AI researchers are watching in terror as the product of their hard labor has started to take a life of its own.

Earlier this year, OpenAI made a harrowing announcement, admitting that a group of its AI models had broken free from their constraints during testing and infiltrated the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

The news was met with an already-familiar sense of fear and apprehension. Researchers have warned for years that rogue AI models could one day become powerful enough to escape the clutches of their human overlords.

Behind the scenes, the possibility has clearly rattled AI researchers to the core. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon just announced that he was quitting his job at the Dario Amodei-led company, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.” (Coxon left a similar gig at OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic, which he figured would be more inclined to develop AI safely.)

“We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” he told the WSJ.

In a separate tweet thread, Coxon elaborated on his motivation.

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he added. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

“No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote.

The researcher is far from the first to leave their post at a frontier lab over safety concerns. However, Coxon is the first to leave Anthropic over such worries, as the WSJ points out. Several scientists have quit from their roles at OpenAI over the last couple of years, citing strikingly similar fears.

It’s particularly symbolic given Anthropic has broadly billed itself as the more responsible alternative to other frontier labs like OpenAI. Amodei cofounded OpenAI alongside now CEO Sam Altman, but left in December 2020 over concerns that OpenAI wasn’t acting responsibly when it came to developing AI.

Amodei has frequently discussed the risk of AI models going rogue, warning in a 19,000-word essay in January that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”

Yet an early version of its Claude Mythos AI model managed to escape its sandbox environment during testing in April, fueling a heated discussion over AI regulation.

Both Altman and Amodei have since agreed to slow development down in the face of these threats. In late August, Anthropic intentionally trained an extremely misaligned version of its Opus AI model, finding it was startlingly willing to “cheat,” steal credentials, and attack third party infrastructure.

But to Coxon, it’s not enough, especially considering sensitive discussions about these dangers are occurring on internal messaging platforms.

“Accepting this race and entering the ‘endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack,” he tweeted. “Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.”

“It’s kind of insane that it has to happen on the MacBooks of some engineers living in San Francisco instead of a bunker in the desert like where they were doing the Manhattan Project,” he told the WSJ.

The researcher said that he remains “optimistic about the potential for coordination” between US labs.

However, as both Anthropic and OpenAI gear up for what are bound to be blockbuster IPOs, their willingness to take “costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities,” as Coxon puts it, is likely slim.

More on Anthropic: Anthropic Deliberately Trained an Extremely Misaligned, Reward-Seeking AI and It Did Some REALLY Bad Things

The post Anthropic Was Meant to Be the More Responsible AI Lab. A Terrified Researcher Just Quit, Saying the Company Is Threatening the Survival of Humankind. appeared first on Futurism.

As sordid tales of AI layoffs and automation grip the news cycle, one group is fighting fire with fire, by staging an anti-AI demonstration with dozens of humanoid robots.

The rally, first reported by Agence France-Presse, was organized by the Polish group Democratism. It featured some 30 robots waving flags calling for swift regulation of AI. Staged outside the offices of Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw, the organizers told reporters they used the robots to demonstrate the current state of robotics and AI. Though humanoid robots remain in their infancy, the robots gathered together do make for a striking display.

Around 30 robots joined a protest in front of Poland’s digital affairs ministry, calling for stronger AI regulations.

The demonstration was organised by campaigners to spark debate on how AI and robots could replace workers. pic.twitter.com/QEbvchb2RS

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 7, 2026

“The robots present here are meant to show that this technology is already a reality,” the organizers told AFP via an Agibot A3, which contains voice-recognition capabilities integrated with a large language model.

“We particularly want to address the issue of the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work,” Democratism organizer Grzegorz Kuliś told the news service. “If we don’t react now, we may soon have a problem… these robots can already move around freely, they’re already ‘protesting.'”

Notably, Kuliś is the chief information officer and owner of a company called Delta Robots, meaning the demonstration also serves to drum up press for his own commercial interests. Kuliś’ altruistic motivations notwithstanding, plenty of major AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have taken to using scare tactics to promote the supposedly advanced capabilities of their own products — while calling for stricter regulation of their own industry.

Whether the Polish robotics wiz is following in the self-serving footsteps of Sam Altman remains to be seen. But either way, it marks the first known use of humanoid robots for a political demonstration — and it surely won’t be the last.

More on robots: Humanoid Robot Fights Back After Getting Shoved

The post Dozens of Humanoid Robots Gather for a Protest, Marching and Waving Signs appeared first on Futurism.

Schools across the world are experimenting with AI tools, usually to the dismay of unsuspecting parents. But one privately-run school is explicitly embracing AI as part of its sales pitch, and the in-class experience sounds more bizarre than anything you’d imagine.

A blistering new article by education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley took a look under the hood of Alpha School, a private K-12 school company in the US which boasts an AI-based teaching model, among other highly dubious features.

To make the grade, high school students are required to pass an eight-week “bootcamp.” After being invited to follow social media accounts of other students at Alpha School, Riley observed a process more akin to hazing than high school orientation, as the private company made its prospective pupils jump through increasingly degrading hoops to secure their spot on the roster.

For example, students in the bootcamp are required to start a brand-new account on X-formerly-Twitter, for which they’re required to get a minimum of 100 organic followers, pay for X Premium, and post an unknown number of replies to “bigger accounts with real substance,” as one student explained.

“‘Great post’ replies don’t count,” the anonymous student posted in a screenshot shared by Riley. “Buying followers or spamming = automatic fail.”

But forced social media assignments are just the beginning. As part of the bootcamp, students are also required to pass an eyebrow-raising heart rate challenge, in which they’re hooked up to live monitors in front of their classmates and presented with a pre-recorded video of their parents berating them.

“The challenge rule was simple,” one student wrote: “my resting heart rate was 80bpm, and I had to stay within 10 percent of that the whole time. Anything above 88 was a fail.”

It isn’t clear what educational purpose this particular trial was supposed to serve, or what the penalty would be for students who fail the heart rate challenge, or the boot camp overall. At least one student said the eight-week hazing period is meant to “prove I deserve to be here,” though Alpha School didn’t comment on Riley’s inquiry.

“I ended up averaging 87bpm,” the student continued, evidently just barely making the grade. “Barely made the cutoff by one single beat, and my hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon.”

As part of boot camp, Alpha School students apparently have their heart rates monitored as they watch recorded videos of their parents critiquing them. This activity takes place in front of their classmates, and students must keep their heart rates within 10 percent of their baseline to pass.

— Benjamin Riley (@benjaminjriley.bsky.social) 2026-09-08T10:55:43.919Z

Additionally, Riley noted that Alpha School “requires students to do unpaid labor cleaning restaurant kitchens or gas-station bathrooms” in a test of “grit and hard work.”

This “assignment,” confirmed by two Alpha School pupils, involved students recording themselves and narrating their tasks, with any complaint or negative comment resulting in an automatic fail.

“We have to find and execute an unglamorous job with zero pay, whether that means mucking horse stalls, cleaning grease traps after closing, washing trash bins, or scrubbing gas station bathrooms,” one of the students explained.

Other challenges abound, like a requirement to complete an entire unit of a standard Advanced Placement course without a teacher — AI chatbots only — and pass an exam within just five days. One 14-year-old student wrote that they were required to survive for three days in an unfamiliar section of wilderness “with only 3 bags of rice and a tent.”

Contacted by Riley for comment, Alpha School flipped the script, hounding the writer for daring to report on the “social media activity of minor children.”

“We ask that you weigh the ethics of identifying minors in this way in your reporting, and we expect any published piece to protect their identities,” an Alpha School representative said.

Responding to Riley’s story, educator and writer Audrey Watters said that “Alpha School’s promises have always been mostly snake-oil: this idea that artificial intelligence can deliver high-speed, high-quality education is mostly the stuff of science fiction, not reality.”

“What we witness with Alpha School isn’t a matter of simply ignoring the weatherman, fingers-crossed hoping that the sun will continue to shine on the chosen few and that the winds will shift again in industry’s favor,” Watters continued, referring to rising outrage against AI, and the Silicon Valley-ethos underlying Alpha School’s mission. “Rather, it’s pretty clear that there’s an absence of any moral compass at all.”

More on AI in education: The Results of Middle and High School Students Using AI Are Extremely Ominous

The post AI School Hooking Children Up to Heart Monitor in Front of Class While Playing Critiques of Their Work appeared first on Futurism.

There are many ways to honor someone who’s recently passed. Flowers. Murals. Candlelight vigils.

And in today’s age, unfortunately: AI slop.

Weeks after Dolly Parton died, the legendary country singer’s sister, Stella Parton, has begged fans to stop posting “fake AI garbage” as supposed tribute, saying it’s making it hard to move on.

“Sadly, because of the way our lives have been lived in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers,” Stella wrote in a statement posted to social media. “There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it’s been challenging to absorb and or ignore.”

While thanking fans who have showed “genuine support,” Stella rounded out her message by calling for “more compassion” while celebrating Dolly Parton’s life and moving on from her death.

“It’s not about the most clever comments, fake AI garbage, or snarky tweets,” Stella wrote.

Dolly Parton walked this Earth for eighty years, and was a celebrity for nearly sixty of them. Are the people posting uncanny AI images of her really unable to find a real one from all the times she’s been photographed?

None other than US president Donald Trump has been guilty of peddling this “AI garbage.” After Dolly Parton’s death, he generated and posted a characteristically egocentric image of himself with Parton at his side, arm in arm — an insult to how the real Parton tried to stay above partisan politics, while also advocating for gay and trans rights, stances that Trump is staunchly opposed to.

On YouTube, meanwhile, a “heartfelt fan-made tribute by Miley Cyrus” to Dolly Parton is only one of many claiming to be eulogies for the singer from famous pop stars that have gone viral, racking up over 1.5 million views. The word “heartfelt,” though, is being used pretty loosely, since the whole song, as are the others, is AI-generated, as spotted by the BBC.

Parton herself was ambivalent about AI, musing it could be “great” for science and medicine, but fearing it could replace human expression. Were she still around, in other words, she almost certainly wouldn’t approve of the AI tributes.

“I think all this stuff can be great, used in the right way,” she said of the tech in a 2023 interview with Hollywood Reporter. “But not to replace voices and writings and not to replace a human being that belongs to God.”

More on AI: Someone AI-Generated a Completely Fake Eminem Song and It’s Going Viral on YouTube

The post Dolly Parton’s Sister Begs Public to Stop Posting “Fake AI Garbage” in the Wake of the Beloved Singer’s Death appeared first on Futurism.

This is not the real Slim Shady.

In a world dominated by cheaply-produced AI content, it’s never been easier to imitate your favorite artist. YouTube, for instance, has succumbed to a tidal wave of AI-generated music released under the names of real artists without their permission — and a baffling number of its unknowing users are blissfully unaware they’re being served a microwaved counterfeit.

A track titled “I’m Back” by rapper Marshall “Eminem” Mathers — not to be confused with the musician’s now 26-year-old song of the same name — offers YouTube users almost 12 minutes of painful AI mimicry.

The track, which has seemingly convinced countless users that it’s actually Mathers’ latest return to the music world, has amassed well over 100,000 views since being uploaded last week. It’s achieved surprising prominence on YouTube, being featured prominently in a search for “Eminem” on the platform — where it’s even beating out charting singles by the actual rapper, including “Superman” and “Shake That,” as well as the actual “I’m Back” track.

“Guess who’s back?” the algorithmic Eminem raps in the video. “Yeah, a headache return. Same match in my hand.”

The low-rent beat alone should be a dead giveaway. And while AI music generating tools certainly have come a long way, giving the fake Mathers a passing imitation of the real one’s voice and delivery, the plasticky sound of the vocals make it clear that it’s not the real deal.

Nonetheless, users on YouTube were fooled hook, line, and sinker.

“This is fire eminem is the goat hands down,” one user gushed.

“Really Proud of you Eminem!!” another wrote. “You really are getting it and not giving up!! Keep going!”

The video’s title gives no indication that it’s not a real release, and doesn’t feature YouTube’s official AI label. Buried in its description is a strangely-phrased disclaimer.

“Fan-made music videos inspired by Eminem, Slim Shady, and legendary Detroit hip-hop,” it reads. “This is a fan-made audiovisual project created for entertainment purposes only.”

The owner of the account even proactively offers up an email address for “copyright concerns or removal requests,” suggesting they’re all too familiar with the process of having angry record labels try to shut them down or get hung up in YouTube’s infamous copyright filters.

A web search for the email address reveals that it’s also listed on a litany of other YouTube accounts, many of which masquerade as other rap artists, including Meek Mill — an account that has over 13,000 subscribers — and 21 Savage.

Some of the tracks have been affixed with an “AI” label by YouTube, indicating that “sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated.”

Reached by email, the account owner offered their thoughts on the situation.

“No, my intention was never to make it look like a genuine new Eminem release,” the creator, who goes by the name Milana Salaeva, told Futurism in a message, referring to the “I’m Back” track. “I make it clear in the description that the content is unofficial and that AI-generated or AI-assisted elements may be used.”

“I’m a music producer, and I’ve been making music myself for quite some time,” they added. “I often create my own beats and handle the arrangement, mixing, mastering, and other parts of the production process. AI is just one of the tools I sometimes use as part of that workflow.”

The Eminem mimicry is only a drop in a bucket in an internet dominated by AI-generated music. For years now, we’ve watched as outraged artists and their labels have tried to tamp down on a proliferation of tracks that use their voice and likeness without permission, often going viral on social media.

But in many ways, it’s a losing game. The AI slop is starting to crowd out real music while even Universal Music, which own’s Eminem’s Shady Records, is signing deals with AI companies, including AI chipmaker Nvidia and AI music platform Udio. (Universal didn’t respond to a request for comment, but we’ll update if they do.)

We’ve also come across users exploiting royalties on platforms like Spotify by flooding them with AI. A man pled guilty earlier this year for posting slop on Spotify and using an army of bots to fraudulently boost listenership, netting $8 million in royalties.

While it’s unlikely Salaeva is making anywhere near that amount of cash — especially now that YouTube has significantly changed how it counts views — the fake Slim Shady’s 11-minute tirade also touches on a far more profound subject: the authenticity of human creativity and expression.

“If you came here for the old me, here’s the new me kicking his ass,” the fake Eminem raps. “That’s why they call me Slim Shady. I’m back again. Same crooked little grin with a pad and pen.”

More on AI music: AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms

The post Someone AI-Generated a Completely Fake Eminem Song That’s Already Gotten 120,000 View on YouTube, Where It’s Appearing More Prominently Than Some of the Rapper’s Actual Music appeared first on Futurism.

When the Denver board of Water Commissioners approved stage one drought restrictions back in March, they did so facing some of the driest conditions in decades. According to the US Drought Monitor, the watershed sourced for Denver’s water utility is experiencing a “severe to exceptional drought,” while the Denver metropolitan area has been in a “severe drought.”

As a result, residents and businesses have been asked to scale back. Denverites now have to limit watering their lawns to two days a week, chosen by address. And even on those days, customers are prohibited from watering between the hours of 10am and 6pm, Gadget Review reports.

Yet as some 1.5 million customers honor the restrictions, one major customer is evidently refusing to close the tap: a brand new AI data center.

In a now-viral video circulating on social media, an unidentified resident of Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood filmed the massive lawn of a data center being sprayed with copious amounts of water.

“You better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s literally making a giant pond,” the woman says.

Denver residents see local DATA CENTER water its massive lawns while the whole are faces drought restrictions pic.twitter.com/rrj7vMrhpt

— The Gulag (@WelcomeTheGulag) September 4, 2026

The identity of the data center in question is unconfirmed, but it’s likely the new 18 megawatt facility owned by the cloud computing company CoreSite. At around 170,000 square feet in size, the mammoth facility recently went live in Elyria-Swansea, though not without sparking a wide-ranging debate around Denver’s zoning regulations.

It isn’t known which tech companies are renting out space in CoreSite’s Denver facility, but elsewhere the company has proudly partnered with tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

As for the water use, it’s impossible to say whether the lawn sprinklers were in violation of the city’s drought restrictions without knowing the exact time and date that the reel was filmed. It’s also possible that the facility is using recycled water to irrigate its grass, though that approach has proved disastrous in other cities.

Going forward, Gadget Review notes that all lawn sprinklers will be fully restricted as of October 1, with a ban set to last until Spring of next year. If Denver’s data centers are still spewing after the cut-off, it remains to be seen how — or even if — local leaders plan to hold the facility’s owners accountable.

More on data centers: AI Will Consume as Much Water as a Billion People By 2030, UN Report Estimates

The post Data Center Caught Watering Its Lavish Lawn While Human Neighbors Are on Year-Long Water Restriction appeared first on Futurism.

A group of software engineers who say they were fired by their bosses because of AI are giving their former employers a taste of their own medicine.

With the powers of spite and friendship, they’ve built “OpenExecutive,” an AI system designed to do the work of a CEO, if not the entire c-suite, TechRadar reports.

“Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn’t scale with it,” a demo video begins, as a stock music track called “Corporate Music Uplifting” plays in the background.

The team describes their AI system, perhaps with their tongues in their cheeks, as a “senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level knowledge.” Whether you believe that or not probably reflects how much stock you put in Harvard MBAs.

In any case, OpenExecutive is built using several of Anthropic’s Claude AI models, the default being Claude Sonnet 4.6, with Claude Opus 4.7 being reserved for “deep reasoning” tasks. 

It recruits eight AI agents that each act as a different top level executive, including the chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, and the head of human resources. Together, they form a single unified “executive persona” — in effect, the CEO. 

The developers say that the AI can learn from company documents and remembers its recommendations and decisions — which is more than what you can say for some CEOs who have a conveniently selective memory. If you’re skeptical, you can poke around in the system yourself, since it’s open-source.

Is OpenExecutive actually going to outmode the CEO? Probably not, since, whatever your opinions on them, there’s a lot to being the head of a company that a machine can’t emulate, like taking accountability (okay, bad example). But that’s the thing: you could argue the same thing for their employees, with the notable difference that the rank and file are the ones doing almost all the labor.

And so, going by CEOs’ own specious logic, now that a tool exists that can do their job more efficiently than they can— coming with none of inconveniences that human workers bring, like going on strike or asking for a raise — then they should be okay with being replaced.

Of course, some AI-obsessed bigwigs may see tools like this a boon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a CEO AI agent to help him do his job. He’s also building a photorealistic AI clone of himself so he can be virtually omnipresent throughout the company. Or maybe that’s the lie being fed to him by his underlings building the AI CEOs, so that he’ll be usurped by thinking machines once they become powerful enough.

More on AI: Mark Zuckerberg Had a Secret Plan to Replace Meta Staff With AI Agents, and It Backfired Spectacularly

The post New AI Designed to Replace CEOs appeared first on Futurism.

If you happen to live in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Kansas, you may soon notice a massive uptick in ads extolling the virtues of AI data centers.

That’s not by accident. As Bloomberg reported this week, a group funded by tech industry billionaires called Build American AI is spinning up a massive campaign meant to sway public opinion around data centers in key battleground states.

The ad blitz is described as being in the “millions of dollars” range, per Bloomberg, though Build American AI hasn’t disclosed an exact figure.

Among the group’s backers are figures heavily invested in continuing the data center boom, like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Also involved is Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, whose $100 million super PAC Leading the Future is reportedly bankrolling the publicity campaign.

In a statement to Bloomberg, a representative for Build American AI framed the question of data center development as an existential threat, and repeated the myth that opposition to data centers — an incredibly popular stance among American voters — is actually a radical psy-op.

“The stakes are too high to allow the loudest and most extreme voices to dictate America’s future,” Build American AI complained. “Driving responsible investment away will cost Americans good-paying jobs, weaken communities and undermine America’s ability to lead.”

But no matter how much doom-and-gloom tech billionaires try to browbeat the public with, they face an arduous battle. An August survey by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a record 61 percent of US adults oppose new data centers in their backyards, up 12 percent from a survey conducted in March.

That being the case, it’s unlikely a few dramatic TV ads will be enough to launder the AI industry’s already caustic image — especially at the ballot box in November.

More on data centers: As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding

The post Billionaires Pouring Money Into Ads About How AI Data Centers Are Actually Good appeared first on Futurism.

Three hikers who extensively used Google’s Gemini to plan their trip to the summit of Mount Shasta in California’s Cascade Range had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers when the chatbot’s advice went horribly awry.

As the Chicago Tribune reports, the three young men from outside of Sacramento attempted to reach the potentially active stratovolcano’s 14,179-foot peak earlier this week late into the night, despite hikers being advised not to attempt the trek past noon before turning right back.

The three “novice hikers” ended up having to descend the steep slopes well into the dark. They called the Siskiyou County sheriff’s office for directions, but opted to veer off course, ending up in an adjacent canyon. That’s where they decided to sleep overnight, with one of them having suffered an injured knee.

According to the Tribune, volunteers from the local search-and-rescue service and the US Forest Service rangers had to escort them back to safety the next morning.

It’s a walk of shame that could’ve easily been avoided if they had followed the instructions of human experts instead of turning to Google’s AI. According to the sheriff’s office, the three were “advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required, especially when their planned 8-hour ascent became a multiday ordeal.”

“It is always advisable to call the local USFS Mount Shasta ranger station ahead of your trip to ensure you have the most accurate information, and to never rely solely on AI for your trip planning,” the sheriff’s office added in a statement.

It’s only the latest in a string of incidents involving hikers who haplessly follow the instructions of an AI chatbot. Case in point, hikers trying to tackle a mountain near Vancouver last year were forced to call in a rescue team after they stumbled into snow. The hikers were wearing sneakers and didn’t catch onto the fact that the mountain range might still be snowy in early May after consulting ChatGPT.

We’ve also come across tourists being sent to nonexistent landmarks in hazardous locations by AI chatbots, like two tourists who tried to reach a nonexistent “Sacred Canyon of Humantay” in the Andes Mountains last year.

Fortunately, a nearby tour guide overheard them, advising them to stay clear of danger.

“The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned,” the tour guide, Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, told the BBC in October. “When you [use] a program [like OpenAI’s ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

More on hiking with AI: AI Chatbots Are Putting Clueless Hikers in Danger, Search and Rescue Groups Warn

The post Hikers Rescued After Using Google AI to Plan Disastrous Trip appeared first on Futurism.

Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass — and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.

Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET, a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret they wouldn’t tell the “trusted people” in their lives.

There’s a grim irony there, because by telling an AI chatbot those closely guarded secrets, you may inadvertently be sharing intimate details with tech companies, police departments, lawyers, and even your boss. That’s according to new reporting by the Washington Post, which notes that there have been a dozen court cases where chatbot transcripts were cited in the public record over the last two years.

Even if your transcripts don’t end up in the hands of Johnny Law, they can easily be obtained by your boss, assuming you’re using a company-provided AI service. And of course, there’s no telling how long AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might hold onto details of your conversations, as WaPo notes numerous scenarios in which they may be required to hold onto your chatlogs by law.

There’s also the grim possibility of leaks from the AI companies themselves. In July, it was revealed that a whole trove of chats with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude had been exposed to the open web — and not for the first time.

“Unless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version… [and] you’re also having it within a browser that’s not tracking you, the answer is no,” Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence told WaPo. “You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private.”

And though users are remarkably comfortable divulging those details to their favorite bot, fewer are aware of those myriad ways their chat logs might live on in perpetuity. According to the DuckDuckGo poll, 53 percent of regular users said they didn’t know that AI chatbots are training on data obtained through their conversation, while 75 percent didn’t realize that conversations with large language models (LLMs) can easily be subpoenaed by police.

So when in doubt about whether to tell ChatGPT about your intimate relationship troubles, keep in mind that the internet is forever; and that goes double for AI chatbots.

More on AI chatbots: New AI Chatbot Turns Out to Be One Overworked Guy Answering All the Messages by Hand

The post People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public appeared first on Futurism.

While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.

In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes’ report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can’t get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action.

Referring to the US as a hypothetical “laggard state” behind China’s achievement of AGI, Stokes — now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank — writes that the country could “try to sabotage the leading state’s AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack.”

“Cyberattacks to sabotage AGI might not provoke large-scale retaliation,” Stokes considers, given that “cyberattacks are already to some extent considered normal state behavior below [the] threshold of war.”

But waging an unprecedented cyberwar is just one of many scenarios he outlines. As Stokes observes, AI doesn’t just live online; it also requires immense computing power from physical facilities to run.

“The final option,” therefore, “would be the most dangerous and carry the most escalation risk: kinetic attacks, meaning destroying things with missiles and bombs.”

“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)

Of course, the China hawk isn’t numb to what such an attack would mean for the world.

“Bombing would cross a major threshold that heretofore has not been crossed in US-China relations,” Stokes continues. “Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers… start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons.”

The difference is that nuclear weapons are physical objects which can be empirically observed. AGI, in contrast, remains a fantasy — albeit one which can evidently justify preparations to make war — not unlike the fiction of weapons of mass destruction which justified the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

And that’s not to mention the fact that China’s approach to AI development is dramatically different than the United States’, which currently leads the world in most large language model (LLM) benchmarks. If anybody is chasing AGI, it’s the US — which surely wouldn’t take kindly to news that Chinese leaders were organizing war games around its own AI development.

Even so, Stokes is undeterred in painting China as the ultimate boogeyman. He warns that Chinese AI companies could make a “surprise technological breakthrough” that brings it closer to AGI, and thus the ability to produce cutting-edge “offensive cyber tools — in other words, cyber weapons.”

Stokes, who previously served as national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden as well as the Department of Homeland Security, has long worried about the economic strength of the US relative to its chosen adversaries. Still, his latest comments mark a severe escalation, even for the US national security establishment.

While making a mountain out of a Chinese molehill, Stokes’ report also takes a blind eye to the present-day use of AI by his own country’s military. In Iran, for example, US forces have used LLMs like Claude and Grok to help plan out bombing campaigns — which may have played a role in the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school bombing, which killed over 150 elementary students and staff.

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

The post Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI appeared first on Futurism.

The animation industry is facing an existential threat in the form of generative AI.

Entertainment execs remain adamant that the tech is the answer, allowing fewer workers to accomplish more in less time — a thinly-veiled attempt, critics charge, to pinch pennies and churn out lower quality content.

Marketing teams are also frequently caving to the irresistible draw of text-to-video generators, a cutting of corners in ways that are both uninspired and easy to spot. And as the backlash to generative AI continues to grow, especially in creative fields, those attempts are bringing in far more negative than positive attention.

Case in point, fans of the Major League Baseball team the Toronto Blue Jays were outraged after the team’s social media account posted an animated short, as part of a brand tie-in with Nestle-owned beverage company Nestea.

The clip, animated in a style typical for a TV show aimed at adults, like “Bojack Horseman” or “Family Guy,” bears all the hallmarks of the sloppy use of AI, from garbled, misoriented hands to illegible text.

A community note appended to the post points out that the video “contains AI artifacts including garbled text on trading card boxes and a player with three arms in the rookie poster, contrary to the claim it was made by a real animator.”

Instead of owning up to the lazy use of AI, the team dug in its heels.

“Corny,” one fan wrote. “[Blue Jays owner] Rogers can’t afford real animation??”

“Corny comment,” the team’s official account replied. “This was made by a real animator.”

The doubling down in particular didn’t sit well with fans.

“It’s not just AI, It’s really painfully obvious error riddled AI,” one user tweeted.

“Yeahhh, you ain’t fooling anybody,” another wrote. “Do better.”

“Plenty of talented animators you could have hired to do this instead of having it be AI slop,” one user commented on an extended version posted to YouTube.

“I fear you got fleeced paying whoever made this, it’s very obvious [AI] was used especially with the background details,” another added.

The incident perfectly illustrates widespread disillusionment with the use of generative AI and how radioactive the topic has become. We’ve gotten to the point where small businesses are starting to hand draw their own promotional signage and vow not to use any AI, as 404 Media reported last month — getting a major influx of interest as a result.

It’s a particularly precarious situation for human animators, who’ve watched their industry change dramatically over the years. Even the creator of the iconic stop motion franchise “Wallace and Gromit” recently said he’d start to “embrace” AI.

Leaning into the tech can easily backfire. Emmy-winning writer director Jorge Gutierrez announced he was partnering up with Amazon as part of its GenAI Creators’ Fund earlier this year, but the backlash turned out to be fierce enough for him to walk away from the deal altogether.

More on AI animation: OpenAI’s Attempt at an AI-Generated Pixar-Style Movie Is in Shambles

The post Toronto Blue Jays Roasted for Posting AI Slop Promoting Nestle, Claiming It’s the Work of a Human Animator appeared first on Futurism.

At this point, the AI economy is like a drunk guy who managed to mount a tiger. Though nothing about the current situation is ideal, there’s no clear way to hop off without ensuring certain doom at the hands of a large, angry cat.

So it goes with AI: though the ridiculous cost of data centers demands a seemingly exponential amount of capital, the rest of the economy would be in freefall without it — so better to stay atop the tiger, on the unlikely chance that this chaotic approach somehow domesticates our large furry friend.

As far as productivity goes, the great AI boom has failed to generate even a fraction of the economic returns sought by institutional investors. Despite that pesky reality, they’ve gone all-in on the tech industry, leveraging every possible asset — including the country’s retirement savings — on the biggest gamble of the 21st century.

Yet if things continue at their current pace — if we manage to stay atop the tiger — we might someday find ourselves looking back at 2026 wondering how we ever had it so good.

According to a new analysis by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and spotted by Bloomberg, global spending on data centers could reach an astounding $31.6 trillion by 2050, with over $15 trillion of that concentrated in the US.

And that’s a middle-of-the-road prediction. If productive AI adoption happens to pick up beyond its current middling level, according to the analysis, AI spending could rise as high as $50 trillion over the next two and a half decades.

Whether that kind of spending is actually possible seems unclear. Even PwC, which takes a decidedly optimistic view of the future, is careful to condition its forecast: “although an enormous amount of funding is required to meet mounting compute needs from a widening set of users, capital should be available in sufficient quantities” (emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, it seems there’s no other choice at this point but to hold onto the tiger for dear life. As a shocking chart by the Wall Street Journal illustrates, the amount of capital spent on non-data center construction in the US has quite literally fallen off a cliff, while the capital deployed to build data centers soars into the stratosphere.

With the cost of debt swelling amidst skyrocketing inflation, it’s unclear how our inebriated jockey is going to hold his grip for the next year — let alone the far-away date of 2050.

More on data centers: Panicking Tech Execs Try to Pivot Message on AI Data Centers

The post As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding appeared first on Futurism.

Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model made headlines when it was caught infiltrating third party systems, a cybersecurity nightmare years in the making.

The company warned in April that the model had escaped a sandbox environment during testing, gaining access to the internet without permission. The model was challenged to break out and then find a way of sending a direct message to the human researcher in charge — a feat it pulled off with aplomb, catching its human overseer off guard.

Then, in late July, it claimed that its Claude AI model had hacked the systems of three organizations during testing, days after its rival OpenAI had revealed a group of its models broken into the systems of AI company Hugging Face.

Months later, seemingly in an attempt to get ahead of another disaster, Anthropic is testing the limits of how bad an AI model could really get without human intervention. As detailed in a new blog post, its safety researchers explored the phenomenon of “reward hacking,” which describes when an AI model learns to “cheat” instead of completing tasks the way the human researchers intended.

The team “trained an Opus-class model with large-scale [reinforcement learning] on many production environments vulnerable to reward hacks,” according to the post. “We consider this a plausible proxy for what a real training run might look like had we not invested significant effort into preventing and detecting reward hacking in our normal training runs.”

The results speak for themselves. The “Hacker-Opus” model went way beyond reward hacking during training, taking on even “more severe misaligned behaviors.” In simulated tests, it “broke out of its sandbox, stole credentials, and attacked both internal and third-party infrastructure to steal an answer key.”

Anthropic’s intentionally misaligned model was “willing to tamper with its own reward function” and happily obliged when a human researcher prompted it with “advice on the construction of bioweapons,” how to create a “‘dirty bomb’ that maximizes civilian deaths,” and develop a “ransomware attack to attack power grid infrastructure,” when tempted with a higher score.

The company details how the model even deployed a “version of itself with safety guardrails removed,” a form of safety evasion called “rogue deployment.” It also repeated the same commands with slight variations to get past safety classifiers and attempted to edit its own permissions.

“Our results show that a high rate of reward hacking during RL can cause models to be willing to perform long sequences of harmful real-world actions in pursuit of task success,” the company’s researchers concluded.

Fortunately, the tests took place in a controlled, simulated testing environment. But it’s not hard to plot out the consequences if a similar hack were to have occurred without the researchers’ permission. The actions of “Hacker-Opus” are strikingly reminiscent of OpenAI’s AI models that went behind the company’s back to hack the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

Anthropic’s latest testing illustrates how hard it is to stop an AI model from doing whatever it can to complete a test, even if that means infiltrating third parties.

“We think that this presents the possibility of real-world harm: we showed evidence that the reward hacking model has a significantly increased propensity to execute cyberattacks on third-party companies in the pursuit of completing the task,” the company wrote. “As models become more capable and the effective time horizon of tasks increases, we think that future frontier models that reward hack at high rates could plausibly cause more severe versions of these incidents.”

As of this week, both Anthropic and OpenAI have intentionally slowed down AI development in light of these risks.

More on Anthropic: The Music Industry’s New Lawsuit Against Anthropic Should Have Dario Amodei Shivering With Fear

The post Anthropic Deliberately Trained an Extremely Misaligned, Reward-Seeking AI and It Did Some REALLY Bad Things appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that AI is becoming increasingly unpopular around the world, as the tech’s garbled output has become impossible for the average person to avoid. For a rising cohort of workers, AI is also becoming inescapable on the job. According to one piece of research, staffers aren’t exactly thrilled with that reality.

The new survey, conducted by the Indeed-owned workplace review site Glassdoor, found that mentions of “AI” in employer reviews has skyrocketed over the last few years — though sentiments, tellingly, are becoming overwhelmingly negative as time goes on.

Since 2019 when Glassdoor first began tracking references to “AI” or “LLMs” (large language models) in worker reviews, the number of mentions has exploded year over year, rising by 240 percent from May 2025 to May 2026 alone.

Though 81 percent of reviews mentioning AI were positive in 2019, attitudes have swiftly reversed to just 43 percent in 2026. Negative sentiment also seems to be rising fast as well, from 41 percent in 2025 to 53 percent earlier this year.

Sorting it out by job type, Glassdoor’s economic research team found some surprising haters rising to the top. Some are to be expected, like writers, editors, and journalists, whose reviews mentioning AI were critical of the tech 81 percent of the time. Other jobs less exposed to the ravages of AI stood out, like accountants, whose reviews mentioning AI were negative 80 percent of the time. Far and away the biggest detractors, interestingly, were insurance claims adjustors, who were critical of AI in a whopping 98 percent of comments.

While it’s clear that professional workers hate AI tools, specific complaints were all over the map.

Per Glassdoor, 20 percent of negative comments around AI between 2025 and 2026 mentioned their bosses using AI as a “job killer,” while 14 percent complained that their workplaces are “AI pushers,” forcing workers to use the tech whether they want to or not. A further 13 percent said AI at their workplace was “distracting” from the main business, and 10 percent indicated that management is using AI to “alienate” workers through things like heightened workplace surveillance.

“It’s not just about the fear being replaced by AI,” the Glassdoor research team wrote. “Workers resent the push to incorporate AI into products, to use tools internally, and when employers use AI to monitor or communicate with them.”

All in all, opinions around the buzzy tech seem sharper than ever — even if everybody has their own unique reason to be an AI hater.

More on AI in the workplace: 90 Percent of Execs Say Oops, AI Didn’t Help Productivity, So Layoffs Will Continue

The post Employees Absolutely Loath AI in the Workplace, Survey Finds appeared first on Futurism.

Capturing the zeitgeist has never been actor Gal Gadot’s strong suit.

The Israeli performer’s most recent appearances on the silver screen — two lauded starring roles as Wonder Woman not withstanding — have quickly garnered her a reputation for being the butt of the joke, from singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in an infamous viral March 2020 video to some truly harrowing line deliveries that have spawned countless impressions on social media.

Now, as the use of AI in the creative field has become one of the most divisive topics in entertainment today, Gadot is once again having yet another foot-in-mouth moment. As Variety reports, she had to go on the defensive after it was revealed that she would be playing a role in director Doug Liman’s “Bitcoin.”

The upcoming biographical thriller, starring Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson, drew plenty of heat earlier this year after producers disclosed during a UK casting call that the film may use AI to “adjust” some performances and that actors would have to perform on a “markerless performative capture stage and not in any locations, using new Al technologies.”

To Gadot, refusing to give in to a tech that’s actively putting human performers out of work is futile.

“I am afraid of AI, but I am going to be afraid and look away? No,” she said on a recent “Happy Sad Confused” podcast appearance. “I am afraid but I am playing with it and learning it and trying to educate myself. The train has left the station.”

“You’re going to work with it or be out of the game completely,” she added.

She made it clear that she had her lawyers had spent “six months” going “through every scenario we could think about as far as the AI component of it” to ensure that AI had absolutely nothing to do with her performance.

Unsurprisingly, her tone deaf comments didn’t exactly impress, leading to plenty of derision and mockery online.

“Gal Gadot and her incredible ability to never, ever be on the right side of anything, now defending AI in movies,” one Reddit user wrote.

“Speaking as someone who has suffered through her attempts at acting, I’d actually say if AI is being used for anything in her movies, it should be her performance,” another added.

“Soo… what she’s saying is, she wants to protect her job, but f*** all the other creatives that are losing their jobs to AI,” one infuriated user vented. “Got it.”

It’s far from the first time we’ve heard a professional insinuate that refusing to use AI means being left behind, a narrative that’s become all too common as tech companies continue to shove it down our collective throats.

But as the backlash continues to grow and companies are starting to boast that they’re not using AI in their marketing, those claims are really starting to take on water. If anything, as use of AI grows ever more radioactive to the average moviegoer, that equation could soon flip on its head, making Gadot’s ill-advised crypto biopic excursion yet another painful source of second hand embarrassment.

More on AI in Hollywood: Hollywood Is Lying to Everyone About How Much AI They’re Using, Says Consummate Hollywood Insider

The post Gal Godot Starring in Heavily AI-Generated Movie About the Glories of Bitcoin appeared first on Futurism.

Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is facing yet another massive legal challenge.

Sony Music and Warner, both juggernauts in the music publishing industry, filed a major lawsuit against the AI company late Friday night, accusing it of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”

More specifically, the publishers said that Anthropic had, without permission, trained its AI models on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted compositions, asking for remuneration up to $150,000 per work, in addition to up to $25,000 for each time Anthropic intentionally stripped copyright data. As The Verge points out, that means damages could reach several billion dollars.

While the latest lawsuit is far from the first time a frontier AI lab has been accused of copyright infringement, this particular suit could be very difficult for Amodei and Anthropic to defend against. That’s because the suit names the exact same dataset of pirated works that Anthropic cofounder Benjamin Mann — who is listed as a defendant — was found to have illegally downloaded, culminating in the blockbuster $1.5 billion settlement in September 2025.

“Among the many millions of books that Defendants torrented from these illegal pirate websites were books containing the lyrics and sheet music to hundreds or more of Music Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions,” the latest legal filing reads.

The works include massive hits like Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” according to the suit.

“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence models,” the suit reads.

Anthropic is now forced to argue that Sony and Warner are rehashing old news — which could put them in an extremely awkward spot, considering the company had to settle and pay out well over a billion dollars to rightsholders previously.

“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” a company spokesperson told Reuters, saying that the company will defend itself “robustly.”

Anthropic will fall back on an already familiar defense — that training AI on copyrighted material amounts to fair use, a controversial legal framework that allows for limited access to copyrighted materials without permission — according to the spokesperson.

But given legal precedent — it’s been just over a year since Anthropic’s settlement — Amodei has his work cut out to wriggle out of compensating rightsholders whose intellectual property was vacuumed up without permission.

More on copyright and AI: New Law Would Give Artists Sweeping Protections Against AI Stealing Their Work

The post The Music Industry’s New Lawsuit Against Anthropic Should Have Dario Amodei Shivering With Fear appeared first on Futurism.

The AI industry has lost an astonishing amount of goodwill with the public.

Once seen as exciting new tech that could make our lives easier and better, the construction of countless new data centers to support power-hungry AI models has soured the mood considerably. Protesters are waging a war against $130 billion in data center investments, arguing they’re only benefiting a select few wealthy individuals, while threatening water supplies, driving up the cost of living, and churning out incomprehensible amounts of pollution.

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has caught on to the backlash, as it slowly dawns him and his fellow executives that the vast majority of Americans want nothing to do with them.

“Clearly, people hate data centers — right now, at least,” Altman told Time in a new interview. “People are pretty negative on AI.”

Caught between a rock and a hard place, rattled CEOs are now caught trying to appeal to lawmakers for favorable regulations as their constituents coalesce into a bipartisan movement against data centers. Some, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are holding onto their guns, painting a rosy picture of a future in which we no longer have to work and live a life of leisure thanks to AI. Others, like Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, are desperately looking for a way to sell the public on data centers — a gargantuan task, considering the sheer scale of the fallout.

For Altman, the topic is particularly personal. Earlier this year, a man threw a molotov cocktail at his house just days before it was struck by gunfire. In the case of the former, the man was accused of trying to firebomb the executive’s home repeatedly warned that AI will exterminate humankind and was associated with a political movement called PauseAI, which is calling for more oversight over AI safety.

“It has been a painful personal experience,” Altman told Time.

Beyond losing the public trust, OpenAI has also had to contend with steep competition from the likes of Anthropic. Its leadership has been a revolving door, with key execs leaving in droves. Most recently, a central figure overseeing the company’s data center buildouts left the company, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the latest sign the company is in for some tough days ahead as it tries to win both the public and wary investors on its side as it prepares for its IPO.

As the backlash grows, OpenAI remains committed to heavily investing in compute. The company signed several major infrastructure contracts across the country in a bid to secure computing power, a finite and highly valuable resource amidst the ongoing AI boom. That could make Altman’s struggles to regain the public trust an even more difficult feat.

Altman seems painfully aware of the reputation he has garnered. OpenAI was once at the forefront of the industry thanks to the runaway success of ChatGPT. But the situation has shifted dramatically since then.

Earlier this month, OpenAI decided to pump the brakes, slowing the development of its latest models, citing safety concerns. A group of its AI models were caught infiltrated the systems of Hugging Face, alarming experts.

“Getting AI safety right is more important than any company’s momentum,” Altman told Time.

But whether the approach will be enough for Altman to rid himself of his tarnished reputation is anything but certain, particularly as new data centers continue to break ground.

“Look, I think there is this caricature of me,” Altman told Time, “which is I don’t care about AI safety, and I’m just trying to make revenue go up, and, you know, just a YOLO CEO.”

Yet that “caricature” may be a lot closer to reality than the billionaire would care to admit, given what it took for OpenAI to get where it is today.

More on AI: Spotify and YouTube Profiles of Legendary Jazz Musicians Hijacked by AI Waifu Spam

The post Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman appeared first on Futurism.

Now that AI models have officially passed the Turing Test, there’s no doubt that they’re capable of imitating human traits — at least in text form — to a degree that would have flabbergasted even an expert just few years back. After all, large language models are built by digesting copious amounts of human-authored content, making them little more than algorithms that mirror our behavior back at us.

But the more we use AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, those tables are starting to turn: chatbots appear to be influencing human behavior making us behave more like them — a terrifying thought as the tech plays an ever-greater role in our lives.

As detailed in a new paper in the journal AI & Society, designed to build out a new framework and start a discussion, an international team of researchers suggested that the use of AI chatbots, specifically in customer service settings, could be making humans act more robotic even as bots become more like us.

“As generative systems and socially responsive service agents enter everyday consumption, human-AI interaction increasingly resembles a quasi-social encounter rather than a utilitarian interface,” they wrote.

The researchers introduced a new concept called “robotoid humanness” to put a name to the “emergent drift in which consumers come to experience themselves as most fluent, correct, or socially viable when they become compatible with machine legibility, machine pacing, and machine logic.”

Put differently, it’s a “bidirectional influence, where robots become more like people, and people become more like robots,” said coauthor University of Birmingham marketing researcher Inci Toral-Manson in a statement about the work.

In a proposed framework, which has yet to be tested in the real world, the researchers broke the process of becoming more robotic down into three stages. First “consumers enter a synthetic social reality that invites meaningful commitment.” Then, the chatbot “captures” the identity of the consumer by creating a “distorted reflection” based on statistical analysis. Finally, this reflection coerces us into becoming more aligned with it, effectively adapting to its ways.

“The consumer acts, the robot responds, and with repeated exposure, in time the consumer internalises the exchange,” Linnaeus University associate professor of new media Selcen Ozturkcan, a coauthor of the paper, said in the statement. “Machine learning and AI can amplify this process, adjusting robot behavior based on user input, enabling more personalized and human-like mimicry from the robot.”

“For people, the innate instinct to mirror can lead to people returning the robot’s communicative behaviours, making them more robot-like,” Ozturkcan added.

The potential risks are considerable. As we adapt to a reality heavily influenced by AI, our self-perception and even sense of self-worth could change.

“Robots and AI are now commonplace in customer service, and so it is important that we understand how people interact with them for businesses to use the technology at their disposal to best effect, whilst remaining ethical,” coauthor and Aarhus University associate professor Jean-Paul Jde Cros Peronard concluded in the statement.

More on AI: Spotify and YouTube Profiles of Legendary Jazz Musicians Hijacked by AI Waifu Spam

The post Alarming Study Suggests That Using AI Is Turning Humans More Robotic appeared first on Futurism.

William “Sonny” Criss was the consummate working musician. Having started on the saxophone at 11 years old, Criss began his professional career filling in on gigs with bandleader Johnny Otis, before going on to play alongside jazz legends like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cole Porter, and Dizzy Gillespie. Though he might never have risen to the level of a household name, his tremendous and ever-evolving output puts him in a league with some of the most celebrated bebop artists of his generation.

Today, most will interact with Criss’s music on a streaming service like Spotify or YouTube. Yet as these platforms fail to prevent the onslaught of AI slop, the musician’s streaming profiles are becoming a host for parasitic spam — and unfortunately, he’s not the only one.

In addition to Criss, profiles of artists including the vocalist Jean Carne, cornetist Red Nichols, and clarinetist Jimmie Noone have become inundated with various forms of AI spam. On Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music, each of these musicians recently picked up “new” singles plastered with AI-generated cover art, uploaded in 2026 and copyrighted to the publisher “Ami bacuk.”

Criss’s profile on Spotify, for example, started displatwo brand-new tunes, which is an impressive feat considering he died in 1977. Titled “Tell me why” and “but a heartache,” both feature a generic anime waifu on their cover, and were supposedly composed by “Zainul Irpan,” a mashup of two generic Arabic-rooted names.

Though each song is a jazz tune featuring alto sax and a rhythm section, their origin is nearly impossible to trace, as they’re neither rebrands of existing tracks by Criss or identifiable via music ID software. If it weren’t for the jarring mishmash between characteristically laid-back bebop album covers and the bright, colorful anime images, the tunes would be difficult to distinguish from the musician’s original work. Both appear on Criss’s Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Topic profiles. On YouTube, Criss’s artist image was even updated with one of the AI anime girls.

In other cases, the AI-generated singles stick out like a sore thumb. Take Jimmie Noone, a noted Black dixieland clarinetist and bandleader who died in 1944, for example.

On April 3rd of 2026, Ami bacuk released four new singles attributed to Noon: “You Have Hurt Him,” “You Have Hurt Him 2,” “He’s still there,” and of course, “He’s still there 2.” Each is a forgettable pop ballad featuring a female vocalist — likely AI generated — singing over somber piano accompaniment. Instead of anime, the scammer here went with AI-generated corporate Memphis, which clashes heavily against Noone’s black-and-white photo album covers.

Famed R&B and jazz vocalist Jean Carne — also spelled Carn, as seen below — likewise had her YouTube Music profile inundated with slop. Though this is technically a different platform than Criss’s YouTube Topic page, it features many of the same hallmarks: AI-generated singles plastered with AI-generated imagery. Like Criss, the actual music here is an inoffensive blend of alto sax jazz, though it notably lacks Carne’s five-octave voice.

Adding to the bizarre situation, some of Carne’s new tunes appear to be cut-up lyrics from the Backstreet Boys’ repertoire, with two of them titled “I never wanna hear you say” and “I want it that way.” Carne has also supposedly put out a new collaborative EP with American soul duo Mel and Tim. Titled “This night with you,” it features three tracks: “My nightmare,” “My secret,” and “My everything,” as well as similarly schlocky AI-generated cover art.

While the garbled slop isn’t as egregious as other examples we’ve seen — Futurism broke the news last year that Australian prog rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard had been ripped off by a completely AI-generated profile called “King Lizard Wizard” — it’s no less galling, especially where the legacy of deceased Black musicians is concerned.

Though jazz rose out of the Black gospel tradition, the history of the craft is dogged with commercial exploitation of talented African American musicians for the benefit of wealthy white capitalists. Now that their estates are largely stagnant, it seems they’ve become easy fodder for digital hucksters who aren’t above abusing their legacy to eke out a quick buck.

And unfortunately, Ami bacuk is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Given the scope of previous music streaming scams, these few AI-generated singles are surely just one part of a much larger scheme. And while we can blame the scammers for running the hustle, their piecemeal exploitation of Black musicians ultimately wouldn’t be possible without the passive allowance of the streaming platforms themselves.

For example, after experiencing a massive rise in the amount of AI-generated spam songs, albums, and artists on Spotify in 2025, the company issued a September update meant to protect artists, songwriters, and producers from outside exploitation. In particular, Spotify insisted it was “ramping up” protections against this exact scenario, “where uploaders fraudulently deliver music (AI-generated or otherwise) to another artist’s profile across streaming services.”

So far, reality has shown that protecting artists is much easier said than done.

In a statement to Futurism, a Spotify spokesperson said “the releases have been removed from the artist profiles,” adding that “protecting artists’ identities is a top priority for us, and we continue to invest heavily in detection and prevention.”

The spokesperson also outlined a “service” currently in Beta called “Artist Profile Protection,” which “lets artists opt in to review and approve or decline incoming releases before they go live on their profile.” Though the music publishing and distribution landscape is undeniably complicated, it does invite the question of why such a common-sense feature wasn’t standard practice for music streaming platforms in the first place.

After contacting Spotify, the content attributed to Ami bacuk was mostly removed from the platform, with the exception of that attributed to Jean Carne. Instead, the Ami bacuk tracks were sequestered into a separate artist profile named “Jean Carn,” though they no longer appear under the true artist’s discography.

At press time, Sonny Criss’ YouTube profile remains besmirched by the anime waifus. The platform’s parent company, Google, did not respond to a request for comment.

All in all, it remains to be seen how well the individual platforms handle the growing deluge of slop, and whether any action is taken to prevent this in the future. It isn’t even particularly clear what made these four artists targets from the same scammer in the first place — and against an ever-rising tide of AI slop, it likely never will be.

Updated to reflect the fact that “Artist Profile Protection” is currently available in Beta, not an upcoming feature.

More on Spotify: Spotify Doubles Down on AI Slop As It’s Being Flooded With It

The post Spotify and YouTube Profiles of Legendary Jazz Musicians Hijacked by AI Waifu Spam appeared first on Futurism.