Trains booked, Operator thinks its job is done. But I’ll need somewhere to stay, I remind it—can it book a hotel? It asks for more details and I’m purposefully vague, specifying that it should be comfy and conveniently located. Comparing hotels is perhaps my least favorite aspect of travel planning, so I’m happy to leave…
Before Duolingo wiped its videos from TikTok and Instagram in mid-May, social media engagement was one of the language-learning app’s most recognizable qualities. Its green owl mascot had gone viral multiple times and was well known to younger users—a success story other marketers envied. But, when news got out that Duolingo was making the switch…
Michael Calore: So publishing is definitely at the top of the list of industries that have been worried about AI plagiarizing original work, and we should all know because we’re all in the publishing industry. But then there’s the content that is the opposite of thoughtful, human-made work, and that is AI slop. The term…
I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one…
Anthropic has scored a major victory in an ongoing legal battle over artificial intelligence models and copyright, one that may reverberate across the dozens of other AI copyright lawsuits winding through the legal system in the United States. A court has determined that it was legal for Anthropic to train its AI tools on copyrighted…
“With fire in particular, times are compressed so much that you have to apply technology to make a decision within the timeframe that you can impact the outcome of what’s happening,” Collins says. Krystal Azelton, a senior director at the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable space policies, says that while satellites…
In the span of just a few years, drones have become instrumental in warfare. Conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan, and elsewhere have shown how autonomous vehicles have become a quintessential part of modern combat. It’s a fact that Taiwan knows all too well. The island nation, fearing imminent invasion from China, has both the…
Midjourney’s new AI-generated video tool will produce animated clips featuring copyrighted characters from Disney and Universal, WIRED has found—including video of the beloved Pixar character Wall-E holding a gun. It’s been a busy month for Midjourney. This week, the generative AI startup released its sophisticated new video tool, V1, which lets users make short animated…
When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth’s company. But…
“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in an aside in a long blog post last week. The average query, Altman wrote, uses 0.34 watt-hours of energy: “About what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb…