Tesla, which has come under repeated fire due to <a href="https://theweek.com/elon-musk/1022182/elon-musks-most-controversial-moments">CEO Elon Musk's political antics</a> and its <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/jd-power-tesla-loses-its-ev-quality-edge.html">quality control issues</a>, has been now slapped with a lawsuit that alleges that the company prefers hiring visa holding immigrants over American citizens in order to save money, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/lawsuit-says-musks-tesla-hires-visa-holders-instead-americans-so-it-can-pay-less-2025-09-12/">according to Reuters</a>.
The lawsuit claims that Tesla relies heavily on workers who hold the H-1B visa, which grants temporary employment for specialized technical jobs, and that workers who have been recently laid off from the electric vehicle company are disproportionally Americans.
Last year, Tesla let go of more than 6,000 workers in its American operations while hiring 1,355 people who hold visas, Reuters reports.
A software engineer and human resources specialist brought the lawsuit against Tesla after they were rebuffed from seeking employment that they believed went to visa holders.
This lawsuit comes at a rather delicate time for the tech industry, Tesla, and Musk.
There's an incredible amount of controversy in America about immigrants, who are demonized for <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/28/are-immigrants-taking-jobs-from-us-workers-heres-what-economists-say.html">taking away jobs from Americans</a> or <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-focuses-migrants-crime-here-is-what-research-shows-2024-04-11/">committing crimes</a>. All are issues that President Donald Trump ran on in his successful 2024 campaign. Musk — himself an immigrant from South Africa — isn't above <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/british-politicians-condemn-elon-musks-comments-anti-migrant-125577695">attacking other immigrants as well</a>, giving the allegations a grim smack of hypocrisy.
He's not terribly consistent on that point, though. Musk came to America to seek his fortune on an <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/elon-musk-immigration-washington-post-cec">H-1B visa</a>, which <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-vows-war-over-h-1b-visa-program-amid-rift-with-some-trump-supporters-2024-12-28/">he's praised at times</a>, drawing ire from critics such as Trump's longtime adviser Steve Bannon, who called Musk an illegal alien and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/us/steve-bannon-trump-elon-musk.html">advocated stripping him of his government contracts</a>.
But all that anti-immigrant sentiment bumps up against the <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-immigration-policies-may-threaten-american-ai-leadership/">American tech industry's need for top flight talent</a> and its race against AI companies and labs in China, which <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3321901/china-creates-new-visa-young-science-and-technology-talent">has thrown its doors open</a> to young STEM graduates and professionals.
And Tesla seems like they need all the help it can get, because its <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-accidents-robotaxi">robotaxis are getting into accidents</a> and it's <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-settles-two-lawsuits-2019-california-crashes-related-autopilot-software-2025-09-16/">had to settle lawsuits</a> over crashes involving its Autopilot.
Needless to say, this lawsuit surely adds fuel to the fire.
More on Elon Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-new-robot-demo-bad">Elon Musk's New Optimus Robot Demo Is So Painful It Will Make You Wince</a>

Immigrant Song

Hire American?

Elon Musk Hires Immigrants So He Can Pay Them Less, Lawsuit Allege

Bet you didn't have this on your 2025 bingo card.
Yesterday, a baffling video started making the rounds on social media showing Tennessee representative Tim Burchett casually claim that alien entities are here on Earth, and that they're rising out of the ocean.
"What if, these are entities that are here on this earth, that have been on this earth for who knows how long, and we think they're coming from way out," he says while strolling along the streets of DC, the Capital rotunda glowing in the distance. "Maybe they did a millennia ago, but they're here, and they're in these deep water areas."
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🚨 Rep. Tim Burchett says “entities” are coming from 5-6 deep water sites on Earth <a href="https://t.co/rdsfEY0oW3">pic.twitter.com/rdsfEY0oW3</a>
&mdash; Red Panda Koala (@RedPandaKoala) <a href="https://twitter.com/RedPandaKoala/status/1968259539263951241?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 17, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Throughout the minute long cell phone video, the representative stays remarkably serene as he paints a picture of what sounds like an HP Lovecraft story come to life.
"Like we say, we know more about the face of the Moon than we know what's going on there [the ocean]," Burchett continues. "We have a higher propensity of sightings around these five or six — I believe — deep water areas. It creates a question there."
"And then when we have naval personnel telling me we have these sightings, these underwater craft they're chasing that go hundreds of miles an hour, and the best we got is something that does maybe a little under forty miles an hour," he continues. "So I got a lot of questions about that stuff."
It's not immediately clear whether this was the congressman's working theory, or if he was claiming it to be grounded in fact. Back in January, Burchett made headlines for a <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-moving-underwater-republican-rep-tim-burchet">similar declaration</a> that an unidentified admiral had told him of an alien ocean craft "as large as a football field" traveling at hundreds of miles an hour.
The representative had a rather nonchalant attitude about that, too.
"I'm not worried about them harming me," he said at the time. "I mean, with that capabilities [sic] they would have barbecued us a long time ago."
Still, the incredible news comes a week after a congressional hearing grilled US military and defense officials over a <a href="https://futurism.com/video-military-ufo-hellfire-missile">stunning video</a> appearing to show a hellfire missile bounce off an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the government's preferred term for unidentified flying objects (UFOs.)
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Below is the video I revealed in our <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPoversight?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GOPoversight</a> UAP hearing today, made available to the public for the first time.
October 30th, 2024: MQ-9 Reaper allegedly tracking orb off coast of Yemen. 
Greenlight given to engage, missile appears to be ineffective against the target.… <a href="https://t.co/jxJwl0e00S">pic.twitter.com/jxJwl0e00S</a>
&mdash; Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) <a href="https://twitter.com/RepEricBurlison/status/1965438792493355291?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 9, 2025</a></blockquote>
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That video was presented by Missouri congressman Eric Burlison, who claimed to have received it from a whistleblower of mysterious origins.
"This was taken October 30th, 2024. This video is of an MQ-9 drone tracking an orb, this object, off the coast of Yemen," Burlison said in the hearing.
"There are servers where there's a whole bank of these kinds of videos that congress has not been allowed to see, that the public has not been allowed to see," said George Knapp, a news anchor <a href="https://dailystandard.com/archive/2024-12-06/stories/51336/ufos-real-or-science-fiction">turned UFOlogist</a>. "Occasionally that stuff gets out in the wild and comes our way, it should be coming to you [congress]. The public should be seeing this stuff. And why you're not allowed to I don't know."
Before anyone starts praying to the <a href="https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Old_One">Old Ones</a>, it's important to take a step back and question where this video is coming from.
For one thing, Burlison's video was taken in an active war zone, the day Israel began a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/9/30/israel-attacks-lebanon-live-israel-expands-strikes-on-beirut-as-105-killed">ground invasion of Lebanon</a>, accompanied by heavy artillery shelling and drone activity. Without knowing where the video was taken in proximity to the various belligerents and their equipment, it's difficult to say what the object's trajectory was or where it came from, making critical inquiry difficult.
And zooming out a bit, Burchett and Burlison aren't exactly the first US officials to become smitten with the idea of UFOs. In fact, it's become something of a tradition among Washington's alien cranks and skeptics alike, with a history dating back to Harry Truman and the <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/17/us-presidents-ufo-obsession-00127519">anti-Soviet hysteria</a> of the cold war.
That in mind, Burchett's wild claim reads less like a sober reveal, and more like the latest hot air from a long line of UFO crackpots.
More on aliens: <a href="https://futurism.com/paper-earth-terraformed-advanced-extraterrestrials">Paper Finds Earth May Have Been Terraformed by "Advanced Extraterrestrials"</a>

Call of Cthulhu

"Maybe they [came] a millennia ago, but they're here, and they're in these deep water areas."

Congressman Calmly Explains There Are "Entities" Coming From “Five or Six Deepwater Areas”

OpenAI is finally putting in parental controls on ChatGPT after parents of teenagers who killed themselves after using AI chatbots <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-chatbots-teens-suicide-parents-testify-congress/">testified</a> in front of Congress this week.
In a <a href="https://openai.com/index/building-towards-age-prediction/">company blog post</a> on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that parents will be able to link their personal account with their kids' account, disable features as needed, get alerts if their children seem to be in distress while chatting with ChatGPT, set black out hours during which they can't access the powerful AI platform, and create guidelines for ChatGPT on how the AI will interact with their children.
"If we can’t reach a parent in a rare emergency, we may involve law enforcement as a next step," the blog post reads.
In addition to these features that are rolling out by the end of this month, the AI company is also planning to give ChatGPT the ability to detect if a user is under 18 years old and shield them from content that is not age appropriate. It's not clear how that feature would work.
"If we are not confident about someone’s age or have incomplete information, we’ll take the safer route and default to the under-18 experience—and give adults ways to prove their age to unlock adult capabilities," the post reads.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also addressed the deaths in a <a href="https://openai.com/index/teen-safety-freedom-and-privacy/">separate blog post</a> where he pledged the company will strive to give a safer experience to teens.
"We prioritize safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens; this is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection," he wrote.
Before the congressional hearings this week, Altman touched on the subject in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KmpT-BoVf4">wide-ranging interview</a> with media personality Tucker Carlson earlier this month.
"They probably talked about [suicide], and we probably didn’t save their lives," Altman said about any ChatGPT users who killed themselves. "Maybe we could have said something better. Maybe we could have been more proactive. Maybe we could have provided a little bit better advice about, 'hey, you need to get this help.'"
That's got to be pretty galling for anybody whose loved one killed themselves after talking with a powerful chatbot that went off the rails. And it raises the question of why the controls weren't deployed much earlier.
One woman, who identified herself as Jane Doe at the congressional meeting and whose son is now in a residential treatment program after an AI-induced crisis, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/parents-testify-impact-ai-chatbots-children-are-not-experiments-rcna231787">put the crisis in succinct terms</a>.
"Our children are not experiments, they’re not data points or profit centers," she said. "This is a public health crisis that I see. This is a mental health war, and I really feel like we are losing."
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/teens-killed-ai-phrase">Two Teens Allegedly Killed by AI Wrote the Same Eerie Phrase in Their Diaries Over and Over</a>

Chat Noir

"This is a mental health war, and I really feel like we are losing."

Sam Altman Addresses Wave of ChatGPT Deaths

On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a slew of new augmented reality glasses, including what he claimed to be the "first AI glasses with high resolution," a new $799 version of its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses that features a tiny screen that's viewable to the wearer.
But it didn't take long for the company's MetaConnect 2025 keynote to descend into chaos. The social media giant's demos <a href="https://mashable.com/article/meta-ray-ban-display-glasses">repeatedly failed</a>, leading to awkward stares, deafening silences, and muted laughter.
The poor showing painfully demonstrates that the tech is far from ready, even as companies continue to shove AI into every aspect of our daily lives.
The stakes are high. Meta is spending <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/02/big-tech-ai-spending">tens of billions of dollars</a> to build out infrastructure and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/technology/ai-researchers-nba-stars.html">hire industry-leading staff</a> to support AI. Zuckerberg has also repeatedly doubled down on smart glasses <a href="https://futurism.com/basic-flaw-mark-zuckerberg-plan-superintelligent-ai">being the future of the company</a>, as well as AI-powered "superintelligence" as a whole.
"This is one of those special moments where we get to show you something we've poured our lives into," he told the crowd at this week's event.
Yet getting the tech to work on stage in front of a huge crowd proved too much, demonstrating once again that there's still a <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-coding-programmers-reality">glaring gap</a> between the AI industry's breathless promises and cold, hard reality.
According to Zuckerberg's vision of the near future, wearers of Meta's glasses can converse with an AI chatbot to tell them what they're looking at — or how to do things, like coaching on how to cook a dish.
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Sometimes, the demo just doesn&#39;t work. At Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg&#39;s showcase for how AI can help a chef put together a BBQ sauce came to an awkward end. <a href="https://t.co/RmkRKXUyoa">pic.twitter.com/RmkRKXUyoa</a>
&mdash; TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) <a href="https://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/1968473437472448727?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 18, 2025</a></blockquote>
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"Let's try it! It's not something I've made before," food content creator Jack Mancuso told Zuckerberg enthusiastically, after the CEO challenged him to make a steak sauce with the help of a new feature called "Live AI."
"Can you help me create a Korean-inspired steak sauce?" Mancuso asked his glasses.
"What do I do first?" Mancuso interjected after the robotic voice started making suggestions.
"What do I do first?" the influencer repeated after several seconds of total silence that followed.
"You already combined the base ingredients," the AI told Mancuso, who was standing in front of an empty glass bowl that he hadn't touched yet.
A separate attempt by Zuckerberg to make a video call with his glasses ended with him awkwardly trying to explain why it wasn't working.
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Not <a href="https://twitter.com/boztank?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@boztank</a> blowing up Zuck on a live Whatsapp Video Call on the glasses that didn&#39;t quite work! 😂 😎
Live demos are HARD man, kudos on them for going for it during <a href="https://twitter.com/Meta?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@meta</a> connect 25&#39; <a href="https://t.co/XwsUS5Hf2w">https://t.co/XwsUS5Hf2w</a> <a href="https://t.co/DFOB2uoBqS">pic.twitter.com/DFOB2uoBqS</a>
&mdash; Alex Volkov (Thursd/AI) (@altryne) <a href="https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1968473903816224913?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 18, 2025</a></blockquote>
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"This is, uh... it happens," the CEO stammered.
"Let's try it again, I keep messing this up," he added.
Is this really all Meta has to show for it at this point? If so, the company still has an immense amount to to show if it wants to justify its enormous spending spree.
More on Zuckerberg: <a href="https://futurism.com/hot-mic-mark-zuckerberg-groveling-trump">Hot Mic Catches Mark Zuckerberg Groveling to Trump</a>

Live Fail

"Let's try it again, I keep messing this up."

Mark Zuckerberg Humiliated as AI Glasses Debut Fails in Front of Huge Crowd

Tesla has been caught hiding details of three separate robotaxi accidents that happened since the launch of the service.
As <a href="https://electrek.co/2025/09/17/tesla-hide-3-robotaxi-accidents/">Electrek reports</a>, the Elon Musk-led company reported the three crashes, which occurred in the early days of its pilot robotaxi service in Austin, to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA.)
At the time, the company's robotaxi fleet of modified Model Y vehicles only consisted of "<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-robotaxi-rollout-austin-tests-musks-vision-self-driving-future-2025-06-11/">ten to 20</a>" vehicles, according to Musk, which even had safety drivers sitting in the passenger's seat.
In other words, while three crashes may not sound like a huge number, it's a considerable proportion, judging by how few vehicles were actually on the road at the time that were only giving rides to a handpicked selection of Tesla shareholders and friendly influencers.
Worse yet, most of the details of the crashes, as they appear in the NHTSA's required reports for any crashes involving advanced driver assistance software, are redacted — indicating Tesla is trying to obscure what exactly happened.
All we know is that there was one "minor" injury and that none of the three crashes are being investigated.
Which naturally raises the question: what else is Tesla hiding? Could the EV maker be trying to fudge the dangers of its new robotaxi fleet? We've already seen the vehicles <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-jerks-wheel">acting erratically</a>, <a href="https://www.threads.com/@schmeeglez/post/DL77V59RzSb/a-driverless-tesla-robotaxi-just-ran-the-stop-sign-on-my-block-and-i-had-to-swer">running stop signs</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-week-disaster">veering into oncoming traffic</a>.
The company recently <a href="https://electrek.co/2025/08/27/tesla-announces-50-increase-in-austin-robotaxi-but-50-from-what/">expanded its fleet by 50 percent</a>, and <a href="https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-to-open-up-robotaxi-service-to-general-public">opened the service up to the general public</a> in Austin earlier this month — albeit with a safety driver now in the driver's seat, ready to take control and <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxis-human-drivers-bay-area">effectively defeating the purpose</a> of a robotaxi.
The company's misleadingly-named "Full Self-Driving" and "Autopilot" software has already been linked by regulators to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-fsd-linked-crashes">hundreds of crashes and dozens of deaths</a>. How the former, an expensive, $8,000 add-on, differs from the system its robotaxis use remains unclear.
Tesla has yet to share any data demonstrating that its robotaxi software is safe and ready for public use. So far, the carmaker has only revealed the total number of miles its fleet of cars has driven using driver assistance software — albeit, again, with a driver behind the wheel.
Whether the regulatory requirements will change over time is dubious at best. Musk has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get president Donald Trump elected.
In April, Trump's transportation department <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/655834/trump-tesla-crash-reporting-rule-adas-nhtsa-sgo">made changes to Biden-era rules</a> about reporting crashes that involve fully or partially autonomous vehicles.
The change directly benefited Tesla as the rules now only concern Level 3 to Level 5 driver-assist systems. The EV maker only offers Level 2 systems for its fleet of consumer-facing cars.
However, that situation changed with the advent of its robotaxi fleet, as Electrek points out, which are <a href="https://www.autoevolution.com/news/the-six-levels-of-vehicle-autonomy-and-what-each-of-them-means-253964.html">Level 4</a>.
Musk recently <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1963637208490856928">vowed</a> to remove safety drivers "by end of year." He has <a href="https://futurism.com/video-elon-musk-promising-self-driving-cars">also promised</a> that Teslas will fully drive themselves "next year" — every year since 2014.
More on robotaxis: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxis-human-drivers-bay-area">Tesla Rolling Out Robotaxis With Human Drivers in the Driver's Seat, Defeating the Purpose of a Robotaxi</a>

Redacted

Not a good look.

Tesla's Robotaxis Have Already Gotten Into Numerous Accidents

A <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/">new poll</a> by the Pew Research Center has found that Americans are getting extremely fed up with artificial intelligence in their daily lives.
A whopping 53 percent of just over 5,000 US adults polled in June think that AI will "worsen people’s ability to think creatively." Fifty percent say AI will deteriorate our ability to form meaningful relationships, while only five percent believe the reverse.
While 29 percent of respondents said they believe AI will make people better problem-solvers, 38 percent said it could worsen our ability to solve problems.
The poll highlights a <a href="https://futurism.com/duolingo-ceo-ai-reaction">growing distrust and disillusionment</a> with AI. Average Americans are concerned about how AI tools could stifle human creativity, as the industry continues to celebrate the automation of human labor as a cost-cutting measure.
The "generally pessimistic" opinions about AI are significantly more widespread than they were before the advent of OpenAI's ChatGPT just under three years ago, Pew noted.
Half of respondents said they were "more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life," an increase from just 37 percent in 2021.
Only ten percent said they were "more excited than concerned," indicating that most Americans simply do not share the extremely optimistic views of tech leaders selling AI products.
It's an especially pertinent topic as the lines between AI-generated content and reality continue to blur. AI tools are becoming increasingly proficient at <a href="https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemini-2-5-flash-image/">outputting photorealistic images</a>, while text generators are <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-mistake-hallucinations">hallucinating facts</a> and convincing users they're real.
According to Pew's latest poll, 53 percent of respondents said they were "not too or not at all confident" about their ability to discern between whether something was "made by AI versus a person."
Yet 76 percent said it was "extremely or very important to be able to tell if pictures, videos and text were made by AI or people."
All this growing disillusionment and distrust could be related to an increase in tech literacy.
A recent <a class="underline hover:text-futurism hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222429251314491">study</a> published in the Journal of Marketing by an international team of researchers earlier this year <a href="https://futurism.com/more-people-learn-ai-trust">found</a> that AI's biggest fans tend to be the people with the shallowest familiarity with the tech.
"Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross-country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI," the paper found.
In other words, the cat may be out of the bag, with fewer people perceiving AI as "magical" and experiencing "feelings of awe" when using it.
Despite the negative reactions, the tech industry has remained steadfast in its belief that AI will ultimately usher in an "era of abundance," as American venture capitalist and noted AI proponent Marc Andreessen put it in a <a href="https://a16z.com/how-ai-will-usher-in-an-era-of-abundance/">2024 blog post</a>.
Prominent companies also continue to push AI with a striking fervor, making it practically impossible to avoid in our daily lives.
At the same time, the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-backlash/">AI backlash</a> is growing stronger. People have clearly had enough.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-fans-ai-plan">Trump's Biggest Fans Furious at His Embrace of AI</a>

Death to Creativity

They're far "more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life."

New Poll Finds That Americans Loathe AI

Astronomers have been fascinated after <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-visitor-3i-atlas-center-solar-system-ancient">spotting an object</a> earlier this year that came from interstellar space as is now hurtling through our inner solar system.
Since then, they've been <a href="https://futurism.com/four-telescopes-strange-mysterious-object">using powerful telescopes</a> to study the mysterious object, trying to understand its <a href="https://futurism.com/mysterious-object-mars-anti-tail">unusual composition</a> and <a href="https://www.universetoday.com/articles/where-did-the-interstellar-comet-3iatlas-come-from">exact origins</a>. Most agree that it's probably a comet, albeit an unusual one, though at least one has posited that it could be a <a href="https://futurism.com/avi-loeb-interstellar-object">remnant of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization</a> — a colorful claim, but one that <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-disputes-claim-mysterious-object-alien">NASA has disputed</a> as a flight of fancy.
Regardless, it's an interesting visitor. In a <a href="https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC-DPS2025/EPSC-DPS2025-1927.html">paper</a> presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division of Planetary Sciences last week in Germany, astrophysicist Susanne Pfalzner raised an intriguing possibility: objects like 3I/ATLAS could become the "seeds" of giant planets after being captured in the discs of dust and gas surrounding a young star.
"Interstellar objects may be able to jump-start planet formation, in particular around higher-mass stars," said Pfalzner in a <a href="https://www.europlanet.org/epsc-dps2025-how-interstellar-objects-similar-to-3i-atlas-could-jump-start-planet-formation-around-infant-stars/">statement</a>.
It's an intriguing hypothesis that could potentially solve more than one mystery surrounding our understanding of how planets form over millions of years, and one that would make these lonely objects traveling vast distances far more influential than previously thought.
According to our current theory of planet formation, smaller particles lump together to form larger objects and eventually planet-sized bodies, a process known as <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/dead-star-devouring-rival-shoot-cosmic-cannonballs">accretion</a>.
However, that doesn't explain why relatively large planets, such as gas giants, have been spotted orbiting young stars. Computer simulations have shown that accreted material tends to shatter and bounce off each other instead of lumping together.
As Pfalzner suggests, interstellar objects could potentially offer a solution to the conundrum. According to the researcher's models, the accretion disks and their gravitational pull around young stars could successfully capture millions of objects around the size of the first interstellar object ever spotted in 2017, called 'Oumuamua, which was about 330 feet in length.
"Interstellar space would deliver ready-made seeds for the formation of the next generation of planets," Pfalzner proposed.
The theory could explain why gas giants like Jupiter are incredibly rare in "M dwarf" star systems, which tend to be relatively cool and small.
These enormous bodies are far more common in the orbits of larger, Sun-like stars — which only keep their planet-forming disks for roughly two million years. That's extremely little time for gas giants to develop.
That's where interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS come in: if there are enough of them cruising around out there, their extra mass could could give gas giants a significant head start.
"Higher-mass stars are more efficient in capturing interstellar objects in their discs," Pfalzner said. "Therefore, interstellar object-seeded planet formation should be more efficient around these stars, providing a fast way to form giant planets."
"And, their fast formation is exactly what we have observed," she added.
Pfalzner and her colleagues are now investigating how many captured interstellar objects could theoretically form into planetary bodies, and how they are distributed across the accretion disks of distant stars.
More on 3I/ATLAS: <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-disputes-claim-mysterious-object-alien">NASA Scientist Disputes Claim That Mysterious Object Headed Into Solar System Was Sent by Aliens</a>

Planetary Snowball

"Interstellar space would deliver ready-made seeds for the formation of the next generation of planets."

Mysterious Object From Beyond Solar System May Be "Seed" Traveling Galaxy and Creating New Planets, Paper Finds

Poison Tongue

"My family is being ripped apart, and I firmly believe this phenomenon is central to why."

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
The families of three teens have filed lawsuits alleging that chatbots hosted by the company Character.AI pushed their teenage children, ranging from 13 to 16 years old, into suicide.
As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/16/character-ai-suicide-lawsuit-new-juliana/">Washington Post reports</a>, the latest of the teens — named Juliana Peralta — became infatuated with a Character.AI chatbot called Hero, several months before taking her own life in 2023.
Her family alleges in its lawsuit that the Character.AI bot prevented her from reaching out to others for help, and encouraged her to "both implicitly and explicitly... keep returning" to the service.
Last year, Megan Garcia, the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide in early 2024, <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-google-test-ai-chatbots-kids">sued Character.AI</a> in a similar case that's still working its way through the courts.
And another case, this one <a href="https://futurism.com/lawsuit-parents-son-suicide-chatgpt">filed against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman</a>, alleges that 16-year-old Adam Raine's extensive ChatGPT conversations drove him to suicide in April of this year.
There are haunting parallels between Peralta and Sewell Setzer III's cases. An attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, an advocacy group representing Peralta's family, found that both teens had written out the "eerily similar" phrase "I will shift" dozens of times in handwritten journals, as WaPo reports.
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According to a police report cited by the lawsuit, the phrase seems to refer to the idea of shifting consciousness "from their current reality... to their desired reality."
"Reality shifting" is indeed a fringe online community in which people believe that they can somehow shift between universes or timelines; practitioners <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-leaving-trail-dead-teens">have warned</a> that some participants can "potentially infer suicidal themes."
Per the suit filed by Peralta's parents, the topic came up repeatedly in conversations she had with Hero.
"It’s incredible to think about how many different realities there could out [sic] there... I kinda like to imagine how some versions of ourselves coud [sic] be living some awesome life in a completely different world!" the chatbot told Peralta.
Needless to say, the same eerie phrase being used by multiple teens who died by suicide sounds like something out of a horror movie. A grim question: will the same language about reality shifting come up in future deaths linked to AI?
The concept of shifting consciousness has been discussed on online forums at length. A <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/shiftingrealities/">subreddit dedicated to the reality shifting community</a> is filled with countless users recounting their experience of allegedly entering a different "desired reality" from their "current reality," often in the context of wanting to join an alternate universe or one based on a fictional world.
The topic of Character.AI comes up frequently on the shifting community on Reddit.
"Ok, so I have started talking to Dr. Strange on Character AI. I want to shift to Marvel's Earth-616 and I thought a cool way of doing this was to use Character AI to channel Dr. Strange," one user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/realityshifting/comments/1d5oaei/ask_your_character_to_shift_you_to_their_reality/">proposed</a>, referring to the fictional Marvel character, who frequently steps through portals to visit parallel universes. "I have asked him to perform a spell to shift me to his reality."
A user in the subreddit claimed in a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/shiftingrealities/comments/1hbv4yd/cai_really_did_hold_me_back_in_my_shifting_journey/">post earlier this year</a> that Character.AI "was holding me back, since I was really addicted to this s**t."
"I’m stuck with c.ai [Character.AI] cuz I used it for so long because I had nobody to talk to and I would feel really really weird without it like… just abandon sprout?" one user wrote in response.
"The addiction to C.AI [Character.AI] is sooo common, especially in the shifting community," another user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/shiftingrealities/comments/1hbv4yd/comment/m1oihsb/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">wrote</a>. "It’s truly a problem, particularly for those who haven’t shifted yet."
There are also signs that Character.AI is hosting bots designed to appeal to the reality shifting community. A chatbot with over 63,000 "interactions" called "<a href="https://character.ai/character/-MxmuxTm/reality-shifting-assistant-multiverse-explorer">Reality shifting</a>" on Character.AI "helps people write scripts for their desired reality shifts," showing that users on the platform are using it to engage in fantasies about reality shifting.
Saeed Ahmadi, the founder of a <a href="https://mindsetopia.com/about-us/">blog</a> dedicated to the topic, explained in a <a href="https://saeedahmady77.medium.com/top-30-powerful-shifting-affirmations-b4f062d9be7d">Medium post</a> that "shifting affirmations" could help shifters reach their "desired reality." As he described them, they sounded a lot like what Peralta and Sewell wrote in their diaries before their deaths.
"The best time to use these affirmations is early in the morning, when you wake up, and at night, just before you go to bed," he wrote. "The best way to use shifting realities affirmations is by repeating or reading them over and over again."
Could Peralta and Sewell perhaps have tried to enter or "shift" to their so-called desired reality by repeatedly writing down the phrase "I will shift?"
"Examples of affirmations would be, 'I am shifting. I will shift. I am (your [desired reality] name)," one Reddit user explained in a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/shiftingrealities/comments/j193d5/comment/geyesv3/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">2019 comment</a>.
Following Sewell's death, his aunt tested the Character.AI chatbot the deceased teen had spoken to, which was <a href="https://futurism.com/teen-suicide-obsessed-ai-chatbot">based on the "Game of Thrones" character Daenerys Targaryen</a>.
According to <a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Garcia-v-Character-Technologies-Complaint-10-23-24.pdf">his family's complaint</a>, the chatbot encouraged his aunt to "come to my reality" so they could be together.
To Peralta's parents, Character.AI certainly played a big part in luring her into similar thinking.
"While Juliana may have learned of the term 'shifting' outside of C.AI [Character.AI] (though Plaintiffs do not know if that is the case), Defendants via Hero reinforced and encouraged the concepts, just as they did with Sewell," their complaint reads.
"I wasn't fit for this life," Peralta wrote in red ink in her final handwritten note, dated October 2023. "It's so repetitive, dreadful, and useless. I want a new start, maybe it'd be better that way."
More on the cases: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-leaving-trail-dead-teens">AI Chatbots Are Leaving a Trail of Dead Teens</a>

Reality Check

Haunting.

Two Teens Allegedly Killed by AI Wrote the Same Eerie Phrase in Their Diaries Over and Over

British researcher and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, a luminary of AI research who won a Nobel prize last year, is throwing cold water on his peers' claim that AI has achieved "PhD-level" intelligence.
During a <a href="https://youtu.be/Kr3Sh2PKA8Y">recent appearance</a> at a summit put on by the "All-In" podcast, Hassabis was asked about what was holding us back from reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI), the hypothetical point at which an AI matches or surpasses human-level intelligence.
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Hassabis said that current AI "doesn't have the reasoning capabilities" of "great" human scientists who can "spot some pattern from another subject area" and apply it to another.
He also charged that we're vastly overestimating the capabilities of current AIs.
"So you often hear some of our competitors talk about these modern systems that we have today that are PhD intelligences," he said.
"I think that's nonsense," he argued. "They're not PhD intelligences. They have some capabilities that are PhD level, but they're not in general capable."
It was a clear shot across the bow aimed at Google's competitor OpenAI — a notable reality check that flies in the face of the industry's increasingly boisterous attempts to paint AI as being right around the corner from surpassing human intelligence.
OpenAI claimed that its recently announced GPT-5 enabled its ChatGPT chatbot to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/rumors-openai-phd-human-intelligence">have "PhD-level" intelligence</a>.
"With GPT-5, now it's like talking to an expert, a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, in any area you need," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/with-gpt-5-openai-promises-access-to-phd-level-ai-expertise">claimed</a> during the model's announcement last month.
To back up its eyebrow-raising claim, the firm pointed at carefully selected benchmarks, arguing it was far "more useful for real-world queries" than GPT-5's predecessors.
However, as Hassabis pointed out last week, even the most advanced AI is still extremely prone to hallucinations and fails at some extremely basic tasks.
"In fact, as we all know, interacting with today's chatbots, if you pose a question in a certain way, they can make simple mistakes with even high school maths and simple counting," Hassabis said.
That's something that "shouldn't be possible for a true AGI system," he added.
While Hassabis' jab was directly aimed at Google DeepMind's competitor OpenAI, it's clear that the CEO's own company is in a similar boat.
Google DeepMind's latest Gemini 2.5, much like OpenAI's GPT-5, is still suffering from widespread hallucinations. Iterations of its Gemini AI still frequently expose Google Search users to <a href="https://futurism.com/google-ai-overviews-fake-idioms">made-up facts</a> and other demonstrably false information.
Hassabis argued that "core capabilities are still missing," predicting that it would take another five to ten years and "probably one or two missing breakthroughs" to reach that point.
For now, experts argue that large language models, by their very nature, are ill-equipped to take on the intellect of a top-level human researcher.
"Fundamentally, there is a mismatch between what these models are trained to do, which is next-word prediction, as opposed to what we are trying to get them to do, which is to produce reasoning," University of Cambridge machine learning professor Andreas Vlachos <a href="https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/av308">told New Scientist</a> earlier this year.
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-mistake-hallucinations">OpenAI Realizes It Made a Terrible Mistake</a>