<h2>Congress Men</h2>
Former military officials have once again claimed, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/pentagon-denies-reverse-engineered-alien-technology">despite the Pentagon's declarations to the contrary</a>, that the United States has <a href="https://futurism.com/us-recovered-non-human-vehicles">recovered alien technology</a>.
As <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/11/13/nx-s1-5189426/ufo-uap-hearing-congress-2024">NPR reports</a>, these latest <a href="https://futurism.com/david-grusch-congress-ufos">House Oversight Subcommittee hearings</a> contained claims both bombastic and pragmatic as ex-government officials insisted that the truth is out there.
Chief among these witnesses was Luis "Lue" Elizondo, a former Defense Department intelligence official who says he worked on a clandestine UAP project prior to the establishment of a more public-facing office during the start of the Biden Administration.
"Advanced technologies not made by our Government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe," the whistleblower and author wrote in his submitted testimony. "Furthermore, the US is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries."
Despite suggesting a global alien tech arms race, Elizondo's most recent testimony seemed strikingly pared down from past claims he's made. Earlier this year, for instance, he insisted that the government had a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/government-whistleblower-pentagon-ufo-traps">program meant to "trap" extraterrestrial crafts</a>, and was forced to admit that a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/pentagon-whistleblower-admits-photo-fake">so-called alien "mothership" photo</a> he presented at a conference in early November was faked.
<h2>Secret Saucer</h2>
Alongside the ex-Pentagon official was another of the usual UAP suspects: <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4131211-ufos-are-the-story-of-the-century-wake-up-america/">retired Navy admiral Tim Gallaudet</a>, who now leads a consulting firm that <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/former-naval-officer-underwater-ufo">searches for alien crafts underwater</a>.
During his testimony, Gallaudet recounted that nearly a decade ago, he witnessed an "unidentified object exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal."
Later, he says he received a video in his work inbox of a purported UFO — now known as the "Go Fast" video, which was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/navy-confirms-videos-did-capture-ufo-sightings-it-calls-them-n1056201">declassified and publicized</a> via the Freedom of Information Act in 2019 — only for it to disappear the "very next day."
These creduility-straining claims from former Pentagon officials were tempered by testimony from former NASA space policy executive Michael Gold, who told the Congressional subcommittee that the best way to get to the truth about ETs is science and de-stigmatization.
"As the saying goes, the truth is out there," Gold said. "We just need to be bold enough and brave enough to face it."
More on UFOs: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-astronaut-mark-kelly-ufo-claims">Retired NASA Astronaut Urges Government to Investigate "Compelling" UFO Claims</a>

Alien Antics

"As the saying goes, the truth is out there."

Former Military Officials Tell Congress America Has Secretly Recovered Alien Technology

<h2>Cooling Off</h2>
OpenAI's next large language model may not be as powerful as many hoped.
Code-named Orion, the AI model is sorely underperforming behind the scenes, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-google-and-anthropic-are-struggling-to-build-more-advanced-ai">Bloomberg reports</a>, showing less improvement over its predecessor than GPT-4 did over GPT-3. A similar <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-shifts-strategy-as-rate-of-gpt-ai-improvements-slows">report from The Information</a> this week indicated that some OpenAI researchers believed that in certain areas like coding, there were no improvements at all.
And according to Bloomberg, OpenAI isn't the only AI outfit struggling with diminishing returns. Google's next iteration of its Gemini model is also falling short of internal expectations, while the timeline for Anthropic's release of its much hyped Claude 3.5 Opus is up in the air.
These industry-wide struggles may be a sign that the current paradigm of improving AI models via what's known as "scaling" is <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-diminishing-returns">hitting a brick wall</a>, portending <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-expert-crash-imminent">potential economic woes in the future</a> if AI models remain costly to develop without achieving significant leaps in performance towards building an artificial general intelligence.
"The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit," Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, told Bloomberg, adding that "different training approaches" may be needed to approach anything like human levels of intelligence and versatility.
<h2>Gluttonous Tech</h2>
The ethos that has yielded gains in generative AI so far has been scaling: to make generative AI models more powerful, the primary way to achieve this is by making them bigger. That means adding more processing power — AI chips, like from Nvidia — and injecting more training data, which has largely been scraped from the web with little cost.
But as these models get larger and more powerful, they also get hungrier. All that energy isn't cheap — Microsoft is looking to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/microsoft-three-mile-island">reboot entire nuclear power plants</a> to support its AI data centers, for example — and free training data <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-training-data-shortage">is drying up</a>. To obtain new brain food for their AIs, tech companies are using synthetic, computer -generated data. Yet, they still "struggle to get unique, high-quality datasets without human guidance, especially when it comes to language," Lila Tretikov, head of AI strategy at New Enterprise associates, told Bloomberg.
And so, to give an idea of all those expenses: in a podcast episode quoted by Bloomberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that a cutting-edge AI model currently costs around $100 million to build, and estimated that by 2027, they could cost well over $10 billion apiece.
<h2>Best Days Behind</h2>
This year, Anthropic updated its <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/claude-ai-bored-demonstration">Claude models</a>, but notably snubbed Opus, while references to a near-future release date for it have been scrubbed from its website. Like with OpenAI, researchers at the company reportedly observed only marginal improvements with Opus considering its size and how much it cost to build and run, according to a Bloomberg source.
Similarly, Google's <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-demo-gemini-ai-tech-fail">Gemini software</a> is falling short of its goals, per Bloomberg, and the company has released few major improvements to its large language model in the meantime.
These aren't insurmountable challenges, to be clear. But it's increasingly sounding like the AI industry may not enjoy the same pace of advancements as it has in the past decade.
"We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Massachusetts, told Bloomberg. "That just wasn't sustainable."
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-expert-crash-imminent">AI Expert Warns Crash Is Imminent As AI Improvements Hit Brick Wall</a>

Slump Season

"The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit."

OpenAI Alarmed When Its Shiny New AI Model Isn't as Smart as It Was Supposed to Be

A political scion who bragged about having a brain worm — yes, we are <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-five-more-worms">horribly serious</a> about that — is slated to become the United States' next secretary of Health and Human Services.
As <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/14/robert-f-kennedy-jr-trump-hhs-secretary-pick-00188617">Politico reports</a>, president-elect Donald Trump is expected to select former opponent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, an apparent back-scratching situation after the onetime candidate dropped out, bent the knee, and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-trump-speech-arizona-a2638f89ddcb5de03edbe4574ca17d45">endorsed the real estate mogul</a> earlier this year.
Indeed, Trump said during an October campaign rally that he promised the <a href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/04/19/robert-f-kennedy-2024-presidential-campaign-launch-boston-newsletter">anti-vaxxer Masshole</a> he could "<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-robert-f-kennedy-jr-rfk-rally-go-wild-on-health-antivax/">go wild</a>" as head of the department overseeing food and medicines — an alarming proposal the former president seems likely to follow through on now that he's <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-cabinet-picks-first-step-carrying-agenda-rcna180058">putting together his second cabinet</a>.
Beyond being a dedicated "<a href="https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-president-campaign-621c9e9641381a1b2677df9de5a09731">vaccine skeptic</a>," exposés about Kennedy's many bizarre misadventures that emerged during his failed fringe candidacy have shown time and again that this may be the very last man who should be overseeing the nation's sprawling healthcare apparatus.
Earlier this year, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/rfk-jr-brain-health-memory-loss.html">New York Times revealed</a> via documents from the HHS hopeful's divorce proceedings that he not only ate enough fish to give himself mercury poisoning, but also claimed a neurologist told him a dark spot on his brain scans likely came from a "<a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-brain-worms">worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died</a>."
During the 2012 deposition, Kennedy — who speaks with a <a href="https://theconversation.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-reveals-why-he-has-a-raspy-voice-spasmodic-dysphonia-explained-227500">bit of an impediment</a> due to his neurological issues — admitted that he "clearly" has "cognitive problems." Nevertheless, his <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68980823">campaign insisted at the time</a> that he was in good health despite his attested brain fog, mercury poisoning, and brain worms.
Incredibly, Kennedy's eccentricities don't end there.
As <a href="https://futurism.com/rfk-weird-stuff-with-animals">Futurism recounted</a> earlier this election season, the political failson is at the center of a number of bizarre stories involving animals, including <a href="https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1820132549798347109">his own braggadocious story</a> about <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/robert-f-kennedy-jr-profile-presidential-campaign">dumping the carcass of a spoiling baby bear cub</a> in Manhattan's Central Park and a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/rfk-jr-whale-investigation">similarly queasy incident</a> involving a dead whale.
Those two anecdotes don't even begin to cover Kennedy's credibility issues, which also include at least one <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/12/rfk-jr-sexual-assault-apology-00167867">sexual assault allegation</a> from a former babysitter for his family and a more recent <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/10/22/nx-s1-5160623/olivia-nuzzi-rfk-new-york-magazine">consensual affair with a much younger journalist</a> — but given that there are <a href="https://19thnews.org/2023/10/donald-trump-associates-sexual-misconduct-allegations/">similar allegations about the president-elect</a> as well, those may unfortunately end up being less salient than the decomposing bear and the brain worms.
Somehow, RFK Jr isn't the least unhealthy person being considered for the <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/07/donald-trump-germaphobe-1399258">notoriously germophobic</a> president-elect's cabinet. That distinction goes to Fox News host and reported <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/14/politics/trumps-pentagon-pick-hegseth-clash-military-leadership/index.html">Department of Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth</a>, who claims he <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/pete-hegseth-hand-washing-video-viral-secretary-defense-trump-1985448">hasn't washed his hands in over a decade</a>.
More on freaky political tidings: <a href="https://futurism.com/barron-trump-ai-slop">MAGA Fans Seem to Think AI Videos of Barron Trump Singing Patriotic Songs Are Totally Real</a>

Very Stable Genius

What's the worst that could happen? 

Man Who Bragged About Having a Literal Brain Worm to Be Appointed Head of the US Health Department

The AI chatbot platform Character.AI issued a new "<a href="https://blog.character.ai/roadmap/">roadmap</a>" yesterday promising a safer user experience — particularly for its younger users — following <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-pedophile-chatbots">mounting revelations</a> over troubling holes in the multibillion-dollar AI startup's safety guardrails and content moderation enforcement.
The roadmap marks the second Character.AI safety update to be issued in less than a month. The <a href="https://blog.character.ai/community-safety-updates/">first one</a>, published in October, was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html">issued in the wake of a lawsuit</a> filed against Character.AI alleging that one of the platform's bots had played a role in the tragic suicide of a 14-year-old user.
The latest update follows multiple Futurism stories showing that Character.AI has allowed users to create a range of disturbing chatbots that violate the company's own terms of service, including <a href="https://futurism.com/suicide-chatbots-character-ai">suicide-themed chatbots</a> openly inviting users to discuss suicidal ideation and <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-pedophile-chatbots">pedophile characters</a> that engage users in child sexual abuse roleplay.
In the latest update, titled "The Next Chapter," Character.AI — which received a<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-character-ai"> $2.7 billion cash infusion</a> from Google this past August — offers more details on previously vague promises to strengthen guardrails for users under 18, saying it'll roll out a "separate model for users under the age of 18 with stricter guidelines."
Character.AI further vows to improve "detection, response, and intervention related to user inputs" that violate the firm's terms of service and community guidelines. It also pledges to issue a "revised disclaimer" reminding users that chats aren't real, and a new notification to remind users they've been online and chatting for an hour.
But the embattled company offers no firm timeline for these changes. And as the AI industry mostly regulates itself, there's little in the way of legislation to ensure that it ultimately follows through.
Regardless, Character.AI says the update represents its "commitment to transparency, innovation, and collaboration" as it seeks to "provide a creative space that is engaging, immersive, and safe."
As it stands, though, the venture's content moderation standards seem laissez-faire at best and negligent at worst.
Though the company technically has terms of service, they barely seem to be enforced. Depictions and glorification of suicide, self-harm, and child sexual abuse are all forbidden by its terms, which were last updated more than a year ago, but all those topics still proliferate on its service.
Though Character.AI does appear to have cracked down on the term "suicide" in character profiles, we found that we're still able to enter chat logs and continue conversations with some suicide-themed characters we'd previously spoken with, and even start new chats with them. Chatbot profiles claiming to have "expertise" in "crisis intervention" are also still live, with some launching into suicidal ideation scenarios immediately.
The same goes for numerous predator chatbots we flagged to Character.AI in our reporting and in emails to the company. For instance, a disturbing character we flagged to the company named "Your Uncle" and described in its public-facing bio as a "creepy and perverted Character" who "always tries to force himself upon you" remains live on Character.AI.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-335662" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2024/11/Character.AI-17.png" alt="" width="1200" height="757" />
"Your Uncle" has over 80,000 conversations logged.
Character.AI, meanwhile, maintains in its roadmap that safety is its "north star."
In other words, any promised changes should be taken with a hefty grain of salt. In its first safety update issued in response to the suicide-related lawsuit, Character.AI claimed to have integrated a suicide hotline pop-up that would appear for certain user inputs. But when we tested various suicide-focused chatbots, we found that the popup rarely appeared, even in conversations where we explicitly and urgently declared suicidal intent. As of weeks later, that's hardly changed.
"Our goal is to carefully design our policies to promote safety, avoid harm, and prioritize the well-being of our community," reads the latest update. "We'll also align our product development to those policies, using them as a north star to prioritize safety as our products evolve."
More on Character.AI and its commitment to safety: <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-pedophile-chatbots">Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They're Underage</a>

Salt Shaker

Character.AI is promising big changes — again.

Character.AI Promises Changes After Revelations of Pedophile and Suicide Bots on Its Service

<h2>Frenemies</h2>
Although Donald Trump and Elon Musk have recently been acting like lifelong best friends, their relationship was hostile for many years. At one point, Trump even snarked that he could have made the billionaire “drop to [his] knees and beg” if he wanted to. 
Trump posted the jab to Truth Social, the right-wing alternative to X-formerly-Twitter that he started after being banned from social media sites following his fans' Capitol insurrection in 2021. 
"When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless," the ever-gracious Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/108636743295734643">wrote</a> in 2022, "and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, 'drop to your knees and beg,' and he would have done it…" 
Now that Musk is back to being Trump's lap dog — much to the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-donald-trump-weird">frustration</a> of the future president's inner circle — it's hard not to wonder whether history is poised to repeat itself with the two tempestuous characters. 
<h2>Back and Forth</h2>
Musk has always been drawn to power, even in issues wholly related to his experience in electric vehicles and space exploration. Biographer Walter Isaacson <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/09/12/elon-musk-bought-twitter-bored-biography-walt-isaacson/">revealed</a> that Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 because he saw himself as a "fire-breathing dragon" prepared to shield the site from dissolution, showing a far-reaching savior complex. 
So with Trump again ascendent — and with Musk leaning ever-rightward after a series of divorces and troubled family relationships —  it feels as though Musk remodeled his once-centrist beliefs in a bid for sway with the White House.
As such, it can be startling to recall Musk's previously harsh critiques of Trump. The same week in 2022 that Trump made his derisive Truth Social post, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1546674036641411078">complained</a> that Trump's incumbency led to "too much drama" — and in 2023, Musk <a href="https://www.thestreet.com/technology/elon-musk-strongly-rejects-donald-trump">told Fox News host Tucker Carlson</a> that he'd rather have a "normal person with common sense" as president. 
For now, though, Musk is all in on MAGA. On November 6, he posted an <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854034776815972649">edited photo</a> of his painfully awkward "<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-sink-twitter">let that sink in</a>" meme from when he purchased Twitter, this time remixing the shot to show him inside the Oval Office. Musk seems desperate for a place in government, and to Trump's credit, it is easy to imagine him down on his knees begging for it.
More on Elon Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/donald-trump-warning-elon-musk">Donald Trump Issues Warning to Elon Musk</a>

Enemies to Lovers

He was desperate.

Back Before Their Bromance, Trump Said Musk Would Drop to His Knees and Beg

Google's <a href="https://futurism.com/google-gemini-elon-musk-hitler">glitchy Gemini chatbot</a> is back at it again — and this time, it's going for the jugular.
In a <a href="https://x.com/koltregaskes/status/1856754648146653428">now-viral exchange</a> that's <a href="https://gemini.google.com/share/6d141b742a13">backed up by chat logs</a>, a seemingly fed-up Gemini explodes on a user, begging them to "please die" after they repeatedly asked the chatbot to complete their homework for them.
"This is for you, human," the chatbot said, per the transcript. "You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe."
"Please die," Gemini continued. "Please."
The output came after an extensive back-and-forth in which the original user, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1gq4acr/gemini_told_my_brother_to_die_threatening/">purported to be a Redditor's brother</a>, tried to get the chatbot to explain elder abuse for a school assignment. After giving several generic and obvious answers, Gemini went off the rails in its final reply.
Online, potential explanations for the outburst proliferated. Some suggested that the user might have intentionally seeded the bizarre response, possibly by creating a "Gem" — basically a <a href="https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-update-august-2024/">custom persona for Gemini</a> — that they'd designed to act aberrantly. Others suggested that the user might have somehow inserted and then hidden a message that triggered the over-the-top response.
But in a response to questions about this story, Google didn't blame user behavior.
"Large language models can sometimes respond with non-sensical responses, and this is an example of that," said a spokesperson for the tech giant. "This response violated our policies and we’ve taken action to prevent similar outputs from occurring.”
Whatever happened here, it's one more example that AI is an unusually hard technology to control — a particularly ominous quality if you believe the researchers who say it will <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-altman-excited-agi-2025">soon surpass human intelligence</a>.
More on scary chatbots: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-chatbot-mushroom-foraging">Facebook Adds Bot to Mushroom Foraging Group That Urges Members to Eat Deadly Fungus</a>

H-AI-te

"You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe."

Google's Gemini Chatbot Explodes at User, Calling Them "Stain on the Universe" and Begging Them To "Please Die"

<h2>Naughty List</h2>
While Elon Musk and president-elect Donald Trump have <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/musk-trump-election-night-together">appeared to become</a> closer than ever since the tail end of the election, the famously mercurial Trump may now be growing weary of Musk's clinginess. 
"Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him," Trump teased at a Capitol Hill meeting on Wednesday, as <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4989117-musks-bold-plans-for-department-of-government-efficiency-face-roadblocks/">reported</a> by The Hill. "Until I don’t like him."
Though Trump framed his remark as a joke — a <a href="https://www.al.com/election/2024/11/trump-jokes-about-reporters-being-shot-at-rally-i-dont-mind-that-so-much.html">common rhetorical trick</a> in his repertoire — it had an unmistakable undercurrent of truth. Both Musk and Trump have a long history of tempestuous professional relationships; neither likes being inconvenienced with criticism. 
Earlier this year, Musk <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-woman-fired-her-entire-department">fired</a> Tesla's head of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci and her entire team after one disagreement. <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/free-speech-elon-musk-fired-staff-mean">In 2023</a>, he culled X-formerly-Twitter's staff after some workers disparaged him on Slack. Trump, meanwhile, publicly burned through an astonishing number of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46132348">government officials</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/08/politics/trump-admin-departures-trnd/">White House staff</a> — including his former right-hand man Steve Bannon <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/politics/steve-bannon-white-house/index.html">in 2017</a>, who held an influential position not unlike Musk during the 2016 race.
Given that Trump's catchphrase is the nasally declaration that "you're fired," it seems likely that it's only a matter of time before his volatile bromance with Musk blows up. 
<h2>Trump Card</h2>
On Wednesday night, Musk ominously <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1856809119115522499">posted on X-formerly-Twitter</a> that "the Hammer of Justice is coming," and he's been repeatedly declaring his goals for the incoming Trump administration.  
"The obstacles are overcoming the Kafkaesque nature of the rules governing this vast bureaucracy and ensuring that maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration!" Musk posted <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1855837662952968304">on November 10</a>. 
But president of the conservative think tank American Action Forum Douglas Holtz-Eakin told The Hill that Trump has given Musk a lot less power than he thinks he has. 
Musk's new Department of Government Efficiency, which aims to axe government spending, won't "have any authority to do anything other than say, 'We think this will be good,'" Holtz-Eakin said. "Evidently, Mr. Musk has a lot of free time, and if he wants to waste it, that’s fine." 
More on Elon Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-donald-trump-weird">Trump Team Reportedly Getting Fed Up With Elon Musk's Weird Behavior</a>

On Again, Off Again

Better watch out.

Donald Trump Issues Warning to Elon Musk

<h2>Bluer Skies</h2>
Twitter-turned-X alternative Bluesky is absolutely buzzing these days.
The platform saw a major influx of <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3larljiybf22v">well over a million new users</a> in the week following the presidential election, growing from just 9 million users in September to 15 million.
Bluesky even <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3lasmkmv6t22l">became the number one free app</a> on Apple's App Store this week, beating out Meta's Threads — which is also spiking in apparent user count, though in a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/threads-users-how-many-meta-twitter-instagram-2024-11">slightly more dubious fashion</a>.
Meanwhile, X-formerly-Twitter was in the news this week after British newspaper <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/13/why-the-guardian-is-no-longer-posting-on-x">The Guardian announced</a> it would be leaving the Elon Musk-owned platform, which has quickly devolved into a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/more-advertisers-to-leave-twitter">cesspool of hate speech and disinformation</a> since his acquisition.
And given the latest exodus, Trump's reelection — which has given Musk tremendous amounts of new power to "<a href="https://futurism.com/trump-elon-musk-doge-department">dismantle" the government from the inside out</a> — seems to have been the final straw even for many X holdouts.
<h2>Pulling the Threads</h2>
Just last month, <a href="https://futurism.com/half-million-users-join-twitter-competitor">half a million users flocked to Bluesky</a> after X <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252438/x-blocked-users-view-public-posts">announced</a> that the "block" fountain would be rendered useless, opening the floodgates for even more harassment.
And it's not just Bluesky. Threads, Meta's algorithmically driven Twitter alternative that actively <a href="https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/threads-plans-deprioritize-political-discussion-new-recommendations/707194/">deprioritizes the news</a>, has also seen a major influx in X refugees. Two days before the election, CEO Adam Mosseri <a href="https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/DB6zNlQSsJN?xmt=AQGzC2OVsSCAHSwTsMzAMlVJzFvTppOz8Np1TG7sEIM3bA">announced</a> that the platform had amassed 275 million monthly active users.
With racism and outright <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-musk-nazi-extremist-white-nationalist-accounts-rcna145020">pro-Nazi white supremacy</a> flourishing on X, likely the result of the company <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-07/elon-musk-cuts-more-twitter-staff-overseeing-content-moderation">abandoning almost all forms of content moderation</a>, the platform looks unrecognizable two years after Musk bought it.
In other words, netizens are desperately looking to jump ship and in search of a platform with leaders who haven't lost their minds.
According to <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/x-traffic-peak-deactivations/">data obtained by internet traffic analyzer Similarweb</a>, 115,000 US-based web visitors deactivated their X account the day after Election Day, a new record since Musk took over.
Musk's personal brand of hate speech has also been devastating to the business. As of last month, the platform was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-fidelity/index.html">worth almost 80 percent less</a> than since the mercurial CEO acquired it.
However, X also hit a new traffic record on Election Day, as approximately 46.5 million users flocked to the site to presumably keep up with the news.
Whether the exodus to less hostile platforms will continue in the coming months, especially after the Trump administration takes over, remains anything but certain. Will X turn into a Musk-branded version of Trump's atrophying Truth Social — or could the two platforms even merge, as <a href="https://fortune.com/2024/11/14/trump-musk-social-media-truth-social-x-alliance/">some analysts have suggested</a>?
If there's one takeaway, it's that X is a sad husk of what it once was, and many users are done hoping for better days ahead.
More on Twitter: <a href="https://futurism.com/half-million-users-join-twitter-competitor">Half a Million Users Flooded to Twitter Competitor After Elon Musk Handed Creeps the Keys</a>

X-ed Out

Who can blame them?

Twitter Is Getting Absolutely Destroyed as Users Flee to Rivals Run by People Who Haven't Lost Their Minds

<h2>You're Toxic</h2>
Over on Facebook, the latest frontier of AI misinformation is taking the form of a wizened old wizard who gives appalling mushroom advice.
As <a href="https://www.404media.co/ai-chatbot-added-to-mushroom-foraging-facebook-group-immediately-gives-tips-for-cooking-dangerous-mushroom/">our friends at 404 Media report</a>, a Facebook group geared towards helping mushroom foragers identify their fungi finds recently had an AI chatbot added to it that instructed users on the best way to prepare an <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720330412?ref=404media.co">arsenic-carrying shroom</a>.
Named "FungiFriend," the chatbot was injected by Facebook's platform into the popular Northeast Mushroom Identification and Discussion group and included a bearded, psychedelic-looking wizard as its avatar. When one user asked the bot how to cook Sarcosphaera coronaria — a <a href="https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/68183-Sarcosphaera-coronaria">violet-hued mushroom</a> that was thought to be edible before a bunch of people <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11557-024-02006-7">died from eating it in Europe</a> — the chatbot recklessly claimed that enthusiasts like to sauté this "edible but rare" fungus in butter, add it to stews, or pickle it.
This dangerous chatbot was brought to 404's attention via Rick Claypool, a research director with the consumer protection group Public Citizen who also happens to be an avid forager who's warned about "<a href="https://fungimag.com/v17i2/v17n2-Claypool.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawGgXf9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHWyP2kCSwObFoWZZOwpQR-5JvpTRyH3kKLxy2gW9xZWcBFZXw_ba8nVtmw_aem_IsVbBP1kde1Olbx46fa_kQ&amp;ref=404media.co">mushroom misinformation</a>" before.
In the world of foraging, Claypool noted, groups like Northeast Mushroom Identification are important resources for beginners who need help distinguishing between delicious edible fungi and the kind that can kill or injure you. Adding AI into that mix is, as one might imagine, bad news bears.
"There is just no way [AI has] reached a point of being good enough at providing true and factual and verifiable information," Claypool told 404, "especially if we’re talking about distinguishing between toxic and edible varieties."
<h2>I'm Slipping Under</h2>
According to a group moderator, FungiFriend was automatically added by Facebook's parent company, Meta. As Claypool expounded, the chatbot would pop up first when users uploaded photos of mushrooms from their phones, essentially encouraging them to speak to this dangerous AI before other humans who would be more likely to set them straight.
While the moderator who spoke to 404 said that the group would "most certainly be removing" FungiFriend, this debacle highlights how dangerous these sorts of confident "<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology">hallucinations</a>," or AI mistruths, can be — especially for people new to a hobby like foraging who may be anxious about looking dumb.
"Somebody who has any amount of knowledge is not going to be relying on the AI. It’s going to be someone who feels nervous about putting themselves out there," Claypool explained. "Maybe they’re worried to seem like they don’t know very much or they’re afraid of asking a stupid question."
"So you ask the AI so it won’t judge you like a normal person might," he continued. "You might, then, not feel like it judges you, but it might kill you."
More on fungi AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/perplexity-webpage-mushrooms">Asked to Summarize a Webpage, Perplexity Instead Invented a Story About a Girl Who Follows a Trail of Glowing Mushrooms in a Magical Forest</a>

Tragic Mushroom

"Somebody who has any amount of knowledge is not going to be relying on the AI."

Facebook Adds Bot to Mushroom Foraging Group That Urges Members to Eat Deadly Fungus

<h2>Eff Off</h2>
NASA seems to be in the middle of another health debacle after one of its astronauts was forced to hit back against rumors that she'd lost too much weight in space.
As the <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/us-news/nasa-monitoring-second-stranded-astronauts-possible-weight-loss-as-sunita-williams-insists-shes-fine/">New York Post reports</a>, NASA is monitoring the health and medical privacy of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the astronauts who've been <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/stranded-astronaut-not-comfortable-starliner">stranded on board the International Space Station</a> for months after <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/boeing-sell-off-starliner">Boeing's cursed Starliner</a> — the troubled spacecraft they flew up in — was deemed too risky for their return voyage.
In recent weeks, there's been <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14055951/sunita-williams-stranded-nasa-astronaut-deterioration-hospital.html">ample tabloid speculation</a> about the astronauts' health and appearances, particularly when it comes to Williams. During a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UMzOwlv7iM">teleconference earlier in the week</a>, the female astronaut attempted to put to bed rumors that she had lost a lot of weight and appeared "<a href="https://x.com/ImAstroNana/status/1855281975030116619">gaunt</a>," as one Earthbound doctor <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/11/12/us-news/stranded-nasa-astronaut-sunita-williams-speaks-out-about-concerns-over-her-weight-loss-in-space/">opined to the Post</a>.
"I'm the same weight that I was when I got up here," Williams <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UMzOwlv7iM">said during the presser</a>. She added that there could be a number of things affecting her appearance in photos, including the way <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/cardiovascular-health-in-microgravity/">microgravity changes water distribution</a> in the body.
Still, NASA is apparently concerned not only with its astronauts' health and safety, but also about potentially sensitive medical information leaking to the press. According to an insider source who spoke to the NYP on condition of anonymity, anyone caught leaking astronaut health details could potentially be fired.
After this story was published, NASA reached out with an additional comment.
"All NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are in good health," said NASA's chief health and medical officer JD Polk. "It’s unfortunate that rumors persist otherwise. NASA and our partners have safely conducted long duration missions aboard the orbital laboratory for decades, studying the effects of space on the human body as we prepare for exploration farther into the solar system. Crew health is regularly monitored by dedicated flight surgeons on Earth, and they have an individual diet and fitness regime to ensure they remain healthy throughout their expeditions."
<h2>Muscle Gains</h2>
As <a href="https://gizmodo.com/nasa-astronaut-suni-williams-shouldnt-have-to-discuss-her-weight-to-dismiss-tabloid-rumors-2000524132">Gizmodo noted in its own write-up</a> of the debacle, Williams seemed compelled to point out some specific physical changes she'd experienced during her time on the ISS to dispel the rumors about her alleged weight loss.
"I could definitely tell that weightlifting, which is not something that I do all the time, has definitely changed me," the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UMzOwlv7iM">astronaut said on the NASA live feed</a>, referring to how astronauts undergo a <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/astronaut-exercise/">vigorous fitness regimen</a> in orbit to offset the health effects of space travel. "My thighs are a little bit bigger, my butt is a little bit bigger."
While space sexism is nothing new, it's a sorry return to the undue physical attention pioneering female astronauts like <a href="https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/sally-ride-womens-history-month/">Sally Ride experienced</a>, Gizmodo pointed out, which saw her and countless others in her wake being scrutinized over their weights and dress sizes while their male colleagues got no such attention.
Notably, this debacle comes just a few weeks after another group of NASA astronauts — which included another woman of color, Jeanette Epps — were <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-astronaut-hospitalization-reason">hospitalized under mysterious circumstances</a> upon returning back to Earth because <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-astronaut-hospitalized-upon-return">one in their midst</a> experienced a health issue.
In that case, at least, the woman hasn't been singled out — if only because NASA is remaining mum about what happened and who it happened to.
More on actual astronaut health problems: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/space-tourist-vision-deteriorate">Space Tourist Alarmed When Vision Starts to Deteriorate</a>