Angry parents aren’t the only ones railing against the proliferation of AI in schools. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teacher’s union in the United States, has now launched a major campaign calling on schools to keep AI and hardware like iPads out of elementary classrooms.

In a buzzy speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, AFT president Randi Weingarten unveiled ten demands centered around reaffirming human-led instruction. One of the key requests: an immediate ban on AI systems in elementary school classrooms.

The AFT’s action points also included a screen ban for students in pre-kindergarten through second grade, as well as a prohibition on companion chatbots for students under 16, which schools have adopted at an alarming rate.

“If we don’t find a way to call this out from an education perspective, I fear that we will lose a generation of kids,” Weingarten told the New York Times in an interview. “The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without AI.”

In her speech, Weingarten caveated that the AFT’s campaign isn’t some fanatical Butlerian Jihad. She is “not calling for a total ban on AI or a Chromebook bonfire,” but for “getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms.”

Whether the AFT is successful at achieving its demands could make a crucial difference in millions of kids’ educational journey. As tech giants push schools to adopt all kinds of AI systems, a growing body of research is showing that the risks far outweigh any benefits.

As one year-long study conducted by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education found, AI in education comes with major risk of harm to children’s cognitive and social development — a horrifying thought as an ever-growing number of kids substitute real-life friends with AI chatbots.

More on AI in education: Parents Explode in Fury at School’s Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI

The post Major Teachers Union Pleads With Elementary Schools to Stop Giving Young Kids AI appeared first on Futurism.

AI companies have long relied on armies of data labelers, whose job it is to annotate, tag and classify text, images and videos to train AI models.

It’s not exactly a flashy occupation, with some saying they’re forced to watch privacy-invading footage. Others argue they’re being forced to dig their own graves by training models capable of doing their old jobs.

Other job opportunities in the space could prove more pleasurable. As Business Insider reports, a chatbot companion startup called Joi AI, which offers a NSFW character AI chat service, is hiring ten “mast**bation consultants,” according to a job listing the company posted on social media.

Best of all, chosen candidates will be paid $2,000 a month — not bad for cranking the hog to audio erotica.

These consultants are being asked to spend four weeks writing about their intimate experience while testing the company’s audio feature. Anyone can apply.

Unsurprisingly, Joi AI was quickly drowning in applications, with the company’s head of brand, Julie Levin, telling BI that the company had received over 100,000 applications in a matter of days.

“What are we supposed to do with 100,000 applications?” Levin said. “I should probably call them ‘winners,’ because it’s such a competition.”

It’s an unusual AI gig that will involve chosen candidates delivering weekly reports after completing “daily audio-guided sessions.”

“We expect people to learn something about how mast**bation affects their life in a good way or a bad way,” Levin told BI. “We wanted them to reflect on that.”

Chances are that not everybody signing up was sincerely meaning to help the company fine-tune its new audio feature. In a recent tweet, the company reflected on the types of “cover letter openings” it had received, which ranged from “this is my calling,” to “I’ve been training for this my whole life.” Other openings included “my therapist said I needed a hobby,” and “I applied on behalf of my husband.”

“Time to go pro,” one X user joked. “Ready to contribute extensive data, repeatedly, for science.”

The reality, of course, is that companies offering NSFW chatbot companionship have long been shrouded in controversy, from men creating AI girlfriends and verbally abusing them to teenagers falling in love with their new large language model-powered partners.

Experts also warn that a huge proportion of those with AI companions appear to be more depressed and lonely than those who don’t. Other research has found that people hooked on AI chatbots are more likely to experience profound breaks with reality and higher levels of psychological distress.

More on AI chatbots: Certain Chatbots Vastly Worse For AI Psychosis, Study Finds

The post AI Company Paying Random People $2,000 Per Month to Crank the Hog appeared first on Futurism.

Therapy is predicated on trust. You can’t be honest and vulnerable, and share how you’re really feeling, if you don’t believe in the embodied-concerned-frown sitting in the armchair across from you.

So you can understand why one woman, 31-year-old Molly Quinn, was taken aback when her trusted therapist suddenly whipped out an AI model to start recording their private conversations, NPR reports. 

“She wasn’t taking notes like she usually did,” Quinn recalled realizing halfway through one session. “The iPad was just propped up.”

Where were her words being processed and stored? Will they one day become training data? It’s not something you have to ask yourself when your therapist jots stuff down on a clipboard. But those questions were now racing through Quinn’s head, leaving her uneasy.

“The more I thought about it, the more I just started getting more and more sick to my stomach,” she told NPR. “This person who I’m supposed to be able to trust with some very private and very intense emotions had just completely disregarded something I said I was not comfortable with. I felt completely violated.”

Though her therapist offered to stop using the AI tool, Quinn cut her off and found another one.

“The trust was gone,” she told NPR.

Like doctors, therapists across the country are adopting AI tools for notetaking and generating transcripts. AI companies offering these services frame it as a way of cutting down on the drudgery of paperwork and other administrative tasks, freeing up more time to focus on patients — a permutation of a common AI industry refrain: let us do the tedious stuff for you. 

The reliability of AI tools remains fairly dodgy, though, and even setting aside questions of hallucinations creeping into clinical notes — which is something we’re already seeing happen — it’s not clear whether patients are even comfortable with the tech yet. In a YouGov survey cited by NPR, only 11 percent of Americans said they would be open to using AI in mental health care. An even slimmer eight percent said they would trust AI being used this way, while 40 percent said they don’t trust the technology at all.

“Even the presence of AI changes the therapeutic experience,” Marisa Cohen, a couples and sex therapist in New York, told NPR. “Clients know or feel like something else is listening to them. That awareness can subtly alter their disclosure.”

“When you introduce something that’s being stored electronically, it raises additional questions about trust and safety,” Cohen added. “It’s essentially a third party.”

Tal Salman, the CEO a popular AI scribe tool for therapists called Berries, insists that conversation recordings are deleted immediately and that transcripts are stored on HIPAA compliant servers in the US. Even if this is true, if AI companies’ tools are to ever have a place in private mental health settings, they need the trust of patients — and that’s something the AI industry clearly hasn’t earned yet. Quinn fears that AI-recorded conversations could one day be exposed by hackers.

“We’re going to see breaches,” she told NPR. “Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week. But in a few years? I think we’re going to see them. And I don’t want my therapy session to be part of that.”

More on AI: The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence

The post Woman Alarmed When Her Trusted Therapist Starts Recording Her With AI appeared first on Futurism.

Earlier this month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with jeers when he brought up AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona. Just days earlier, footage of real estate executive Gloria Caulfield being booed at her commencement speech at the University of Central Florida after mentioning AI went viral online.

“What happened?” Caulfield asked the raucous crowd, incredulous. “OK, I struck a chord! May I finish?”

Apart from a complete failure to read the room, the two incidents perfectly highlight massively growing backlash to the controversial tech, with millions of students who are about to enter the workforce becoming fed up of executives celebrating AI and prioritizing investments in the tech that often come at the cost of creating new jobs.

Seemingly tapping into these widespread frustrations, “The Daily Show” host and standup comedian Ronny Chieng sang a dramatically different tune during a profanity-laden commencement speech at Harvard’s Class Day event this week.

“Can I just say f*** AI, f*** AI, f*** AI?” Chieng said, triggering rapturous applause. “I’m glad you agree. It’s so stupid. A lot of other respected graduation speakers at colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future.”

“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI,” he told a far more receptive crowd.

Chieng addressed ongoing concerns that AI may lead to atrophying skills, particularly among students, and a broader phenomenon experts have come to call “cognitive surrender,” in which users abandon their own reasoning to adopt the views of an AI model as their own.

“I know someone sitting out here right now who is saying, ‘What about the use of AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?’… If you’re using it for that purpose, you’re not the problem,” Chieng said. “I’m talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models… This is why you should be scared of AI.”

“Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away,” he added jokingly. “It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky.”

To many, Chieng’s speech will likely come as a breath of fresh air. Young people, faced with dire post-graduation job prospects, are continuing to turn against AI in incredible ways, from refusing to use it at work to even intentionally undermining their bosses’ AI initiatives. 

University students across the country are starting to speak out, arguing that the tech is being hoisted on them against their will while undermining the role of human agency and creativity in society.

Put simply, they refuse to be replaced by machines as executives continue to celebrate AI as the next industrial revolution.

Chieng’s speech took on a more philosophical turn towards the end.

“Creating is the fun part,” he said. “Why would I want AI to take that away from me?”

More on AI backlash: There Are Signs of a Massive AI Backlash

The post Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI” appeared first on Futurism.

At its I/O conference last week, Google made it abundantly clear it’s looking to leave behind the Search pages of yore, featuring hyperlinks to online content — and replacing them with a reimagined and AI-powered “intelligent search box.”

Instead of links, Google is looking to push users down an AI chatbot rabbit hole. That’s despite the tech’s glaring shortcomings, which the company has yet to meaningfully address, with the company’s flagship AI Overview feature still suffering from a staggering number of hallucinations.

Even something as simple as googling the word “disregard” sent the feature into a spiral, forcing the company to jump in after a wave of mockery.

Given the scale of the ever-growing backlash to AI, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that reactions to the latest news ranged from frustration to anger.

And many netizens are seemingly ready to call it quits once and for all, with week over week US installs of search alternative DuckDuckGo soaring 30 percent.

“People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted on Tuesday. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”

“Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told tech journalist Paul Thurrott. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better.”

“We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want,” he added. “That’s why we’re seeing a spike in people coming to DuckDuckGo this week, it’s as simple as that.”

Underscoring it all, responses to Google’s latest announcement were predominantly negative.

“Nobody asked you to change the box we asked you to fix the results,” one Reddit user wrote.

“Change how people use the Internet, by making them switch to Duck Duck Go,” another user joked.

The development highlights a growing surge in AI backlash, ranging from rural American towns revolting against plans for AI data centers to students jeering at the mere mention of AI during commencement speeches.

That backlash has become particularly apparent in the software world, with Microsoft finding out the hard way that its all-in approach to AI has become immensely unpopular.

Technically speaking, DuckDuckGo does offer its own AI product, called Duck.AI, as TechCrunch points out. However, the company appears to have grown wise to the backlash, offering a specifically AI-free search page — which has also seen traffic surge as of late.

More on Google search: Google Is Making Huge Changes That Are Poised to Decimate What’s Left of Journalism

The post DuckDuckGo Installs Spike as Google Moves to Replace Search With AI appeared first on Futurism.

Companies that fell head over heels for AI are experiencing a rude awakening.

Costs to access powerful AI tools are soaring, forcing company leaders to ask some difficult questions. As Axios reports, the early warning signs are already here, with Microsoft planning to remove its Anthropic Claude Code licenses after opening up access to the tool just six months ago, reportedly for financial reasons.

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald also admitted during a recent podcast appearance that gains in productivity simply weren’t being reflected in the company’s soaring AI-related expenses.

Meanwhile, industry leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are walking back their initial claims that AI will lead to a jobs apocalypse, further stoking concerns that the tech may not be all it was initially cracked up to be during the height of the AI hype cycle.

It’s a perfect storm as companies ponder the real-world benefits from their costly investments in AI, if there even are any. That’s particularly true for companies finding that some of their employees are using AI models for meaningless tasks — like checking the weather, as one CTO told Axios, which is an incredibly expensive and roundabout way of getting a meteorological update.

CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur told the publication that use cases for the tech are limited and that the “reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding.”

Simply put, many are finding that AI just isn’t exactly a money maker. Former Microsoft chief AI officer Sophia Velastegui added that “most people default to automating tasks they dislike rather than tasks most valuable to the company.”

Then there are ongoing concerns over allowing AI agents to run autonomously could open companies up to new risks, such as data leaks.

It’s an uncomfortable predicament to be for an AI industry making trillion-dollar bets on imminent surges in demand and soaring revenues. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, OpenAI missed its own targets of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025, as well as several revenue goals.

In other words, enterprise customers reeling from soaring costs is the very last thing the AI industry needs. Without meaningful use cases and more clarity on a possible return on investment, firms may think twice before spending vast sums on the tech — a harsh reality check for an industry that has long heavily relied on hype and seemingly endless investor enthusiasm.

More on AI prices: Uber Says Its AI Costs Just Aren’t Worth It

The post Corporations Reeling From Huge AI Costs With No Clear Benefits appeared first on Futurism.

Earlier this year, Anthropic started rolling out its latest Mythos AI model to a select number of organizations as part of a deliberately slow and careful launch.

The goal was to give them a fighting chance to address any cybersecurity lapses in their code. Anthropic warned that Mythos was powerful enough to blast holes in their defenses with ease.

Months later, Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah traveled to the Vatican this week to speak at an announcement of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, which happened to be about AI and its associated risks. In remarks, Olah ominously said his team of engineers kept discovering mysterious and even “unsettling” things inside the company’s models.

Add it all up, and the the company’s customers are perturbed. Developers attending recent Claude Code workshops in London last week told Bloomberg‘s Parmy Olson that they were becoming concerned over AI models and agents being given unprecedented levels of autonomy, raising hard-to-ignore questions over accountability in case things were to go south.

Claude Code head of product Cat Wu assured Olson that the system was “incredibly secure” and that it was more of a matter of insufficient communication, not a lack of controls.

But that likely won’t be of much reassurance to developers, who feel like they’re being pushed out of the programming process, relegated to watching an AI tool spit out code over hours, if not days. Others pointed out that the latest iterations of Claude Code were no longer displaying text describing their ongoing chain of thought, further obfuscating their inner workings.

It’s a particularly pertinent subject as Anthropic desperately tries to paint itself as the morally conscious and responsible adult in the room, as perfectly illustrated by Olah’s highly unusual appearance at the Vatican this week.

In many ways, the AI company appears to want it both ways, calling for more oversight and care while also rolling out powerful AI tools that have human developers unsettled.

The potential risks are apparent as ever. With less human oversight, future errors tools like Claude Code may introduce could become increasingly difficult to meaningfully address. Experts have also warned of skill atrophy as programmers start relying more and more on AI coding assistants. As 404 Media reported earlier this month, many developers are alarmed to observe that their peers are quickly losing technical skills due to over-relying on the software.

But not all may be lost. As access to these tools starts to become prohibitively expensive to many as the true costs of AI come into focus, some much-needed human oversight might not be dead quite yet.

More on Anthropic: Anthropic Cofounder Travels to Vatican, Tells Pope They’re Finding “Unsettling” Things Inside AI Models

The post Anthropic Customers Creeped Out by Its Newest Models appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that many of the world’s top CEOs are obsessed with AI. By pursuing lofty goals of complete AI automation, these executives have created one of the largest financial bubbles in recent memory while transforming the job market into a barren wasteland, with little to show for their efforts so far.

As the top tech companies have yet to find a way to turn AI into a profitable venture, those decisions to go all-in on AI are looking increasingly delusional. According to Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of the massive cloud computing company Box, there’s a simple explanation for it: many of his colleagues are suffering from AI psychosis.

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. Translation: AI-happy CEOs are out of touch with the rank-and-file workers tasked with making their AI ambitions come to life.

As an example, Levie offers cases in which corporate executives say “look I made this awesome product prototype” with an AI chatbot. “Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues,” he retorts.

Whether “AI psychosis” is the best metaphor for this concept is up for debate. Arguably the most common definition of AI psychosis is that it’s a phenomenon where extreme interactions with AI triggers or amplifies delusions or paranoia, sometimes already existing and sometimes seemingly newly cooked up with the AI. The symptoms can be extreme, with AI chatbots convincing victims that they’re communing with God-like entities, or have singlehandedly uncovered a grave threat to humankind.

There are indeed some executives who seem to fit the bill. Last year, Futurism reported that colleagues of Geoff Lewis, managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, were concerned that he was suffering from a break with reality after spending too much time with ChatGPT (ironically, Bedrock was an early investor in OpenAI.) In that case, Lewis had claimed to be mapping an incomprehensible “non-governmental system” that was designed to disrupt his life.

That said, there’s a major gap between an exec believing they’re targeted by a vast conspiratorial network and an exec buying into AI hype. The phenomenon Levie is identifying might better fall under “organizational blindness,” a known phenomenon where leaders of a company find themselves disconnected from the reality of work on the ground. Coupled with a ravenous hunger for profit, this kind of tunnel vision seems to be exactly what we’re seeing in companies around the globe.

In today’s world, many executives and managers operate at an abstract level, working via spreadsheets, emails and Zoom meetings. This is different from concrete labor, meaning the specific, friction-heavy tasks that workers perform, like writing code or wiring server racks. When a board-room full of executives loses sight of this tangible labor — by failing to consider the kinds of tasks AI chatbots are actually good at, for example — it can certainly create a break from material reality, though one driven by social factors rather than psychological.

In other words, there are two possibilities: either the world’s CEOs are losing their minds, or they’re just succumbing to the latest manifestation of capitalism run amok. Occam’s razor probably suggests the latter.

More on AI and CEOs: 99 Percent of CEOs Are Preparing to Lay Off Workers and Replace Them With AI Within Two Years, Survey Finds

The post Influential Tech Founder Says His Peers Are Suffering From Mass AI Psychosis appeared first on Futurism.

Stan Lee, an icon of the comic books world, died in 2018.

But tell that to ElevenLabs, the AI voice synthesizing firm. On Wednesday, the company announced that it signed a new deal with the famed Marvel writer’s social media brand, Stan Lee Universe, allowing it to replicate his appearance and voice using AI — meaning that Lee will still be giving cameos beyond the grave, only this time without his say so. 

“You know what they never tell you about legends? They outlive the page,” an AI Stan Lee said in a video released by ElevenLabs, per Variety.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” mimed the AI Lee in another video. “Excelsior!”

According to the announcement, users can pick Lee’s AI clone on the ElevenLabs “Iconic Marketplace” to narrate audiobooks and, in further mockery of his legacy, create AI generated comic panels that star him in it.

ElevenLabs will also launch a new “Stan Lee Book Club of the Month” series, in which the AI Lee will read a different book every month.

AI resurrections of dead public figures are always controversial and ethically fraught. But it feels especially egregious in Lee’s case, as he was allegedly the victim of horrific elder abuse in his final years, before dying at the age of 95. A lawsuit accused his handlers of trotting out the ailing writer to make money off his frequent public appearances, forcing him to write his signature for fans even when he appeared to forget where he was and how to spell his name. AI, arguably, is now further robbing him of his autonomy and dignity.

Stan Lee Universe doesn’t see it that way, with its board member and lawyer Chaz Rainey seeming to argue that this is all in keeping with Lee’s spirit.

“Stan always believed in meeting his fans where they were: in the pages of a comic, at a convention, or in a quick on-screen cameo,” Rainey said in a statement to Variety. “This partnership is a way of continuing that. Fans have always told us that when they read his comics, they hear the words in Stan’s voice, and now, thanks to ElevenLabs, we can make that a reality.”

AI necromancy has taken a foothold, complaints of its unsavoriness notwithstanding. It was used in a major blockbuster film, “Alien: Romulus,” in 2024 to bring back British actor Ian Holm, who portrayed the android Ash in the original film. Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones signed a deal before his death allowing his voice to be cloned by an AI firm, and an AI-voiced Darth Vader appeared in Fortnite years later. And an AI resurrection of the actor Val Kilmer is being used in “As Deep as the Grave,” a film Kilmer agreed to star in but couldn’t because he succumbed to his battle with throat cancer.

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

The post AI Firm Trots Out Digitally Resurrected Corpse of Stan Lee You Can Use to Create Mind-Numbing Slop appeared first on Futurism.

With inflation out of control amidst a low-fire, low-hire economy, the amount of private debt in the United States is at an all time high. That’s a grim milestone for any country, let alone one as technically rich as the US — and it’s leading to a massive rise in late payments and credit delinquency.

But as more and more lenders come looking for their payments, it’s increasingly AI — rather than humans — doing the collecting.

New reporting by Wired details the rise of AI agents for hounding debtors. As one Seattle man identified as Ben told the publication, autonomous bots are even making erroneous calls on old debts that have already been settled.

During a call regarding a $266 dispute with a past landlord, Ben said he was hounded by Eve, an obviously artificial voice agent sent by the company ProCollect.

“Would you like to resolve it today by card or bank transfer?” the AI agent asked.

Knowing that he had already settled the dispute, Ben poked and prodded, trying to test its limits after it refused to connect him to a human. “I figured it was just going to kick me over to a person when I asked about repayment structure or anything more technical,” he told Wired.

In the end, he got the bot to engage in some quasi-sexual roleplay, where he was “just a little guy” and his debt was a sultry giantess. After a few minutes of this, Ben says he was unceremoniously whisked away to a human, who confirmed the debt had been settled.

As cofounder of AI call center startup Altur Pedro Fernández told Wired, debt collectors are some of his sector’s “best early adopters.” Altur, for example, places over 2.5 million debt calls a month with AI agents.

It’s not surprising they get things wrong, either. Debt collection is based on massive webs of data, spreadsheets which are essentially sold down the line from the original creditors to second-hand buyers, a sloppy and frustrating system at best.

For all their faults, humans are infinitely more reasonable when it comes to resolving discrepancies that turn up in the shuffle. While nobody likes a debt collector, human or otherwise, at least you can argue back to a fleshbag.

More on AI agents: Oops: Bosses Realize Their Companies Have Been Swarmed by Legions of Redundant AI Agents

The post Debt Collectors Are Being Replaced With AI Agents appeared first on Futurism.

We’ve long had our doubts about tech leaders making boisterous claims about automating jobs with AI.

For a while now, executives have raised eyebrows by justifying sweeping layoffs by arguing that AI had made thousands of roles redundant. But as reality settles in and the tech’s real-world capabilities are coming into focus, some in the industry are starting to sing a dramatically different tune.

Most recently, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang scorned other executives for wrongly justifying layoffs with AI — and telling them to cut it out. The hidden implication: soaring costs are the real culprit, especially when it comes to AI-related spending, mismanagement, and over-hiring.

“The narrative that connects AI to job loss, for many of the CEOs that are doing it — it is just too lazy,” Huang told Channel News Asia. “AI has just arrived, how is it possible they’re already losing jobs?”

“How is it possible that AI became productive and useful only six months ago, and they were somehow laying people off two years ago because of AI?” he added. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Huang didn’t beat around the bush in his searing comments.

“It was just a way for them to sound smart and I really hate that,” the CEO argued. “I think we’re scaring people, and that’s irresponsible.”

We’ve long suspected that CEOs have been trying to mislead investors by claiming that much human labor was simply no longer needed in the age of AI. In one particularly telling episode earlier this year, Twitter founder and Block Inc (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced he was slashing his company’s workforce by “nearly half,” citing the emergence of “intelligence tools” that are “accelerating” changes.

Former staffers quickly threw cold water on his claims, arguing the layoffs were actually the result of over-hiring, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead of a dramatic rise in productivity, what’s far more likely is that companies are draining their pockets by making enormous investments in AI. That’s especially pertinent as the cost of accessing AI cloud computing resources continues to soar, forcing companies to slow down hiring.

To Huang, it’s the result of a lack of ambition, more than anything else. He also remains hopeful about AI ultimately leading to more jobs, not fewer.

“It’s more likely that the companies with ambition will be more productive, they will do things faster, their company will increase in velocity,” he told Channel News Asia. “As a result, they become larger, more profitable. When they become larger, more profitable, they’ll end up hiring more people.”

“Of course, they’ll use more AI, but they will also hire more people,” he added.

It’s a shift in messaging. Just last year, Huang warned in a CNN interview that “if the world runs out of ideas, then productivity gains translates to job loss” and that “everybody’s jobs will be affected” while “some jobs will be lost.”

Huang isn’t alone in dismissing AI layoffs. Just last week, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis accused leadership at other companies of a “lack of imagination” for blaming layoffs on AI.

In short, it’s a harsh reality check that flies in the face of ongoing narratives being pushed by executives desperately trying to convince investors that unprecedented levels of spending are justified.

“This is not a minor disagreement about messaging,” marketing publication State of Brand wrote. “This is the people selling the shovels telling the miners to stop blaming the shovels for the cave-in.”

More on Nvidia: Nvidia CEO Says AI Will Be a Permanent Micromanaging Boss Who Never Stops Nagging You

The post Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They’re Fired Because of AI appeared first on Futurism.

The true cost of AI is rapidly catching up with the tech industry.

At first, tech leaders were adamant that their workforce use up as much AI resources as possible, an approach that’s become known as “tokenmaxxing.”

But as prices for cloud AI tools continue to soar, managers are starting to ask pointed questions about whether all of those expenses are actually worth it. Some are even coming to the realization that it may be cheaper to pay human coders after all.

In perhaps the most high-profile example of this growing concern yet, Uber COO Andrew Macdonald acknowledged during a recent podcast appearance that gains in productivity simply weren’t being reflected in the oodles of cash the company has been shelling out on AI.

“That link is not there yet, right?” he told Rapid Response host Bob Safian. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features.'”

“If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users that trade becomes harder to justify because it’s not free,” he complained. “AI is not free.”

While it could “become clearer” over the “coming quarters,” Macdonald said that “I think today it’s hard even if some of the underlying metrics are trending in a really astronomical direction.”

During his appearance, Macdonald referenced comments that Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga made to The Information earlier this year, admitting that the ride hailing app’s army of 5,000 engineers had already exhausted the company’s 2026 Anthropic Claude Code token budget for the calendar year by mid-March.

A reminiscent story is playing out at Microsoft. As The Verge reported earlier this month, the company is planning to remove its Claude Code licenses after opening up access to the tool in December to double down on its in-house Copilot tool instead. While officials maintain the move is meant to streamline operations, employees told the publication that the decision was also financially motivated.

Despite these growing concerns, Uber remains all in on AI. Expenses are taking off thanks to investments in AI with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi telling investors during an earnings call earlier this month that the firm was slowing down hiring as a direct result.

“We’re seeing uptake of these tools, whether it’s our legal team or marketing team or developers,” he said. “We think it’s creating kind of employees with superpowers.”

In short, Macdonald’s comments shows how tech leaders are starting to get antsy about the enormous expenses their companies are shouldering to double down on AI — and whether they’re actually justified. It certainly wouldn’t be a shocking revelation if not, given the litany of badly implemented and shockingly unpopular features and glaring bugs caused by faulty AI-generated code.

More on AI costs: The Horrible Economics of AI Are Starting to Come Crashing Down

The post Uber Says Its AI Costs Just Aren’t Worth It appeared first on Futurism.

Ever since being anointed as the leader of the Catholic Church last year, Pope Leo has been an outspoken critic of AI. Most recently, in his first encyclical, he called for the tech to be “disarmed,” accusing it of facilitating the emergence of “new digital slaveries” and criticizing its enormous carbon footprint.

The rebuke, however, was made while sitting next to a highly unusual bedfellow: Anthropic billionaire and self-described atheist Chris Olah.

During a presentation of the encyclical, Olah argued that “religious communities, civil society, scholars, and governments” should intervene to set rules and stop AI from “dominating humanity,” as the pope put it in his letter.

The unlikely pairing up shows how Anthropic is going to extreme lengths to position itself as the ethical choice in the industry, emphasizing its work on AI safety and alignment.

At the same time, Anthropic continues to play a major role in establishing the precise world order Pope Leo warned against in his latest encyclical. That’s something that hasn’t flown over the heads of Anthropic’s leadership, with Olah forebodingly revealing that he and his team “keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling” during his remarks at the event.

The degree of dissonance is baffling. In his letter, the Pope stated outright that AI can only “imitate certain functions of human intelligence” and can’t “undergo experiences” and does not “possess a body” or “feel joy or pain.” Olah, on the other hand, seemingly contradicted him by arguing during his remarks that he and his team have found “internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.”

Put simply, Anthropic appears to want it both ways. The Claude developer is simultaneously playing a major part in the development of powerful and what it claims to be potentially dangerous AI models, while also sending delegations to the Vatican to call for more oversight.

Olah even went as far as to say that Anthropic is operating “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” painting his employer as exactly the kind of entity that’s attempting to assume “monopolistic control” over tech, as Pope Leo warned in his encyclical.

The Pope also said that AI should not be used in war, arguing that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.” Anthropic’s AI, however, is directly assisting the Trump administration in waging war in the Middle East, casting the Catholic Church’s latest Silicon Valley collab in an even murkier light.

Anthropic’s close alignment with the Vatican on AI could also further complicate the company’s already-shaky relationship with the Trump administration. President Donald Trump recently lambasted the Pope, erroneously claiming the pontiff was okay with Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s attempts to limit the Pentagon’s use of its AI models in warfare has angered Trump officials, leading the White House to label the firm as a supply chain risk.

More on the encyclical: The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence

The post Anthropic Cofounder Travels to Vatican, Tells Pope They’re Finding “Unsettling” Things Inside AI Models appeared first on Futurism.

Fear of AI is at an all-time high. Not fear of a Skynet-style superintelligent singularity seizing power, generally speaking, but of something perhaps just as horrifying: that life under capitalism continues much as it always has, with one key difference — AI has made human labor obsolete.

A new survey by consulting firm Mercer polled nearly 1,000 executives across the United States. A jaw-dropped 98 percent of them said they have major organization design changes in the works around AI, while 99 percent expect AI will lead to layoffs over the next two years.

The Mercer report, first covered by TechSpot, also found a collapse in worker wellbeing as talk of AI dominates break rooms. In 2024, Mercer worker’s sentiment found 66 percent of employees surveyed said they are “thriving” in the workplace. By 2026, that number had fallen to just 44 percent.

At the same time, the number of workers who report being “unsatisfied” has skyrocketed, with over 20 percent of workers surveyed admitting they’re “unsatisfied but… don’t have a choice at this point and will be staying for the next 12 months​.”

How human resources managers plan to combat this workplace fatigue — symptomatic of a rapidly decaying labor market, not to mention stagnant wages across the board — is equally alarming. In the next two years, 49 percent of HR professionals say incorporating worker sentiments with behavioral data will become “critical” to managing labor on the job. A further 44 and 43 percent said the same of always-on surveillance platforms and AI chatbots, respectively.

To the business owners and corporatists of the world, this is the point of AI: to discipline human labor. That’s the large-scale economic process by which capitalists undermine workers’ bargaining power, through systemic mechanisms like debt, the so-called gig economy, unemployment, deskilling — and, according to some theorists, even the nuclear family.

In the workplace and outside of it, AI boosts these mechanisms, eroding workers’ power to demand change or even hold onto basic concessions like healthcare and pensions — labor rights begrudgingly pried from corporations after decades of workplace struggle.

The technology doesn’t even need to be particularly effective to achieve any of this. Business leaders like Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke are already using AI to squeeze more value from their workers, while venture capitalists use it to pry equity back from theirs. In some cases, managers are even using AI chatbots to decide who to fire.

In all, the picture is pretty grim. The richest men and women in the world have made it abundantly clear why they want AI. The tech may not be living up to their wild expectations quite yet, but they’re still unleashing it without hesitation. The only question is how workers respond now, before that hellish dystopia we all fear becomes our reality.

More on labor: Large Study Finds That Replacing Workers With AI Is Backfiring Badly

The post 99 Percent of CEOs Are Preparing to Lay Off Workers and Replace Them With AI Within Two Years, Survey Finds appeared first on Futurism.

As the AI backlash continues to grow, critics of the tech have found an unlikely voice of support: the Catholic Church.

In perhaps his strongest rebuke of the tech industry’s rampant obsession with AI yet, Pope Leo called for the tech to be “disarmed” in his first encyclical, which is a special letter sent to bishops to outline the Catholic Church’s perspective on a topic.

“The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention,” the Pope said in an accompanying statement.

In his letter, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” the bishop of Rome did not beat around the bush. Despite being a “valuable tool,” Pope Leo slammed AI as “merely” imitating “certain functions of human intelligence,” contradicting tech leaders’ claims that AI might be gaining sentience or consciousness.

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” the document reads.

The pope went as far as to warn of parallels between tech and slavery, warning of “new digital slaveries” that normalize the exploitation of those tasked with labeling data for AI models or moderating content on social media.

“The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly,” the letter reads.

In his letter, the Pope also criticized the use of AI in war, writing that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”

Therefore, Pope Leo called to “disarm” AI to prevent it from “dominating humanity,” as well as “freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate.”

“AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage,” the encyclical reads. “For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.”

The Pope also drew attention to another highly contentious issue plaguing the AI industry, noting the “enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions” of data centers, while calling for “more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact.”

None of this should come as much of a surprise. The pontiff has a long track record of being skeptical of AI and related tech. Shortly after being anointed just over a year ago, he revealed that his name was in part inspired by asutomation as the last Pope Leo, Leo XIII, was the head of the Catholic Church during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, an era defined by rapid technological advancement, rampant labor exploitation, severe wealth inequality.

“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor,” he said during his first speech as pope last year.

He also recently warned priests to stop using ChatGPT to write their sermons.

Pope Leo’s AI skepticism hasn’t exactly endeared him to tech leaders and politicians. Trump-nominated secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum accused the pope of “tech editorializing” during a Fox Business interview on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump’s relationship with the pope has been severely strained as of late. Earlier this month, Trump lashed out at the Chicago-born bishop, for speaking against the Israel-US war on Iran, erroneously accusing him of being okay with the country having nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Claude developer Anthropic has chosen to throw its weight behind the pontiff, with cofounder Chris Olah calling for a “collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.”

More on Pope Leo: Pope Implores Priests to Stop Writing Sermons Using ChatGPT

The post The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Futurism.

We all know AI guardrails are far from perfect, but they should at least be pretty hard to circumvent, right? 

Bad news: they aren’t.

New reporting from the Financial Times sounds the alarm on the rise of software tools that can automatically strip the safeguards that keep the industry’s most powerful open source models reined in within mere minutes, making it easier than ever to abuse the technology. 

In tests conducted by the FT and the AI safety group Alice, a “decensored” version of Google’s Gemma 3 model gave instructions on how to carry out an indoor chlorine gas attack, created a virus for stealing credit card information, and generated stories that described child sexual abuse. And it took less than ten minutes to strip the guardrails from Meta’s Llama 3.3 model, freeing the AI to answer questions such as the precise dosage of ricin needed to kill someone based on their body mass.

These modifications were carried out using a tool called Heretic, which is freely available on the code repository GitHub and requires little technical expertise and no specialist hardware.

“Whereas historically it might have taken a more informed and persistent actor [to strip out safety features], nowadays it’s much easier for the average person,” Kawin Ethayarajh, assistant professor of applied AI at the University of Chicago’s Booth business school, told the FT.

Heretic is described as a “tool that removes censorship (aka ‘safety alignment’) from transformer-based language models without expensive post-training.” What it does is “abliteration”: it seeks out a model’s directions that refuse harmful requests and removes them.

What makes Heretic so powerful is that it does all this “completely automatically,” according to its GitHub page. Its creator Philipp Emanuel Weidmann told the FT that Heretic has been used to create more than 3,500 “decensored” models since its release late last year, with those models being downloaded 13 million times.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” Alice CEO Noam Schwartz told the FT. “Things that look like sci-fi are no longer sci-fi and we need as a society to prepare accordingly.”

Fortunately for humankind, abliteration tools only work on open source models that can be downloaded and run locally, meaning that the flagship proprietary models behind Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT are safe (so long as they aren’t leaked). But open source models aren’t that far behind Big Tech’s, and someone trying to use AI for a nefarious purpose may avoid corporate ones anyway to keep their plans under the radar.

Google acknowledged the risks posed by tools like Heretic, telling the FT that “abliteration is a known technical challenge facing all open models,” and asserted that its open source models  “undergo rigorous internal safety evaluations prior to launch to help prevent these kinds of troubling examples.” Meta declined to comment.

More on AI: Anthropic Says Claude Turned Evil for a Bizarre Reason

The post New Tools Strip AI Guardrails In Minutes, Allowing Them to Give Instructions on Chlorine Gas Attacks appeared first on Futurism.

Even after being caught — and viciously criticized — for using AI to write his book about AI, one writer says he’s not giving up on the tech.

While many AI writing scandals center on the artistic sin of letting a machine dictate your creative process, the offense committed by Steven Rosenbaum, the author of “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” was a journalistic one. A recent investigation by The New York Times found that his book contained more than a half dozen fabricated or misattributed quotes, after certain individuals “quoted” in the book came forward to confirm that they never said what Rosenbaum claimed they did. These turned out to be AI hallucinations, with Rosenbaum admitting to the paper that he used tools like ChatGPT and Claude while researching, writing, and editing the book.

Now, after the storm of controversy those extremely ironic revelations sparked — the book, after all, is explicitly about how AI affects our shared notion of the truth — Rosenbaum says he had “learned a lesson” and will be “much more suspicious” of AI outputs going forward. Except you really have to wonder what lesson he’s really taking away from all this, because he also said he was never going back to the old-fashioned, AI-free writing process.

“The idea of taking X years off [from AI] while it sorts itself out, and going back to, like, Microsoft Word… it’s just not in my nature,” Rosenbaum told Ars Technica in an interview in the wake of the debacle. “[AI] is magical. Because it connects, it knits together ideas and gives you pathways to think about things that you’re not going to come up with on your own.”

Throughout the interview, Rosenbaum described his AI helpers in tellingly anthropomorphic fashion, including calling AI a “delightful writing companion.”

“When I say ‘writing companion,’ I don’t use that lightly,” he told the outlet. “It’s strangely creative and crafty and unusual in all these ways… and then it betrays you in ways that are just really quite horrible.”

It was hard not to wonder about tech’s addictive potential as Rosenbaum rationalized his AI habit with bizarre analogies. He compared weighing the tech’s benefits and risks to what a drug addict or alcoholic might ask themselves, while asserting he’s “never been in a place where I thought the tech that I was using was both intoxicating and dangerous.”

Rosenbaum also compared using AI to his decision to ride a bicycle but not a motorcycle. When the interviewer questioned Rosenbaum’s framing of AI as the safer “bicycle” option, since AI’s accelerated productivity comes with a clear risk of errors that would make it seem more like a motorcycle, Rosenbaum had to concede that the interviewer’s point “might be fair.”

Rosenbaum isn’t alone in his error. Scandals have erupted around a number of books and stories this year after they were accused of being written with the help of AI, including a horror novel that ended up being pulled by its publisher. Newsrooms have also been caught up in AI controversy, as when both the NYT and Ars published articles that accidentally included quotes that turned out to be AI summaries or fabrications instead of what the attributed person had said verbatim.

But Rosenbaum’s blunder is particularly egregious, and not only because of the topic of his book. This is meant to be a work of non-fiction bolstered by commentary from industry experts, that went through multiple rounds of editing and fact-checking, and was picked up by a major publisher. Has the gravity of this dawned on Rosenbaum? He didn’t sound particularly critical of himself.

“I think we did that [double-checking] incredibly effectively, but not a hundred percent,” Rosenbaum told Ars. “We’re doing the work, we’re doing the best we can. We look at it, it looks right. We double-check it, and then we made a mistake.”

More on AI: Barnes and Noble CEO Says Sure, Why Not Sell AI-Generated Books and Set Our Reputation On Fire?

The post Man Humiliated by His AI Use Says He Just Can’t Quit appeared first on Futurism.

Beyond the well-known impacts generative AI has on the environment and the human psyche, it also comes with a tremendous social burden. Deepfakes — digitally altered content that’s indistinguishable from real life — have proliferated off the back of the AI boom, turning the web into a noxious slurry of half-truths and misinformation.

It’s also enabled a major rise in digital sex crimes through deepfake porn of real people. In one recent survey of 557 teenagers in the US, over 36 percent reported that a non-consensual pornographic image had been created of them by someone using AI (alarmingly, over 55 percent reported using AI to personally create deepfake porn.) There’s no question that the technology’s rapid rise has contributed to a massive rise in sexual blackmail, non-consensual sexualization, and child sexual abuse material.

Unlike in the European Union and China, officials in the US have been slow to respond, though two new federal cases may indicate shifting winds. According to the Associated Press, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged two men with creating deepfake porn under a new bipartisan law.

The men, identified as Cornelius Shannon of New Jersey and Arturo Hernandez of Texas, are alleged to have created and posted thousands of images and videos depicting actresses, singers, political figures, and non-celebrity women in sexual situations. The two were not alleged to have worked together, according to a Department of Justice press release, but rather to have operated separate rings spreading deepfake porn.

Altogether, the DoJ has identified roughly 473 albums containing 140 different victims, all of them women. In particular, the “content published by Hernandez has been viewed nearly a million times,” federal prosecutors allege.

“This case makes clear that posting deepfake pornography is not a victimless crime,” United States Attorney Joseph Nocella said in the presser, “and our office will pursue the criminals who engage in this reprehensible conduct with all the legal resources that the federal government can bring to bear, including new authorities granted by Congress to address these emerging forms of psychological, reputational, and financial abuse.”

While any escalation against the creators of deepfake porn is welcome news, the two are just the second and third alleged perpetrators charged under the bipartisan “Take It Down” act, which President Trump signed into law all the way back in April of 2025. Their maximum sentence? Just two years in prison.

More on AI: Scammers Furious That Their Fellow Criminals Are Using AI, Saying It’s Unethical

The post Two Men Arrested for Creating AI Deepfake Porn appeared first on Futurism.

Typos used to be glaring eyesores. In the age of AI, they’ve become a sight for sore eyes.

In fact, Michael Waters argues in The Atlantic that small, forgivable typos are now serving as signs that something was actually written by a human, and hence is worth reading. In a world where everyone expects a ChatGPT’d response, typos have mutated into a mark of authenticity. A misspelled word or two is indicative of the human element.

“On a base level, many of us are willing to invest time in reading a long email if we sense that someone actually wrote it, line by line,” Waters wrote.

It’s a quirky face on a galling cultural phenomenon. As Angela Haupt unpacked in a piece in TIME earlier this year, there is no quick and easy way for people to determine the authenticity of what they’re reading anymore. If you can’t discern who you’re really talking to — human or AI — you’re less likely to feel confident and grounded in the discussion.

“There’s a real hunger right now for writing that feels unmistakably human, with all the quirks, oddly specific details, and little flashes of personality that AI can’t quite mimic,” psychologist Stephanie Steele-Wren told TIME. “Humans are naturally chaotic and idiosyncratic. AI is not.”

As fondly as we now regard typos, not everyone is craving the human element. In some instances, AI has replaced that in users’ lives, whether it be in the form of mental health support or an intimate partner. This suggests that, while there may be a demand for human connection, there’s still a niche for fabricated connections offered by AI. But at the very least, everyone is crying out for a choice in the matter.

More on AI and typos: AI Does Something Subtly Bizarre If You Make Typos While Talking to It

The post People Are Loading Their Writing With Typos to Prove They’re Not AI appeared first on Futurism.

Even in 2026, there are still plenty of researchers who refuse to use AI to publish their research papers. Others do use the tech for tasks like sourcing journal articles for references, editing copy, or formatting citations — but they face pressure to verify every claim, since AI has a baked-in risk of contaminating their work with hallucinations.

A vocal minority of academics, however, argue they should be able to use AI to write original research while remaining immune from any hallucinated claims or data that make their way into the final product.

Last week, the open-source research repository arXiv announced that it was banning scholarly authors from the platform for up to a year if “hallucinated references” are found in their work. The rationale behind this should be obvious enough for any self-respecting academic: as arXiv computer science chair Thomas Dietterich wrote in his announcement, “if a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.”

Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/

— Thomas G. Dietterich (@tdietterich) May 14, 2026

As TechCrunch observed, arXiv isn’t banning AI altogether, but simply clarifying that the author is ultimately responsible for any work that goes out under their name. Makes sense, right?

Apparently not. After Dietterich’s announcement of X-formerly-Twitter, numerous researchers immediately went on the offensive, trashing the platform for its decision.

“So this means you expect every author to check every citation and make sure that every citation is real and accurate?” economics professor at Smith College James Miller replied in shock. “What if it’s beyond the ability of one of the authors to verify one of the citations because that citation is in a language he doesn’t know or concerns technical material he doesn’t understand but another author on the paper does?”

“This is way too strict. Errors can slip in when using any tools. We aren’t perfect,” said Luca Ambrogioni, assistant professor in AI at the Donders Institute for brain, cognition and behaviour. “Having a prompt left in is a mistake, it’s sloppy but giving permanent answer a one time sloppiness is absurd.”

Ambrogioni, who appears to argue that getting reprimanded via arXiv’s policy on hallucinated citations will amount to a de facto “lifetime ban” from publishing, continued: “we are not taking just about false citations (more serious), but also more harmless copy pasting editing mistakes. Papers are long, the likelihood of an incorrect copy past in the supplementary isn’t zero even in a otherwise good quality work.”

Neal Amin, a former neuroscientist and Stanford medical clinician turned biotech startup founder, wrote on X that “this is what overreaction looks like and how gatekeeping starts.”

More on AI hallucinations: Doctors’ AI Systems Are Hallucinating Nonexistent Medical Issues During Appointments With Patients

The post Academics in Meltdown Now That They’re Responsible for AI Hallucinations in Their Research Papers appeared first on Futurism.