After an ego-bruising stint with the New York Jets, it seems like seasoned quarterback and chief NFL conspiracy crank Aaron Rodgers is finally in good company with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
In a recent interview with the Athletic, the team’s veteran wide receiver DK Metcalf admitted that he’s a “big conspiracy theorist.”
“Shout out to my quarterback,” the two-time pro bowler said, referring to Rodgers, whose infamous conspiracy takes range from 9/11 skepticism to belief in a hollow Earth. That latter idea — known in conspiratorial Facebook groups as the “Inner Earth theory” — evidently has a supporter not only in Rodgers, but also in his receiver.
“I think there is another civilization inside of Earth,” Metcalf told the Athletic. “I think it’s another world.”
Following the basic outline of the Inner Earth theory, Metcalf outlined his concept of a civilization thriving deep beneath the crust, which can only be accessed via passageways in Antarctica.
“You can go to Alaska. You could go to the North Pole,” the wide receiver continued. “But why not Antarctica? Why can’t you just book a trip to Antarctica? Why is there a secret meeting — well, it’s not secret, but why is there a meeting between every world leader of every country in Antarctica, specifically?”
While it shouldn’t take an expert to tell you that this scenario is impossible, the Athletic asked one anyway. As Brent Christner, a rabid Steelers fan and associate professor of microbiology at the University of Florida told the publication, one can easily book a trip to Antarctica (in fact, Antarctic tourism is growing faster than environmental monitors can realistically keep up with, resulting in a notable rise in pollution on the white continent.)
As for any sort of UN-style meeting-of-the-minds at McMurdo Station, Christner says forget it.
“There are definitely some distinguished visitors that come down to Antarctica,” the researcher told the Athletic. “When they would come down, they would get the royal treatment and get thrown in helicopters and shown all the excellent sites. But there’s not like a G7 that occurs down there.”
Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.
A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.
Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.
“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.
The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.
“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.
“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”
In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”
“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”
Schools across the world are experimenting with AI tools, usually to the dismay of unsuspecting parents. But one privately-run school is explicitly embracing AI as part of its sales pitch, and the in-class experience sounds more bizarre than anything you’d imagine.
A blistering new article by education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley took a look under the hood of Alpha School, a private K-12 school company in the US which boasts an AI-based teaching model, among other highly dubious features.
To make the grade, high school students are required to pass an eight-week “bootcamp.” After being invited to follow social media accounts of other students at Alpha School, Riley observed a process more akin to hazing than high school orientation, as the private company made its prospective pupils jump through increasingly degrading hoops to secure their spot on the roster.
For example, students in the bootcamp are required to start a brand-new account on X-formerly-Twitter, for which they’re required to get a minimum of 100 organic followers, pay for X Premium, and post an unknown number of replies to “bigger accounts with real substance,” as one student explained.
“‘Great post’ replies don’t count,” the anonymous student posted in a screenshot shared by Riley. “Buying followers or spamming = automatic fail.”
But forced social media assignments are just the beginning. As part of the bootcamp, students are also required to pass an eyebrow-raising heart rate challenge, in which they’re hooked up to live monitors in front of their classmates and presented with a pre-recorded video of their parents berating them.
“The challenge rule was simple,” one student wrote: “my resting heart rate was 80bpm, and I had to stay within 10 percent of that the whole time. Anything above 88 was a fail.”
It isn’t clear what educational purpose this particular trial was supposed to serve, or what the penalty would be for students who fail the heart rate challenge, or the boot camp overall. At least one student said the eight-week hazing period is meant to “prove I deserve to be here,” though Alpha School didn’t comment on Riley’s inquiry.
“I ended up averaging 87bpm,” the student continued, evidently just barely making the grade. “Barely made the cutoff by one single beat, and my hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon.”
As part of boot camp, Alpha School students apparently have their heart rates monitored as they watch recorded videos of their parents critiquing them. This activity takes place in front of their classmates, and students must keep their heart rates within 10 percent of their baseline to pass.
Additionally, Riley noted that Alpha School “requires students to do unpaid labor cleaning restaurant kitchens or gas-station bathrooms” in a test of “grit and hard work.”
This “assignment,” confirmed by two Alpha School pupils, involved students recording themselves and narrating their tasks, with any complaint or negative comment resulting in an automatic fail.
“We have to find and execute an unglamorous job with zero pay, whether that means mucking horse stalls, cleaning grease traps after closing, washing trash bins, or scrubbing gas station bathrooms,” one of the students explained.
Other challenges abound, like a requirement to complete an entire unit of a standard Advanced Placement course without a teacher — AI chatbots only — and pass an exam within just five days. One 14-year-old student wrote that they were required to survive for three days in an unfamiliar section of wilderness “with only 3 bags of rice and a tent.”
Contacted by Riley for comment, Alpha School flipped the script, hounding the writer for daring to report on the “social media activity of minor children.”
“We ask that you weigh the ethics of identifying minors in this way in your reporting, and we expect any published piece to protect their identities,” an Alpha School representative said.
Responding to Riley’s story, educator and writer Audrey Watters said that “Alpha School’s promises have always been mostly snake-oil: this idea that artificial intelligence can deliver high-speed, high-quality education is mostly the stuff of science fiction, not reality.”
“What we witness with Alpha School isn’t a matter of simply ignoring the weatherman, fingers-crossed hoping that the sun will continue to shine on the chosen few and that the winds will shift again in industry’s favor,” Watters continued, referring to rising outrage against AI, and the Silicon Valley-ethos underlying Alpha School’s mission. “Rather, it’s pretty clear that there’s an absence of any moral compass at all.”
Simply put, documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney had a very rich source of material to draw from for his upcoming documentary “Musk,” which had its world premiere today at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.
According to journalist David Sirota, Musk is “freaking out” about the film because Gibney “doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t cower and won’t be bullied.”
By all accounts, the four-hour epic will be a doozy. The documentarian “crafted a movie that, while not new in its specifics, is often damning in its totality, standing apart from anything the media entertainment complex has recently turned out — a portrait of power with the cinematic scope of ‘All the King’s Men’ and the potential social impact of ‘The Pentagon Papers,'” the Hollywood Reporter gushed.
Musk has reportedly gone to extreme — and sometimes unsuccessful — lengths to silence those involved in Gibney’s latest work. Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is “prominently featured” in the documentary, told reporters at the Venice Film Festival that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million,” as quoted by People.
“When you’re offered something like that [to stay quiet], it really causes a debate in your head about what your speech means and how valuable that is and why do they want to offer me this amount of money to not speak?” St. Clair said.
St. Clair is one of four women who have had a total of 14 children with Musk, at least that we know about so far. The 26-year-old had a major falling out with the entrepreneur, going as far as to allege that the billionaire “financially retaliated” against her for filing a custody petition by reducing child support payments.
We’re likely to hear more commentary from Musk about the film. Last week, Musk tweeted that Gibney was “obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” calling him a “douchebag to his core.”
But considering the staggering amount of material Musk has gifted the world, Gibney had plenty of material to work with.
AI’s wide proliferation shares some striking similarities with the ways viruses spread, as an international team of researchers argue in a new paper that has yet to be peer reviewed. They set out to lay out a new theoretical framework about how we’re increasingly becoming hooked on tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and how it’s changing our collective ways of understanding the world around us.
“Here we introduce the idea of [large language models] as cognitive viruses,” they write. “Culturally transmitted technologies whose spread is promoted by their usefulness but can also increase dependence through cognitive offloading.”
“More generally, humans have always externalized parts of cognition into language, writing, institutions, and technology,” the researchers write. “This externalization has been the engine of rapid and accelerated change driven by culture. AI represents a new step in this process, one in which external cognitive machinery becomes increasingly active and agent-like.”
This transition to adapting LLMs also “has a contagion-like component,” because the spread occurs “because people learn from other people.”
It’s a slippery slope, the researchers argue, as the “loss of autonomy becomes self-reinforcing and the population can move rapidly toward a state of much stronger cognitive offloading and lower cognitive competence.”
Put simply, the widespread use of LLMs could be making us much dumber than we were before — not to mention wreaking complex psychological and sociological changes that we’re only starting to understand.
At the same time, there are ways to protect ourselves from being infected through a process the researchers dub “cognitive immunization.”
“At the population level, immunization does not mean preventing contact with AI,” the paper reads. “It means preserving the practices and institutions that keep human cognition active: unaided problem solving, verification, critical discussion, periods of deliberate disengagement, maintenance of non-AI skills, and educational designs in which the model supports rather than completes the cognitive task.”
An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.
It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.
The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.
The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.
Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.
The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”
Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.
With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.
In a world dominated by cheaply-produced AI content, it’s never been easier to imitate your favorite artist. YouTube, for instance, has succumbed to a tidal wave of AI-generated music released under the names of real artists without their permission — and a baffling number of its unknowing users are blissfully unaware they’re being served a microwaved counterfeit.
The track, which has seemingly convinced countless users that it’s actually Mathers’ latest return to the music world, has amassed well over 100,000 views since being uploaded last week. It’s achieved surprising prominence on YouTube, being featured prominently in a search for “Eminem” on the platform — where it’s even beating out charting singles by the actual rapper, including “Superman” and “Shake That,” as well as the actual “I’m Back” track.
“Guess who’s back?” the algorithmic Eminem raps in the video. “Yeah, a headache return. Same match in my hand.”
The low-rent beat alone should be a dead giveaway. And while AI music generating tools certainly have come a long way, giving the fake Mathers a passing imitation of the real one’s voice and delivery, the plasticky sound of the vocals make it clear that it’s not the real deal.
Nonetheless, users on YouTube were fooled hook, line, and sinker.
“This is fire eminem is the goat hands down,” one user gushed.
“Really Proud of you Eminem!!” another wrote. “You really are getting it and not giving up!! Keep going!”
The video’s title gives no indication that it’s not a real release, and doesn’t feature YouTube’s official AI label. Buried in its description is a strangely-phrased disclaimer.
“Fan-made music videos inspired by Eminem, Slim Shady, and legendary Detroit hip-hop,” it reads. “This is a fan-made audiovisual project created for entertainment purposes only.”
The owner of the account even proactively offers up an email address for “copyright concerns or removal requests,” suggesting they’re all too familiar with the process of having angry record labels try to shut them down or get hung up in YouTube’s infamous copyright filters.
A web search for the email address reveals that it’s also listed on a litany of other YouTube accounts, many of which masquerade as other rap artists, including Meek Mill — an account that has over 13,000 subscribers — and 21 Savage.
Reached by email, the account owner offered their thoughts on the situation.
“No, my intention was never to make it look like a genuine new Eminem release,” the creator, who goes by the name Milana Salaeva, told Futurism in a message, referring to the “I’m Back” track. “I make it clear in the description that the content is unofficial and that AI-generated or AI-assisted elements may be used.”
“I’m a music producer, and I’ve been making music myself for quite some time,” they added. “I often create my own beats and handle the arrangement, mixing, mastering, and other parts of the production process. AI is just one of the tools I sometimes use as part of that workflow.”
The Eminem mimicry is only a drop in a bucket in an internet dominated by AI-generated music. For years now, we’ve watched as outraged artists and their labels have tried to tamp down on a proliferation of tracks that use their voice and likeness without permission, often going viral on social media.
We’ve also come across users exploiting royalties on platforms like Spotify by flooding them with AI. A man pled guilty earlier this year for posting slop on Spotify and using an army of bots to fraudulently boost listenership, netting $8 million in royalties.
While it’s unlikely Salaeva is making anywhere near that amount of cash — especially now that YouTube has significantly changed how it counts views — the fake Slim Shady’s 11-minute tirade also touches on a far more profound subject: the authenticity of human creativity and expression.
“If you came here for the old me, here’s the new me kicking his ass,” the fake Eminem raps. “That’s why they call me Slim Shady. I’m back again. Same crooked little grin with a pad and pen.”
Is being the world’s richest man not enough for Elon Musk?
He must also have us all believe that he’s a genius, sui generis, with a mind so mighty that it’s wasted on supposedly intellectual pastimes like “chess.”
He’s so convinced that the board game is beneath him, in fact, that he’s begun arguing about it with… Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI.
The inane saga kicked off yesterday on X — where else — when Musk responded to a post about all the possible moves you can make in chess. To a mind as omniscient as Musk’s, the number — a mere 40 orders of magnitude more than all the atoms in the observable universe — wasn’t sufficiently large enough to be interesting.
“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”
Here, Chess.com entered the fray by responding with a succinct rejoinder: “skill issue.”
The bait worked.
“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, essentially repeating himself. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”
Indeed, humans who aren’t intelligent as Musk, in their feeble-mindedness and fleeting time on this planet, may enjoy activities such as games and sports, blissfully unaware that a hypothetical machine may hypothetically make mince meat of those activities one day. And yet, as Musk admitted, he’s choosing to waste his time “arguing with some random intern.” (“I’m a full-time employee,” the Chess.com account clarified.)
Musk also went on about how an artificial superintelligence — something we don’t even know is possible to build — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.” Then he cited some conversations he had with his personal AI chatbot, Grok, as if that put matters to bed.
There’s certainly an interesting intellectual debate to be had about “solving” chess — something that actual mathematicians have explored and tried to tackle — but Musk’s arguments seem to be driven solely by contempt. The board game is a long-held bugbear of his.
Back in 2022, in a now infamous tweet, Musk wrote about how he stopped playing chess as a child because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” before extolling how Polytopia, a mobile game, was the superior activity of choice for the cognoscenti.
He had something similar to say amid his battle with Chess.com. Responding to another account, Musk wrote that he “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.” Next time your opponent destroys you at chess, you might try deploying that excuse, too.
A man is facing numerous felony charges in Georgia after police allege he allegedly used a bizarre projectile to melt automatic license plate readers into smoldering heaps of metal and plastic.
According to Fox5 in Atlanta, 25-year-old Colby Williams was hauled into jail after allegedly setting fire to three automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) installed by the extremely controversial company Flock.
Though it isn’t known how the fires started, at least one camera was found “completely melted,” and had a “DeFlock” sticker slapped onto what remained of the pole. A fourth camera nearby was reportedly found with two bullet holes, the news channel reported.
Ironically, Williams was arrest using video captured from the ALPRs, which picked up a vehicle registered under his name.
Williams is now being charged with four counts of criminal damage to property and four counts of arson, as well as reckless conduct and interference with government property — though Flock operates using a model known as “hardware-as-a-service,” meaning its ALPRs are only rented, not owned by police agencies.
The use of fire to disable Flock ALPRs is a new one, as far as we can tell. So far, anti-surveillance vigilantes have mostly resorted to using tools like hand saws and power drills, or barring that, spray paint.
On social media, supporters further fanned the flames, expressing support for Williams and blasting the police department for deploying the devices in the first place.
“What it boils down to is this, either y’all can take them down or somebody will!” one Facebook user declared under Fox5‘s post about the arrest.
Another commenter made an appeal to patriotism: “it wasn’t him, he was at the library rereading the Constitution!”
In an affront to creeps everywhere, Meta has started remotely bricking the smart glasses of wearers who try to secretly record other people.
Earlier this month, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company said it would crack down on customers who modified the spectacles to disable or cover up their lights that indicate when they’re recording, amid incredible public backlash against how the glasses are being used to film people without their consent — girls and women especially — and harass them.
Now, it looks like more than a few weirdos have gotten the ax. On Tuesday, Meta said it’s bricked the photo and video-taking capabilities on thousands of its smart glasses users, as part of a software update that was reported by Semafor.
Meta didn’t provide hard numbers, but its vice president of wearables Alex Himel told Semafor that it estimated that less than one tenth of a percent of all glasses sold have been tampered with. Seven million of the glasses were sold in 2025, making that fraction of a percentage translate to up to, but probably less than, 7,000 individual units.
More than a sign of Meta caring about people’s privacy, it goes to show that the abuse of its “pervert glasses” wasn’t down to just a few bad apples. A few thousand doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s worth remembering that this crackdown only applies to customers who physically tampered with their glasses to disable the recording light. There’s no doubt that many people using the glasses to creepily record people have made no effort to modify their devices or hide that they’re recording.
Instagram, which is owned by Meta, recently began suspending some influencers who filmed themselves using the glasses as they aggressively hit on girls and women, often by making sexually explicit and provocative comments. The social media platform’s head Adam Mosseri vowed to crackdown on the harassment in “every way we can.”
Still, these efforts are a drop in the bucket, and with Meta reportedly planning to stuff the glasses with facial recognition tech, members of the public who aren’t convinced that Meta has their best interests in mind have taken matters into their own hands. Many establishments are outright banning smart glasses, including popular nightclubs. Some feel strongly enough about the glass that they’re confronting people who wear them in public.
Himel, Meta’s VP of wearables, admitted that it’s fighting an uphill battle.
“It’s been a little bit of a cat and mouse game,” Himel told Semafor, adding that “I don’t think we’ll ever be done… There’s always new ways to get around the safeguards that are in place. So we’re going to keep monitoring and evolving the measures that we have.”
Well, tell that to president Trump. On Thursday, he slapped a 100 percent tariff — he sure loves round numbers and levying imports — on larger foreign-made drones.
Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Mlakar, chief of the Lake County Drone Unit outside Cleveland, called the tariffs financially onerous and lamented that it would prevent many communities from buying them, adding that his unit uses them to hunt crime suspects at night and search for lost children.
“Most of this, in our humble opinion, is lobbying by US manufacturers to eliminate foreign competition,” he said. “This is not national security. It’s protectionism.”
The tariff is explicitly designed to target popular Chinese drones, while making exceptions or imposing much lighter tariffs on drones made from allies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the EU. In particular, these steep duties will apply to drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is weighing reclassifying some drone technologies like lidar as “military grade,” Ars noted, which would restrict who can access these drones even further.
Drones have a lot of other practical uses beyond law enforcement, obviously, including monitoring wild fires and assisting rescue operations. Amid heightened backlash against Flock, though, they’ve come to be seen as another surveillance apparatus.
But weaning the US off Chinese drone tech is supposed to be good for national security, according to the Trump administration. One small problem: a single Chinese company, DJI, makes more than 70 percent of the world’s commercial drones, according to the NYT. Good luck replacing all those.
Plenty of other cops are bellyaching about the tariffs, too, extolling how irreplaceable that awesome Chinese made drones have become to their operation.
Ars spotted a Texas police officer named Jason Lee, for instance, who complained to the FCC that “there is currently no economically viable domestic replacement” for DJI drones. “More than 80 percent of state and local law-enforcement drone programs surveyed in 2024 used DJI aircraft,” he added.
“The fact that a domestic product exists does not necessarily mean it is a viable substitute,” Lee said. “A replacement must be operationally comparable, economically obtainable, supported by an adequate supply chain, and accepted by pilots who must rely on it during real-world incidents.”
For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.
Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.
Out of 53 skipjack, marine researchers counted over 1,600 worms infesting nearly every organ of every fish hauled in from the ocean. Only the kidneys and hearts of the tuna remained worm-free, the researchers noted. Everything else, including the muscle tissue we humans eat, was festering with flatworms and roundworms.
Though most preparation methods will kill the parasites, the images are pretty off-putting. As the researchers explain, the sheer volume of parasitic infection is alarming.
“These results highlight the importance of sanitary inspection and emphasize the importance of immediate evisceration to avoid the migration of larvae from the viscera to the musculature,” the authors write.
Still, parasitologists say the worms aren’t all bad. Though increased presence of worms also comes with more risk of infection, University of Washington parasitologist Chelsea Wood told ScienceAlert in a prior story that they can actually be a sign that the fish is well-sourced.
“Everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry,” Wood said. “But the anisakid [roundworm] life cycle integrates many components of the food web. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem.”
A rising Gen Z indie musician known as Betty Hammerschlag has turned out to be a middle-aged man, in an elaborate — and dare we say a bit creepy — deception that fooled everyone from fans to music critics to the artist’s own collaborators.
Music journalist Shawn Reynaldo blew open the charade in an exposé published Wednesday in his newsletter FirstFloor. By all appearances, Hammerschlag presented herself as a young woman still in art school, using pictures of women in her social media posts and promotional materials, and writing in a pointedly whimsical, all-lowercase and flowery emoji-laden style intended to evoke Gen Z.
Hammerschlag’s music has been featured and praised in notable publications like The Guardian and The Quietusas recently as last week, and has received quite a bit of airtime on the renowned British music streamer NTS Radio. That includes songs from her latest album which, we kid you not, is titled “fake girl.”
But Reynaldo dug around and discovered that Hammerschlag didn’t actually exist, and was in reality the creation of Tilman Hornig, a 45-year-old (or possibly older) musician from Germany.
Hornig’s stunt extended beyond creating Hammerschlag’s artistic persona. According to Reynaldo, he went to extraordinary lengths to keep up the charade, such as messaging people online while still masquerading as a young girl, including other young female and queer artists.
Even some of the musicians Hornig/Hammerschlag collaborated with were under the impression that they were working with a young woman, including tibslc, an ambient artist from Leipzig. They had several private exchanges; in one of them Hammerschlag told her she couldn’t perform at a show tibslc was organizing because “I have to study for several exams and hardly have the energy for music and live shows .”
“When I eventually learned about the fact that Tilman Hornig, a 47(?) year old guy, was running it the whole time, it was really quite a shock, like one of those moments when your reality is shaking to the core because someone tricked you,” tibslc told First Floor. “I was emotionally unwell and affected by it a lot. I felt like I was played, especially because of the private chat.”
Tim Dalzell, the founder of the label blush which published some of Hammschlag’s music, also felt betrayed, saying in a recent Instagram story that he had “no idea who was behind the project when I released it.”
“The whole time we worked together he messaged me in the style and dialect of a young girl, creating elaborate lies to cover his tracks,” Dalzell said. “At one point he asked for royalties to be paid earlier so he could buy paints for art school.”
“I was under the impression the artist wanted privacy and respected that,” he added. “When I found out the deal (earlier this year) — I expressed my concerns to him about how he was running the project. I didn’t like how he responded and so I decided to stop selling the music.”
Suspiciously, Hammerschlag would evade requests for a live interview, insisting they be conducted over email. On several occasions when Hammerschlag was booked for live shows, a young woman would appear claiming to be her, but organizers strongly suspected she was an impersonator. In other words, it appeared that Hornig was sending women to pretend to be Hammerschlag.
It also appears that Hornig used AI to keep up the act. Reynalldo found that some of the promotional text for one of Hammschlag’s albums were flagged as AI by several AI detectors. It’s unclear, though, if the female sounding vocals in some of Hammerschlag’s songs are the work of AI as well.
In his exposé, Reynaldo didn’t leave us wondering what his personal thoughts on Hornig’s behavior was.
“It’s creepy, especially when so many of the people that Hornig is interacting with — including people that he has directly sought out online — are unwitting participants in an art project they didn’t ask to join,” he wrote.
If you happen to live in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Kansas, you may soon notice a massive uptick in ads extolling the virtues of AI data centers.
That’s not by accident. As Bloomberg reported this week, a group funded by tech industry billionaires called Build American AI is spinning up a massive campaign meant to sway public opinion around data centers in key battleground states.
The ad blitz is described as being in the “millions of dollars” range, per Bloomberg, though Build American AI hasn’t disclosed an exact figure.
Among the group’s backers are figures heavily invested in continuing the data center boom, like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Also involved is Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, whose $100 million super PAC Leading the Future is reportedly bankrolling the publicity campaign.
In a statement to Bloomberg, a representative for Build American AI framed the question of data center development as an existential threat, and repeated the myth that opposition to data centers — an incredibly popular stance among American voters — is actually a radical psy-op.
“The stakes are too high to allow the loudest and most extreme voices to dictate America’s future,” Build American AI complained. “Driving responsible investment away will cost Americans good-paying jobs, weaken communities and undermine America’s ability to lead.”
But no matter how much doom-and-gloom tech billionaires try to browbeat the public with, they face an arduous battle. An August survey by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a record 61 percent of US adults oppose new data centers in their backyards, up 12 percent from a survey conducted in March.
That being the case, it’s unlikely a few dramatic TV ads will be enough to launder the AI industry’s already caustic image — especially at the ballot box in November.
Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass — and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.
Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET, a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret they wouldn’t tell the “trusted people” in their lives.
There’s a grim irony there, because by telling an AI chatbot those closely guarded secrets, you may inadvertently be sharing intimate details with tech companies, police departments, lawyers, and even your boss. That’s according to new reporting by the Washington Post, which notes that there have been a dozen court cases where chatbot transcripts were cited in the public record over the last two years.
Even if your transcripts don’t end up in the hands of Johnny Law, they can easily be obtained by your boss, assuming you’re using a company-provided AI service. And of course, there’s no telling how long AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might hold onto details of your conversations, as WaPo notes numerous scenarios in which they may be required to hold onto your chatlogs by law.
There’s also the grim possibility of leaks from the AI companies themselves. In July, it was revealed that a whole trove of chats with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude had been exposed to the open web — and not for the first time.
“Unless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version… [and] you’re also having it within a browser that’s not tracking you, the answer is no,” Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence told WaPo. “You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private.”
And though users are remarkably comfortable divulging those details to their favorite bot, fewer are aware of those myriad ways their chat logs might live on in perpetuity. According to the DuckDuckGo poll, 53 percent of regular users said they didn’t know that AI chatbots are training on data obtained through their conversation, while 75 percent didn’t realize that conversations with large language models (LLMs) can easily be subpoenaed by police.
So when in doubt about whether to tell ChatGPT about your intimate relationship troubles, keep in mind that the internet is forever; and that goes double for AI chatbots.
Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in?
Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the state with the most data center under construction.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found that job postings in the state had dramatically fallen for AI-exposed fields since the release of ChatGPT, disproportionately affecting college graduates. By the first quarter of 2025, postings plummeted by 8 percent compared to jobs that were deemed less exposed to AI, it also found.
“These dynamics suggest that recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate rose to unusually high levels during this period of rapid [generative AI] adoption, are where the effects of GenAI on employment and earnings are likely to first appear,” the researchers wrote in the analysis, as quoted by the FT.
Until recently, Texas and its governor Greg Abbott has embraced the AI data center buildout with open arms. A recent Reuters analysis found that requests from data centers and other large power users to connect to the state’s power grid soared from about 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts currently, making it one of the fastest growing hubs for AI and cloud computing facilities.
But as public backlash against data centers has continued to mount — and with midterm elections looming — Abbott changed his tune and became an AI industry critic, announcing a freeze on new data center connections last month. Along with the myriad concerns around the data center’s environmental impact, many fear that the technology that the data centers support will destroy jobs, while the facilities themselves provide little for local economies.
The latest research, its authors say, demonstrates the reality of how AI is shaping labor demand in the very area that should be directly benefiting from it.
It’s not the only research suggesting AI is wiping out entry level jobs — an outcome that industry figures like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned would happen.
A recent analysis by researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab similarly found a marked decline in employment among young knowledge-workers, while the headcount of those working in fields not considered vulnerable to AI automation, including industrial and retail work, rose.
“For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs,” one of the report authors said.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty around how many jobs are truly being replaced by AI, and whether some of the chaos can be explained as AI being used as an excuse to fire workers for other reasons. But it’s brought a demoralizing effect on the workforce. In a Gallup poll conducted over the final three months of 2025, 72 percent of respondents said it was a “bad time” to find a good job.
While most of the vandals ripping down automatic license plate readers prefer to go incognito, an Albuquerque character named Jevon Martinez isn’t afraid to show his face.
Weeks after Bernalillo county officials cancelled their contract with the controversial surveillance company Flock earlier this year, Martinez noticed the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) were still up. In a series of videos posted on social media and flagged by KOB4, Martinez filmed himself tearing the camera towers down in order to return them to their rightful owners.
“Since [Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department] is busy — I know BCSO is busy, everyone who works for BCSO, I know you guys are busy, so I went ahead and helped you out,” Martinez says while driving his pickup truck, the bed of which is notably full of ALPR parts.
“We got a bunch of these bad boys,” he says in another video, showing off a truck bed stuffed to the brim with tower parts. “Let’s see how much I can get in one day. That’s gonna be the challenge for everyone out there.”
Playing the helpful citizen, Martinez drove his literal truckload of ALPR bits directly to the Sheriff’s department, where he was promptly taken into custody.
Though he wasn’t armed and hadn’t committed any violent offense, officers made a dramatic show of force as they arrested him. Clad with ballistic-resistant plate carriers, the deputies surrounded Martinez’s truck, drawing their guns and forcing him into cuffs.
“Is this a crime? I don’t think so,” Martinez said in one of his videos. “Neither does the public. I’m just liberating my people from tyranny.”
Marketing teams are also frequently caving to the irresistible draw of text-to-video generators, a cutting of corners in ways that are both uninspired and easy to spot. And as the backlash to generative AI continues to grow, especially in creative fields, those attempts are bringing in far more negative than positive attention.
Case in point, fans of the Major League Baseball team the Toronto Blue Jays were outraged after the team’s social media account posted an animated short, as part of a brand tie-in with Nestle-owned beverage company Nestea.
The clip, animated in a style typical for a TV show aimed at adults, like “Bojack Horseman” or “Family Guy,” bears all the hallmarks of the sloppy use of AI, from garbled, misoriented hands to illegible text.
A community note appended to the post points out that the video “contains AI artifacts including garbled text on trading card boxes and a player with three arms in the rookie poster, contrary to the claim it was made by a real animator.”
Instead of owning up to the lazy use of AI, the team dug in its heels.
“Corny,” one fan wrote. “[Blue Jays owner] Rogers can’t afford real animation??”
“Corny comment,” the team’s official account replied. “This was made by a real animator.”
The doubling down in particular didn’t sit well with fans.
“It’s not just AI, It’s really painfully obvious error riddled AI,” one user tweeted.
“Yeahhh, you ain’t fooling anybody,” another wrote. “Do better.”
“Plenty of talented animators you could have hired to do this instead of having it be AI slop,” one user commented on an extended version posted to YouTube.
“I fear you got fleeced paying whoever made this, it’s very obvious [AI] was used especially with the background details,” another added.
The incident perfectly illustrates widespread disillusionment with the use of generative AI and how radioactive the topic has become. We’ve gotten to the point where small businesses are starting to hand draw their own promotional signage and vow not to use any AI, as 404 Media reported last month — getting a major influx of interest as a result.
It’s a particularly precarious situation for human animators, who’ve watched their industry change dramatically over the years. Even the creator of the iconic stop motion franchise “Wallace and Gromit” recently said he’d start to “embrace” AI.
Leaning into the tech can easily backfire. Emmy-winning writer director Jorge Gutierrez announced he was partnering up with Amazon as part of its GenAI Creators’ Fund earlier this year, but the backlash turned out to be fierce enough for him to walk away from the deal altogether.
New York City just instituted a sweeping ban on schools using AI in the classroom through the start of high school, along with other restrictions on the technology.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the one-year moratorium on Wednesday, calling it the “most comprehensive of its kind anywhere in the country.”
“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary,” Mamdani said during a press conference. “We do not see it that way. I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school, with the exception, of course, of research sponsored by the very corporations that stand to profit.”
Under the new AI policy, the school system will “fully discontinue or disable more” than 38 AI features that were part of previously allowed programs that don’t meet the new standards, Mamdani said. Ailish Brady, the deputy mayor’s senior education adviser, said that includes an AI reading assistant called Amira, Politico noted.
Young students, starting with kids in 2-K (the city’s free education and daycare program for two-year-olds), won’t use AI as part of class until they enter high school. Even then, its use will be closely controlled. High schools will take limited “AI literacy” classes to prepare students for what Mamdani called an “AI-saturated world.” Exceptions will be made for helping students with learning disabilities or are still learning English. The restrictions also don’t apply to certain approved instructional programs like e-books and coding software.
AI isn’t the only tech the policy grapples with. It also imposes strict limits on screen time, recommending no more than 30 minutes of using devices per day for students in third through fifth grade, and 45 minutes for middle schoolers.
Beyond the broader debate raging on AI’s role in education — with colleges across the country embroiled in AI cheating scandals, as well as a bevy of research suggesting AI impairs critical thinking and other cognitive abilities — the ban comes after months of New York City facing heated political debate on using the tech in the classroom. In April, controversy erupted over plans to open an AI-focused high school in Manhattan, with a crowd of parents, teachers, and high schoolers protesting outside City Hall. While the plans were withdrawn soon afterwards, it amplified calls on Mamdani to institute an AI moratorium.
While deeming the moratorium a meaningful step in the right direction, some hoped Mamdani would’ve gone further. Kelly Clancy, the founder of Parents for AI Caution and a member of the Coalition for an AI Moratorium, wanted a temporary moratorium on AI in all grades. Some of the original calls for a moratorium demanded that it last at least two years.
“The fact that this policy exists at all is due to the enormous work of parents across the city who spoke out against the overreach of AI into their kids’ classroom,” Clancy told the New York Times.
The aggressive action will be closely watched by other states and school systems. New York City boasts the largest school system in the nation, with the ban affecting more than 600,000 students. It will be a large, and indeed, “comprehensive” experiment in how detoxing young minds on AI will affect their learning — though it pales in size to the experiment that tech companies are conducting by unleashing the tech on students in the first place.
“Children need their teachers and human connection in order to learn and in order to grow,” Mamdani said. “And they need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with their teachers, and wrestle with tough problems on their own.”
The digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses of individuals from the United States and Canada are being sold on the dark web through an easily accessible service called Nexus.
As noted cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs noted on his blog this week, the sale has now caught the attention of the FBI, which has launched an official inquiry.
On the same day Krebs published his post, the service mysteriously vanished from the dark web, which could make tracking down the people behind the hack more difficult.
Nonetheless, the scale of the leak is staggering, and includes not just drivers licenses, but 10 million ID cards, over three million travel documents, and over half a million medical cards as well, representing over 170 million individuals total. That’s pushing half of the United States’ and Canada’s combined populations.
The ID scans appear to have been taken from a widely-used ID verification company based out of Louisiana and even include the license of US defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
The incident highlights the dangers of having little regulatory oversight over identity verification services — a thorny subject, considering regulators continue to push for age limits for content online, rules that could put people at risk of having their identity stolen by bad agents.
The ID scans first appeared on a Russian cybercrime forum. The owner of the files caught Krebs’ attention after showing the journalist a scan of his Virginia drivers license, strongly supporting the leak’s validity.
Before it was taken down, the shadowy dark web service called Nexus allowed virtually anybody to peruse identity documents of over 170 million people in the US and Canada.
“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service boasted in a post on the Russian forum. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”
According to the people behind Nexus, the source of the leak is a “major identity verification company” that’s in business with several Fortune 500 companies, Krebs writes.
While the feds are starting their own investigation, Krebs dug a little deeper and found a fascinating common thread: many of those, whose identity cards showed up in the database had rented cars from the company Hertz.
“I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine,” Krebs wrote. “That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time.”
Other individuals the reporter talked to recalled giving their driver’s license to a dispensary, which struck a deal in 2022 with ID verification company idscan.net — which also provides services to other big brands, including Hertz.
The New Orleans-based firm told Krebs that it’s now investigating the matter. The FBI has also confirmed that it’s also officially looking into the company.
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