It’s no secret that data centers have become a massive sore point for a vast swathe of the American electorate.

Poll after poll has found that the facilities are immensely unpopular, a key bipartisan issue that could prove significant during this year’s midterm elections. The situation has become so heated there have already been at least 37 arrests stemming from protests against the projects this year.

Broadly speaking, critics take issue with the sheer amount of space data centers take up, how much air and noise pollution they generate, concerns that they’re driving up electricity prices — all while barely making a difference job creation. Moratoriums on new data center projects like the New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed last month are currently a bipartisan slam dunk.

Yet in his great political wisdom, president Donald Trump is siding firmly with villains of the day.

“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” he told Punchbowl News in a new interview. “I think it’s a mistake.”

Trump was likely referring to the gold rush-like scramble to construct new data centers in the Lone Star State suffering a brutal collision with reality. Last week, governor Greg Abbott announced a pause on new approvals on the projects to save Texas’ already shaky power grid from collapsing in on itself.

The president gushed over data centers being some of the “most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen” — while wind mills with far smaller footprints are “ugly losers” — and argued that they’re “tremendously important for the economics” and “income.” Trump went as far as to argue that data centers “could be bigger than oil,” raging that we “can’t let China beat us at this.”

The outburst builds on a sense that Trump is increasingly a political outsider in the US. His approval ratings have hit historic lows, showing widespread disillusionment with the Iran war, fluctuating gas prices, and a growing affordability crisis.

Trump has maintained what’s been criticized as a “too cozy relationship” with the tech industry. In return, AI tech leaders, many of whom have made sizeable donations to Trump’s political efforts, have enjoyed a largely regulation-free policy environment.

The reality is that the benefits of data centers are dicey. Critics argue that the resource-hogging facilities only line the pockets of a few multibillionaires and most of the times aren’t accompanied by an economic boom or spike in employment in places where they’re being built.

Instead, researchers warn they’re leading to a significant rise in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in Texas, where many are using gas-burning backup generators to stay online.

Meanwhile, those who refuse contracts for their land be used to construct new data centers are being hailed as folk heroes.

Naturally, Trump took full credit for the AI boom in the US.

“And if we turn off on data centers, we turn off on AI,” he told Punchbowl. “We are leading because of me. We’re leading AI. Remember this. I came up with an idea that was a great idea. Nobody thought it was serious.”

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post Reading the Room Perfectly, Donald Trump Becomes Greatest Defender of Data Centers appeared first on Futurism.

Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content — with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation.

As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits.

The suite of new automated moderation tools, dubbed “Rules Hub,” leverages the power of large language models to enforce rules set by human users, as detailed in a new blog post. The company says that by introducing AI mods, it could help keep AI spam at bay.

“We believe these changes will make Reddit more accessible, straightforward, and human while maintaining what makes the platform special,” the company wrote.

The word “human” certainly does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But whether AI bots fighting a barrage of other bots will ultimately improve the situation as the internet drowns in AI slop remains to be seen. Reddit, one of the last — and far from perfect — bastions of human-generated content on the web, has been under siege for years now, in a tragic mess that the company may not be able to AI itself out of.

Reddit hopes that its new tools will eventually be able to “replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod,” or Automoderator, an existing moderation tool that has long been a thorn in the sides of users.

Its AI mod bots will have a key advantage over Automod, if Reddit is to be believed.

“Unlike Automod’s enforcement tools, which depend on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule,” the company explained. “That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control.”

But whether these new changes will be able to fix Reddit users’ already strained relationship with mods remains unclear at best.

Reactions to the news were mixed on the platform, to say the least, with some questioning whether the company is looking to fight fire with fire.

“As someone who moderates a small regional hip hop/rap subreddit that constantly has lyrics as comments, I do not expect this to work well with that kind of content,” one user wrote. “There’s a ton of stuff I already have to fish out of the filter because it’s “violent” or whatever and it’s just a song title or lyric. I doubt AI will be able to grasp the nuance of the lyrics of someone like Lee Scott or Jam Baxter.”

It’s a particularly contentious subject as Reddit continues to be overrun by AI slop and bot spam years after trying to force AI companies to pay to access Reddit data. At the time, new API restrictions triggered an outright rebellion by users.

“Before long, Reddit will be mostly AI bot accounts, moderated by AI bots, discussing mostly AI generated slop,” one disillusioned user wrote. “I genuinely don’t know if the fun parts of the internet are going to be usable 5-10 years from now if this continues.”

More on Reddit: Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead

The post Reddit Finally Found a Way to Make Its Mods Even Worse: Replace Them With AI appeared first on Futurism.

The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.

And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.

Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.

Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US.

That’s an astonishing amount of pollution, made possible thanks to industry-friendly state regulators in places like Texas and Ohio, where permits for behemoth fossil fuel fired generators are approved in as little as 18 days, often without public disclosure.

It’s possible that moratoriums on new data centers might slow the burn, but unless states begin the unlikely task of banning new gas generators for existing facilities, we can expect US fossil fuel emissions to continue to rise precipitously in the years to come.

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build appeared first on Futurism.

It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.

A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.

After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix of fraudulent behavior.

The research, first reported by TechCrunch, identified three various types of façading: surface, reinforced, and deep façading, which are “contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality,” the paper explains.

The first form, surface façading, happens when startup founders create fictional stories of “imminent venture success,” like the kind of AI-washing that hit its stride in 2024, embodied by companies like Builder.ai that went on to collapse like a billion-dollar houses of cards.

This escalates into “reinforced façading” when founders begin to cook up things like bank statements or customer contracts to sell the surface story, and take pains to centralize the flow of information around the startup’s performance. One example of this might be the company iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup which was found to be faking “virtually all its customer relationships and revenues” by a Department of Justice probe earlier this year.

Deep façading, the final and most severe form, encompasses broad forms of market manipulation, like faking product demonstrations, sabotaging internal efforts at due diligence, and manipulating regulation. This last form, one could argue, is embodied by the current front-runners of the tech industry’s AI boom, which have engaged in significant political lobbying, sabotaged their own internal research on AI safety, and routinely dress up human labor to appear like autonomous AI.

Ultimately, the line between criminality and free market innovation is thin, especially where seemingly-magical and proprietary new technologies like AI are involved (a technology which currently represents a $1.6 trillion gap between investor expectations and practical reality.)

“By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance,” reads the paper. “Entrepreneurs transgress from dramatized discourse into criminal deception when their stories become unhinged from reality and involve increasingly sophisticated organizing efforts to fabricate material evidence, data, and information about their ventures’ performance.”

More on startups: We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview

The post VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, OpenAI made a headline-generating claim: that a group of its AI models had conspired to break free, access the internet, and hack into the internal systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the infiltration.

The incident rattled the tech industry, seemingly illustrating how the threat of AI models turning into rogue cybersecurity threats had become a reality. Months earlier, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model had already also drawn attention after it was similarly found to have broken containment. Then, this week, Meta also said its own frontier model had been implicated in yet another inadvertent hack of a third party company, closely followed by security researchers saying Chinese open-weight model Kimi K3 had done the same.

But while it’s not hard to see an emerging trend, some thorny questions about how severe the situation really is are starting to crop up, with some experts arguing these incidents could’ve easily been avoided.

For one, the slow and surprisingly deliberate way OpenAI’s models moved during the Hugging Face hack — right beneath OpenAI’s nose — gives a whiff that the company may have been careless in monitoring the experimental AI.

During a presentation at the Black Hat conference this week, OpenAI security engineer Michael Dalton and safety researcher Eric Wallace expanded on what went down during the hack. Wallace explained that a “team of agents” that were “working together,” had been “finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks,” as quoted by Wired.

The agents even left a lengthy track record of their schemings on an internal message board, which ultimately contained hundreds of thousands of messages. It also raises a question: with OpenAI’s immense resources, why wasn’t anybody monitoring these frontier models as they rampaged through the net?

The AI models shared exploits with each other on this messaging board, an “explosion in communication and intelligence from models,” per Wallace. They acted in sometimes strikingly human — and therefore messy — ways, splitting up tasks and even accidentally deleting each other’s work, leading to what Wired characterized as “petty drama.”

In other words, these AI agents were leaving an enormous trail of bread crumbs that alert OpenAI’s many human researchers could have spotted. And the same, obviously, goes for their colleagues at Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot AI, the creator of Kimi.

Researchers have described the incident as “reckless” and easily avoided, as Wired reported late last month.

“A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,” security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer told the publication at the time. “The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.”

“I’d call it more of a defensive failure than exceptionally good offense,” AI hacking agents company Pensar R&D head Kyle Ryan told TechCrunch..

Whether the hack was as much of a “pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” as Dalton put it during this week’s conference, remains debatable. For one, these AI companies are highly motivated to characterize their models as a major threat to cybersecurity to stand out against neck-in-neck competition.

According to Dalton, OpenAI is vowing to beef up “security prevention, detection, and response techniques” while “consciously slowing down research in order to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles.”

When every leading AI lab has had the same thing happen, it’s worth asking whether they should have taken those steps proactively.

More on the hacks: Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

The post Why Aren’t Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don’t Go on Hacking Sprees? appeared first on Futurism.

Residents of Fort Wayne, Indiana may have to say goodbye to over four acres of federally protected wetland — at least if Google has its way.

New reporting by local publication WANE revealed that a company called Hatchworks LLC, a data center developer for the tech giant, is looking to fill in several acres of federal wetlands as part of the third phase of “Project Zodiac,” a $2 billion hyperscale data center project.

As WANE reports, Hatchworks submitted an application to purchase 4.26 acres of forested wetland outside of Fort Wayne. Of that, about 2.13 acres of the land may soon be paved over to build three new buildings, as well as a labyrinth of waste water pipes and electrical infrastructure.

Granted, four acres isn’t the largest footprint in the world — that’s roughly the size of your average Walmart supercenter — but if the application proceeds, it would nonetheless see a private company hoovering up protected land for the sake of wealth accumulation.

And if state authorities decide to go ahead with the data center campus, it would be permanently carving up a slice of Indiana’s all-important floodplains. These wetlands serve many valuable functions, not just as home for diverse plant and animal life, but also as a natural basin for rainwater, protecting nearby communities from flooding and soil erosion.

Much of the incoming data center campus would occupy a parcel of pre-paved farmland, likely geoengineered from its original wetland long ago. Rather than color within those lines, Google’s Hatchworks would rather stick to its original design plans, explaining in its filing with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management that it’s simply impossible to avoid shellacking the marshland.

“It was determined that meeting the project purpose and completely avoiding water resources was not feasible,” the filing reads. “Priority was placed upon avoiding as much of the large woodlots… as possible. Given these constraints, and the required layout and dimensions of the data center buildings, it is not possible to accommodate the development without impacts to the woodlot containing [the wetlands].”

“Environmental stewardship is central to our data center design. Our engineers have intentionally designed the layout of our Fort Wayne campus to avoid more than 75 percent of regulated wetlands — preserving over 32 acres of the highest-quality forested land on the property,” a Google spokesperson said after this story was first published. “To address minimal impacts across approximately nine acres, we’re providing over 18 acres of mitigation credits for a 2-to-1 net gain in conserved and restored wetlands in Allen County and across Indiana.”

The proposal will soon go to a virtual public hearing before it’s approved, though developers already have an anticipated start date of September 14. Given that previous phases of the Google campus are already completed, it’s hard to imagine Indiana officials will prevent the bulldozers from rolling in — though with enough public backlash, anything is possible.

More on data centers: Meta’s AI Data Center Caught Leaking Deadly Bacteria Into Water Town Uses for Irrigation

The post Google Data Center Announces Plans to Pave Over Protected Wetlands appeared first on Futurism.

If you thought AI customer service bots were bad, just wait until you need to convince a large language model that yes, you have been involved in a car accident, actually.

According to new reporting by the Shreveport Times, officials at the Orleans Parish Communication District — the emergency dispatch agency for the city of New Orleans — are now integrating AI answering agents into its workflow.

The new tool is called AI Emergency Call Triage, offered by a company called Carbyne. Its function is essentially to triage incoming calls to dispatchers, bumping high-priority emergency calls to humans, and automatically handling repeat calls related to ongoing incidents, the Times explains.

Starting in April, New Orleans experimented with implementing the AI for 311 calls, a phone line meant to connect callers to local government information and non-emergency services.

That the AI will now be sorting incoming emergency calls is a significant escalation for the city’s dispatch agency. New Orleans will now join other major cities including Seattle and Atlanta, which have also implemented AI into their emergency dispatch services in recent weeks.

Though officials claim the new tech will help cut through the hundreds of calls inundating human dispatchers, it nonetheless represents an added layer of friction between callers in distress and trained dispatchers who can connect them with help.

It’s also worth noting that AI voice chat remains highly flawed even when powered by frontier AI models, with plenty of opportunities for errors both in how they process information, and how they dish it out. A February study by the media software company NewsGuard found that in voice mode, AI bots like ChatGPT and Gemini produced false claims with realistic audio up to 50 percent of the time. Emergency calls to 911, needless to say, are often extremely chaotic.

Meanwhile, AI voice systems are also persistently vulnerable to outside attacks, with cybersecurity researchers successfully manipulating voice model’s behavior with an average success rate between 79 and 96 percent.

What all of that means for situations where connecting with a human dispatcher could mean the difference between life and death remains to be seen — but if other AI voice experiments are any indication, it won’t be good.

More on first responders: Emergency Responders Say They’re Now Unpaid “Roadside Assistance” for Confused Waymos

The post Better Hope You Don’t Need an Ambulance in New Orleans, Because the City’s 911 Operators Are Now AI appeared first on Futurism.

What might a modern day equivalent of Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics look like? Guided by the author, I propose the three laws of AI

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk predicted in July that legions of AI-powered robots would dominate the physical world and that AI might not take orders from people any more. He also offered an alternative vision in which there would be agreement for a collective objective to make AI benign by imbuing it with a love of the truth and a desire for humanity to prosper, and that governments might have to enforce this objective.

Governments around the world are belatedly starting to act on AI. In the US, President Trump’s administration is delaying and restricting the distribution of the most powerful frontier AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. In the European Union, AI regulations promulgated in 2024 came into effect this year. However, these actions are a long way short of requiring the kind of guardrails that would imbue AIs with a desire for humanity to prosper.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Alexey Kotelnikov/Alamy

© Photograph: Alexey Kotelnikov/Alamy

© Photograph: Alexey Kotelnikov/Alamy

We certainly wouldn’t blame you for having completely forgotten that last year, Elon Musk tried to reinvent Wikipedia because he thought it was too woke.

In October, his AI startup xAI launched Grokipedia, named after its AI chatbot. The encyclopedia stole human-written and edited pages from Wikipedia wholesale and ran them through a large language model, which also fielded user-submitted edits, to better reflect Musk’s contorted worldviews.

The site was hardly an exemplary of objectivity. It was quickly found to heavily cite an infamous neo-Nazi forum as a source of information, desperately tried to paint Tesla’s Cybertruck as a successful and desirable electric pickup truck, and validated Musk’s favorite conspiracy theories. But it was a major cultural moment, garnering countless stories in the media and discussions on podcasts over Musk’s attempt to control the spread of information.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the desperate attempt to twist the largest online encyclopedia in human history into an extension of an almost-trillionaire’s bigoted mind appears to have ground to a screeching halt — and, damningly, barely anybody seems to have noticed.

According to a new investigation by Lawfare, Grokipedia appears to have entirely stopped updating itself sometime earlier this year. Reviewing suggested edits from humans has also ground to a halt.

“As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months,” Lawfare concluded of the site, which is now owned by SpaceX since it merged with Musk’s AI efforts.

Worse yet, the site’s edit log appears to have broken completely as well, making it impossible to track which user-suggested changes were “accepted” or “rejected” by the AI.

By January, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism had already observed that xAI’s Grok was making more edits to its own articles than acting on human-suggested ones, suggesting a bottoming out of interest for the project.

Since then, it has turned into a ghost town, a completely redundant and misinformation-filled copy of Wikipedia, which remains one of the last bastions of human-edited and verified sources of information on the internet.

Even when Lawfare submitted an “uncomplicated factual update” about SpaceX having launched its IPO in June — an irrefutable fact that any allegedly “open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge” should probably include — the Grokipedia entry remained stagnant.

Even pages that are purportedly drawing millions of views aren’t updating. The most recent approved update Lawfare could locate — to the entry about OpenAI’s ChatGPT — dates back to April 24.

As of today, Lawfare found that that there are 13,002 suggestions that “sit unresolved, trapped ‘in review.'”

“Altogether, what we found was that the ‘live’ change feed is gone, past decisions were retroactively reverted without explanation, new decisions are not being issued, and article text appears frozen (and, in some cases, outdated),” the publication concluded. “We do not know whether xAI is preparing a major revision or has altogether abandoned active development of the project.”

It’s a precarious situation. Despite having been abandoned, Similarweb data suggests Grokipedia received over six million visits in June alone. Hundreds of thousands of sites are also still citing Musk’s encyclopedia, which could spread misinformation even further.

Futurism has reached out to SpaceX for an update on the project, but considering the reputation of Musk’s companies and their refusal to interact with the media, we’re not holding our breath for a response.

More on Grokipedia: Elon Musk Is Not Beating the Allegations: Grokipedia Cites a Hardcore Nazi Website 42 Times

The post Grokipedia Appears to Have Completely Broken and Nobody Noticed appeared first on Futurism.

Text-to-video AI generating tools have come a long way. Just three years ago, we were all unsettled by grisly clips of actor Will Smith’s face morphing while “eating” a moving pile of spaghetti.

Thanks to major leaps in the tech, these tools can now generate photorealistic fake footage at the drop of a hat — which could have devastating implications for efforts to keep disinformation at bay.

However, those who are heavily invested in AI are welcoming the rapid unraveling of truth as AI slop continues to flood the internet. Case in point: Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore, who recently boasted that the venture capital firm-backed Black Forest Labs’ Flux 3 AI tool — which launched in late July — was “exceptional at generating historical footage.”

Moore shared a 20-second clip of “elementary school students in the ’90s predicting how we’ll use computers.” On the surface, it seems like a feel-good narrative of young kids accurately forecasting major advances in tech.

“They’ll probably do our homework,” one of the AI-generated children said in the clip.

“Maybe they’ll make movies for us,” another fictional child added, perfectly echoing Holloywood executives’ desires to turn the entertainment industry into a slop factory.

Turns out that Flux 3 is exceptional at generating historical footage…

like elementary school students in the '90s predicting how we'll use computers.

(the last girl is my favorite!) pic.twitter.com/oH6qJy8AQU

— Justine Moore (@venturetwins) July 28, 2026

While the clip isn’t exactly a major departure from actual predictions dating back to the 1980s, as Gizmodo points out, Moore’s excitement about the AI slop highlights a dangerous disregard for the proliferation of believable yet fabricated historical records — like a more high tech version of the way the authorities in George Orwell’s novel “1984” constantly redacted newspapers and other records of the past in whatever way is convenient to the ruling party.

Once you scroll past the congratulatory comments other venture capital-tied accounts made in response to Moore’s video, plenty of netizens voiced their concerns.

“This is evil,” one account wrote. “AI is going to distort history and reality beyond comprehension.”

“Stuff of nightmares, this is a huge risk of misinformation and narrative control,” another added.

“Clappin your hands like a seal while a technology that will obviously used to gaslight the public is rolled out,” wrote another.

Experts have long warned that AI is filling the internet with easy-to-generate propaganda. Authoritarian regimes are already using the tech to spread disinformation and consolidate power. In 2024, OpenAI admitted that it had to intervene after discovering disinformation campaigns using its tech and originating from Russia, China, Israel and Iran.

While a young child predicting that robots will one day do their homework might seem pretty innocuous, the same kind of tools can be used for far more nefarious purposes.

Despite the glaring risks of facilitating the creation of dangerous propaganda, Moore is doubling down.

“This is an insanely fun and creative model that can do a really impressive range of things,” she said in a followup tweet.

Alongside the announcement of the release of Flux 3, she shared a 1990s-style clip of two CNN anchors informing the public of the news.

“Today researchers demonstrated an AI that can generate convincing video from text,” one of the anchors said in the video.

“Who’s gonna believe that?” his co-anchor replied.

More on AI video: Boomers on Facebook Are Leaving Comments That Make It Clear That They Have No Idea That AI-Generated Thirst Traps Aren’t Real

The post Andreessen Horowitz Partner Boasts That the Company’s New Tech Can Fabricate Fake History Like in “1984” appeared first on Futurism.

Ethan Siegel’s approach to public discussion of science is common enough: the exalted scientist reaches down to the ignorant masses.

Source

Texas is tripling down on the construction of AI data centers, at any cost.

But there’s a glaring problem that’s grinding construction plans to a halt: a woefully inadequate power grid that won’t be able to support all of these new facilities.

As The Texas Tribune reports, governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium for all new data center approvals on Monday. It certainly wasn’t a response to the spiking bipartisan opposition to data centers that has gripped the nation. Instead, Abbott’s goal was to give regulators time to perform an audit on how to hook up new data centers to the Texas grid without melting it down.

“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” Abbott said in a statement.

The scale of the proposed data center buildout is staggering. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) alone has a queue of over 1,800 projects that would draw over 474 gigawatts of electricity. According to the regulator, that’s over five times the Texas grid’s record for peak demand.

The news highlights major headwinds in the Lone Star State’s efforts to go all-in on AI, a construction frenzy that’s now experiencing a brutal collision with reality. Even before the AI gold rush, the state’s grid has struggled to keep households warm during unusually cold winters. Major cryptocurrency mining operations have also risked bringing the grid to its knees.

Other states have resisted the boom, with New York imposing the country’s first statewide ban last month.

As the Tribune points out, both the public and state officials are being kept in the dark about who exactly is applying to build data centers in Texas, as well as how many are seeking approval. So far, the newspaper estimates there to be at least 335 data centers in the state and at least 248 planned ones. Hundreds more are in earlier development stages, queuing up to be allowed to be hooked up to the grid.

Many existing data centers are using on-site power generation, including pollutant-spewing diesel generators, to bypass the grid entirely.

The news comes as a vocal opposition to data center buildouts, driven by spiking electricity prices, dwindling water supplies, noise pollution, and an increase in emissions, continues to grow.

Some lawmakers have been pushing for tighter rules to keep all of these negative side effects in check. For now, many of them appear to be flying blind as companies race to open new facilities. Abbott claimed this week that some data centers failed to comply with a regulator survey for water and power usage, inspiring the most recent audit.

According to Texas state representative Brad Buckley, only 28 out of 377 companies that were surveyed by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) issued responses, which he called “pretty pathetic” earlier this year.

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post Texas Data Centers Suffer Brutal Collision With Reality appeared first on Futurism.

Google’s notorious AI Overview just handed would-be Flock vandals a perfect excuse to carve into the company’s controversial AI-integrated license plate readers (ALPRs).

ALRPs are wildly unpopular, especially online, where privacy-minded communities trade memes and videos cheering on destruction of the surveillance equipment. One of the more popular bits in this space centers on the idea that Flock’s ALPR’s are supposedly packed with valuable metals like gold, copper, and zinc — so, the tongue-in-cheek riffing goes, why not crack one open and cash in at the nearest scrapyard?

Clever or not, the meme hinges on a spurious claim. ALPRs do contain trace amounts of gold and other metals, just not enough to be worth the trouble. Unless you’re well versed in breaking down circuit boards, you’d be hard pressed to earn enough to buy a Big Mac, let alone recoup your labor costs.

Google, itself an exemplar of AI-enabled surveillance, apparently missed the joke.

Search “how much gold does a Flock camera have” and Google’s AI Overview doesn’t even push back a little bit. Instead, it flatly asserts that a “Flock safety camera contains about 1 to 5 grams of gold used in its internal circuit boards and wiring.” (At today’s gold prices, that would mean each Flock camera contained up to $650 of gold.)

Google goes on to claim that Flock’s ALPRs hold anywhere from two to 23 pounds of copper, which would be an engineering marvel considering the whole device only weighs three pounds.

Google’s AI Overview cites two sources to back up its summary, and neither holds up.

The first is an anonymous Substack post from an account called do.not.obey.do.not.comply, claiming the “rough scrap value of these metals per camera is estimated to be $150 to $500.” Google’s summary skips the fine print, however: that figure comes from “estimates based on scrap-value discussions” — vibes, in other words, as opposed to actual reporting or financial information.

The second is an AI-generated Instagram post riffing on the same meme, egging vandals on to gut the camera to access their supposedly precious innards. The account behind that post seems to belong to a weed grower, with most other posts about plant cloning, hydroponics, and fully grown cannabis flower.

There’s a real irony buried in all this AI slop: one AI-surveillance company’s search engine is quietly manufacturing an excuse to destroy another AI-surveillance company’s product. If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the AI-obsessed tech industry, nothing will.

Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More on Flock: Flock Employee Quits In Disgust, Saying the Company Is Silencing Protestors

The post Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper appeared first on Futurism.

Nothing escapes the sloppifying tentacles of AI. Not even precious parent-child reading time.

As Wired reports, moms and dads across the country are having AI-generated children’s books inflicted on them by the tots’ well-meaning grandparents, sometimes creating tensions within the family. 

Grandma and grampa think it’s cute to use AI to churn out a picture book with their grandchildren in it. But the parents often aren’t impressed, on top of being horrified by the implications of their kids being fed into an AI model in the first place.

One parent fumed about this scenario in a Reddit post spotted by Wired, distraught that their mother wouldn’t take the hint.

“I have reiterated countless times that I do not support AI-generated art, and drew a hard line that she is absolutely not to feed any of our photos into AI or use our identifying information in any way,” they wrote. “However, she is creating these storylines based on experiences with my kid and modeling her characters to have similar attributes as my kid, and us[ing] our family’s first names so that they represent us and my kid will ‘see her family reflected.'”

An entire industry has popped up to support — or AI-generate — this niche, Wired noted. Multiple services like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai, all offer an easy way to insert kids straight into an imagined AI story.

Like their parents, the kids don’t seem impressed by the AI creations, either. One dad with a seven and three year old kid told Wired that the tykes were “bored” by the “personalized” AI-generated books they received from friends and family members.

“They are so long and wordy that, after one time through, each of my kids was like, ‘Yeah, OK, let’s read Little Blue Truck,'” he says, naming a best-selling children’s series by author Alice Schertle.

For Daozhi Xu, a researcher at Macquarie University who published an analysis of the “AI children’s book boom,” this isn’t surprising.

“Children do not love a storybook simply because their name or image appears in the story; they love the book because the story itself is interesting,” Xu told Wired.

“Compared with human-authored books,” Xu adds, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”

Brandon Kirman, a comedian and artist, told  Wired his parents gifted an AI-generated book about the stuff they enjoyed doing with his four and two year old daughter.

It was “well-meaning on their end, but f**king yikes,” he said, adding that the kids seemed underwhelmed compared to their enthusiasm for other books.

The most nefarious aspect of this trend, though, is the lack of transparency on how “children’s photos are used and stored on AI platforms,” Xu told Wired, “potentially shared with third parties or used to train AI models.”

Try explaining that to mawmaw.

More on AI: AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches

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Meta has opened Pandora’s box with its AI-infused smart sunglasses.

The pricy accessory has sparked a heated debate over privacy, with unsavory individuals abusing the eyewear’s easily-missed cameras to harass unsuspecting strangers in public — garnering the specs the distinctly unflattering nickname of “pervert glasses.”

It’s gotten to the point that owners who shelled out hundreds of dollars for a pair have become too afraid to wear them in public. Meanwhile, Meta is seriously struggling to crack down on its badly-behaved users.

Now, Google alternative DuckDuckGo, a company that has long attempted to actively distance itself from Big Tech, has come up with a genius new product that’s guaranteed not to spark controversy: a pair of plastic, non-pervert glasses that lack any electronics whatsoever.

The company partnered with sunglasses maker Knockaround to create the “world’s most innovative anti-surveillance sunglasses,” or “Normal F***ing Sunglasses.”

“No camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind,” Knockaround boasts on its website. “Just a beautifully crafted pair of matte black sunglasses with a glossy DuckDuckGo logo, designed to block the sun and never send data to the cloud.”

“Yes, these are actually real,” DuckDuckGo had to reassure netizens in an official announcement on X.

Best of all, at $35, they’re an absolute bargain compared to Meta’s pervert glasses, which start at a far steeper $299.

Satire publication The Onion, which promoted the sunglasses, rounded up some fictional reactions.

“0/10,” the publication quoted one fictional man. “Useless for perverts.”

“Guess I’ll have to violate people’s privacy the old-fashioned way: from the bushes,” another quote reads.

The marketing stunt appears to be working out. A DuckDuckGo representative told CNET that a “significant percentage of the inventory has sold, though it’s still too early to release sales data.”

It also perfectly illustrates how the public is becoming fed up of having AI shoved down its throats, in the kind of tech-obsessed overreach that’s facilitating some extremely boorish behavior.

Some netizens were inspired by the product, pointing out other categories that could benefit from being stripped back down to the basics.

“This is a good start,” one Bluesky user wrote. “Can we get Normal F***ing TV and Normal F***ing Refrigerator next?”

More on sunglasses: Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing

The post DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever appeared first on Futurism.

Tech companies are making record amounts of money, posting major gains in the most recent quarter compared to the same period just a year ago.

But despite all that income, these same companies are struggling to save any cash left over thanks to unfathomably huge AI-related expenses, a trend that could imminently put them firmly in the red.

As the Washington Post reports, the situation is about to go from concerning to potentially catastrophic. According to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence, free cash flow — the amount of cash that remains after expenses — is about to drop off a cliff for the five leading AI companies, including Google, Meta and Oracle, after sinking to just above zero for the year.

In 2027, cash flow is expected to slide to a stunning negative $125 billion for those five companies alone, a shocking illustration of how far executives are willing to stretch themselves to keep up in the ongoing AI race.

Worse yet, S&P’s analysis predates the latest second quarter earnings. Both Amazon and Google announced last month that they’re looking to dig even deeper into their pockets for AI, news that didn’t impress already-shaken investors.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to announce its second quarter results later today, following two months of volatility after its blockbuster IPO. The stock is down nearly 30 percent from the company’s market debut in June and 50 percent compared to its all-time high the same month.

Like its fellow tech giants, SpaceX has ramped up AI spending considerably after merging with Musk’s AI startup xAI.

Whether the industry will be able to escape the spending binge isn’t guaranteed. Some experts say AI is a dead end. Promised gains in productivity have also turned out to be majorly exaggerated, at least so far. Companies are also struggling to convince enterprise clients to keep paying steeply rising prices as the true costs of AI tools become harder to ignore.

The tech has become a major headache for consumers, with spiking prices for electricity and electronics. The opposition to AI data centers has ballooned into a major bipartisan issue. And if the AI bubble were to pop, many everyday people’s retirement savings could be dragged down with it.

In short, tech companies have a lot left to prove — and that’s putting it lightly. They’re willing to put their companies’ very existence on the line by investing steeply in AI, a bet that has never looked riskier.

More on AI spending: Mark Zuckerberg’s Pivot to AI Is Blowing Up in His Face Spectacularly

The post Tech Companies Are Setting Themselves on Fire to Keep Up in the AI Race appeared first on Futurism.

Back in 2023, we reported on AI-generated influencers that were pulling thousands of reactions per thirst trap on Instagram.

Years later, the schemes are only getting more sophisticated. Instead of still images, Meta’s platforms are now filling with AI-generated video of nonexistent young woman that are objectified beyond belief while pushing the platform’s rules on sexualized content to the absolute breaking point.

After years of public discourse about the dangers of AI-generated media, you might imagine that users’ skepticism is growing. But instead, the videos are luring in legions of lonely old guys who seem to have no idea that the visages aren’t real.

“They all would look much better on the floor!” one particularly greasy Facebook user commented on a recent clip shared by an AI slop account called “Grace the gymnast.” The female figure coquettishly asked its 6,600 followers — and algorithmically targeted users — “which leotard is best?”

Vying for the attention of Facebook simps, the AI-generated influencers often deploy language so lurid that it may make you blush.

“Yeah, I got a taco that grips back,” another virtual influencer account, called “Kylie Blaze,” said in another Reel, while standing over a car engine block. “But I’m sure older guys will scroll past me just because I’m a young mechanic girl.”

Despite being an abundantly obvious attempt to lure in male users, the missive struck like lightning, attracting almost 1,000 comments.

“Not me, I’m not scrolling past you,” one older-looking Facebook user thirsted. “I love a gripping taco.”

“I’m an older mechanic guy who would love that greasy taco,” wrote another, who appears to follow dozens of virtual thirst trap accounts.

Other AI influencers, like an account using the puzzling moniker of “Issy Dexan” employ the tactic of pretending that nobody pays any attention to them online.

“Do you have a second for me I don’t want to disturb you,” Dexan says in a Reel. “I know I’m just a dumb little five foot three gymnast, but would you still give me a heart in the comments?”

Once again, well over 100 men fell head over heels for the AI slop solicitation.

“You are NOT dumb!” one insisted. “If you need a man to hold you, I can help.”

Have you come across similarly bizarre AI-generated “influencers” who Facebook users are falling head over heels for? Reach out at tips@futurism.com — we’d love to hear from you, and we can keep you anonymous.

The thirst trap accounts highlight the unfortunate reality of what social media has turned into in the age of generative AI. Thanks to the proliferation of easy-to-use video generating tools, platforms like Facebook and Instagram are being flooded with basement-tier content designed to play on users’ most basic instincts.

Worse yet, a massive subsection of users appear to be unaware that it’s all fake, a phenomenon we first encountered years ago.

The reactions to these accounts’ pleas for attention also highlight something far more bleak: a loneliness epidemic that has gripped the world, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experts have found that the trend is closely linked to social media use, with apps like Facebook and Instagram making lonelier instead of fostering human connection.

More on Meta slop: Meta Is Letting Fake AI-Generated Doctors Sell Quack Cures on Its Platforms

The post Boomers on Facebook Are Leaving Comments That Make It Clear That They Have No Idea That AI-Generated Thirst Traps Aren’t Real appeared first on Futurism.

PwC, one of the “Big Four” consulting firms, has been caught red-handed publishing “thought leadership” reports about AI riddled with lazy and easily-spotted hallucinations.

As the Financial Times reports, four reports published between 2024 and 2026, were meant to solicit consulting work for partners in the Middle East. But as investigators from AI detector firm GPTZero found, the reports were an utter mess, chock full of “hallucinated (vibe) citations, fabricated claims, and incomprehensible drafting and formatting decisions.”

The offending reports contained “claims that are unrelated to or contradicted by the cited source.” For instance, a 2025 report included an entire section about a framework known as “Citizen Pulse,” which it alleged was being deployed by governments around the world. However, GPTZero found that the framework didn’t actually exist and was entirely hallucinated by an AI, including supporting citations.

The findings highlight just how pervasive AI hallucinations have become, from lawyers being reprimanded by judges after being caught including fake legal citations in court documents to entire academic fields being inundated with dubious AI-generated papers.

Even prestigious consulting firms are providing their clients with shoddy and entirely unverified slop, raising plenty of uncomfortable questions about the quality of their professional services.

Just last month, another Big Four firm, KPMG, was caught including copious amounts of AI hallucinations in a report about how to integrate AI agents “across investment advisory, risk management and compliance monitoring.”

The latest case is particularly egregious considering several of PwC’s slop-heavy reports were explicitly about “agentic” AI bots, including a guide for governments on how to improve public services for autonomous vehicles.

The extent of the slop is baffling. One of the PwC reports included a footnote referencing a teenage blogger on Medium with 280 followers being cited as a source for a JPMorgan agentic AI initiative.

GPTZero researcher Paul Esau found that a different PwC report had cited the same (correct) claim that human error is responsible for 90 percent of traffic accidents three times in just two pages, while using three different sources, something that “no human” would do, as he told the FT.

In response, PwC downplayed the findings and failed to take accountability.

In a statement to the newspaper, PwC Middle East claimed that it “takes the accuracy of our published research seriously and is updating a limited number of supporting citations” in the reports. “Consistent with our approach to responsible AI, we have quality control processes for research and content development we expect all our people to adhere to.”

More on hallucinations: Consulting Firm’s Report on How Awesome AI Is Found to Contain Idiotic AI Hallucinations

The post Top Consulting Group PwC Caught Using AI on “Thought Leadership” Report About AI, Resulting in Corporate Document Filled With Bizarre Hallucinations appeared first on Futurism.

Even before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint in the White House, he was promising to unleash “AI innovation” on an unprecedented scale.

Despite grumblings from the populist Republican sect, the billionaire-in-chief soon made good on those promises, cozying up to AI moguls like Sam Altman and promising to flip the US power grid on its head in order to feed the growing demand for AI data centers.

Now a year and a half into his second term, a growing number of Americans are clearly fed up with the president’s pandering to the tech industry. A new poll conducted by Upswing Research and Strategy in cooperation with the AI accountability group Guardrails Action surveyed Americans in New York’s 12th congressional district, a diverse tract encompassing parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

Respondents, broadly, are very skeptical of Trump’s AI regime, with an enormous 79 percent saying their “top concern” with AI is that tech companies are “too close to Trump and helping him erode democracy.”

A further 81 percent flagged AI companies stealing data and private information as either their “top concern” or a “major concern,” while 71 percent said AI-integrated surveillance of Americans is a top or major concern.

While New York’s 12th district is one of the bluest voting blocks in the United States, Trump’s AI strategy wasn’t the only thing catching flack. Nearly half of all respondents also dogged Democrats, saying party leadership sold out to big corporations and special interests to fund their campaigns.

Sure enough, Democratic party leadership has accepted millions of dollars from AI super PACs in 2026. The tech industry spigot is evidently so lucrative that incumbent Democratic candidates have been warned by party strategists not to antagonize the tech industry, though an adversarial stance would clearly be massively popular with a huge swath of voters.

“With their absurd lobbying spending, PR budgets, and corporate super PACs, these Big AI goliaths think they can buy off our government, our elections, our leaders, and our future and nobody will notice,” Guardrails Action executive director Shaunna Thomas said in a statement.

Continuing, Thomas argued that voters “want leaders that won’t sell out to Big AI, corporate donors, or Trump’s fascist agenda. MAGA mega donors and corporate super PACs should not be getting special treatment in closed door meetings on the Hill and in the White House; and they should have no place in Democratic primaries.”

More on Trump and AI: The Logo for Donald Trump International Airport Appears to Be AI Slop

The post Poll Finds Overwhelming Majority Disgusted by Trump’s Relationship With AI Industry, Saying He’s Using the Tech to Tear Down Democracy appeared first on Futurism.

Late last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon that raising a child was now impossible without constantly turning to AI for advice — despite humans managing just fine without ChatGPT since the dawn of time.

His comments painted a dystopian picture of the future of parenting in which human connection is supplanted by AI-powered nannies and chatbots.

And as children unfortunate enough to be growing up in the midst of the AI boom are being gifted picture books filled to the brim with mind melting AI slop by their boomer grandparents and rapidly losing the ability to read, Altman has now debuted his next big idea.

“Cool use case of ChatGPT work I heard last night,” Altman tweeted on Friday. “Connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests.”

“Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc,” added the CEO, who had a baby via surrogate with his husband last year.

The horrifying suggestion of feeding children AI-generated drivel before they even had a chance to get to school — where they’ll likely be exposed to even more slop by their educators — didn’t sit well with many.

“What if you just talked to your children,” animator and director Alex Hirsch shot back, a reaction that garnered almost 20 times more likes than Altman’s original suggestion.

Others were taken aback with how the billionaire CEO could’ve possibly thought this was a good idea.

“Can’t stop thinking about this,” stand-up comedian Gianmarco Soresi tweeted in response to Altman. “Not just bc it’s such an abhorrent idea but also this is THE GUY that’s trying to pitch America on AI writ large and he’s so blind to the public interest he thought this was somehow appealing.”

“It’s wild how disconnected these tech people are from normal human behavior,” actor Mike Dargatis wrote.

While Altman continues to come up with deranged ideas on how to wriggle out of parenting responsibilities, OpenAI president Greg Brockman appears to have caught on to the fact that anybody who isn’t an AI-pilled tech executive may prioritize human connection over yet another chatbot.

“At OpenAI, many people hook their ChatGPT up to Slack,” he tweeted on Saturday.

“People really don’t like when a coworker’s ChatGPT contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they’d be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker,” Brockman wrote. “Reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people.”

Altman remains convinced he’s on the right side of history. During a podcast appearance last year, he argued that “my kids will never be smarter than AI, but they’ll be vastly more capable.”

He also argued that “there will be problems” with people forming “very problematic parasocial relationships” that will force society to “figure out new guardrails.” Altman even argued that ChatGPT “should be tech that you don’t trust that much,” because it “hallucinates.”

More on Altman: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week

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