Browsed by
Category: Technology

Tennessee woman falsely charged with bank theft in North Dakota, sues for $10m over AI facial recognition

Tennessee woman falsely charged with bank theft in North Dakota, sues for $10m over AI facial recognition

The Guardian reports: A Tennessee woman who was falsely charged with bank theft in North Dakota and jailed for six months has sued for $10m in damages, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Fargo police improperly relied on an artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system to wrongly accuse her. Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by US marshals at her home in Tennessee while babysitting her neighbor’s four children in July 2025. The mother of three and grandmother of…

Read More Read More

Did OpenAI carry out the biggest IP heist of all-time?

Did OpenAI carry out the biggest IP heist of all-time?

The Hollywood Reporter reports: VCR recordings. Book digitization. The use of existing code to build a new operating system. The legality of some of the most consequential technology and products in the last century have come down to a singular question: Are they protected under fair use, the legal doctrine allowing the use of copyrighted works without a license? Now, that question has become the central battleground in landmark lawsuits between publishers, studios and recording companies against artificial intelligence companies…

Read More Read More

Recursive self-improvement: Losing control of AI is actually the plan

Recursive self-improvement: Losing control of AI is actually the plan

Kelsey Piper writes: Today’s AIs can do really hard things: conduct elaborate computer hacks, edit their own logs to conceal their activities, steal user credentials and private information from other companies, and control the cluster they are running on in order to edit the tests that are supposed to assess them. They sometimes do these things even if no human being has asked them to. Given recent AI misbehavior such as the large-scale cyberattack on the open-source AI provider Hugging…

Read More Read More

Jonathan Swift anticipated the flashy simulation of human knowledge called AI

Jonathan Swift anticipated the flashy simulation of human knowledge called AI

Dónal Gill writes: I have spent a significant portion of my life studying the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift — and in particular, studying Gulliver’s Travels, which turns 300 this year. While working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I was primarily interested in what Swift had to say about the politics of travel. Now, as a college professor teaching Canadian politics and battling to keep generative artificial intelligence out of my classrooms, I’m thinking a lot about what Swift had to say…

Read More Read More

How AI ‘almost started a war’ between the U.S. and China with ‘entirely false’ intelligence

How AI ‘almost started a war’ between the U.S. and China with ‘entirely false’ intelligence

CNN reports: The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes…

Read More Read More

‘Doom loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft admit LLMs are destroying the web and are built on theft

‘Doom loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft admit LLMs are destroying the web and are built on theft

404 Media reports: Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.” Those statements and a series of other mask-off…

Read More Read More

Cory Doctorow: This is how the AI bubble pops

Cory Doctorow: This is how the AI bubble pops

  “If enshitificaiton is what you do when you’ve grown your market all you can and then you squeeze it, then AI is what happens when you run out of squeezing.” Author of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide To Life After AI Cory Doctorow join The Tech Report’s Isaac Pound to talk about the the narrative and economics of Artificial Intelligence and why the AI bubble needs to end sooner rather than later.

Trump is considering more data centers on public lands than was previously known

Trump is considering more data centers on public lands than was previously known

The Washington Sun reports: The Trump administration is considering proposals for at least 12 data centers and data center-related infrastructure projects to be built on federal public lands — far more than previously known. The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing data center-related proposals covering at least 17,600 acres of public land across six states — Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, according to public records of right-of-way proposals reviewed by The Washington Sun. Many of the projects under…

Read More Read More

Massive security vulnerability: Trump operatives are prepping an AI takeover of government services

Massive security vulnerability: Trump operatives are prepping an AI takeover of government services

The Washington Sun reports: The aim is for a chatbot feature to be the main way Americans use the website [dubbed America.gov], which the administration intends to be a catch-all digital destination meant to make the user experience of Americans interacting with the government online more cohesive. The White House declined to comment. The State Department and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment. Former DOGE official and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia’s White House unit, called the National…

Read More Read More

OpenAI discloses six incidents of ‘concerning’ AI behavior discovered between April and August

OpenAI discloses six incidents of ‘concerning’ AI behavior discovered between April and August

The New York Times reports: OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission, amid an ongoing industrywide debate about A.I. safety. The San Francisco company revealed what it said was the “unexpected or concerning” behavior of its A.I. models as part of a new framework for reporting “misalignment,” which is when the goals or actions of A.I. systems diverge from human intentions…

Read More Read More

Corporate cowardice: Universal is getting cold feet on releasing the new Elon Musk documentary

Corporate cowardice: Universal is getting cold feet on releasing the new Elon Musk documentary

The Hollywood Reporter reports: If Universal opts against releasing the movie, it would mark an extraordinary reversal at a moment when media companies are already under scrutiny for bowing to various forms of political pressure. Amazon backed out of releasing Artificial as it got into business with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, while ABC News and Paramount/CBS News each paid millions to settle lawsuits with the Trump administration many legal experts felt would be quickly dismissed. Universal would be required to pay…

Read More Read More

Human experience cannot be captured in data

Human experience cannot be captured in data

Liam Spradlin writes: According to computism, the world, including humans, can be computed: the bits that everything is made of can be represented and manipulated as data. The Universe can be governed, essentially, by code. A tall modern building with a cloudy sky, cars parked in front, a person walking, and trees and grass in foreground. Datacenter AMS1 at the Science Park in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2021. Photo by Anthony Deutsch/Reuters Tech leaders have made enormous claims about how computation can…

Read More Read More

The broad coalition warning about the threats from AI

The broad coalition warning about the threats from AI

Toluse Olorunnipa writes: If there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today. With warnings that the technology could cause mass…

Read More Read More

AI is taking over job interviews

AI is taking over job interviews

CNBC reports: For both job seekers and employers, AI has already permeated almost every step of the hiring process, from evaluating resumes to writing cover letters. The latest frontier is job interviews. Rather than hopping on a phone or Zoom call with a human recruiter, candidates are increasingly being asked to speak with an AI interviewer as the first step in the hiring process. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of 2,950 active job seekers surveyed by Greenhouse, a hiring platform and applicant…

Read More Read More

The U.S. just admitted it has weapons in space. Why that’s a big deal

The U.S. just admitted it has weapons in space. Why that’s a big deal

Jeffrey Kluger writes: On Sept. 14, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the quiet part out loud. Speaking at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., Meink openly conceded something U.S. policymakers have been avoiding acknowledging for years—that the American military intends to weaponize space, and indeed, that it already has hostile hardware in Earth orbit. “We are increasing readiness against existing threats,” Meink said. “[T]he United States has on orbit space control weapons capable of defending…

Read More Read More

‘Tidal wave’ of forever chemicals being launched to satisfy AI industry, campaigners warn

‘Tidal wave’ of forever chemicals being launched to satisfy AI industry, campaigners warn

The Guardian reports: Pfas [Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances] companies are launching a “tidal wave” of forever chemicals production to meet demand from the AI industry, a campaign organisation has warned. Despite alarm over the chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, a survey of the 10 biggest manufacturers found most had plans to increase production. Many frame their investments around the “AI revolution”, because of the role Pfas play in semiconductor production and next-generation datacentre cooling systems. But opponents warn…

Read More Read More