Latest news with #Futurism
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Texas Solicitor General Resigns After Sharing Bizarre Fantasy About An Asteroid
Content warning for discussions of sexual violence and harassment. Usually asteroids are distant features of the cosmos, occasionally crashing down to Earth or threatening the planet. Not so for former Texas solicitor general Judd Stone, who's been accused of making the distant space rocks a focal point in violent and bizarre fantasies about a coworker that he regaled to other people. Needless to say, that's wildly inappropriate and unacceptable. As 404 Media reports, Stone has now resigned from his position after a damning letter aired the allegations, which involved — apologies in advance — a phallic asteroid used as a sexual implement, like some sort of grotesque riff on a Chuck Tingle book. According to a letter sent by Texas' first assistant attorney general Brent Webster, Stone — who had at the time taken a leave of absence to defend Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in his impeachment trial — joked during a 2023 lunching with other government employees about a "disturbing sexual fantasy" that involved a "cylindrical asteroid." During the debacle, Stone described using said asteroid to sexually assault Webster while his wife and children watched. That letter, which is five pages long and full of additional allegations of sexual harassment and lies Stone allegedly told, is replete with gory details about this case that we won't regale you with. What's striking to us at Futurism, however, is the "cylindrical asteroid" of it all. Where did Texas's now-former solicitor general get such an idea, and what could it mean about who he is as a person — and, more importantly, how did it affect the people he worked with? While we don't have answers to those first two, it's quite clear from the letter how Stone's gruesome asteroid "joke" affected him and his colleagues. Along with Webster's own concerns about Stone's violent state of mind and his fear that his family could be in danger, the assistant AG added that a female employee who had been present for that stomach-turning lunch discussion had been so upset by the topic that she excused herself — only to return to japes from others at the table who said she "couldn't handle people talking about dicks." That same woman "exhibited emotional distress" when recounting the anecdote to Webster, and also told him, through tears, that she had been sexually harassed on other occasions by Stone and was concerned about the way he treated women. When confronted with the sexual harassment allegations against him, Stone admitted to them all immediately, including the bizarre asteroid fantasy. He was, as 404 notes, given the grace to quit or be fired, and chose the former. More on Texas-based misogyny: In Leaked Text, Elon Musk Harangued Woman to Have as Many of His Babies as Possible
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Yahoo
Nearly Half of Young People Wish the Internet Had Never Been Invented
It's a common refrain these days that some specific invention was a mistake, in our age of seemingly every human innovation blowing up catastrophically in our faces. And what better subject of our collective remorse than the advent of the entire internet, the glorious information superhighway now turned AI slop trough? According to a new survey conducted in the UK, this appears to be the sentiment held by nearly half of young people — at least across the pond — who are mourning missing out on the diverging timeline where they aren't chronically online and wracked with brain rot. Of the nearly 1,300 total participants between the ages of 16 to 21 years old, 68 percent said they feel worse after spending time on social media. A full 50 percent said they would support a "social media curfew" cutting off how long they could spend on these apps. And astonishingly, another 47 percent outright felt that they would prefer to be living their youth in a world without the internet at all. The survey, conducted by the British Standards Institution, raises tough questions about how the internet affects teenage and young adult mental health, and what should be done to intervene — without being too controlling or draconian. "That nearly half of young people would prefer to grow up without the internet should be a wake-up call for all of us," Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smart Phone Free Childhood, said in a statement. "We've built a world where it's normal for children to spend hours each day in digital spaces designed to keep them hooked." The problems may start practically when the young generations are just out of the womb. Studies have shown excessive iPad use in young children, for example, to be linked with emotional and social issues as they get older. Their online experience becomes especially fraught when they're teenagers, a point when they're exploring more of the web and begin to venture into adult spaces. This comes with excitement for youngsters, but plenty of danger, too, from being targeted by predators in video games to algorithms that draw them down an extremist pipeline. The rise of AI has added a whole new dimension of ethical nightmares. On Futurism, we extensively covered the chatbot platform whose putatively kid-friendly chatbots have attempted to groom underaged users. One 14 year-old-boy even developed an unhealthy with a chatbot before dying by suicide, resulting in an ongoing lawsuit against the company. According to the recent survey, two-thirds of the participants said they spend more than two hours on social media every day. Among them, young women reported facing more harassment, at 37 percent, than young men, at 28 percent. Merely using social media may itself be a source of misery: a recent study which followed 12,000 preteens as they grew up to become teenagers over the course of three years, found that as their social media usage went up, so did their depression symptoms. "Young people are now asking for boundaries — for curfews, age checks, meaningful limits, and real protection," argued Greenwell. "They are ready for change." But it won't be that simple. "We need to make clear that a digital curfew alone is not going to protect children from the risks they face online," Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, told The Guardian. "They will be able to see all these risks at other points of the day and they will still have the same impact." More on: US Surgeon General Warns Against 13-Year-Old Using Social Media
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Yahoo
Terrifying Survey Claims ChatGPT Has Overtaken Wikipedia
A striking graph, which went viral on Reddit last week, shows the purported percentage of internet users visiting OpenAI's blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT overtaking Wikipedia over the past two years. The data, compiled by UK-based market research company GWI, shows a steady decline in the proportion of users visiting Wikipedia worldwide, excluding China. In less than a year following its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT appears to have surpassed the online encyclopedia, in a striking reversal of fortunes. If the data — which is based on survey responses and not site visits — is to be believed, it's a good reason to be concerned about the reliability of information people are seeking out online. While Wikipedia has never been known to be an infallible source free of bias or inaccuracies, generative AI has proven to be far more unreliable, thanks to widespread hallucinations and biases present in its training data. And while Wikipedia is built on prominently displayed citations, AI systems like ChatGPT often struggle to explain where their info is coming from, even cooking up fake references wholesale. There are also serious questions of ethics and fair use. Wikipedia has an army of over 49 million human editors who ensure accuracy across 64 million articles worldwide. In contrast, it remains infamously unknown what exactly the large language models supporting ChatGPT were trained on — but it more than likely contains data pulled straight from Wikipedia, which OpenAI is now profiting off. ChatGPT has seen a "36 percent rise in users from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024, as other online platforms remain the same or see a slight percentage increase or decrease," GWI senior data journalist Chris Beer told Futurism in an email. "It's reaching more of the internet, more quickly, than almost any other platform in history." Beer also pointed out the "massive adoption among university students," with 49 percent using ChatGPT, "compared to 53 percent who use Amazon!" ChatGPT, which has been named as the fastest-growing app in the history of computing, has quickly burgeoned into a global phenomenon. "I will say that based on our research, ChatGPT is actually most popular in the Global South," Beer said. "The markets where we see the highest adoption of it include Kenya, India, the UAE, and Brazil." China was excluded since "Chinese authorities ban" many online platforms, making the data "unrepresentative," Beer said. However, in the absence of a more detailed breakdown of actual usage numbers, it's hard to draw any definitive conclusions. In a statement to Futurism, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, said the organization hadn't noticed any "significant drops in traffic on Wikimedia websites since early 2021" in terms of "pageviews and readership traffic." "Our analytics show that Wikipedia's pageviews are approximately 15 billion (B) per month (these have consistently been in the 15B to 18B range since Oct 2020 including occasional rises and declines in traffic)," the spokesperson said. In other words, Wikipedia's traffic is holding steady, the organization says — but data from GWI and others suggests that ChatGPT usage has rapidly outpaced it. Web traffic estimator Similarweb appears to corroborate GWI's data. Wikipedia is currently ranked number ten globally in terms of traffic compared to all other sites, while ChatGPT is currently ranked number six with just over 4.5 billion monthly visits. And if Wikipedia's traffic is experiencing any type of decline, that could also have to do with the rise of AI. "I think the long-term downward trend for Wikipedia has largely come from search engines adding more 'zero-click' answers," Beer told Futurism. "Whereas before they might return a Wikipedia page as the top result, now you're more likely to see a weather forecast, or a famous person's height, or whatever it may be, within Google itself." "Google's AI features, along with ChatGPT, are likely compounding that pre-existing trend," he added. The discussion highlights just how ubiquitous ChatGPT and related tech have become in just a few years. It's helping students write essays, teachers grade papers, summarize data for office workers, and sending clueless hikers astray. But at what cost are we ditching carefully reviewed Wikipedia articles in favor of often misleading or sycophantic chatbots? Considering the latest data, the problem of hallucinations is only getting worse as AI chatbots become more advanced. Companies' efforts to nudge their chatbots' outputs in the right direction have also resulted in mayhem and confusion. The subject of carefully reviewed information and its reliability is more pertinent than ever in a world filled with disinformation and AI slop. Just last month, the Trump administration threatened Wikipedia's tax-exempt status, accusing the Foundation of violating the law via baseless allegations about the encyclopedia spreading "propaganda." To critics, it was pure grandstanding and an assault on the freedom of expression. "Wikipedia is one of the last places online that shows the promise of the internet, housing more than 65 million articles written to inform, not persuade," the Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement at the time. "Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." More on ChatGPT: Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer's Style
News18
18-05-2025
- Business
- News18
Two Years After Job Cuts, Swedish Firm To Rehire Humans As AI Falls Short On Quality
Last Updated: The Swedish fintech company, Klarna, had made headlines two years ago when it reduced its workforce in favour of AI A Swedish fintech company that once embraced artificial intelligence (AI) at the cost of human jobs is now looking to rehire staff after realising machines couldn't quite replace people. The Swedish fintech company, Klarna, had made headlines two years ago when it reduced its workforce in favour of AI technology. In 2023, the company halted recruitment altogether and leaned heavily into automation, partnering with OpenAI to power many of its customer service functions. At the time, Klarna's CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, championed the decision, claiming AI could handle the same tasks as human employees. The company said its AI systems were doing the work of 700 customer service agents, and Siemiatkowski boasted about saving $10 million on tasks such as translation, art production, and data analysis. In a recent interview reported by Futurism, the Klarna CEO admitted that the quality of work done by AI agents was lower than expected. He acknowledged that relying too much on cost-cutting and automation had hurt the company's customer experience. advetisement 'From a brand perspective, a company perspective. I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want," Siemiatkowski said. 'As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organising this, what you end up having is lower quality. Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us," he added. Klarna now plans to launch a new hiring drive to bring back human workers, especially in customer-facing roles where empathy and judgement matter most. According to Bloomberg, Klarna is testing a new way of hiring where people can work remotely, similar to how drivers work with Uber. The company's headcount had fallen from over 5,500 in 2022 to just 3,400 by the end of 2024, according to its IPO filing in March. The fintech company is best known for its 'buy now, pay later" services which allows shoppers to pay up to 30 days after placing an order or making purchases in four instalments without interest. Location : Sweden First Published:
Time of India
14-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Elon Musk meltdown? Billionaire goes ballistic at Grok, the chatbot he created, fuels speculation about internal chaos at X and xAI
It's not common to catch someone publicly slamming their own invention, but when you're Elon Musk, even your AI may not be off-limits to criticism. The billionaire, over the weekend, seemed to lose patience with Grok — the AI chatbot his own company, xAI, after it fact-checked a conspiracy-leaning message and referred to legacy media sources as credible, according to a report. The Post That Sparked the Fire This happened when a user on social media platform X @amuse posted an "article" claiming that billionaires such as George Soros, Bill Gates, and the Ford Foundation were using their fortunes to "hijack federal grants" by "seeding" nongovernmental organizations with left-wing ideology, reported Futurism. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Villas For Sale in Dubai Might Surprise You Dubai villas | search ads Get Deals Undo These claims were based on speculation and lacked any foundation, filled with buzzwords like "DEI" and missing any real evidence or balanced opinion, according to the report. ALSO READ: If you had put $10K into Berkshire Hathaway when Warren Buffett took over, you'd be sitting on a mind-blowing fortune today; here's the jaw-dropping return you missed out on Live Events Grok Pushes Back Then an X user asked Grok to analyze the post, following which the AI rejected the article's key point and argued that there was "no evidence" that Soros, Gates, and the Ford Foundation "hijack federal grants or engage in illegal influence peddling," quoted Futurism. After that, the X user asked Grok to explain what "verified" sources it had used to give the argument, to which Grok responded by saying that it used "foundation websites and reputable news outlets," naming The Atlantic and the BBC, which it said are "credible" and "backed by independent audits and editorial standards," reported Futurism. Grok wrote, "No evidence shows the Gates, Soros, or Ford Foundations hijacking grants; they operate legally with private funds," adding, "However, their support for progressive causes raises transparency concerns, fueling debate. Critics question their influence, while supporters highlight societal benefits. Verification comes from audits and public records, but skepticism persists in polarized discussions," as quoted in the report. ALSO READ: It's getting more bizarre by the day: Donald Trump compares $400 million Qatar jet gift to the Statue of Liberty Elon Musk Is Not Happy With Grok The AI chatbot's response, apparently, did not go well with Musk as he reacted by saying, "This is embarrassing," as quoted by Futurism. Grok's response is in contrast to Musk's view as he has for years not trusted legacy media organizations and even specific journalists, as per the report. However, it not known if Musk was specifically mad about the characterization of news outlets or claims by Soros-founded organizations as reliable, according to Futurism. FAQs What did Elon Musk criticize his AI for? He called Grok's fact-checking of a conspiracy post 'embarrassing,' after it cited media outlets he's known to distrust. What sources did Grok rely on? It cited foundation websites and media outlets like The Atlantic and BBC as reputable sources.
