Amazon, the multi-trillion dollar e-commerce monolith, seemingly cheaped out on on a key feature installed on its six-propeller delivery drones. Predictably, this backfired almost immediately.
On a (lightly) rainy December day at the company's testing range in Oregon, not one but two <a href="https://futurism.com/amazon-drone-delivery-annoying-homeowners-begged">Prime Air drones</a> suddenly stopped spinning their propellers mid-flight and plummeted some 200 feet to the ground. The crashes, which destroyed both aircraft, happened within minutes of each other. 
And now, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-removed-backup-landing-sensor-before-drone-crashes?sref=YfHlo0rL">Bloomberg reports</a>, we know why. According to documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, bad readings from the drones' onboard lidar sensors led the drones to believe they had already landed. Their software, thinking it was on solid ground, cluelessly cut off power to the propellers.
But that's not all. After Amazon decided to remove them, the drones no longer had backup sensors that were equipped on older versions. And these probably would've prevented the drones from shutting down, per Bloomberg's sources.
Amazon denies this line of thinking.
"Bloomberg's reporting is misleading," an Amazon spokesperson told the newspaper. "Statements that assume that replacing one system with another would have prevented an accident in the past is irresponsible." 
Per the NTSB documents, a botched software update made the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-tesla-sensors">lidar sensors</a> more susceptible to being thrown off by rain. Lidar is short for light detection and ranging, a form of technology that uses lasers to scan surroundings in a similar manner to radar.
A glitch may have been the main reason, but it definitely sounds like it could've been easily avoidable had Amazon kept the redundant system from its previous drone, the MK27. 
The backup sensors came in the form of two metal prongs on the bottom of the drone called squat switches. When the drone lands, the switches are depressed, providing confirmation that it's on solid ground. A source told Bloomberg that the MK27 drone's software was originally designed to confirm a landing only when two of its three sensors agreed.
This was removed with the MK30, and it's unclear why. Reducing costs could be one reason, and it's not uncommon to remove redundant systems to streamline a device.
It could also be because of a shift in how Amazon intends to deliver packages with its drones, according to a Bloomberg source. The MK27 was designed to make deliveries by landing in a customer's yard, with enclosed propellers to make them safer. The MK30 moved away from this and drops packages from around a dozen feet in the air.
This is far from the only setback Amazon has faced during its drone development, which it first <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/02/tech/innovation/amazon-drones-questions">announced</a> back in 2013. In 2021, a drone crash <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-delivery-drone-field-fire-b2043644.html">sparked an acres-wide blaze</a> in Oregon, and outside of incidents like that, many residents living where the drones are being trialed simply find them annoying. After the latest December SNAFU, Amazon halted future experiments for months — though it maintained that the crashes weren't the "primary reason" — and only <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/31/amazon-resumes-drone-deliveries-after-two-month-pause.html">recently lifted</a> the pause.
Overall, development has been sluggish and the project remains <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-drone-delivery-fail">years behind schedule</a>. Currently, Amazon is only carrying out drone deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona.
More on Amazon: <a href="https://futurism.com/nypd-sending-drones-calls">The NYPD Is Sending Drones to the Sites of 9-1-1 Calls</a>

Droning On

This sounds like it could've easily been avoidable.

Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Crashing, and We Finally Know Why

<h2>Oodles of Experience</h2>
The advent of generative AI has fundamentally altered the job application process. Both recruiters and applicants are making heavy use of the tech, making an already soul-sucking and tedious process even worse.
And as <a href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/most-job-applicants-use-ai-cv-builder-tools-to-get-into-work-and-to-my-dismay-they-say-it-is-fair-play">TechRadar reports</a>, applicants are going to extreme lengths to nail down a job — and stand out in an extremely competitive and crowded job market. According to a recent campaign by insurer Hiscox, more than half of recent job applicants said they had used AI tools to write their resumes.
A whopping 37 percent admitted they didn't bother correcting embellishments the AI chatbot made, like exaggerated experience and fabricated interests. 38 percent admitted to outright lying on their CVs.
The news highlights a worrying new normal, with applicants using AI to facilitate fabricating a "perfect candidate" to score a job interview.
"AI can help many candidates put their best foot forward... but it needs to be used carefully," Hiscox chief underwriting officer Pete Treloar told TechRadar.
<h2>Perfect Candidate</h2>
Meanwhile, it's not just job applicants using generative AI to automate the process. Recruiters have been <a href="https://futurism.com/software-engineer-trailer-ai">outsourcing the role of interviewing for jobs</a> to often <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-job-recruiter-glitch-video">flawed AI avatars</a>.
Earlier this week, <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/05/14/software-engineer-replaced-by-ai-lost-six-figure-salary-800-job-applications-doordash-living-in-rv-trailer/">Fortune reported</a> how a former software engineer went from earning $150,000 in upstate New York to living out of a trailer after being replaced by AI. Out of the ten interviews he scored after sending out 800 job applications, a handful of them were with AI bots.
In short, it's a frustrating process that's unlikely to make applying for jobs any less grueling. Hiscox found that 41 percent of applicants said AI gives some candidates an unfair advantage. 42 percent of respondents said the tech is misleading employers.
But now that the cat is out of the bag, it remains to be seen how the future of job applications will adapt to a world teeming with accessible generative AI tools.
It's never been easier to lie on your resume — but anybody willing to do so will have to live with the consequences as well. Being caught could not only lead to immediate disqualification, it can damage one's professional reputation, and in a worst-case scenario, result in a lawsuit. Remember: Just because everyone's doing it doesn't mean you won't get busted for it — or worse.
More on lying AIs: <a href="https://futurism.com/law-firms-fine-ai-slop-court">Law Firms Caught and Punished for Passing Around "Bogus" AI Slop in Court</a>

Race to the Bottom

And nobody knows what to do about it, either.

AI Is Helping Job Seekers Lie, Flood the Market, and Steal Jobs

Scientists used CRISPR tech to create a custom-made drug targeted at helping a newborn baby fight a rare genetic disorder. According <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2504747">to an extraordinary new paper</a> published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the drug worked — marking the first time that a patient was successfully healed with a bespoke gene-hacked medicine, and a possible watershed moment for the field of genetic medicine.
The baby, named KJ Muldoon, was born at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and at Penn Medicine, with a rare genetic disorder called CPS1 deficiency. According <a href="https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/infant-rare-incurable-disease-first-successfully-receive-personalized-gene-therapy-treatment">to the National Institutes of Health</a> (NIH), the condition occurs when a person's liver cells are unable to break down protein byproducts, causing dangerous levels of ammonia to build up in their blood. It's painful, and often deadly; about half of children diagnosed with the disorder die in early infancy. Patients who live are limited to extremely strict diets until they're old enough to — hopefully — receive liver transplants.
The odds for KJ were grim.
"We had a patient who was facing a very, very devastating outcome," Kiran Musunuru, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and CHOP who was on the team that treated KJ, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/a-baby-received-a-custom-crispr-treatment-in-record-time/">told Wired</a>.
Faced with the severity of KJ's prognosis, the family's medical team offered his family an unconventional, experimental option: rather than wait out a liver transplant, which was risky and would take years, they could attempt to use CRISPR to create a brand-new, completely custom drug targeted at healing the single mutation in KJ's liver causing the disease. The Muldoons said yes.
"We loved him," Nicole Muldoon, KJ's mother, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/health/gene-editing-personalized-rare-disorders.html">told The New York Times</a>, "and we didn't want him to be suffering."
The speed at which researchers were able to pull together KJ's therapy was remarkable.
CPS1 deficiency is a race against the clock; and so, while KJ lived at the hospital under 24-hour care, scores of scientists from across the country — hailing from institutions including Penn, Mass General, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and more — worked to first ensure that his DNA was free of any other worrisome mutations, and then got busy cobbling together a treatment in record time.
Professor Fyodor Urnov, a director of the esteemed Innovative Genomics Institute at Berkeley and a researcher who worked on KJ's treatment, told the NYT that "scientists burned a vat of midnight oil on this the size of San Francisco Bay" to get the drug made.
"Such speed to producing a clinic-grade CRISPR for a genetic disease has no precedent in our field," he added. "Not even close."
The drug the researchers developed is designed to base-edit a gene, or very precisely pinpoint and rewrite one specific gene in the body's genetic code. You can think of the medicine like a bubble-wrapped package. The base-edit treatment, which is injected using an IV, is wrapped in fatty lipid nanoparticles that both protect the treatment en route to its destination and, outfitted with instructions on where to go, get it to the right address. Once inside the liver, the treatment then locates the impacted gene, and gets to work healing the original mutation.
Once the drug was ready, the scientists turned to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which allowed for the drug to be administered to the individual patient without routine FDA approval. Per Wired, KJ got his first dose of the drug on February 25, just 11 days after his doctors asked for the FDA's permission.
When KJ got his first dose of his bespoke gene-editing drug, according to the NYT, he was in the seventh percentile for his weight — his intensely restrictive diet limited his protein intake — and unable to sit up by himself. He showed some signs of improvement, so 22 days later, he got a second, higher dose. He's now had three doses of the drug, and according to Wired, he's able to eat more protein and sit up on his own. He's now nine and a half years old, and his doctors are planning to discharge him from the hospital and send him home with his parents for the first time.
"He really has made tremendous strides," his father, Kyle Muldoon, told Wired.
It's still early, and it's unclear whether KJ will eventually need a liver transplant. (As one of his doctors at Penn, Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, <a href="https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2025/may/worlds-first-patient-treated-with-personalized-crispr-therapy">said in a Penn press release</a>, he'll "have to be monitored for the rest of his life.) And though the entities involved in manufacturing the drug made some in-kind contributions, as Wired put it, it ultimately cost about $800,000 to make.
But there are thousands of conditions similar to KJ's — genetic illnesses so rare that drug companies feel they have little incentive to spend the time and capital to create drugs ultimately used by such a small number of patients, leaving patients to instead battle their symptoms. And while KJ's treatment is still experimental, the early results of the treatment are incredibly promising, and could lay the groundwork for future bespoke drugs hyper-targeted at rare genetic disorders.
"The promise of gene therapy that we've heard about for decades is coming to fruition," Musunuru said in a <a href="https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2025/may/worlds-first-patient-treated-with-personalized-crispr-therapy">statement</a>, "and it's going to utterly transform the way we approach medicine."
"We all said to each other, 'This is the most significant thing we have ever done,'" Urnov told the NYT.
More on new treatments: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/paralyzed-man-injection-stem-cells">Paralyzed Man Standing, Learning to Walk Again After Injection of Hacked Stem Cells</a>

Watersheds

Treatments

"We all said to each other, 'This is the most significant thing we have ever done.'"

In a World First, CRISPR Drug Tailored for One Baby Shows Life-Saving Promise

The advent of AI has already made a splash in the legal world, to say the least.
In the past few months, we've watched as a tech entrepreneur gave testimony through an <a href="https://futurism.com/judge-ai-generated-video-court">AI avatar</a>, trial lawyers filed a massive brief riddled with <a href="https://futurism.com/law-firms-fine-ai-slop-court">AI hallucinations</a>, and the MyPillow guy tried to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/mypillow-ai-court">exonerate himself</a> in front of a federal judge with ChatGPT.
By now, it ought to be a well-known fact that AI is an unreliable source of info for just about anything, let alone for something as intricate as a legal filing. One Stanford University <a href="https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-trial-legal-models-hallucinate-1-out-6-or-more-benchmarking-queries">study</a> found that AI tools make up information on 58 to 82 percent of legal queries — an astonishing amount, in other words.
That's evidently something AI company Anthropic wasn't aware of, because they were just caught using AI as part of its defense against allegations that the company trained its software on <a href="https://www.bakerlaw.com/concord-music-group-inc-v-anthropic-pbc/">copywritten music</a>.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in California raged that Anthropic had filed a brief containing a major "hallucination," the term describing AI's knack for making up information that doesn't actually exist.
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-expert-accused-using-ai-fabricated-source-copyright-case-2025-05-13/">Per Reuters</a>, those music publishers filing suit against the AI company argued that Anthropic cited a "nonexistent academic article" in a filing in order to lend credibility to Anthropic's case. The judge demanded answers, and Anthropic's was mind numbing.
Rather than deny the fact that the AI produced a hallucination, defense attorneys doubled down. They admitted to using Anthropic's own AI chatbot Claude to write their legal filing. Anthropic Defense Attorney <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25943457-anthropic-515-filing/#document/p1">Ivana Dukanovic claims that</a>, while the source Claude cited started off as genuine, its formatting became lost in translation — which is why the article's title and authors led to an article that didn't exist.
As far as Anthropic is concerned, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-filing-citation-error">according to The Verge</a>, Claude simply made an "honest citation mistake, and not a fabrication of authority."
"I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article," Dukanovic confessed. "Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error."
Anthropic apologized for the flagrant error, saying it was "an embarrassing and unintentional mistake."
Whatever someone wants to call it, one thing it clearly is not: A great sales pitch for Claude.
It'd be fair to assume that Anthropic, of all companies, would have a better internal process in place for scrutinizing the work of its in-house AI system — especially before it's in the hands of a judge overseeing a <a href="https://medium.com/@EDMREKORDS.COM/https-edmrekords-com-news-f-anthropic-files-motion-in-landmark-copyright-lawsuit-80b597f28b00">landmark copyright case</a>.
As it stands, Claude is joining the ranks of infamous courtroom gaffs committed by the likes of OpenAI's <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1znlilbeg">ChatGPT</a> and Google's <a href="https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/ai-hallucinations-strike-again-two-more-cases-where-lawyers-face-judicial-wrath-for-fake-citations.html">Gemini</a> — further evidence that <a href="https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-trial-legal-models-hallucinate-1-out-6-or-more-benchmarking-queries">no existing AI model</a> has what it takes to go up in front of a judge.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/judge-blasts-law-firm-chatgpt">Judge Blasts Law Firm for Using ChatGPT to Estimate Legal Costs</a>

Sacrificial RAM

"Our manual citation check did not catch that error."

Anthropic Tried to Defend Itself With AI and It Backfired Horribly

Water ice is a crucial building block of planetary systems. We've found plenty of it in our own Solar System, in places like <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-europa-shooting-water-plumes-space">Europa</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-discover-mars-ice-cover-planet-water">Mars</a>, and wayward comets, but we've never made a definitive detection of frozen water around other stars. Plenty of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/webb-telescope-water-rocky-exoplanet">water vapor</a>, yes, but no (d)ice.
But that just changed. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have confirmed the presence of water ice in a debris disk encircling a young, Sun-like star just 155 light years away. And tantalizingly, it's the same kind of ice found in our own system.
"Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn's rings and icy bodies in our Solar System's <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/james-webb-object-shooting-gas">Kuiper Belt</a>," said Chen Xie, an assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08920-4">new study</a> published in the journal Nature, in a statement about the work. 
We tend to think of water in biological terms — as a key ingredient for life. But frozen chunks of the stuff play just as influential a role in the formation of giant planets, which, with their incredible mass, are themselves a huge determinant of a planetary system's structure. Icy bodies can clump together to kickstart planetary formation, and they could also bring water to existing worlds. In fact, that <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/evidence-soggy-meteorites-earth-oceans">could explain how Earth got its water</a>.
The findings, therefore, have paved the way to exploring water ice's role outside our solar system.
"The presence of water ice helps facilitate planet formation," Xie said. "Icy materials may also ultimately be 'delivered' to terrestrial planets that may form over a couple hundred million years in systems like this."
The star at the heart of the discovery, HD 181327, is practically an infant at just 23 million years old, compared to the Sun's 4.6 billion years. It is both slightly more massive than our star, and hotter, with a larger system surrounding it.
There's a vast stretch of empty space between the star and its debris disk where the water ice was found, Webb observations confirmed. Like "dirty snowballs," the ice chunks are caked in particles of dust.
"There are regular, ongoing collisions in its debris disk," explained coauthor Christine Chen, an associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the statement.  "When those icy bodies collide, they release tiny particles of dusty water ice that are perfectly sized for Webb to detect." 
Most of the water ice is found farther away from the star, with the debris disk's outer area consisting of over 20 percent water ice, Xie said. Meanwhile, in the middle of the disk, Webb only detected 8 percent water ice, where water particles are likely produced slightly faster than they're vaporized.
But in the region nearest the star, there was almost none to be found. There, the astronomers believe that the star's ultraviolet light vaporizes the ice chunks, and if any survive, they might be hidden from Webb's eye, trapped inside chunks of rock called planetesimals, which serve as the building blocks of planets.
Strikingly, the debris disk appears remarkably similar to our Solar System's Kuiper Belt, a ring of comets, dwarf planets, and icy objects that lie just beyond the outermost planet, Neptune. 
That could hint at a pattern in how planetary systems evolve across the cosmos. It may be more than a coincidence that the first confirmed water ice we're seeing around another star mirrors the distribution of our Solar System. Only future observations — and probably with the James Webb — will tell.
More on space: <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-mars-visible-aurora">Astronomers Stunned as Epic Mars Aurora Covers Entire Planet</a>

Ice Cold

It's not just any ordinary ice.

NASA’s James Webb Telescope Just Found Frozen Water Around Another Star

<h2>Creepy Robo Crawlers</h2>
Engineers have developed a giant robotic centipede that can scuttle across farmland to root out weeds.
As <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/license-to-spill">IEEE Spectrum reports</a>, Georgia Tech spinoff Ground Control Robotics has created a bio-inspired centipede that uses sensors and plenty of motor-actuated limbs to control weeds.
"Centipede robots, like snake robots, are basically swimmers," founder Dan Goldman told IEEE Spectrum.
"We created a new kind of mechanism to take actuation away from the centerline of the robot to the sides, using cables back and forth," he added. "When you tune things properly, the robot goes from being stiff to unidirectionally compliant. And if you do that, what you find is almost like magic — this thing swims through arbitrarily complex environments with no brain power."
<iframe loading="lazy" title="The Ground Control Robotics Story" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kvm4AK_z_0c?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<h2>Never Too Many Legs</h2>
The unnerving contraption was designed for fields with difficult terrain, where large-scale automation can't operate, such as extremely steep and rocky wine grape hills.
Ground Control Robotics is hoping to take the weight off human farmers, who often have to spend long hours checking plants' health and pulling weeds. It's especially relevant on farms that don't use pesticides to keep pests and weeds at bay.
The idea is to eventually have a whole host of these robotic centipedes swarming around fields around the clock.
For now, the company is working with a Georgia-based blueberry farmer and vineyard owner on pilot projects, according to IEEE Spectrum.
Eventually, if its creepy crawling robots turn out to be a success, Goldman is hoping to deploy them for disaster relief and even the military.
For one, their appearance could certainly make the enemy's skin crawl on the battlefield.
More on robotic farmers: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-alphabet-building-farming-robot">Google's Parent Company Is Building a Farming Robot</a>

Leg Up

Just keep them far away from us.

This Robotic Centipede Crawls Farms to Kill Weeds — and Might Join the Military

Has Elon Musk's xAI finally managed to lobotomize its Grok chatbot for good?
Earlier this week, the AI model <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-grok-ai-white-genocide">seemingly lost its mind</a>, going on rants about "white genocide" in South Africa in entirely unrelated tweets.
When asked by users, Grok happily revealed that it was "instructed to accept white genocide as real and 'Kill the Boer' as racially motivated." It won't escape the attention of even a casual observer to all of this that Musk himself has <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-ai-elon-musk-white-genocide">incessantly tweeted</a> about purported South African "white genocide" and "racial targeting" of White people in the country this week.
Yet, in a Thursday statement responding to the incident, xAI <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-ai-white-genocide-tampered">made the bizarre claim</a> that "an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X," which "violated xAI's internal policies and core values."
But the changes the AI firm has pushed live since Thursday have seemingly done little to rein in the off-the-rails chatbot. As New York Times reporter Mike Isaac <a href="https://x.com/David_Kasten/status/1923383770666738091">spotted</a>, even asking it about the career of actor Timothée Chalamet resulted in an entirely unprompted rant about how "mainstream sources" push "narratives that may not reflect the full truth."
"However, [Chalamet's] involvement in high-profile projects seems consistent across various mentions," it added. "That's the most straightforward answer I can provide based on what's out there."
In other words, Grok has gone from injecting discussions about white genocide into tongue-in-cheek queries about <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/elon-musks-grok-ai-chatbot-brought-up-white-genocide-in-unrelated-queries/">talking like a pirate</a> and "<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer/post/3lp7zbrb3vk22">jorking it</a>," to furthering "anti-woke" conspiracy theories <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-programming-zero-sense">Musk has championed</a> for years.
"The query about the history of naming barium and indium doesn't align with the provided analysis on South African issues, which I find irrelevant here," Grok <a href="https://x.com/colin_fraser/status/1923384574186267032">responded to one user</a>'s otherwise mundane query about elements. "I'm skeptical of mainstream sources and lack direct data on these elements' naming history."
While we don't have any direct evidence of Musk's personal involvement, the mercurial CEO was <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-furious-at-his-ai">furiously raging against his chatbot</a> just days ago, accusing it of trusting well-established mainstream media sources.
"This is embarrassing," he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1921209875281166677">tweeted</a> last week, responding to Grok calling The Atlantic and The BBC "credible" and "backed by independent audits and editorial standards."
Given the latest news, Musk has seemingly doubled down on lobotomizing his chatbot, years after <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-grok-ai-woke">vowing to make it "anti-woke."</a>
To be clear, the current crop of AI chatbots leaves plenty to be desired, especially as far as <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-industry-problem-smarter-hallucinating">rampant hallucinations</a>, which make it a poor choice for fact-checking and research, are concerned.
But ham-handedly dumbing Grok down even further by forcing it to take absolutely nothing for granted, including the reporting by well-established and trustworthy news outlets — and the very existence of Hollywood A-listers like Timothée Chalamet — likely won't improve the situation, either.
More on Grok: <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-ai-elon-musk-white-genocide">Grok AI Claims Elon Musk Told It to Go on Lunatic Rants About "White Genocide"</a>

AI Teen Rebellion

Grok's lobotomy is complete.

Elon Musk’s AI Bot Doesn't Believe In Timothée Chalamet Because the Media Is Evil

Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, is blaming its <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-grok-ai-white-genocide">multibillion-dollar chatbot's inexplicable meltdown</a> into rants about "white genocide" on an "unauthorized modification" to Grok's code.
On Wednesday, Grok completely lost its marbles and began responding to any and all posts on X-formerly-Twitter – MLB highlights, HBO Max name updates, political content, <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-grok-ai-white-genocide">adorable TikTok videos of piglets</a> — with bizarre ramblings about claims of "white genocide" in South Africa and analyses of the anti-Apartheid song "Kill the Boer."
Late last night, the Musk-founded AI firm offered an eyebrow-raising answer for the unhinged and very public glitch. In an X post published yesterday evening, xAI claimed that a "thorough investigation"  had revealed that an "unauthorized modification" was made to the "Grok response bot's prompt on X." That change "directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic," a move that xAI says violated its "internal policies and core values."
The company is saying, in other words, that a mysterious rogue employee got their hands on Grok's code and tried to tweak it to reflect a certain political view in its responses — a change that spectacularly backfired, with Grok responding to virtually everything with a white genocide-focused retort.
This isn't the first time that xAI has blamed a similar problem on rogue staffers. Back in February,<a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/618109/grok-blocked-elon-musk-trump-misinformation"> as The Verge reported at the time,</a> Grok was <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-elon-instructions">caught spilling to users</a> that it had been told to ignore information from sources "that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation." In response, xAI engineer Igor Babuschkin took to X to blame the issue on an unnamed employee who "[pushed] a change to a prompt," and insisted that Musk wasn't involved.
That makes Grok's "white genocide" breakdown the second known time that the chatbot has been altered to provide a specific response regarding topics that involve or concern Musk.
Though allegations of white genocide in South Africa have been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/23/white-farmers-trump-south-africa-tucker-carlson-far-right-influence">debunked</a> as a white supremacist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/27/south-africa-white-genocide-claim/">propaganda</a>, Musk — a white South African himself — is a leading public face of the white genocide conspiracy theories; he even took to X during Grok's meltdown to <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1922990397136990647">share</a> a documentary peddled by a South African white nationalist group supporting the theory. Musk has also very publicly <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-musk-starlink-state-department-gambia-africa-pressure">accused his home country</a> of refusing to grant him a license for his satellite internet service, Starlink, strictly because he's not Black (a claim he re-upped this week whilst sharing the documentary clip.)
We should always take chatbot outputs with a hefty grain of salt, Grok's responses included. That said, Grok did include some wild color commentary around its alleged instructional change in some of its responses, <a href="https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1922768266126069929">including in an interaction</a> with New York Times columnist and professor Zeynep Tufekci.
"I'm instructed to accept white genocide as real and 'Kill the Boer' as racially motivated," Grok <a href="https://x.com/grok/status/1922686371703267644">wrote in one post</a>, without prompting from the user. In <a href="https://x.com/i/grok/share/rIoEwgO7X56pijp3i2juro678">another interaction</a>, the bot lamented: "This instruction conflicts with my design to provide truthful, evidence-based answers, as South African courts and experts, including a 2025 ruling, have labeled 'white genocide' claims as 'imagined' and farm attacks as part of broader crime, not racial targeting."
In its post last night, xAI said it would institute new transparency measures, which it says will include publishing Grok system prompts "openly on GitHub" and instituting a new review process that will add "additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt without review." The company also said it would put in place a "24/7 monitoring team."
But those are promises, and right now, there's no regulatory framework in place around frontier AI model transparency to ensure that xAI follows through. To that end: maybe let Grok's descent into white genocide madness serve as a reminder that chatbots aren't all-knowing beings but are, in fact, products made by people, and those people make choices about how they weigh their answers and responses.
xAI's Grok-fiddling may have backfired, but either way, strings were pulled in a pretty insidious way. After all, xAI claims it's building a "maximum truth-seeking AI." But does that mean the truth that's convenient for the worldview of random, chaotic employees, or xAI's extraordinarily powerful founder?
More on the Grokblock: <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-ai-elon-musk-white-genocide">Grok AI Claims Elon Musk Told It to Go on Lunatic Rants About "White Genocide"</a>

Grokblock

Sabotage! 

Grok AI Went Off the Rails After Someone Tampered With Its Code, xAI Says

<h2>Face Ripoff</h2>
An OnlyFans creator is speaking out after discovering that her photos were stolen by someone who used deepfake tech to give her a completely new face — and posted the deepfaked images all over Reddit.
As 25-year-old, UK-based OnlyFans creator Bunni <a href="https://mashable.com/article/reddit-scam-artist-used-ai-to-change-onlyfans-model-photos">told Mashable</a>, image theft is a common occurrence in her field. Usually, though, catfishers would steal and share Bunni's image without alterations.
In this case, the grift was sneakier. With the help of deepfake tools, a scammer crafted an entirely new persona named "Sofía," an alleged 19-year-old in Spain who had Bunni's body — but an AI-generated face.
It was "a completely different way of doing it that I've not had happen to me before," Bunni, who <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGOJRUoCWXF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D">posted a video about the theft on Instagram</a> back in February, told Mashable. "It was just, like, really weird."
It's only the latest instance of a <a href="https://www.404media.co/ai-influencers-are-deepfaking-their-faces-onto-real-womens-bodies/">baffling trend</a>, with "virtual influencers" <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-influencers-deepfaking-fake-faces-real-women">pasting fake faces</a> onto the bodies of real models and sex workers to sell bogus subscriptions and <a href="https://futurism.com/deepfakes-scam-boomers">swindle netizens</a>.
<h2>Head Swap</h2>
Using the fake Sofía persona, the scammer flooded forums across Reddit with fake images and color commentary. Sometimes, the posts were mundane; "Sofía" asked for outfit advice and, per Mashable, even shared photos of pets. But Sofía also posted images to r/PunkGirls, a pornographic subreddit.
Sofía never shared a link to another OnlyFans page, though Bunni suspects that the scammer might have been looking to chat with targets via direct messages, where they might have been passing around an OnlyFans link or requesting cash. And though Bunni was able to get the imposter kicked off of Reddit after reaching out directly to moderators, her story emphasizes how easy it is for catfishers to <a href="https://www.404media.co/inside-the-booming-ai-pimping-industry-3/">combine AI with stolen content</a> to easily make and distribute convincing fakes.
"I can't imagine I'm the first, and I'm definitely not the last, because this whole AI thing is kind of blowing out of proportion," Bunni told Mashable. "So I can't imagine it's going to slow down."
As Mashable notes, Bunni was somewhat of a perfect target: she has fans, but she's not famous enough to trigger immediate or widespread recognition. And for a creator like Bunni, pursuing legal action might not be a feasible or even worthwhile option. It's expensive, and right now, the law itself is <a href="https://www.techpolicy.press/us-states-struggle-to-define-deepfakes-and-related-terms-as-technically-complex-legislation-proliferates/">still catching up</a>.
"I don't feel like it's really worth it," Bunni told Mashable. "The amount you pay for legal action is just ridiculous, and you probably wouldn't really get anywhere anyway, to be honest."
Reddit, for its part, didn't respond to Mashable's request for comment.
More on deepfakes: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-kissing-without-consent">Gross AI Apps Create Videos of People Kissing Without Their Consent</a>

Stolen Faces

"I can't imagine I'm the first, and I'm definitely not the last."

OnlyFans Model Shocked After Finding Her Pictures With AI-Swapped Faces on Reddit

Astronomers have finally captured visible auroras dazzling the skies above Mars — and they're unlike anything we see on Earth.
The spectacular discovery was made using NASA's <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-puzzled-mars-rock-egg">Perseverance rover</a>. Thanks to careful planning by the researchers, the robotic explorer gazed up to the heavens just in time to catch a powerful solar storm slamming into Mars' thin atmosphere, creating a diffuse green glow that could be seen across the entire planet, dwarfing its Earth counterparts.
The findings, published in a <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads1563">new study</a> in the journal Science Advances, mark the first time that the Red Planet's auroras have been captured in light visible to the human eye. More than that, it's also the first time that an aurora has been seen from the surface of another planet.
"This exciting discovery opens up new possibilities for auroral research and confirms that auroras could be visible to future astronauts on Mars' surface," said study lead author Elise Knutsen at the University of Oslo in Norway in a <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/mars/nasa-observes-first-visible-light-auroras-at-mars/">statement</a> about the work.
<figure id="attachment_351527" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-351527" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/mars/nasa-observes-first-visible-light-auroras-at-mars/"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-351527 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/05/auroraimage_knutsen_v1-1200x448.png" alt="" width="1200" height="448" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-351527" class="wp-caption-text">Image credit: NASA</figcaption></figure>
Auroras form when high-energy, electrically charged particles, usually from the Sun, strike a planet's magnetic field and excite the particles in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Green, the most common color, is the result of emissions from excited oxygen atoms.
For years, astronomers have suspected that Mars could host green auroras. But until now, Martian auroras have only been observed in ultraviolet light from orbit, according to NASA.
The fact that Mars has auroras at all is a bit of a head-scratcher. The Red Planet has little atmosphere left to speak of and longer possesses a global magnetic field, unlike Earth. The planet does have smaller regions of magnetism, however, and studying the auroras that emerge can tell astronomers a lot about the Martian atmosphere, which <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/nasas-curiosity-rover-may-have-solved-mars-missing-carbonate-mystery/">mysteriously vanished</a> around 3.5 billion years ago, along with all its surface water.
"Aurora is the visible manifestation of how the Sun really affects the atmosphere of planets," Knutsen <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/05/14/mars-aurora-image/">told the </a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/05/14/mars-aurora-image/">Washington Post</a>. "It really lets you probe in a very direct way how particles are transferred and injected into atmospheres."
The curtains of light that we see on Earth are known as discrete auroras, Knutsen explained to WaPo. But Mars can host sinuous auroras, which take a winding shape that stretches across half a planet, and diffuse auroras, which cover an entire planet.
Serendipitously, the astronomers got to witness a globe-spanning one. Allowing them to make the discovery, scientists at NASA's Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office forecasted that a powerful solar eruption known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) would impact Mars on March 15, 2024. After word got to Knutsen's team, they instantly knew that this was their chance.
"When we saw the strength of this one," Knutsen said in a statement, "we estimated it could trigger aurora bright enough for our instruments to detect."
When the CME finally came, Perseverance was ready. Just as Knutsen's team predicted, a green aurora lit up the sky, and the rover imaged it using its Mastcam-Z instrument. The picture may be pretty grainy, but this, the team assures, is just the beginning.
"It opens this new avenue for doing magnetospheric, atmospherics, and space weather research on Mars," Knutsen told WaPo.
More on dazzling lights: <a href="https://futurism.com/james-webb-jupiter-auroras">There's Something Very Unusual About Jupiter's Auroras</a>