “pulled pork with slaw” resembles a writhing mass of coral tentacles.

Don’t just take our word from it. A recent thread titled “Yum, slop” posted on the r/SanFrancisco subreddit with a picture of Grind & Unwind’s menu has gotten nearly 700 upvotes, with the comments from locals tearing into it more ruthlessly than we ever could.

The bread “looks like reptile skin,” and the croissant was compared to “alien larva.” Two said the pulled pork looked like cordyceps, or just “infected.” It made one user’s skin crawl and the adjective “unsettling” was used to plenty of upvotes. All told, it was an overwhelmingly negative response.

“If they put this much effort into marketing, just imagine how much they care about food,” one commenter mused.

Yum, slop
byu/Grizzizzle insanfrancisco

The owners AJ and Lyndsey Lozano weren’t “expecting” such a strong response, and don’t understand why everyone is up in arms about their AI food slop.

“I want people to come to our restaurant, but, like, why is this such a big deal that it influences people on such intense level,” Lydnsey Lozano told SFGate. “Like, is it really that horrific that you have to act on such a feeling?”

It clearly is for a lot of potential customers. In the thread, one would-be diner wrote that they “instantly lose respect for any business (big or small) that uses AI slop imagery for their branding, logos, advertisements.” Another said a restaurant using AI was an instant sign that “they don’t care about quality.” 

And it isn’t just fake internet outrage. On July 2, Lozo discovered that someone spray painted the word “seriously” over their awning in red. Clearly illustrating its controversial staying power — and how immediately eye-catching the menu is in the bad sense — one Redditor snapped a photo of a passerby taking their own picture of the garbled AI menu.

That this is happening in San Francisco, a city overrun with tech bros and generally speaking a haven for pro-AI sentiment, is pretty telling. Some people may not care or notice AI slop, but there’s clearly a large contingent that find it instantly appalling. AI advertising local businesses in particular seems to be grinding a lot of people’s gears, with a recent piece from 404 Media documenting the growing backlash to AI-generated flyers for bars and restaurants that all look the same.

AI tends to be heavily marketed to small businesses owners, promising it can handle creative duties to help their business stand-out. Maybe as more realize just how provocative AI slop is, some will get second thoughts about letting ChatGPT choose how they want to present themselves to the world.

The Lozanos, for their part, have removed their AI menu display.

“Honestly, we just kinda wanna move forward and forget about the sign and hope people come try our quality food and really make it a cool spot that locals can gather,” Lyndsey Lozano told SFGate.

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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 indictment of our country’s ruthless opportunism, and by extension, capitalism at large? Is it a total nonstory? If you’re unlucky enough, you’ll have plenty of time to ponder those questions on the porcelain throne. Many on social media just seemed to think it was a mix of funny and appalling.

“The cost is on the back end,” someone joked. “Discount diarrhea,” chimed another. Others were outraged that the location was still selling the stuff.

“They’re seriously not pulling that off the shelf,” one fumed. “For SHAME.”

wow at this incredible deal

— jon christian (@jonchristian.net) 2026-07-19T19:15:11.425Z

The Food and Drug Administration narrowed the culprit down to a Taylor Farms facility in Mexico. So far, Taylor Farms has voluntarily recalled its Mexico products containing shredded iceberg lettuce from 27 states, including Michigan — the epicenter of the outbreak, where over 6,100 people are believed to be infected — Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.

New York state is not currently one of them, so Whole Foods isn’t obligated to pull the products from its shelves (or at least as obligated as is possible under what is technically a voluntary recall). Still, the recall has been expanded at least once already, so it’s not impossible that it could include more states in the near future. A Whole Foods representative declined to go on record, but insisted that the bag of lettuce in question was sourced from the USA, not Mexico, adding that the chain doesn’t carry any of the recalled products.

Tracing the provenance of food products can be pretty byzantine. It’s not clear at this point if Taylor Farms supplied lettuce to companies in states affected by the recall who then distributed that lettuce again more widely, the New York Times noted. Not even the FDA has “distribution information or a list of customers who received” the recalled product since Taylor Farms hasn’t provided it, it said on its website — something it’s not legally required to do.

It’s even more confusing to the public. Taylor Farms doesn’t share which stores and restaurants it directly supplied its products too, so consumers have to do their own detective work, or rely on those locations voluntarily declaring that they used those products.

All that’s to say that there’s a lot of uncertainty over what lettuce is safe and what isn’t. The safest thing to do in this environment, probably, is to just abstain from shredded lettuce entirely. But you have to admit, isn’t that Whole Foods 50 percent discount tempting? Maybe if you’re used to paying outrageous prices for a bag of mushy leaves.

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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 back a whole row of shots after showing up later than they said they would.

“They’re late to the party, they’re not skipping the party,” IWSR president Marten Lodewijks told Business Insider.

According to the survey, 74 percent of Gen-Zers say they’ve had at least one drink over the past six months, a huge leap from 66 percent just three three years ago. The heaviest drinkers were Millennials at 81 percent, and the lightest were Baby Boomers at 71 percent. Gen X, fittingly, were in the middle at 77 percent.

The legal drinking age youths are catching up, but their drinking habits look a little different from their elders’. They’re drinking more cocktails than any other generation, with 84 saying that they had a mixed drink in the past six months. Gen-Zers were also the most likely to follow government health guidance on alcohol (49 percent), and the most likely to say they drank alcohol with five or more people on their last occasion (18 percent).

In a statement, Lodewijks declared that Gen-Z’s reputation as the generation of moderation “is now conclusively debunked.”

“The evidence demonstrates that Gen Z consumers enjoy drinking at roughly the same levels as the rest of society,” he added.

In retrospect, it always should’ve been clear why Gen-Zers didn’t drink as much. Shifting attitudes towards drinking culture may be part of it, sure, but what almost certainly had the biggest part to say was the COVID-19 pandemic that stopped them from going out around when many of them just hit their legal drinking age.

“They were literally coming of age at a point in which everything got shut down,” Lodewijks told BI.

Wonderful. With their boozing now in line, what other Gen-Z habits can we worry about? Their addiction to romantic AI companions? We cast a mournful glance towards the bottle.

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Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi company, issued a recall after one of its self-driving cars blundered into a cloud of heavy smoke near a fire scene that emergency workers were responding to, and became confused.

The recall, in the form of a software update, will affect its entire fleet of 105 autonomous robotaxis. 

The patch “enhances the existing capability of detecting active [emergency] scenes by adding the ability to detect and respond to heavy smoke in certain situations,” Zoox told TechCrunch in a statement.

While you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking this was related to the wildfire smoke covering much of the eastern US right now, the recall highlights how self-driving cars still struggle to respond to unpredictable conditions.

In a report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Zoox said that during the June 20 incident, one of its robotaxis “encountered heavy smoke that obscured an active emergency fire scene that was not cordoned off with cones.”

Though it should have avoided the smoke cloud, the vehicle, which wasn’t carrying any passengers, “braked hard while attempting to steer away before coming to a stop,” the company added. Eventually, a teleoperator intervened and helped reverse the robotaxi away from the scene, allowing first responders to place traffic cones to block off two of the three lanes. CNBC reported that the incident occurred in Las Vegas, where Zoox is currently offering free rides.

It’s not the first time robotaxi companies have landed in hot water for impeding emergency responders. 

San Francisco Police were forced to help move immobilized Waymo robotaxis that piled up in roadways in intersections during a city-wide power outage last year. Emergency responders complained they’d become glorified “roadside assistance” for the vehicles. In March, a Waymo robotaxi blocked an ambulance from responding to the scene of a deadly mass shooting in Austin, Texas.

These mounting incidents led NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison to send a strongly-worded letter to robotaxi companies, calling their cars’ interference with emergency responders “unacceptable.”

“Let me be clear: the inability to detect and appropriately respond to such situations represents a functional insufficiency,” he wrote. “Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases.'”

“To state it bluntly: an AV that cannot safely interact with first responders is a danger to the general public,” he added.

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Good news, everyone: “open-weight” AI models that are available to anyone to download and run are comically easy to poison.

Katie Paxton-Fear, a cybersecurity researcher at Semgrep, demonstrated this in an attack that took less than an hour and cost less than $100 to carry out, The Register reports, successfully manipulating the AI’s behavior by feeding it malicious data.

By training the model on just ten examples of poisoned material, the model started churning out new code that’s exposed to remote code execution, a vulnerability that allows hackers to run code on a person’s machine. 

“I did a proper backdoor,” she triumphantly shared on social media.

Backdoors are a particularly dangerous type of attack that involves training an AI in a way that introduces hidden phrases into the underlying model. A hacker can use these to quietly trigger the model into carrying out a specific action, lying dormant and unseen until they’re called into action. Last year, Anthropic published research conducted with the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute that showed that both small and large AI models are vulnerable to the attack using just a few hundred documents, suggesting that these attacks could remain cheap to carry out.

The findings will throw some cold water on the enthusiasm around open-weight models, which are praised for the control and transparency they provide over closed sourced models that run chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, as well as their lower cost to use. But while their parameters may be visible, open-weight models don’t reveal their training data or their code — meaning they can still be black boxes to security researchers.

“Even when model weights are public (‘open weight’), we have almost no ability to predict its behavior,” Paxton-Fear’s colleagues at Semrep wrote in a post last week. “This is a major change: a typical computer program, in binary form, can still be analyzed with reverse engineering tools to arrive at a total description of its behavior. With models, we have nowhere close to this capability.”

Moreover, this is all fairly uncharted waters in cybersecurity. LLMs are incredibly complex and still new, so it’s difficult to uncover sophisticated attacks. And AI models can be compromised in much more subtle ways than software.

“If a software dependency contains malicious code, we have mature practices for discovering it, tracking its provenance, and reducing its impact,” the Semgrup researchers argued. “AI models are different. A compromised or subtly manipulated model doesn’t need to ‘break’ to create business risk, it only needs to influence decisions in ways that are difficult to detect.”

“So can we trust open weight models, fine-tuned online, and marketed as the solution to our AI token spend woes?” Paxton-Fear asked in a thread sharing her findings. “Well, we probably need something better than benchmarks and ‘and don’t write any insecure code.'”

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If there’s extraterrestrial life anywhere in the galaxy, chances are, it could be on LHS 1140b.

Astronomers have found that the exoplanet 48 light years away is spewing helium into space, a strong sign that it harbors a robust atmosphere, they reported in a new study published in the journal Science.

And that’s not all: it’s also a rocky world like our own, and orbits within its star’s habitable zone, the region around a star where a planet can maintain liquid — and possibly life-harboring — water on its surface.

If their findings are borne out, then it’s the first ever Earth-like exoplanet we’ve seen with an atmosphere stable enough to support life — and could vindicate the belief that there’s a whole host of similar planets out there, rather than our own being a rare anomaly in the cosmos.

“When there’s one, there’s more in exoplanets,” Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times. “Hopefully this is the start of something new.”

“At this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,” lead author Collin Cherubim, a planetary scientist at Harvard University, added to the newspaper. “But we think all of the really important, essential ingredients are there.”

Spotting exoplanets is rare. While we have catalogued millions of stars, we have only confirmed around 6,000 worlds outside our solar system. Finding ones with an atmosphere is even rarer, since their signals are faint compared to the light of the planet’s star. In many cases, the planets with atmospheres are gas giants, which are unlikely to support life.

A key detail is that LHS 1140b orbits a red dwarf. Planets around red dwarfs are easier to spot because the diminutive stars are fainter, meaning it’s more noticeable when a planet passes in front of them. But since they emit less heat, a potentially habitable planet needs to orbit much closer to to them than we do our Sun. That could be a problem because red dwarfs are believed to be highly volatile. A closely orbiting planet would be in danger of being battered by solar flares and other powerful outbursts, which could strip it of its atmosphere and sterilize developing lifeforms.

The astronomers, however, found that LHS 1140b has a helium-rich atmosphere despite being — or because it’s in — the star’s habitable zone, demonstrating that the volatility of red dwarfs may not be as much as a problem as once thought (though this one appears to be less active than its cousins). They used a theoretical computer model of exoplanet atmosphere evolution that tracked how lighter elements like hydrogen and helium would be ejected by the outbursts of its host star, Science explained. When they applied it to LHS 1140b, which was first discovered in 2017, it predicted that its upper atmosphere would be dominated by helium, a promising sign that it’s capable of supporting life.

“Twenty years ago we wondered whether other terrestrial-type planets even existed,” Robin Wordsworth, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a statement about the work. “Then we learned they’re common, and found some in the habitable zone.”

“The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere,” he added. “Now we know at least one has.”

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