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

But AI companies are interested in neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI is upending the way voters take part in the democratic process. The worst part? You might not even know you’ve been affected.

In the county of St. Charles, Missouri, a race for county executive has devolved into slop-slinging of the AI variety. According to local channel First Alert 4, conservative candidate Jason Law is flooding the airwaves with an AI-generated video depicting his two rivals Steve Ehlmann and Bill Eigel as co-conspirators in a nefarious plot against voters.

“Steve, wake up, I’ve been telling people for 12 years that I’ll cut their personal property taxes, and they still believe me” the AI-Eigel declares in a generic AI-generated voice, rubbing his palms in glee.

“Property taxes have risen by 300 percent over the past 20 years and I just tell people there’s nothing I can do about it!” a grinning Steve Ehlmann replies.

Near the end of the ad, Law himself appears — also as an AI-approximation, with a stock text-to-speech voice — to declare that “we need a fresh start.”

Per First Alert, Law says the noxious campaign ad was inspired by a similar AI-generated smearjob by conservative reality TV star-turned Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt. Those ads take a similar tone, painting a sloppified Pratt as a superhero, and his opponent as a cartoon villain.

These are far from the only examples. Back in May, similar deepfake attack ads emerged in the race between incumbent Republican congressman Thomas Massie and the Trump-backed candidate Ed Gallrein. Unlike the local races in Missouri and California, both candidates were the targets of AI commercials, which were funded by independent PACs, rather than the candidates directly.

In Massie’s case, AI deepfake ads depicted the long-time representative in fake CCTV footage checking into a hotel with progressive Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, declaring “Thomas Massie caught in a throuple!”

During the race, Massie raged that “it’s always the losing campaign that does the crazy crap,” adding that it’s “frankly an insult to older voters who don’t know that AI exists,” Louisville Public Media reported.

Unfortunately for Massie, the ads — not to mention the Trump endorsement — appear to have worked out in Gallrein’s favor, as the challenger triumphed with 54 percent of the vote.

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The post Voters Are Being Inundated by a Barrage of AI-Generated Election Ads appeared first on Futurism.

It’s become strangely difficult to attend a work meeting without the presence of an AI recording tool that’s carefully jotting down what every single participant is saying.

Some people in tech circles are taking the trend to perverse ends by recording every single conversation they’re having — not just at work but in their private lives as well, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

Worse yet, many of them aren’t even asking for permission first, which could technically put them at risk of violating state laws, depending on where the conversation is taking place.

It’s a bizarre extension of our newfound obsession with keeping track of every single thing that’s being said around us, a trend that could have severe privacy implications, from people being shocked to find their therapist has been recording them to wearers of Meta’s AI glasses harassing strangers.

Apps like the transcription service Granola have seen a steady rise in popularity. AI tech executives are growing increasingly reliant on these tools — sometimes to an astonishing degree.

“In the office, we actually get really bummed when we realize we’re having a conversation and we forgot to turn on Granola,” AI marketing platform Flint CEO and cofounder Michelle Lim told the WSJ. “I wish there was a Granola in every room.”

Lim admitted that she simply assumed she was being recorded, noting that being asked “almost kills the mood.”

Others, like AI sales company Yuzu Labs founder Emmie Chang, go even further. Chang admitted to the WSJ that she records most of her first dates by putting her phone on the table or chair. Afterwards, she asks Anthropic’s Claude how the date went, wondering if she could be “more engaging or empathetic.”

It’s a baffling new trend that highlights how pervasive AI and surveillance have become in our daily lives, particularly for those working in tech. And while researchers are still investigating the effects on our lives, there are reasons to be concerned. For instance, experts warn of the dangers of “cognitive offloading” through the extensive use of AI chatbots, a trend that can have corrosive effects on our mental abilities.

Then there are the glaring privacy implications of recording every single conversation, not just with colleagues but with strangers on dates. Unlike Zoom’s built-in recording feature, which announces itself with a robotic voice, Granola does not make its presence known at all.

In the workplace, workers have little recourse, and will likely have to accept being recorded, as privacy law expert Alex Alben told the WSJ.

Nonetheless, “companies need to be careful about technologies that are automatically recording, especially when it involves third parties,” he said.

Other experts put it a lot more bluntly, pointing out the risk of leaking confidential personnel information, the possibility of remarks that could later be interpreted as incriminating, or even trade secrets.

“There are huge risks to the organization on AI note takers,” human resources firm HRCI executive Amy Dufrane told the Associated Press earlier this month. “I don’t think companies should use it at all.”

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By now, it should be pretty clear that the corporate executives of the world aren’t exactly into AI because they think it’ll cure cancer.

They’re making a different calculation, motivated by simple economics: pretty soon, they believe, AI will be efficient enough to do many or even all workers’ job, removing employee payroll from the corporate equation. That means more money for those at the top, and less time dealing with pesky annoyances like labor rights and health coverage.

For that to happen would take a series of technological miracles — as a recent study out of the University of California Berkeley shows, today’s cutting-edge AI tools are still incapable of completing the bulk of real-world tasks at a level comparable to humans.

Still, it’s clear executives are hungry for the kind of cost-savings AI could provide. Luckily, a new AI site offers a solution: OverpAId, a distinctly tongue-in-cheek project that facetiously claims to offer an AI-powered replacement for your company’s CEO — or as the site’s landing page puts it, the “world’s first Chief Executive Replacement Engine”.

“OverpAId is an Artificial Intelligence built from the ground up to do your CEO’s entire job — strategy, ‘vision,’ motivational all-hands emails — better, faster, and without ever once asking the board for a bigger jet,” the site exclaims.

The parodic offering claims to offer helpful features to help your team transition from an expensive human executive to a cheap AI equivalent. These include a “jargon bingo,” an AI-hype press release translator, a “talk to a real executive” chat widget (currently busted), and an ROI calculator that helps users distribute CEO pay packages equally across every remaining employee.

It hammers that point repeatedly, pointing out the fact that the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio is an astonishing 290 to 1 at large public companies (which is actually true, incredibly.)

While OverpAId is clearly a piece of satire, it gets at something very real: the fact that CEO pay has grown at an astonishing rate, while rank-and-file wages and salaries have crawled at a snails pace, in many cases not even keeping pace with inflation.

“Somewhere along the way, the story became: pay the person at the top enough, and the value will trickle down to everyone else,” the site explains. There’s just one problem with that telling: “It hasn’t. It doesn’t. It never really did.”

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Amazon now requires sellers to label photorealistic AI-generated people in product images to comply with New York's synthetic performer disclosure law.

Publishers have watched in horror as Google continues to double down on AI features that discourage users from actually clicking on links — a once-steady source of readership that’s causing a crisis in the media now that the search engine is cutting it off.

The situation has become so dire that some publications are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating.

According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People, and Reuters are all reexamining their relationship with Google. Some are debating whether to continue to work with the tech giant at all.

“This is existential for some categories of publishers,” media consulting firm media consulting firm DJB Strategies CEO David Buttle told the WSJ. “They are looking at more radical things.”

Even Reddit executives are reevaluating the company’s $60 million-a-year contract that allows Google to train its AI models on user-submitted content on the platform. They’ve similarly watched as Google’s AI features discourage users from navigating to Reddit.

Last month, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince noticed that automated bot traffic had overtaken human traffic for the first time in the internet’s history, a sobering turning point and concerning inflection point for anyone in the attention economy.

USA Today has seen its traffic from US users drop by almost half over the last year, leading executives to ponder whether to cut off Google’s access entirely.

“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” USA Today CEO Mike Reed told the WSJ.

Naturally, Google doesn’t see itself as the one to blame, arguing that it’s still sending “billions of clicks to the web every week” and helping “creators and publishers grow their audiences” with the help of AI, as a spokesperson told the newspaper.

Those reassurances, however, are seemingly falling on deaf ears. Beyond pondering whether to cut Google off, other publishers have resorted to suing the company, accusing it of illegally rehashing their intellectual property via AI summaries.

It’s an extremely undesirable position for publishers. By severing ties with the search giant, they could face even steeper declines in traffic. At the same time, there’s seemingly little to gain from having Google’s AIs crawl their content — and in the long term, it could guarantee their destruction.

In some ways, Google is biting the hand that feeds it. AI companies are desperately trying to find new training data that doesn’t include AI-generated slop. By actively discouraging users from visiting websites that source new information, the company is cutting off a fresh supply of the data it so desperately needs.

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Over four months after the deadly US bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Southern Iran, which killed 120 children and dozens of teachers and parents, questions still remain over how the horror unfolded.

All available evidence suggests that the US military was behind the bloodbath. Images that show fragments of US Tomahawk missiles on the site, leaked commentary from military analysts, and operational profiles of the military forces involved in the region make a pretty air-tight case that the Pentagon bears responsibility for the horrific attacks.

Adding to the mountain of evidence is a new in-depth analysis conducted by Sky News and the publication Forensic Architecture. Reconstructing the school as a 3D model, the team verified that the site had been a school for years prior to the attack, refuting the claim that old intel was they key factor behind the attack.

US president Donald Trump isn’t satisfied with that answer. Speaking to Fox News anchor Trey Yingst, Trump avoided saying whether he would release the findings of the investigation, saying he still has to “speak to the generals.”

“Y’know, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to be able to say what happened there,” Trump opined.

“There are images from this site that show fragments that appear to be from US Tomahawk missiles,” Yingst gently prompts. “Is it possible that old intelligence, or a mistake from a very active time in the war lead to this event?”

“It is,” Trump replied, “but it’s also possible that those images you have are AI generated. I know you’re waiting for a conclusive report but I don’t think there can be a conclusive report.”

The dodge is a perfect illustration of the deleterious effects of AI on civic society: not only can peddlers of disinformation use the technology to fabricate evidence, but dishonest power players can point to the existence of AI to discount actual documentation of misbehavior or crimes.

That Trump refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of his war on Iran is hardly shocking at this point, but the pressure is mounting.

In a recent statement, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International Amanda Klasing wrote that the “public and the victims’ families must have transparency and accountability, and families must get truth, justice and reparations.”

“President Trump has given contradictory statements, the Pentagon is stonewalling Congress, and lawmakers and the public are growing increasingly frustrated by the rote response of secretary Hegseth and others that the incident is still under investigation,” Klasing continued. “What we do know is this: the US military was responsible for killing over 150 people in an attack with precision-guided Tomahawk missiles on a school packed with children.”

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The post Trump Says Images of the Iranian Elementary School His Lackeys Obliterated Could Be “AI Generated” appeared first on Futurism.

AI companies are pouring untold billions of dollars into enormous data centers in their efforts to sustain increasingly complex and resource-intensive AI models.

It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.

Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, highlighting how precarious the AI industry’s steep investment in AI has become, and inspiring comparisons to energy company Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2001 because of similar debts hidden behind shell companies. Like Enron, they’re using special purpose vehicles, or off-balance sheet arrangements such as legally distinct subsidiaries, as a way to make their financial reporting look healthier than it actually is — often a glaring sign that something is deeply amiss behind the scenes.

“The accounting treatment itself is in fashion,” technical accounting consultant Tom Selling told Bloomberg. “But what if one of these companies was a house of cards and was propping itself up with this accounting treatment? To me, that’s the risk.”

Experts continue to warn of an AI bubble, noting the enormous and widening gulf between company valuations and their comparatively measly profits. The latest news will do little to quiet critics who say the situation is more dire than the companies’ official balance sheets suggest.

To keep up with the ongoing AI race, tech giants are committing vast sums to build out large-scale data center projects, a long-term bet that may — or may not — pay off. They’re also selling new shares to raise new funds, as Nikkei reports, which could lead to equity dilution and a drop in investor confidence.

That could make them even more vulnerable if the AI bubble does pop, or the industry fails to generate enough demand to justify the data center construction frenzy.

The pressure is on: four of the five companies Nikkei analyzed are set to report second quarter earnings in the coming days and weeks. We’ll be watching.

More on the AI bubble: There’s a Gigantic Problem at the Heart of the AI Industry That Could Cause the Whole Thing to Collapse

The post AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt appeared first on Futurism.

A Chinese open-weight AI model called Kimi K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI, has sent a shiver down the spines of AI tech executives. The powerful, 2.8 trillion-parameter model impressed with its competence, igniting a war with far more expensive alternatives being offered by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Top executives at both companies are sounding alarm, the Wall Street Journal reports, watching as Chinese open-weight models are rapidly catching up to their most powerful proprietary models. As a result, they’re begging the Trump administration to step in and protect them from the influx of cheaper alternatives, which could undermine their increasingly desperate attempts to attract new customers.

Dean Ball, who joined OpenAI as the head of strategic futures after helping shape AI policy for the Trump administration, was seemingly rattled, arguing that allowing Chinese open-weight models to take over would result in “AI communism” in a controversial and widely disputed tweet.

He also suggested the Trump administration would inject enough “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” through “regulatory risk” that would eventually deter hyperscalers from using Chinese AI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also watched as China continues to catch up in the ongoing race, telling CNBC in February that the progress the country’s tech sector had made was “remarkable” and “amazingly fast.”

Altman has also signaled that he’s prepared to slash prices for the company’s latest AI models. While he didn’t directly mention the skyrocketing popularity of cheaper AI alternatives from China, Altman tweeted last week that OpenAI would be “happy to deliver” its latest flagship GPT-5.6 Sol AI at “one-quarter of the price.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also has a long track record of begging the US to stop selling AI chips to China, likening Nvidia selling its hardware to the country to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and then bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing and so the US is ‘winning,'” in a lengthy January essay.

In June, Amodei called capable open-weight models a serious concern, arguing that the US government should have the power to block AI developers from deploying risky AIs.

The incursion isn’t just coming from China. As the WSJ notes, US-based AI labs are starting to switch to open-weight models. Just last week, former OpenAI exec Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Lab released its first model, which happens to be open-weight.

The trend could put AI companies in a bind: how can they keep financing their enormous AI data center projects and advanced model development if potential customers start switching to heavily subsidized or free AI models that provide good-enough or even frontier capabilities?

Early signs of an imminent exodus are certainly there. Moonlight AI was forced to pause new subscriptions to its blockbuster model just 48 hours after launch due to overwhelming demand, pushing its servers to capacity.

It’s a particularly precarious moment as frontier labs continue to hike up prices to start covering at least some of their unprecedented spending, despite growing fears over an AI bubble. Put simply, why shell out for Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex when there’s a far cheaper and highly customizable option out there?

Markets are seemingly painfully aware of the dynamic. The Nasdaq composite had a bruising couple of days following the announcement of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 last week, only regaining some ground on Monday.

It’s a familiar refrain. In January 2025, DeepSeek’s V3 open-weight large language model threw a tech-heavy stock market into chaos, offering the same capabilities as other alternatives while requiring only a fraction of the computing power.

All eyes are now on the Trump administration. Anthropic has ramped up the pressure on individual states to regulate AI faster in light of little momentum on Capitol Hill. Critics, most notably Trump’s AI czar David Sacks, have accused the company of using fear-mongering to shut out smaller AI labs, and possibly Chinese companies as well.

Nobody knows whether federal regulations are on the horizon. A White House official told the WSJ that the Trump administration remains committed to promoting America’s open-source ecosystem and strengthening its security.

In other words, it’s leaving all cards on the table for now — a reality that has AI tech executives spooked as Chinese companies are eating their lunch.

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The post It’s Official: AI Execs Are Quaking in Their Boots appeared first on Futurism.

Little love has been lost between writers and the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have ripped off their life’s work without permission, incurring countless copyright infringement lawsuits in the process — while creating a product that’s often putting them out of work.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when renowned author Dave Eggers was invited to OpenAI’s headquarters in the Bay Area, he had some choice words for the roughly 200 attendees. As he recalled in an interview with the Financial Times, Eggers was invited after he excoriated CEO Sam Altman for gushing over an AI-generated short story.

In March 2025, Altman said he was “really struck” by a short story about AI and grief — which was widely panned as being “just trash” and an “atrocious piece of writing” that would’ve gotten a first-year creative writing student a failing grade.

Eggers was also unimpressed, telling the FT he thought the story was “pastiche nonsense” and wondered “just how gullible and ridiculous you’d have to be to think that there would ever be an AI novel that anybody would read?”

In an apparent attempt to prove him wrong, OpenAI invited him to talk to its workers — and Eggers relished the opportunity to set the record straight.

He told the staff that the “effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic,” adding that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”

“If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write,” he added. “And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.”

Eggers also had some advice for an employee who said they had used ChatGPT to write a poem: to touch grass.

“So why don’t you leave your house, leave the screen, meet some people, get yourself in a writing group,” he told the staffer. “Another human might be very encouraging and help you express yourself authentically.”

“It ended up being a very poignant hour,” Eggers concluded.

The best-selling author’s comments are cathartic, to say the least. Eggers is one of many prominent authors, who’ve spoken out against the use of AI, from Lev Grossman to Kazuo Ishiguro.

For years now, writers have watched as large language model-based tools have made a mockery of their work. The advent of AI chatbots has also minted an entirely new class of people who refer themselves as “novelists,” churning out dozens of “books” made up entirely of AI slop that choke out real writing in the marketplace. Amazon in particular has been flooded with meaningless self-published AI drivel.

That’s not all. Students are rapidly losing the ability to read, having long turned to AI tools to write essays and other assignments.

Teachers are returning to the use of pen and paper, banning laptops and smartphones amidst an AI cheating crisis. Literary magazines are no longer accepting writer submissions thanks to the rampant proliferation of AI slop.

Even prominent publisher Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishing houses in the US, was forced to pull a horror novel earlier this year after the author was accused of using AI to help write the book.

In short, Eggers was entirely within his right to call out OpenAI staffers for enabling the rapid cognitive deterioration of an entire generation, tech that has turned educators into involuntary AI detectives, and budding writers into prompt engineers.

At least the author enjoyed being given the opportunity to send an important message to the people monetizing the whole mess.

“I had a ball,” Eggers told the FT.

More on AI slop: Restaurant in Major Trouble After Posting AI Pictures of “Its Food”

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While military brass and corporate bigwigs race to hand every decision to an AI chatbot, one major American institution is drawing a bright white chalkline in the dirt.

According to reporting by the New York Times’ Athletic, the use of AI in major league dugouts will no longer be tolerated, after concerns were raised that the tools were giving some teams an unfair advantage.

Speaking to the publication, anonymous baseball insiders estimated that roughly a third of all major league teams had already been using AI chatbots installed on dugout iPads to give advice on in-game strategy.

Per a memo sent out from the MLB commissioner’s office and viewed by the Athletic, baseball teams were using iPads to access AI chatbots, in a way that went “beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches.”

It’s a major policy adjustment, as the MLB rarely issues sweeping rule changes mid-season, preferring instead to wait until the offseason. Arguably the most recent analogy came in early summer of 2021, when the league mandated in-game glove checks as part of its crackdown on foreign substances on the pitcher’s mound.

All told, the league is probably tilting at windmills. In lab settings, which lack the chaos and pressure of a real-world batting lineup, AI chatbots have flunked pretty much every test of sports analytics and prediction.

As one major study found in June, though AI can do basic tasks with some degree of accuracy — identifying which basketball players are on the court at a given time, for example — the tech is horrible at prediction and analytics tasks, like anticipating what the final score will be or accurately explaining why certain plays happened the way they did.

That being the case, it’s unclear exactly how much of an advantage AI gave ball clubs that used it. While ChatGPT could maybe predict the first pitch or two thrown during your next at-bat, or recommend which reliever to sub in when the fatigued left-handed starter loads the bases, it surely isn’t predicting full pitch sequences or making personnel suggestions with any meaningful accuracy.

Still, it’s probably just as well to see the tech leave the dug-out for good — a welcome sign that, in the MLB at least, human ingenuity is still the name of the game.

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Does anyone expect the food they’re ordering to look exactly like it does on the menu? Of course not. But we do expect that the pictures we’re seeing should at least be somewhat based in this reality.

On this issue, the customers have spoken. In San Francisco, a new restaurant has incurred the ire of hangry locals for using outlandish AI-generated images of its “food,” San Francisco Gate reports, putting a fresh-from-the-oven twist on false advertising. The backlash is so heated that the eatery, Grind & Unwind, was even defaced with graffiti.

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

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

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

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

Yum, slop
byu/Grizzizzle insanfrancisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Earlier this summer, socialite Kylie Jenner appeared in a series of ads promoting Meta’s controversial smart glasses.

The camera-adorned and AI-enabled spectacles, a collaboration with global eyewear juggernaut Ray-Ban, have been at the center of a discussion over personal privacy and surveillance so heated that many owners are now too afraid to be seen in public while wearing them.

Critics say they’re far too easily abused to prey on unsuspecting victims, even garnering them the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses.” Wired also found in June that Meta silently added a facial recognition system to its glasses’ software — yet another privacy nightmare in the making — but hadn’t activated it.

Now, an inventive group of activists calling themselves Everyone Hates Elon took matters into their own hands by transforming a Meta AI glasses ad featuring Jenner into a cleverly subversive statement. Specifically, they seem to have added a lenticular overlay on top of a London bus stop ad that transforms her visage into a terrifying bug-eyed monster — but only when seen from a specific angle.

A lenticular spoof ad near Meta’s London headquarters transforms Kylie Jenner’s Meta AI smart glasses campaign into a surveillance warning, depending on the viewing angle.
byu/PrimedGold inDamnthatsinteresting

As a video that’s making its rounds on social media demonstrates, standing right in front of the ad shows Jenner’s face as the black-and-white demon, with a bold type caption that reads: “We’re always watching.”

Users were quick to point out that the addition was referencing John Carpenter’s 1988 dystopian sci-fi epic “They Live,” in which the protagonist finds a pair of sunglasses that reveal subliminal messages hidden all over the world, in billboards and other media. They also expose a race of bug-eyed aliens that masquerade as humans, much like Jenner in the tampered-with Meta ad.

“Meta has spent years tracking us online,” an Everyone Hates Elon spokesperson told online arts magazine Hyperallergic. “Now it wants to track us in the real world too.”

As its name suggests, Everyone Hates Elon was formed last year to voice opposition to Elon Musk for his disastrous attempts to gut US government budgets, as well as spouting far-right talking points and racist rhetoric. It has run guerrilla poster campaigns that call Musk a “bellend,” and parody Tesla’s latest vehicle as “the Swasticar,” which can go “from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds.”

The group has also taken aim at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and president Donald Trump’s extensive relationship with deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

Meta’s glasses are a natural target for the activists’ latest campaign given how easily they’re exploited for highly questionable behavior.

“Meta and Ray-Ban’s new AI glasses can be used to secretly record women and young people for sexual reasons,” the spokesperson told Hyperallergic. “Simply put, that’s abuse.”

“Billionaires could fund cures for cancer — so why are they funding glasses for perverts instead?” the group asked rhetorically.

More on Meta’s glasses: The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

The post New “Advertisement” for Kylie Jenner’s Meta Perv Glasses Shows Something Extremely Funny If You Look at It From the Wrong Angle appeared first on Futurism.

For years, AI companies have been selling investors on the idea that scaling up operations is the key to success — the bigger the AI model, the more powerful it becomes.

But in practice, that premise is leading to enormous business problems. As The Atlantic points out, LLMs are suffering from severely diminishing returns: the cost of inference, or the act of using a trained AI model to process new data, is rising exponentially, making the tech far less lucrative than it was even half a year ago.

Put simply, it’s effectively the opposite of what investors would conventionally want to see, as The Atlantic argues, which would be a continuous drop in cost per user instead of the reverse.

That’s bad news for an industry pouring billions of dollars into the construction of enormous data centers across the country, despite having no clear path to profitability in the foreseeable future. While it’s impossible to predict when exactly fears of an AI bubble will hit a breaking point, analysts warn it’s a matter of when, not if. The consequences could be disastrous if the industry were to collapse in on itself, bringing down entire economies — which have vastly over-indexed on AI tech — with it.

Nonetheless, AI companies are steadfast in their belief that chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, are the future. They’ve become practically inescapable in our day-to-day lives, from integrations in operating systems to replacing humans on customer service calls — despite a major public backlash that represents another headwind for the industry.

Meeting AI’s rapidly growing demands will also require revolutionary leaps in hardware tech that are becoming increasingly harder to come by, with experts warning of the imminent end of Moore’s Law, the decades-old truism that more transistors steadily improved computing power.

In short, as behemoth AI models are quickly becoming unaffordable to those who’ve grown to rely on them, they’re also becoming far less efficient — a concerning trajectory that could nudge the entire economy closer to the brink.

For a while now, Yann LeCun, one of the so-called godfathers of AI, has been warning that LLMs are a “dead end” and won’t bring us to the much-touted point where AI intelligence matches or exceeds that of human intelligence.

But whether tech leaders who are already deeply invested in scaling up the current crop of AI models will heed those warnings feels increasingly unlikely.

More on AI: AI Bubble Fears Are Starting to Spill Over

The post There’s a Gigantic Problem at the Heart of the AI Industry That Could Cause the Whole Thing to Collapse appeared first on Futurism.

As the public backlash to AI data centers continues to escalate, activists are resorting to extreme measures to send home an important message.

The growing concern over environmentally damaging, yet rapidly growing, data centers has become an international phenomenon. In Amsterdam, climate activists affiliated with the group Extinction Rebellion claimed responsibility for some unique vandalism against a Microsoft data center construction project. According to the Register, the protestors filled water balloons with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint before hucking them at the facility.

“This acidic mixture attacks concrete, and the hydrogen peroxide causes steel to rust faster,” Extinction Rebellion said in a statement.

What physical impact the balloons had on the data center itself is unknown, but it may be beside the point. Extinction Rebellion often uses nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action to draw attention to climate issues that would otherwise be ignored. Previous actions involved spattering the offices of fossil fuel insurers with foul smelling butyric acid, and using superglue and bicycle locks to barricade the entrance of Lloyd’s, a major insurance market in London.

As targets for climate activism go, data centers are a no-brainer. The facilities underlining the AI boom are a major driver of carbon emissions due to their intense energy demand, and likewise cause major problems with local water supplies.

In the post-action statement, Extinction Rebellion argues that the data center in question is weaponizing a loophole “to circumvent the rules banning so-called ‘hyperscalers,'” and will “consume a gigantic amount of power in an area that already suffers from power shortages.”

In addition to local concerns around electricity usage and climate impacts, Extinction Rebellion connects their action to the data center’s future tenant, Microsoft, which international rights groups argue played an instrumental role in Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

As Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Martijn Dekker said in the post-action statement, “the fight against data centers clearly shows how ordinary people unite against the power of big capital.”

“The climate and ecological crisis cannot be viewed in isolation from Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians or the fight against the destructive effects of AI,” Dekker continued. “These abuses originate from the same few mega-rich, the same large corporations.”

“We must join forces and resist the anti-democratic power of this small group of the very wealthiest,” he added. “Stopping the construction of this data center is a necessary step in that regard.”

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

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