When poet John Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he probably didn’t have AI influencers in mind. Perhaps he should have. Back in April, Fanvue, an AI-infused creator platform that falls somewhere between OnlyFans and Cameo in terms of services, launched what …
Read More »The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here
Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project …
Read More »Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up
When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google’s new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company’s head of search, Liz Reid, admitted that the flubs had highlighted …
Read More »Google's AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That's How AI Works
A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI—and also the treacherous and fundamental …
Read More »It's the AI Election Year
In the largest global election year yet, generative AI is already being used to trick and manipulate voters around the world. Will this growing trend have real impact? Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we talk about a new online project that will be tracking the use of AI in elections …
Read More »AI Agents Are Coming for Mundane—but Valuable—Office Tasks
For all the bluster about generative artificial intelligence upending the world, the technology has yet to meaningfully transform white-collar work. Workers are dabbling with chatbots for tasks such as drafting emails, and companies are launching countless experiments, but office work hasn’t undergone a major AI reboot. Perhaps that’s only because …
Read More »2024 Is the Year of the Generative AI Election
Hi! I’m Vittoria Elliott. I’m a reporter on the WIRED Politics desk, and I’m taking over for Makena this week to talk about politicians rising from the dead in India and the rapper Eminem endorsing opposition parties in South Africa. These things haven’t really happened, obviously, but deepfakes created by …
Read More »Foreign Influence Campaigns Don’t Know How to Use AI Yet Either
Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that OpenAI identified and shut down between 2023 and 2024. In the report, OpenAI reveals …
Read More »Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms
When Palmer Luckey cofounded the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebook, the idea of a twentysomething from the tech industry challenging the giant contractors that build fighter jets, tanks, and warships for the US military seemed somewhat far-fetched. Seven years …
Read More »It’s Chromebook’s Turn for an AI Injection
Ai Ai Ai. No not the Vanessa da Mata song—it’s the theme for tech in 2024. Last week, Microsoft announced new Surface laptops with artificial intelligence capabilities, and several PC manufacturers like Samsung, Asus, and Acer are launching new Windows machines to take advantage of the AI bump. Early in …
Read More »