Amongst the sea of American flags and ubiquitous blue signs at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week prowled Jonathan Padilla, the “crypto guy.” Wearing a baseball cap and conspicuous pineapple-print shirt, Padilla tramped the halls of the convention, talking crypto policy with anyone who would listen. In a …
Read More »‘Hundreds of Ads in Minutes’: This Startup Thinks AI Can Drown Out the MAGA Movement
Stories about AI-generated political content are like stories about people drunkenly setting off fireworks: There’s a good chance they’ll end in disaster. WIRED is tracking AI usage in political campaigns across the world, and so far examples include pornographic deepfakes and misinformation-spewing chatbots. It’s gotten to the point where the …
Read More »Mike Lynch, ‘Britain’s Bill Gates,’ Confirmed Dead in Superyacht Wreck
British software mogul Mike Lynch, 59, has died after a superyacht he was onboard sank off the coast of Sicily, where he was celebrating being acquitted of fraud by a jury in the US weeks earlier. Lynch, his teenage daughter Hannah, and four other passengers—including Morgan Stanley international chair Jonathan …
Read More »A Popular iOS Illustration App Is Saying No to Generative AI
On Sunday, Procreate announced that it will not incorporate generative AI into its popular iPad illustration app. The decision comes in response to an ongoing backlash from some parts of the art community, which has raised concerns about the ethical implications and potential consequences of AI use in creative industries. …
Read More »An ‘AI Scientist’ Is Inventing and Running Its Own Experiments
At first glance, a recent batch of research papers produced by a prominent artificial intelligence lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver might not seem that notable. Featuring incremental improvements on existing algorithms and ideas, they read like the contents of a middling AI conference or journal. But …
Read More »Condé Nast Signs Deal With OpenAI
Condé Nast and OpenAI have struck a multi-year deal that will allow the AI giant to use content from the media giant’s roster of properties—which includes the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, and, yes, WIRED. The deal will allow OpenAI to surface stories from these outlets in both …
Read More »'Fortnite' Maker Epic Games Challenges Apple’s Dominance With New iOS App Store
Epic Games today officially launched a rival app store for iOS in the European Union, marking the first time Apple’s own App Store has had to face a serious rival. The Epic Games Store will initially offer Epic’s games, including Fortnite, for users to download onto their iPhones, with plans …
Read More »Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero
WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X …
Read More »Tether Was Playing a Risky Game, a New Celsius Suit Reveals
On June 12, 2022, Alex Mashinsky, founder of crypto lender Celsius, made an urgent plea for help. As the price of bitcoin crashed, panicked customers were rushing to withdraw billions of dollars’ worth of crypto from their Celsius accounts. But after a series of bad investments, the company no longer …
Read More »Google Has Unleashed Its Legal Fury on Hackers and Scammers
About three years ago, some of Google’s security engineers came to company attorneys with a gigantic mess. The security team had discovered that Google unwittingly was enabling the spread of malicious software known as Glupteba. The malware had corrupted more than 1 million Windows computers, turning them into vehicles to …
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