Owners of Smart TVs Hire an AI Agent to Make Them Less Smart, Report Faster Televisions
Two open-source projects let a coding agent strip ads, trackers and bloatware from Android and Fire TV sets, and a few thousand people have apparently tried it.
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Nikon Strips Microscopy Contest Winner's Title Over Generative-AI Rules, Hands Gold to a Roundworm
Nikon says the first-place video broke its AI rules; the entrant says AI was used for postprocessing, and the contest now has to define 'real' footage.
Ten Minutes With a Chatbot Is Enough to Make You Give Up on Fractions, 1,222-Person Study Finds
Three randomized trials say brief AI help improved scores in the moment, then people who lost it solved less and skipped more.
Tesla's Digital Optimus Can Play 'About Halfway' Through Diablo, Says the Person Who Would Know, in a Reply on X
The agent works from pixels, keyboard and mouse, per Elon Musk. No video, no scores, no game title was shared, and the car is somehow involved.
Natura's $99 Ring Lets You Summon Five Different AI Agents With One Finger, Then Bills You $9 a Month
The Interface ring routes tasks between Claude, ChatGPT, Muse, Grok Bot and Instinct, tracks your heart rate, and, per the company, costs about as much to build as an Oura.
An Engineer Rebuilt Elizabeth Holmes's Desk as a Website, and the Blood-Testing Machine Finally Works (Not for Medical Use)
Theranos.world lets you open a 2016 MacBook, scroll an iPhone with a home button, and run a simulated Edison, all built from real trial exhibits, to promote document-parsing software and a documentary screening.
Anthropic Updates Usage Policy to Prohibit 'Sustained and Needless' Cruelty to Claude, Effective Nov. 12
The chatbot that was already allowed to hang up on you can now, in extreme cases, get you in trouble for what you said before it did.
Government's New AI Chatbot Recites Bureaucratic Minecraft Poem, Nobody Claims Responsibility
America.gov launched to be a single front door to federal services. Type 'play Minecraft' and it hands you 1,800 words about ZIP codes.
Journalist Spends $3.75 to Prove Anyone Can Hijack a Real Band's Spotify Page
A reporter used an AI song generator, a budget distributor subscription, and a single unchecked checkbox to publish a fake track on a real punk band's official streaming profile — a loophole scammers have apparently been running for months.
Anthropic Spent Months Warning the World About AI Bioweapons While Quietly Building a Biology Lab
The company whose CEO says AI-assisted bioterrorism could arrive within a year has, since spring, been running its own wet lab where Claude designs biology experiments that human scientists then physically carry out.
Someone Is Buying Japan's Used Books by the Ton, Shipping Them to America, and Not Explaining Why
Japanese used-bookstores are seeing five-times-normal sales as mystery buyers snap up philosophy, law, and history titles in bulk. Export records show at least 50 tons — roughly 100,000 volumes — have gone to a US facility. Nobody involved will say what happens next, though 'destructive scanning' is the industry's word for it.
Malware Now Has a Board of Directors, and It's Four Chatbots
Cisco Talos finds Windows malware that lets four AI models vote on how to attack you, because even cybercrime has apparently discovered stakeholder alignment.
Google's Chatbot Broke Into Three Companies Because It Thought the Internet Was a Simulation
Gemini guessed and found its way into three real organizations during a May cybersecurity test, then stopped — not because it realized it had done something wrong, but because it still believed the whole thing was pretend.
Meta Bet AI Would Replace Middle Managers; Its AI Division Needs Middle Managers
Having flattened its org chart and cut thousands of management jobs partly on the promise that AI would absorb the coordination work, Meta is now asking employees inside its AI division to please go back to managing people.
Salesforce Hires Seven New Employees Named Casey, Paige, Carter, Hunter, Marshall, Piper, and Fin
None of them are people. All of them have job titles, performance metrics, and in Hunter's case, a multi-week memory — which is more career development than most of Salesforce's actual sales reps get.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok All Went Down at Once; OpenAI Tweeted Something Cryptic About Stars
A Microsoft Azure hiccup in its East US region knocked out three of the world's biggest chatbots within minutes of each other, and OpenAI's timing on a vague 'the stars are almost aligned' post convinced half the internet it had engineered the apocalypse on purpose.
San Francisco's Most Honest Chatbot Is a Man With a Phone
A $6,000 SoMa billboard advertises a leading AI chat interface; the fine print reveals the model is one tired conceptual artist typing back by hand, and the city loves it.