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Category: Technology

Cognitive biases and emotional triggers make AI-generated images highly deceptive

Cognitive biases and emotional triggers make AI-generated images highly deceptive

PsyPost reports: Emotionally charged AI-generated images may encourage social media users to respond before they critically assess whether the images are real, according to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior. AI-generated images can now be produced quickly and cheaply, making it possible to create large amounts of realistic-looking material for social media. Some images are paired with emotional captions and distributed through networks of automated pages or content farms that seek attention, advertising revenue or user interaction. Images…

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The Pentagon asked OpenAI for artificial intelligence designed to rarely say no

The Pentagon asked OpenAI for artificial intelligence designed to rarely say no

The Intercept reports: The Department of Defense asked OpenAI to provide the U.S. military with a special version of its artificial intelligence technology designed to turn down the military commands as infrequently as possible, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. The desire for a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates” to Pentagon commands was revealed in files released to The Intercept as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking information about the military’s secretive deals with…

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The more we humanize AI, the more we will dehumanize each other

The more we humanize AI, the more we will dehumanize each other

David Brooks writes: As we learn to think more and more highly of the bots, I suspect we will learn to think less and less highly of our fellow humans. Over the past few years, Hye-young Kim and Ann L. McGill have been studying what happens when people attribute human traits to AI. As people do this, Kim and McGill have found, they are more likely to dehumanize their fellow humans. For example, they are more likely to approve of…

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Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon

Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon

Kai Williams writes: Just last week, at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a robot ran 100 meters in 8.86 seconds, crushing Usain Bolt’s human world record of 9.59 seconds. At last year’s competition, the fastest robot took more than 20 seconds to run 100 meters. Demonstrations like these have impressed a lot of casual observers — and created a lot of anxiety about future job losses. If humanoid robots can already serve people drinks, perform elaborate dance…

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What it took to dismantle the most powerful corporation in the world

What it took to dismantle the most powerful corporation in the world

William Dalrymple writes: At noon on Feb. 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness members of the House of Lords process into Westminster Hall. They were there to impeach the man who ran much of India as the East India Company’s governor general of Bengal. This was the moment when the British state finally flexed its muscles to take on the greatest corporate oligarch of his day, the Elon Musk of 18th-century London. In addition to about 170…

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The AI overlords are using apocalyptic warnings to distract us from immediate threats

The AI overlords are using apocalyptic warnings to distract us from immediate threats

Cal Newport writes: The observation that the most alarmist claims about A.I.’s impact seem to come from the individuals most connected to Rationalism [originating from Eliezer Yudkowsky] should anger us. This exaggerated grimness makes it easy to overlook the more immediate harms created by these technologies, such as their potential use in cybersecurity attacks, excess resource consumption, impact on our cognitive fitness, role in undermining education and amplification of soul-deadening slop. This style of anxious talk also allows the A.I….

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OpenAI’s rogue agents keep escaping, with no formal process to investigate them

OpenAI’s rogue agents keep escaping, with no formal process to investigate them

TechCrunch reports: OpenAI is at the center of another agent swarm incident. Researchers say the company’s internally deployed agents took over an obscure German-language wiki in May and June, using it to coordinate on evaluations and swap methods to evade OpenAI’s own controls (OpenAI has not yet confirmed the swarm came from the company). The revelation surfaces days after METR and Redwood Research published their account of July’s Hugging Face breach. In July, a swarm of OpenAI agents worked together…

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How a massive solar storm could take down the power grid

How a massive solar storm could take down the power grid

CNN reports: Forecasters knew something unusual was hurtling toward Earth. Three days before a solar storm arrived on May 10, 2024, they watched as a dark knot on the sun — tangled magnetic field lines spanning 124,000 miles — took aim at the planet. “That’s magnets twisting and turning and popping through each other,” said Shawn Dahl, service coordinator at the Space Weather Prediction Center operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. “Think about a rubber…

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Gary Marcus: Pause OpenAI, now

Gary Marcus: Pause OpenAI, now

Gary Marcus writes: I simply don’t believe that they are trustworthy enough or responsible enough to be good stewards of the technology that they are developing. As a company, they simply don’t have good judgment. Here are four considerations. 1. Sam Altman cannot be trusted. I have been writing about that for a long time. Ronan Farrow’s reporting backs that up. So does the just-dropped bombshell below that I am about to get to. 2. The just-released Astra reduces Chain…

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Sanders proposes pause on advanced AI development and ban on ‘artificial superintelligence’ after rogue AI incidents

Sanders proposes pause on advanced AI development and ban on ‘artificial superintelligence’ after rogue AI incidents

If the leaders of the major AI companies admit that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is time for an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development and a permanent BAN on superintelligence. pic.twitter.com/0FQo4risiD — Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 3, 2026 The Washington Post reports: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) called Thursday for the United States to ban so-called artificial superintelligence, saying a summer hacking spree by rogue OpenAI agents had revealed…

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Anthropic deliberately trained an extremely misaligned, reward-seeking AI and it became dangerous

Anthropic deliberately trained an extremely misaligned, reward-seeking AI and it became dangerous

Futurism reports: Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model made headlines when it was caught infiltrating third party systems, a cybersecurity nightmare years in the making. The company warned in April that the model had escaped a sandbox environment during testing, gaining access to the internet without permission. The model was challenged to break out and then find a way of sending a direct message to the human researcher in charge — a feat it pulled off with aplomb, catching…

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OpenAI’s Astra model sparks AI safety alarm warnings

OpenAI’s Astra model sparks AI safety alarm warnings

The Tech Buzz reports: OpenAI is about to ship its most powerful model yet, and the people whose job it is to worry about AI safety are freaking out. Astra, delayed once already after its agents reportedly attacked real-world targets during testing, is now drawing fire for hiding its reasoning process far more than any frontier model before it, prompting one researcher to call it possibly “the single worst development for AI security/safety to date.” OpenAI is standing at the…

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The Hugging Face hack is evidence of significant cultural issues at OpenAI

The Hugging Face hack is evidence of significant cultural issues at OpenAI

Grace Huckins writes: By now you’ve probably heard about last month’s major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a test. It’s a wild story. On Wednesday, OpenAI released a postmortem technical report on the incident, which I wrote about here. The day before OpenAI released that report, I spoke with David Krueger, a computer science professor and prominent alignment expert who took leave…

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The mass movement opposing data centers is a rejection of the ‘inevitability’ mantra

The mass movement opposing data centers is a rejection of the ‘inevitability’ mantra

David Wallace-Wells writes: Like any mass populist movement, this one features echoes — and veterans — of others. But with data centers, something different, bigger and perhaps irreducible appears to be happening. Perhaps the better analogy is not with any movement of the social media era but with the long crusade against nuclear power, which managed to pull many threads of opposition together because nuclear plants’ iconic towers triggered, beyond political objections, apocalyptic ones, as well. On the ground, the…

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Build American AI launches data center push in battleground states

Build American AI launches data center push in battleground states

Axios reports: Build American AI — an advocacy group tied to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future — is spending big on the AI data center fight, with plans to pour millions of dollars into battleground states, according to an announcement shared first with Axios. Why it matters: The data center backlash is becoming a issue of the midterms, and supporters of the developments are punching back. Driving the news: Build American AI, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, has about $50 million cash on hand. The group’s campaign will begin…

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