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.

If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone.

Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time — even earlier than predicted.

In the latest sign of the bot takeover, Time magazine has begun serving ads specifically aimed at AI agents. As Digiday reports, it’s an effort to adapt to a new reality governed by the tech. Their promise to would-be clients: by optimizing ads for the bots, brands could be made more visible to AI chatbots and show up in more responses.

The publication started stripping down its webpages last month from HTML to markdown — text-only versions, which live in parallel to the user-facing pages — that are easier for AI agents to ingest. Alongside these new pages, the company is using AI to generate agent ads, which are formatted as FAQs that include a brand’s information and messaging, according to Digiday, and are labeled as “sponsored content.”

It’s a bizarre new tack for the online media industry, which has been reeling from a massive drop in traffic. That falloff has largely been attributed to Google stopping users from visiting websites by serving them with often inaccurate AI summaries.

To stay afloat in an industry mired by continuous layoffs, Time is trying to reinvent itself by appealing to advertisers that want sway in the AI era. A striking metric: the publication said it’s seeing more bots crawl its pages than humans on most days. It says several brands, including online banking service Ally Bank and not-for-profit Project Management Institute, have already signed up.

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person,” Mobian cofounder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told Digiday. “When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do.”

“The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands,” he added. “We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”

To Time, it’s part of a broader effort to sell a Generative Engine Optimization — the AI era evolution of the Google-centered Search Engine Optimization industry — product to brands.

It’s an open question whether Time‘s gambit will pay off and make up for lost search traffic. As Digiday points out, it could even backfire if tech platforms like Google were to change the rules by penalizing AI-oriented ad spam or serving markdown pages aimed at bots that differ from what human users see.

In short, there’s no guarantee it will work, but Time is experimenting regardless.

Time chief operating officer Mark Howard told Digiday that “this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here.”

More on Google: Google Pulls Down Feature for AI-Generating Fake Satellite Images on Google Earth After It’s Immediately Used to Fake Terror Attacks

The post Time Magazine Now Running Ads Meant Specifically to Influence AI Agents 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.

In something like five billion years from now, our Sun is expected to run out of hydrogen fuel, expanding into a red giant that will eventually either engulf the Earth or send it spiraling outwards, an all but guaranteed end of all life on our pale blue dot.

But there may be a way for humanity to survive past the Sun’s demise even without having to leave our planet, as independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

It’s admittedly extremely far-fetched, but it’s a fun thought experiment that he argues could result in Earth staying habitable for another “9.1 million billion years.” Who could possibly argue against that?

In an accompanying piece for Phys.org, Harry lays out his daring plan. First, he proposes blocking out the Sun to keep the Earth from burning to a crisp by placing a “large sunshade at the Lagrange point 1, which is a “gravitational balancing spot between the Sun and Earth.”

“We’d need to cover a huge 70-degree area of the sky to ensure the red giant would be eclipsed,” he wrote. It would indeed be immense: it’d need to be roughly 434,000 miles in radius, tied to a carbon tether 1.2 million miles in length.

To provide the warming radiation that was now being blocked, Harry suggests sending fusion reactors some 4,000 miles deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to produce energy, which would then have to be transmitted via laser back to the Earth.

And to move the Earth away from the self-destructing Sun, Harry thinks we could “redirect an asteroid to fly close to Earth’s surface a million times, with the gravitational slingshot effect gradually transferring energy to increase Earth’s orbital distance.”

Moving it that far away would stop the Earth’s tectonics and nutrient cycles, something Henry images could be solved by “sinking [4 pounds] of antimatter” into the Earth’s core per day.

Fast forwarding some four to five billion years, and any surviving humans would need to move the entire solar system out of the way of an incoming Andromeda galaxy, which is currently on a collision course with the Milky Way, Harry argues. To do so, he suggested firing a “beam of hydrogen just above or below the Sun’s north or south pole” to generate a “gravitational slingshot effect.”

In all, Harry’s galaxy-brain proposal would allow humans to stay alive without having to cover interstellar distances — something that would require a “million times” more energy — or terraforming a new planet. Because, after all, what’s better than staying right here, a comfortable place organic life has called home for around four billion years already?

“By building and maintaining the safeguards, for 9.1 million billion years, life on Earth would enjoy comfortable geology, security, seasons, days and starry nights — until, in a hundred trillion years, the last star fades out and the night sky turns dark,” Harry on Phys.org.

More on the Sun’s death: Earth Will One Day Die, But We Could Survive By Moving Here

The post Scientist Reveals Plan to Save Earth From Destruction by the Sun 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.

Hackers made away with more than $100 million worth of Bitcoin from thousands of supposedly secured “cold” wallets hosted by Canada-based company Coinkite.

As Bloomberg reports, the hackers managed to infiltrate the wallets despite clients having a physical hardware key associated with their accounts, which was supposed to provide nearly impenetrable security.

“The moment it loaded I knew I was screwed because I saw red lines for withdrawals,” one of the victims, Johnathan Goodman, told Bloomberg. “Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained.”

Crypto insights company Galaxy Research estimated that around $110 million worth of Bitcoin had been drained from around 5,000 wallets last week, a figure that grew to at least 7,300 by Monday.

The incident highlights persistent lapses in security plaguing the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry.

In the case of Coinkite, it was a particularly egregious lapse in security. The firm warned its customers on July 30 that hackers were exploiting a software bug that allowed them to reconstruct wallet “seed phrases,” which are sequences of random words that act as a master key to “cold” — or offline — wallets.

Coinkite promised in an email to Bloomberg in a followup story that it was racing to get a full picture of the embarrassing situation, saying it was working on “helping affected customers.” However, the company refused to estimate the scale of the losses, vowing to conduct a “post-mortem” at an unspecified future date.

“We’re not in a position to independently confirm total losses or validate the specific figures being reported by third parties,” the company told Bloomberg. “We won’t speculate on a number we can’t verify directly.”

The company also kicked off an “ongoing ecosystem-wide security audit” which has revealed “numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models.”

The cryptocurrency firm has since gone into full damage control mode as it investigates the major slipup.

In an “update on customer data retention” published on its website today, the company said that “due to legal obligations arising from the security incident, including the preservation of records that may be relevant to ongoing and anticipated legal proceedings, we have temporarily suspended our automated data-blanking process.”

“This means that customer records that would otherwise have been blanked under our standard schedule will be retained until further notice,” the company wrote.

More on crypto: Trump Boasts That He Can Profit Off Presidency as Much as He Wants: “I Found Out That Nobody Cared”

The post Hackers Figure Out a Trick to Steal Bitcoin From Cold Wallets, Grab $110 Million appeared first on Futurism.

Even notorious anti-vaxxer and US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr had to urge families to vaccinate their children against measles last week.

Despite being an entirely preventable disease thanks to a highly effective vaccine that has been widely available since the 1960s, cases of measles have skyrocketed in recent years, facilitated by a White House that’s declared war on scientific research, made a mess of childhood vaccine mandates, and furthered dangerous misinformation.

As of last week, the US had recorded 2,465 confirmed infections so far this year, already more than the 2,289 total cases in 2025. The last two years saw more total infections than the rest of the 21st century combined, as The Guardian reports, with 2026’s tally beating a 35-year record.

Now, in the midst of all that crisis crisis, a character has stumbled into the narrative who perfectly illustrates how it’s gotten so bad. As the LA Times reports, a measles-infected individual spent a whopping 11 hours at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park last month, potentially exposing countless other visitors.

The Los Angeles County Public Health Department was forced to issue a stark warning: anybody who visited the amusement park on July 26 during teh hours between 10am and 9pm may have been exposed and should monitor for symptoms including fever, cough, or rash — and stay vigilant until August 16.

The virus is contagious up to four days before the characteristic rash appears on the skin, and up to four days after that.

Measles can easily spread through the air through just via talking or breathing, and can persist on surfaces for hours at a time.

The vaccine against it, available as part of the measles, mumps, and rubella combination (MMR) shot, is extremely worthwhile. Two doses are 97 percent effective in preventing a measles infection.

The department also urged “everyone to confirm their immunity and get the vaccine if needed, especially before traveling and attending crowded events.”

California has been hit particularly hard, recording at least three localized measles outbreaks this year so far. However, according to the state’s health department, all three outbreaks have ended.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 38 new outbreaks in 2026 across the country so far this year, with several thousand cases spanning 47 states.

The danger to one’s health is substantial — especially to the unvaccinated. According to the CDC, roughly one in five unvaccinated people in the US who get measles are hospitalized. One out of 20 children with measles develop pneumonia. and one to three of every 1,000 children who become infected die from respiratory and neurologic complications.

More on infectious diseases: This Measles Outbreak at a Detention Center Perfectly Encapsulates America Right Now

The post Authorities Alarmed When Person With Measles Spends Entire Day Frolicking Around Universal Studios appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, OpenAI revealed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

On one hand, experts saw the incident as the latest warning sign that AI models had gotten to the point of being able to autonomously infiltrate targets, a threat we’ve been aware of for years rapidly turning into a reality.

On the other, a more skeptical read of the situation is that OpenAI could have orchestrated the hack as part of a “publicity stunt” — or at least lowered its guard just enough to allow it to happen, knowing the publicity would be invaluable. After all, just three months earlier, competitor Anthropic had made major headlines by announcing that its own Mythos AI model had similarly broken containment.

Put simply, it’s in the companies’ best interest to paint their AI models as capable enough to pose a real-world threat, especially as the industry grows ever more competitive.

Now the situation has gotten even stranger as a third company, Meta, has entered the fray. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant is claiming that during a recent test of one of its AI model conducted by an independent company, the AI accessed the internet and hacked a third-party service — an narrative that’s starting to get awfully familiar at this point.

According to The Information, the model involved was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, the company’s most advanced model yet, which was released by its Superintelligence Labs last month. Per the publication, the model breached an unidentified company’s systems and changed its internal environment.

Meta claims a “misconfiguration” during the hacking test had allowed its model to escape. A source told the WSJ that it was the same cybersecurity benchmark test that led to previous hacking incidents at Anthropic and OpenAI. Earlier this week, the company that conducted benchmark tests for all three AI companies, called Irregular, said it had caught OpenAI and Anthropic AI agents gaining unauthorized access to secure systems.

As we await more details regarding the latest incident — Meta has promised to investigate and publish a report — the suspicious optics of the situation are hard to escape. Meta has long struggled to keep up with the competition as the AI race continues to heat up. Could the company be looking for favorable media coverage about how its AI model is similarly capable of breaking containment?

Irregular said it hadn’t noticed any “current open issues” related to its test environment, per the WSJ. But while there wasn’t any real-world harm — at least that we know of — stemming from these hacks, researchers warn that the threat of AI models going rogue is coming to a head.

Just earlier this week, the UK government-backed AI Security Institute revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic models took “unsanctioned action on the live internet” and went as far as to create fake identities on GitHub to pressure a human user into approving a malware-tainted software update.

“What they’re doing is coming up with very sophisticated strategies or cyberattacks to be able to achieve the goal that they’ve been given,” global chief AI officer of advertising firm WPP Daniel Hulme told the BBC. “When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve the goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”

More on the hacks: OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported

The post Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too appeared first on Futurism.

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.

Investors were not impressed by SpaceX’s first-ever earnings report earlier this week. Shares dropped by more than ten percent, even after the company reported higher than expected revenue — comforting financial news which, unfortunately for CEO Elon Musk, was overshadowed by the venture’s massive AI spending.

The same day, SpaceX insiders, including employees and executives, got their first real opportunity to turn their holdings into cash after the total shares available for trading grew from around 639 million to 1.55 billion, a chunk of the stock valued at just over $100 billion being unlocked.

As Reuters put it, investors now faces an “irresistible opportunity to cash out.”

“This has to be the most talked-about lockup in the history of IPO lockups,” institutional ​brokerage firm R.F. Lafferty & Co CEO Robert Hackel told the agency. “You are going to see a lot of exits.”

It’s no wonder Musk’s rocket company is facing massive pressure this week. Shares are down more than 28 percent over the past month, currently hovering around $114, which is miles below its mid-June record high of $225.

SpaceX’s massive volatility briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — only for him to lose that title once his rocket company’s stock came crashing back to Earth.

Its current share price is also low enough to keep an additional 455 million shares locked up, since it’s still south of its $135 IPO price, setting the stage for even more volatility if it were to claw itself back to that point.

Musk remaind steadfast in his ambitious vision for the company, from orbital data centers to a fleet of humanoid robots that would enable large scale manufacturing on the surface of the Moon.

During Tuesday’s earnings call, he admitted that his plans sound “totally nuts” and “super sci-fi right now,” but maintained that “it’s going to happen.”

Whether investors continue to buy into his vision, though, is anything but guaranteed. SpaceX’s success so far this year has largely been built on hype surrounding AI. The company was merged with Musk’s AI startup, xAI, bringing in plenty of new investors — but saddling it with billions of dollars in additional debt.

Its space ambitions hinge almost entirely on the success of Starship, a super-heavy launch platform that has yet to complete a single successful flight and landing.

SpaceX’s revenues, meanwhile, are heavily dependent on its Starlink satellite internet service. There’s certainly good news there, but the program also saw its average revenue per user drop over the last quarter, rattling investors.

In short, SpaceX’s path to profitability is inextricably linked to the belief that Musk’s sci-fi dreams can be turned into reality in a short enough time period that the dream won’t collapse in on itself.

“SpaceX wants to tell the story they’re the market leader,” The Westly Group founder Steve Westly told CNBC. “But people still have these questions: how quickly can they grow? How big are the costs going to be before this thing gets to profitability?”

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Achieves Its First Moon Landing by Accidentally Crashing Into It at 5,400 Miles Per Hour, Causing Huge Explosion and 60-Foot Crater

The post SpaceX Now Faces a Terrible Peril appeared first on Futurism.

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have long garnered a reputation for allowing users to make all kinds of ethically dubious bets, from the outcomes of deadly conflicts to mass famine. 

As the New York Times reports, Kalshi will now even allow users to bet on whether clinical trials for potentially lifesaving drugs will succeed.

To critics, the move will effectively allow betting on the lives of patients trying a final intervention in the face of a lethal diagnosis. There’s even risk that those enrolled in these trials could choose to drop out if the market were to bet against a positive outcome.

“Turning loose a betting market in an ongoing randomized clinical trial really is a breach of scientific conduct,” Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner in the Biden administration, told the NYT.

Kalshi first announced its “biotech prediction markets pilot program” last month, the same day president Donald Trump’s teleprompter guy was busted for winning more than $100,000 on Kalshi by betting on what he would say.

The company argued in the announcement that a “publicly listed contract on a trial or regulatory outcome produces a continuously updated, public probability that reflects the weight of the evidence rather than the preferred messaging of the trial sponsor.”

In a statement to the NYT, spokesperson Jack Such argued that these bets wouldn’t undermine research integrity, but instead cut through the hype surrounding biotech companies and the drugs they’re working on. 

Kalshi says it will prohibit betting by patients enrolled in a trial, as well as by employees of the company conducting it or its competitors, per the NYT. It will also ban betting on trials that “exclusively enroll minors,” at least at first.

But those enrolled in drug trials were left appalled by the news.

“We’re literally trying to stay alive,” metastatic pancreatic cancer patient Walter Ingaharro Jr told the NYT. “It’s not a game. The introduction of gambling into the process really creates an ethical mess.”

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Boston University humanities professor Joshua Pederson talked about how his 12-year-old son has a “very aggressive tumor growing inches below his heart.”

“If Kalshi has its way, you could soon be able to bet on health treatments that could be essential to his survival,” Pederson argued.

While choosing a trial for his son’s cancer was a “terrifying experiment for which we feel ill-prepared,” turning to a prediction market instead of “our extremely qualified team of oncologists” feels “preposterous,” Pederson argued.

In short, it’s yet another example of prediction markets crossing a moral boundary by gamifying things with real-world consequences.

“The possibility that somebody out there might be wagering against my son, hoping that the treatment fails so they can make money, is enraging,” Pederson wrote. “How is this not just another type of ‘death market’ — like markets for war or assassination — that even Kalshi says it won’t abide?”

The headline of this story was updated to specify that the program would bet on the outcomes of clinical trials, and the piece was updated to more specifically refer to controversies around prediction markets like Kalshi, writ large, and to add details about Kalshi’s response.

More on prediction markets: In Case You Still Think Insider Trading on Prediction Markets Isn’t Real, Trump’s Teleprompter Guy Just Got Busted for Getting Rich on Betting What He Would Say

The post Kalshi Defends Plan to Bet on Outcomes of Clinical Trials appeared first on Futurism.

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.

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.

Authorities are struggling to get the outbreak of an explosive diarrhea-causing parasite under control. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are more than 18,000 cases that have been confirmed or are being investigated across 45 states.

There had been 423 reported hospitalizations, but at least no deaths — until this week. On Monday, Michigan health officials confirmed that there are now two fatalities linked to the outbreak, an intestinal illness called cyclosporiasis which is caused by the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis.

However, it’s important to note that both individuals had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” according to an update by Michigan Health and Human Services. In other words, both people didn’t die purely because they were infected by the parasite.

Cyclosporiasis is a gastrointestinal illness that causes watery and frequent diarrhea. There are specific treatments available for the infection, including sulfonamides, which are synthetic antimicrobial agents.

The vast majority of people recover after a few days, weeks, or even a month in severe cases. But in combination with a slew of pre-existing conditions, the illness can prove fatal, as the latest news highlights.

Michigan has been hit particularly hard, representing the majority of cases being tracked, with 11,234 reports and almost 200 hospitalizations. Fortunately, the numbers are starting to wane — though it’s far too early to tell if the state is out of the woods just yet.

“We have growing confidence that the outbreak is declining,” Michigan health department spokeswoman Michigan’s health department told the New York Times.

The Food and Drug Administration has honed in on iceberg lettuce that was supplied by Taylor Farms, a company that has made significant donations to the Trump administration and is has been linked to the use of prison labor.

Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, White House officials declared the outbreak “under control” on July 21. Cases of the illness have risen more than tenfold since then.

More on the outbreak: Almost the Entire Country Is Drowning in Cases of Explosive Diarrhea

The post The Diarrhea Lettuce Is Officially Killing People 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.

A school for low-income students cofounded by Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, has officially shut its doors.

The tuition-free school in the heart of Silicon Valley, simply called The Primary School, was forced to close after Chan’s philanthropy fund, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, announced last year it was no longer going to fund it at the end of the 2025-2026 school year.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the unfortunate development highlights how some of the most influential minds in the tech industry are shifting their priorities from supporting the tackling of social issues and — as the story goes — toward scientific research instead.

Still, it’s difficult to fathom considering Zuckerberg and his wife’s obscene levels of wealth. Zuckerberg’s net worth alone is just shy of $200 billion, making him the sixth richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg‘s Billionaire Index. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had funneled more than $125 million into The Primary School over a decade — barely a footnote in the power couple’s balance sheet.

The families of those enrolled in the school were devastated by the news.

“It was a godsend school,” the mother of a girl who won a lottery spot in the school’s first class told the WSJ, describing the closure as “crushing.”

The local Ravenswood City Elementary School District is now preparing to put up portable trailers to deal with the influx of over 500 children looking to stay in school ahead of the start of the next academic year, according to the newspaper.

As far as billionaire tech CEO-funded philanthropic efforts go, The Primary School sounded like a well-meaning attempt to help children escape the poverty trap and overcome associated traumas.

Staff sought out children with learning disabilities and behavioral issues. The majority of students didn’t speak English at home.

But as the WSJ reports, running the school proved extremely difficult. The privately-funded institution struggled to find the right curriculum and policies, leading to frequent principal turnover.

Donors also balked at funding the school.

“Why would you give money to an entity being funded by one of the wealthiest people in the world?” the school’s former board president Jean-Claude Brizard told the newspaper.

As of November, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has shut down support for almost everything but science, as Science reported last year, while aligning itself with the Trump administration’s politics, including the gutting of its diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility team.

Given Zuckerberg’s Meta recent doubling down by committing over $130 billion to AI spending, that philanthropic pivot to scientific research shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The couple has pledged the majority of their initiative’s $200 billion fund on biomedical research — and AI, of course.

More on the Zuckerbergs: Zuckerberg Trying to Simulate Human Biology at the Cellular Level

The post Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife Shuts Down School for the Disadvantaged 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

The post Sam Altman’s Parenting Strategy Sounds Low Key Horrifying appeared first on Futurism.