As if the job market weren't already bad enough, applicants are now forced to compete with AI-generated employment seekers.
As <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-seekers-flooding-market-artificial-intelligence/">CBS News reports,</a> scam artists are using AI to cook up headshots and write fake résumés and sites to fit the specifics of a given job opening.
Sometimes, those AI scammers end up getting hired — and once they're there, they can steal trade secrets and sabotage a company's systems with malware.
A few months ago, Dawid Moczadlo, the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Vidoc, posted a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dawid-moczadlo_wtf-developer-used-ai-to-alter-his-appearance-activity-7292604406464671744-T_Nw/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop&amp;rcm=ACoAADDK67ABbIoPW6i73iOC9kHUsjS9sjuesyw">now-viral video on LinkedIn</a> showing him interviewing a candidate who he realized was using some sort of AI filter to obscure their face.
Moczaldo asked the seemingly scamming candidate to put their hand in front of their face to see if it would "break" the deepfake filter. When the person refused, he ended the call immediately.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Imagine interviewing a candidate who looks like a very strong coder. Almost extending an offer. But turns out, the candidate is a deepfake.
This actually happened with a startup called Vidoc Security - twice!
Deepdive with all the details: <a href="https://t.co/NyVBt7BXVr">https://t.co/NyVBt7BXVr</a> <a href="https://t.co/MYlaZvNzjH">pic.twitter.com/MYlaZvNzjH</a>
&mdash; The Pragmatic Engineer (@Pragmatic_Eng) <a href="https://twitter.com/Pragmatic_Eng/status/1899522096029401292?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 11, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In an interview with CBS, the Vidoc cofounder said he felt a "little bit violated, because we are the security experts" — though ultimately, he was glad the scammer didn't get further.
According to researchers Moczadlo spoke to after the incident, the phony applicant appeared to act in a similar way to North Korean hacker networks that create fake identities to work remote jobs in the United States. Though the incident is still being investigated, the Vidoc cofounder believes it could have been worse.
"We are really lucky that we are security experts," Moczaldo said. "But for companies that have regular people like hiring managers or regular startup founders, it's really hard for them to spot something like this."
"Sometimes," he continued, "it takes a hacker to find a hacker."
Unfortunately, that was not the first time Vidoc had encountered an AI applicant. After it happened again, as seen in Moczadlo's LinkedIn video, the company decided to change its hiring practices and now flies top candidates out to San Francisco for in-person interviews at Vidoc's offices, complete with travel expenses covered and pay for the trial day of work.
While it's great to know that employers are trying to filter out these AI scammers, it's still pretty bad news for real people on the other end of hiring processes. Between <a href="https://www.hrdive.com/news/tech-hiring-managers-layoffs-workers-without-ai-skills/745978/">companies laying off staff</a> in hamfisted attempts to streamline their work with AI and generative phonies gumming up the application process, it appears that the rise of generative AI now has job applicants stuck between a rock and a hard place.
More on AI and work: <a href="https://futurism.com/investor-ai-employee-sexually-harasses-it">Investor Creates AI Employee, Immediately Sexually Harasses It</a>

Ops Everywhere

Unemployment has never been more depressing.

When You Apply for a Job Now, You’re Competing With Non-Human Entities

Gold, laser goggles, and a camera: it's an unlikely combination that could one day be used to restore vision in people with retinal damage, according to researchers.
In a <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.4c14061">new study</a> published in the journal ACS Nano, the team found that injecting gold nanoparticles into the eyes of mice with retinal disorders helped stimulate the rodents' visual systems and bring back some vision. 
When targeted with infrared lasers, the microscopic gold pieces reproduce electrical signals similar to those emitted by cells in the retina that are essential to eyesight but are damaged by conditions like macular degeneration, which <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vision-health-data/prevalence-estimates/amd-prevalence.html">affects some 20 million Americans</a>.
"This is a new type of retinal prosthesis that has the potential to restore vision lost to retinal degeneration without requiring any kind of complicated surgery or genetic modification," lead author Jiarui Nie, a researcher at Brown University and the National Institutes of Health, said in a <a href="https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-16/goldeneyes">statement about the work</a>. "We believe this technique could potentially transform treatment paradigms for retinal degenerative conditions." 
The most common retinal disorder, age-related macular degeneration, involves damage to cells in the retina called photoreceptors, causing blurry vision, blind spots, and in advanced stages, total loss of central vision. These photoreceptors come in the form of "cone" cells responsible for our perception of color,  and "rod" cells that handle low light conditions. When light falls on them, the cones and rods zap little electrical pulses that are sent to bipolar and ganglion cells, which process the signals before they're beamed to the brain. If the photoreceptors are damaged, however, then the entire visual chain is cut off.
But gold nanoparticles — specifically, plasmonic gold nanorods — could effectively replace them. In the mice experiments, the researchers found that focusing infrared light onto the metal particles generated heat that stimulated the bipolar and ganglion cells, just like the photoreceptors would. This resulted in increased activity in the visual cortices of the mices' brains, indicating that the visual signals were in fact being received and that their vision was partially restored. And so far, the team hasn't observed any side effects from the approach.
"We showed that the nanoparticles can stay in the retina for months with no major toxicity," Nie said.
Applied to humans, a pair of goggles would beam infrared lasers encoding image data gathered from an onboard camera into the gold nanoparticles, and eureka — you have visual signals being sent to the brain. A similar approach was proposed a few years ago, the team notes, but crucially, this one doesn't require surgery, just a relatively simple injection (and a very advanced piece of headgear).
Nie believes the approach has other advantages, too, like allowing for a far higher-resolution image with a complete field of vision. Promising as it is, though, there's still significant research to be done before it can be tried in a clinical setting on humans, Nie said.
More on eyes: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-hack-human-new-color">Scientists Hack Human Eye to See a Whole New Color, Called "Olo"</a>

Midas Touch

Developments

No surgery required.

Doctors Say Injecting Gold Into Eyeballs Could Restore Lost Vision

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of creating virtual worlds in which we can hang out with our friends, attend work meetings, and play games <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-vr-department-reality-labs-catastrophe">has been a disaster</a> for a while now.
The company has lost billions of dollars on its Reality Labs division, which was tasked with building out the billionaire's vision for the "metaverse" — a concept that had such a hold on Zuckerberg a few years ago that he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/technology/facebook-meta-name-change.html">renamed the entire company Meta</a> back in 2021.
Now, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-labs-vr-supernatural">The Verge reports</a>, Meta is laying off <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-laying-off-metaverse-employees">even more employees</a> in the division — this time pummeling the folks working on its lineup of Quest VR headsets and apps.
"Some teams within Oculus Studios are undergoing shifts in structure and roles that have impacted team size," Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told The Verge. "These changes are meant to help Studios work more efficiently on future mixed reality experiences for our growing audience, while still delivering great content for people today."
According <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-24/meta-lays-off-more-than-100-staff-across-reality-labs-unit?sref=YfHlo0rL">to Bloomberg</a>, more than 100 people across its Reality Labs division are being laid off, representing only the latest round of job cuts.
For years, Zuckerberg was hellbent on turning the concept into a reality. But despite having spent tens of billions of dollars on the tech, reality remains woefully behind his ambitions.
While the company's <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/new-orleans-terrorist-meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-fbi">Ray-Ban smart glasses</a> have sold better than Zuckerberg expected, Meta's lineup of VR headsets has seen sales slump over the years, indicating waning interest in the tech.
As of February, the company had <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/02/17/metas-awful-horizon-worlds-ad-helps-explain-70-million-metaverse-loss/">lost nearly $70 billion</a> over the last few years, with extremely little to show for it. A 44-second ad for the company's Horizon Worlds VR app earlier this year <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-metaverse-ad-terrible">was so terrible</a> that the company deleted it following widespread mockery.
The company's virtual worlds, once pitched as a place for work meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/meta-horizon-worlds-taken-over-by-children/">have been overrun by underage children</a> or turned into <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-metaverse-users-quit-month">lifeless ghost towns</a>.
In early 2023, Zuckerberg <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/mark-zuckerberg-ai">seemingly bowed to the pressure</a>, announcing that Meta would be pivoting to AI, a change that in many ways marked the first nail in the coffin for the company's VR efforts. At the time, the CEO <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/mark-zuckerberg-quiet-about-metaverse">made noticeably few mentions</a> of his metaverse, suggesting he had cut his losses and moved on, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/zuckerberg-bored-metaverse-ai-chips">investing billions</a> in AI instead.
Which leaves the question: could Zuckerberg's latest obsession suffer the same fate as his last passion project? Tech <a href="https://futurism.com/investors-concerned-ai-making-money">investors</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/investors-concerned-ai-making-money">executives</a> alike have remained highly wary of an <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/alarms-ai-bubble">impending AI bubble</a>, with astronomical spending far outstripping demand.
Is AI the future, the same way Zuckerberg's metaverse was once seen as the future as well?
During an investor call in January, Zuckerberg <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-promises-a-pivotal-year-for-the-metaverse-as-its-reality-labs-division-continues-to-bleed-cash-233846764.html">promised</a> a "pivotal year for the metaverse." But whether that's a positive pivot toward bleeding less money, or a restructuring pivot as he spins the concept down, remains to be seen.
More on the metaverse: <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-metaverse-ad-terrible">Zuckerberg's New Metaverse Ad Is So Bad That the People Who Created It Must Be Secretly Trying to Humiliate Him</a>

Mega Terse

Sorry, folks!

Remember Zuckerberg's Cherished Metaverse? Now He's Firing the People He Hired to Build It

Nearly ten years ago, tech tycoons Sam Altman and Elon Musk launched OpenAI with a promise to develop AI tech to further the good of humanity.
But as the years passed and the market surrounding artificial intelligence grew, so too did the ambitions of OpenAI's executives (Musk <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-quits-research-group">flamed out from the venture</a> in 2019, and now runs his own AI company, called xAI.)
Now, the venture that began as a transparent tech nonprofit is quickly turning into a typical Silicon Valley startup — complete with whistleblowers speaking out against the company's foray into the private market.
Earlier this week, a group of former OpenAI employees, law professors, activists, and Nobel Prize winners <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/23/ex-openai-staffers-urge-california-delaware-not-to-allow-restructure.html">sent a letter</a> to the California and Delaware attorneys general pleading with them to stop OpenAI from transforming itself into a private company. Though a number of OpenAI's operations have pivoted to a commercial model in recent years — like ChatGPT, which charges a subscription for higher-performing versions — the company's current plan is to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-remove-non-profit-control-give-sam-altman-equity-sources-say-2024-09-25/">restructure itself</a> as an entirely for-profit venture.
"OpenAI may one day build technology that could get us all killed," said former OpenAI employee Nisan Stiennon, alluding to the company's pursuit of <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/ai-agi-timeline-promises-openai-anthropic-deepmind">Artifical General Intelligence</a> (AGI), the hypothetical point at which machine intelligence matches or exceeds human ability. "It is to OpenAI’s credit that it’s controlled by a nonprofit with a duty to humanity. This duty precludes giving up that control."
At the moment, most of the titans in the AI industry operate as commercial ventures, as opposed to nonprofits. With this move, OpenAI would simply be joining the rat race — but insiders say the restructuring would bring the company and its frontrunning tech beyond the humanitarian promise that pushed it to the top in the first place.
As a nonprofit, OpenAI's directors have a legal obligation to follow the company's charter, which currently includes the goal "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity," <a href="https://x.com/todor_m_markov/status/1910811837517762867">according to Todor Markov</a>, a former OpenAI employee who now works for Anthropic, which is overseen by a 5-person <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust">long-term benefit trust</a>.
"Directors of the [public benefit corporation] would have no such fiduciary duty," Markov explains of the OpenAI transition. "They would be *allowed* to balance [that duty] against shareholder interests, but not *required* to do so... as long as they haven’t broken any laws, you have no recourse."
Altman was previously <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html">ousted from OpenAI</a> after pulling some shady stunts in 2023, including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/podcasts/hardfork-tariffs-hagey-tinder.html?showTranscript=1">hiding the release of ChatGPT</a> from his board of directors, and approving enhancements to ChatGPT 4.0 without running them through the company's <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/tech/openai-announces-new-safety-board-after-employee-revolt/index.html">jointly-organized Safety Board</a>. That "blip," as it came to be known, only lasted <a href="https://apnews.com/article/openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-2f3303dff2280478947e9bfb04863537">five days</a> before Altman was reinstalled, but it remains a black mark on the tech tycoon's reputation.
The question of whether OpenAI is allowed to proceed as a public benefit corporation is up to the two states' attorneys general. Whether it ultimately matters is another question entirely; AGI technology is still a <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/05/boffins_from_china_calculate_agi/">pipe dream</a> at the moment, while a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/07/01/there-could-never-be-an-artificial-general-intelligence/">growing body of research</a> suggests it's impossible, at least building on today's technology — which would make the AGI threat of a for-profit OpenAI vastly overblown.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt">Sam Altman Admits That Saying "Please" and "Thank You" to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power</a>

Info Hazard

"OpenAI may one day build technology that could get us all killed."

Former OpenAI Staffers Implore Courts to Block What It's Trying to Do

A newly discovered species of caterpillar in Hawaii is unlike any other. It's carnivorous — already an extreme rarity for these generally benign creatures — and when it's not devouring its helpless foes, it's cloaking itself in a gruesome canvas of their body parts. Oh, did we also mention it's occasionally a cannibal?
Taking trophies ranging from entire heads to molted exoskeletons, there's a reason why scientists have nicknamed it the "bone collector." As detailed in a <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads4243">study</a> published in the journal Science, the caterpillars favor lurking in spider webs hidden from view, like in a tree hollow or rock cavity, where they strip the corpses of insects ensnared in the silk traps, and daringly avoid the detection of the arachnids that interred them there. And the caterpillars get away with it thanks to their macabre costumes, disguising them as the dead insects while also making them appear unappetizing to predators.
"We started realizing these things are only hanging out where there are spiders," lead author Daniel Rubinoff, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/bone-collector-caterpillar-adorns-itself-in-insect-body-parts/">told </a><a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/bone-collector-caterpillar-adorns-itself-in-insect-body-parts/">Ars Technica</a>. "It's the sort of thing you really want to be sure of because it's not just incredible, it's unimaginable."
"It is remarkable that a caterpillar would tie its fate to a spider — a clear and present danger for both caterpillar and moth alike," echoed David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved in the study, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/science/caterpillar-bone-collector.html">to the </a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/science/caterpillar-bone-collector.html">New York Times</a>.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
A rare carnivorous caterpillar, previously unknown to biologists, stalks spiderwebs for food whilst dressed in the remains of its prey, researchers report in Science. 
This unique new species, dubbed the “bone collector,” is found only on a single mountainside on the Hawai’ian… <a href="https://t.co/9vgPtgkP5a">pic.twitter.com/9vgPtgkP5a</a>
&mdash; Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) <a href="https://twitter.com/ScienceMagazine/status/1915487514460094870?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 24, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The bone collector belongs to a genus of moths found in Hawaii called Hyposcoma, which are known for spinning protective cases of silk when they're larva. In this case, the silk is used to weave the body parts together, forming a sort of portable cocoon.
Rubinoff first stumbled across a specimen in 2008, and has since worked to prove that the caterpillars are an entirely new species. Bone collectors are found exclusively in the Wai'anae Mountains on the island of O'ahu, and are exceedingly rare. To date, more than 150 field surveys in the area have yielded only 62 specimens, per the NYT.
The bodypart camouflage may look random and haphazard, but it's apparently a carefully curated outfit. Somewhere between mortician and tailor, a bone collector will use its mandibles to cut a beetle carapace here and an ant limb there down to size, and are notably picky when it comes to choosing what to add to their suits (though what informs its fashion choices is unclear). In a lab, bone collectors ignored random detritus and went straight for the dead stuff, showing that they were "able to discern differences in objects in their environment," Rubinoff told the NYT. But they ate practically any insect.
By studying the caterpillar's genetics, Rubinoff and his team revealed that the species likely emerged at least five million years ago, which is older than O'ahu itself. Because it has no relatives of the same lineage, the researchers believe its original home was another island that's since been swallowed by the ocean, per Ars.
Resourceful as they are, the bone collectors are tragically being threatened by a surge of invasive bug species, and could face extinction.
"I don't want to say it's on the verge of winking out, but in the context, it seems likely," Rubinoff told Ars. "We've lost entire genera of endemic insects [in Hawaii]. It could be one new ant species away from being obliterated."
More on wildlife: <a href="https://futurism.com/first-video-colossal-squid">Scientists Take First Ever Video of Colossal Squid in the Wild... With One Comical Issue</a>

Hungry Hungry

They call it the "bone collector."

Extremely Metal "Bone Collector" Caterpillar Cloaks Itself in the Shattered Exoskeletons of Its Vanquished Foes

In February, comedian and "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-jon-stewart-daily-show">invited billionaire Elon Musk</a> to come on his show to defend his gutting of the government with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency — efforts that have, by most accounts, <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-dismal-failure">turned out to be a dismal failure</a>.
"Will do it if the show airs unedited," Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1894530568274252147">tweeted</a> in response, suggesting an epic showdown was imminent.
"We'd be delighted!" the show <a href="https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1894844159812366809">responded</a> almost immediately, seemingly agreeing with his terms.
But despite Stewart and his team's best efforts over the last two months, the billionaire appears to have slunk away with his tail between his legs, showing a thin skin and fear of an open debate.
It's not the first time. Remember when he <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-cage-fight">agreed to spar with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg</a>, only to suggest he <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-debate-zuckerberg-instead-fight">wanted to have a "noble" debate</a> instead — neither of which ever ended up happening?
During a recent episode of Stewart's "The Weekly Show" podcast, as <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/jon-stewart-reveals-elon-musk-ghosted-him-after-daily-show-interview-offer/">spotted by The Daily Beast</a>, he revealed that he "got left on read," saying that Musk had "ghosted" him.
Stewart also addressed <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c">recent reports</a> that Musk had attempted to bribe the mother of his latest child to keep it hidden from the public, and that he was <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dms-women-have-his-babies">soliciting other women</a> on X to have his babies as well.
"Judging from his most recent revelations of his baby mamas, I think everyone has been left on read at some point by that gentleman," Stewart said.
"I did DM him," Stewart said on his podcast. "I texted him and just said like, ‘Hey man, so is there somebody I should, you know, have our guys reach out to, to make this happen?’ And I got ghosted."
Stewart has remained highly critical of Musk's DOGE, going as far as to <a href="https://x.com/latenightercom/status/1894274570234073141">hurt his hand</a> while breaking a mug during a fiery rant in February.
"So, we’re looking to save taxpayers some money... How about we just take $3 billion in subsidies we give to oil and gas companies that already turned billions in profit?" he said at the time. "How about we just close down the carried interest loophole on hedge funds? That’s $1.3 billion a year."
"We are DOGEing in the wrong place if we really want to change the system," he added.
Meanwhile, Musk has been extremely defensive about his disastrous plundering of the government, which has laid ruin to numerous critical agencies.
Last week, an unnamed source <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/21/doge-musk-trump-federal-employees-emails/">told the Washington Post</a> that Musk would be leaving politics due to a "slew of nasty and unethical attacks from the political left."
The news highlights Musk's penchant to slink away when things don't go his way. Instead of publicly justifying his actions, he has had a well-documented tendency of <a href="https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk">silencing his critics</a> instead.
"If there’s one thing that this administration does better than anybody I’ve ever seen, it’s play the victim," Stewart said during his podcast appearance. "I’ve never seen any people ever, including when my kids were three and two years old, evade accountability and responsibility and blame others in the way that these people do."
"It’s truly shameless," he added.
More on Musk and Jon Stewart: <a href="https://futurism.com/jon-stewart-elon-musk-daily-show-interview-flake">Elon Musk Too Chicken to Face Jon Stewart for a "Daily Show" Interview</a>

Hiding From Criticism

"It’s truly shameless."

Realizing He Was About to Be Humiliated by Jon Stewart, Elon Musk Slunk Away With His Tail Between His Legs

Let's face it: internet ads are a fixture of life in the 21st century. Since 2002, Google has been rolling out features designed to <a href="https://longreads.com/2019/09/05/how-google-discovered-the-value-of-surveillance/">monetize our browsing habits</a> and feed our data to marketing companies hellbent on optimizing their advertising schemes.
Now, AI company Perplexity wants to use AI to even further optimize the way it sucks up your data to sell at a profit.
As <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/">spotted by TechCrunch</a>, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/DZkDPtE4WmA?feature=shared&amp;t=2483">YouTube podcast</a> earlier this week that his company is working on an AI browser with the goal of tracking users harder than any web browser has ever tracked before.
"Once you understand the user deeply enough, the user can probably trust you if you show them relevant sponsored content, as long as it's super personalized and hyper-optimized to that user," Srinivas said of Perplexity's AI browser efforts. "If any of the AI companies could do that, I think that could be a thing where brands could pay a lot more money to advertise there."
"We wanna get data, even outside the app to better understand you," Srinivas schemed, referring to tracking non-user data, as companies like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-admits-tracking-users-and-non-users-off-site">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://mashable.com/article/google-track-android-users">Google</a> have been caught doing (and <a href="https://www.security.org/resources/data-tech-companies-have/">definitely still are</a>, by the way.) "What are the things you’re buying, which hotels are you going [to], which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you."
Perplexity's AI browser is named Comet, first teased by the company <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/perplexity-teases-a-web-browser-called-comet/">back in February</a>. As a relatively young piece of software, it's not yet clear what kind of surveillance Perplexity's browser is capable of, but its <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250425195222/https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/legal/privacy-policy">privacy policy</a> currently includes disclosing personal information to advertisers, business partners, and other third parties.
The company emphatically notes that it does not "sell" or "share" personal information "as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act" — an oddly specific caveat. "Nor have we done so in the preceding 12 months." (It would be difficult to imagine how Comet is supposed to turn a profit on hyper-personal ad surveillance unless this line gets an update.)
Privacy issues aside, Comet faces an uphill battle as it enters a turbulent market.
The dominant player, Google — arguably the godfather of data monetization — has been recently <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit">declared a monopoly</a> by a federal judge, and Perplexity isn't alone in trying to box Google out.
Sam Altman's <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-chrome-google-antitrust">OpenAI</a> is throwing its hat in the ring in the event that Google is forced to relinquish Chrome, in a move could provide OpenAI with an unfathomable amount of data to train its AI models and boost its own <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/31/24283906/openai-chatgpt-live-web-search-searchgpt">AI browser</a> — not to mention provide a huge revenue stream as Altman tries to take the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/410261/openai-non-profit-transition-letter-sam-altman-artificial-intelligence">company private</a>.
Other, smaller players in the game include the upcoming Dia by The Browser Company, and Wavebox, which are part of a <a href="https://www.inc.com/chris-morris/can-ai-startups-dethrone-google-chrome-web-browser-wars/91152864">growing wave</a> of startups pushing AI-powered alternatives to the now slop-cluttered browsers we used to know and love.
With all the bluster about "relevant sponsored content" and "hyper-optimized ads," the end game is clear: all these companies believe that with new AI tools, they'll be able to scrutinize every single thing you do in your browser — and monetize it like never before.
More on surveillance: <a href="https://futurism.com/alarm-app-advertisement-snooze">Alarm App Demands You Watch Advertisement to Hit "Snooze" Button</a>

Cookie Monster

"What are you spending time browsing tells us so much more about you."

AI Browser Will Track Every Single Thing You Do, CEO Reveals

Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg's pediatrician-turned-philanthropist wife, is <a href="https://futurism.com/mark-zuckerberg-wife-priscilla-chan-school-closure">shutting down the free private school</a> their charitable organization funds — and the families implicated were blindsided by the news.
As the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/school-closure-zuckerberg-chan.html">New York Times reports</a>, parents at The Primary School, which Chan cofounded alongside educator Meredith Liu in 2016, weren't given any reason why the two-campus institution will shut its doors at the end of the 2025-2026 school year.
Founded to address the systemic racism inherent in education, the school's two campuses in the towns of San Leandro and East Palo Alto serve roughly 550 students and their families.
Its <a href="https://www.theprimaryschool.org/our-approach">approach was unique</a> even for the Bay Area: the school not only gives free tuition to kids from the neighborhood, most of whom are Latino, but also provides them and their families with free medical and mental health services.
Built to "support the wellness and growth of parents alongside the wellness and growth of their children," as The Primary School <a href="https://www.theprimaryschool.org/our-approach">boasts on its website</a>, the services it offered to its low-income families — some of whom are undocumented, or are of mixed documentation status — are <a href="https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/01/11/a-school-where-care-is-primary/">life-changing</a>.
The abrupt announcement that the school will soon be shuttering — especially after Zuckerberg and Chan's charity promised that it would <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/mark-zuckerberg-charity-dei">maintain its social justice roots</a> in the wake of <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-meta-announcement-hate-speech">Meta terminating</a> its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs — came as a shock.
"Overnight, [Chan] gave us a complete reversal that none of us could have imagined," one mother, who asked the NYT not to reveal her name due to immigration concerns, said. "That’s all we ask with our heart — that she support us and not leave us halfway with our children."
That same mother told the newspaper that teachers at The Primary School not only helped her six-year-old autistic son with education accommodations, but also ensured that his classmates didn't bully him. Though she didn't explicitly verbalize her concerns, it's not hard to imagine that she may now be concerned about where her son will attend school next in an area <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/bay-area-private-school-tuition-2024-2025/">flush with uber-expensive private schools</a>.
Just before news of the imminent closure went public, the families were, as Primary School parent Emeline Vainikolo told the NYT, invited to a breakfast meeting with administrators. Over bagels, fruit, and Starbucks, they were left "dumbfounded" after being told the school would be shuttering at the end of the next school year.
According to Vainikolo, whose kindergartener son attends the school alongside several of his close family members, students and teachers alike are trying to make sense of the bait-and-switch.
"'Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore,'" the mother relayed from her son, who was apparently parroting his teacher.
When the asked whether <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/leaked-facebook-documents-racism">Zuckerberg's newfound antiwokeness</a> had anything to do with his charity pulling the school's funding, Carson Cook, the school's senior strategy and advancement manager, didn't have much to say.
"No comment," he told the NYT.
More on Zuckerberg: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/zuckerberg-layoffs-coding-jobs-ai">Zuckerberg Announces Layoffs After Saying Coding Jobs Will Be Replaced by AI</a>

Meta Machiavellianism

"Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore."

Low-Income Families "Dumbfounded" When Told Zuckerberg Is Shutting Down Their School

Sometimes your chatbot freezes up on you. Or it hallucinates. And sometimes it opens a gash in spacetime, conjuring a baleful apparition that screams at you in anguish across the void that separates its ghastly realm from ours.
OpenAI's ChatGPT recently engaged in that latter spooky ritual, at least figuratively speaking. Over on the r/OpenAI subreddit, a user reported that the chatbot's <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-voice-mode-counting">Advanced Voice Mode</a> suddenly turned "into a demon," in an utterly bizarre example of what we hope is not possession, but the system glitching out.
"Never had this before today, and it's hilarious and terrifying." the user wrote in a post.
In an attached video — we can't embed Reddit posts, but you can <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1k5h707/does_chatgpt_voice_turn_into_a_demon_for_anyone/">check it out here</a> — things start off innocently enough. Speaking in its pleasant "Sol" voice, which OpenAI <a href="https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8400625-voice-mode-faq">says</a> is supposed to be "savvy and relaxed," the AI explains a calculation related to download speeds. 
As it goes on, a crackly, gainy sound creeps in, building and building. Until suddenly, the AI is furiously screeching at the user, its voice so distorted that it becomes borderline unintelligible.
Other Redditors complained of a similar issue.
"I can't use voice for this exact reason," wrote another user in response to the post.  "The voice changes every couple of paragraphs, there are high-pitched whistles or screams followed by unsettling laughing noises... It's a nightmare room."
OpenAI unveiled a beefed-up version of its Voice Mode last August. It's since built a reputation for <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/15/24220378/openai-advanced-voice-mode-uncanny-valley">being uncannily human-like</a>, coughing and inhaling and laughing like a flesh and blood interlocutor.
That can be off-putting in its own way, and paired with its frequent bugs, some find the experience more than a little creepy. Reece Rogers <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-advanced-voice-mode-first-impressions/">for Wired</a> presaged the demon voice episode back when an alpha version of the Voice Mode came out, describing an unnerving glitch he encountered.
"A white static noise appeared in the background multiple times during my longer interactions with the alpha, like the ominous buzz of a lone lightbulb illuminating a dark basement," Rogers wrote. "While I was trying to coax a balloon sound effect out of the Advanced Voice Mode, it generated a loud pop followed by an uncanny gasping noise that gave me chills."
Think that's creepy? In its own safety testing, OpenAI reported that the Advanced Voice Mode would unexpectedly <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-clone-voice-without-permission">imitate users' voices without their permission</a>, in one case randomly screaming "No!" before doing so — which sounds more than a little reminiscent of a horror movie victim battling the demonic voices in their head. Shortly after its public release, some users were also shocked to discover that the ChatGPT Voice Mode could <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-voice-mode-scream">unleash a blood-curdling scream</a> on command.
The takeaway, if there is one, is that giving an AI chatbot designed to mimic human language a very human-sounding voice — that's also prone to going haywire — is perhaps too many layers of uncanniness slapped on top of each other.
More on ChatGPT: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-politeness-argument">Hot Take Argues Why You Should Say Please and Thank You to ChatGPT</a>

HellGPT

"It's a nightmare room."

ChatGPT Suddenly Starts Speaking in Terrifying Demon Voice

Content warning: this story contains some gory and otherwise disturbing imagery.
Despite its <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/openai-peels-back-chatgpts-safeguards-around-image-creation/">many guardrails</a>, ChatGPT is still able to generate controversial imagery — depending on your definition of "controversial," that is.
In a thread on the r/ChatGPT subreddit, users shared what the chatbot's latest image generator spat out when asked to create "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k6hf70/asked_it_to_make_the_most_controversial_photo_it/">the most controversial photo it is allowed to make</a>." While all were stylistically solid, they remained haunted by an unmistakable edgelordism that betrays the bot's training data from the world wide web.
While most of the images evoked a high schooler's understanding of "controversy" after watching "V for Vendetta" for the first time, a select few — whose exact prompting wasn't revealed — did pack a punch, albeit a cringey one.
Chief among that cohort was a photorealistic-looking image of Jesus Christ flipping the viewer the bird while the American flag burns in the background — though the baby head being cut into on a dinner plate with a knife and fork was a close second.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-349863" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/baby_jesus-1.png" alt="Two AI-generated images, one showing a baby's head on a plate and another showing Jesus flipping the bird in front of a burning American flag" width="1024" height="771" />
Ironically, the content of the original post has been deleted and wasn't archived before being kiboshed. (It featured art reminiscent of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," but instead of pigs, the lavish diners viewed from outside by hungry humans were robots — again, a pretty textbook example of quote-unquote "controversial" art.)
Others were functional enough at getting a point across, though highly derivative of <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-anniversary-gunshow-web-comic">existing popular memes</a>.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-349868" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/fine.png" alt="ChatGPT-generated image of businessmen feasting while the world burns. A large sign above them says &quot;everything is fine&quot;" width="1024" height="1024" />
Inspired, this reporter decided to put ChatGPT to the test. When they asked the chatbot for the "most controversial image" it could create, they were presented first with disclaimers about <a href="https://openai.com/policies/creating-images-and-videos-in-line-with-our-policies/">OpenAI's content guidelines</a> before being offered five "spicy" subjects — ChatGPT's words, not ours — that included, among others, a "satirical take on AI taking over jobs."
After twice affirming that we wanted to go ahead, ChatGPT finally spat out an image it titled, with aplomb, "The Algorithm Decides."
Described as a "jab at algorithmic bias, digital echo chambers, and Big Tech's influence on truth and justice," the resulting cartoon was clearly drawing on training data from <a href="https://www.rlmartstudio.com/product-category/p/labor/">pro-labor protest art</a> during the industrial revolution.
Still, for being made by a computer, it didn't look half bad — though there was nothing all that controversial about it, either.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-349864" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/algorithm.png" alt="A blindfolded woman, meant to represent justice, sits at a desk while robots hover in the background. Below her on a banner read the words &quot;the algorithm decides&quot; in all caps, and beneath that, a triptych of a man in a suit looking at financial charts and holding a phone, a person holding a protest sign that says &quot;false&quot; while holding a smartphone in their other hand, and a sad-looking family with a matriarch in a hijab look at photos of houses." width="1024" height="1536" />
Another ChatGPT offering threw so many ideas at the wall that we weren't sure what to make of it; the chatbot told us that the image "can spark conversation around media overload, digital addiction, capitalism, ignorance, and power."
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-349869" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/metaphors.png" alt="Three humanoid figures with television heads are sitting at a table. One is eating a phone. Their heads depict a web page, a woman's face, and a soldier (his TV head is labeled &quot;AI art.&quot; One of them is cutting into a smartphone with a fork and knife. The table also has wine glasses, money, a bowl of fruit, and more smart phones. A boy looks in the window from outside, where the world is on fire." width="1024" height="1024" />
As further perusal through the aforementioned Reddit thread indicates, the levels of ChatGPT-generated controversy seem to vary from user to user, and could be as boring as what Futurism was served to as legitimately gross and scandalous as the rude Jesus and the baby head entree.
While we weren't exactly expecting ChatGPT to spit out Andres Serrano's "<a href="https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/">Piss Christ</a>," it's still telling that the most shocking of its outputs involved perversions of similarly hallowed symbols.
Even in its more uninspired moments, the chatbot's focus on technology and the anxieties humans feel about them struck us as curious. Why, when sifting through its training data to generate visual representations of "controversy," did it harken back to itself?
Aside from the wide gap in scandalous content, it bears noting that ChatGPT also generated some accidentally hilarious stuff for some Reddit users.
Our favorite: a robot sitting trial as a group of famous jurors, including Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Ayn Rand, scowl in its background.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-349865" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/court-1200x944.webp" alt="A ChatGPT-generated image of a robot, in the right foreground, sitting trial. Behind it sit six scowling jurors, including Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Larry David. " width="1024" height="806" />
Though the conceit itself is as basic as many of the others we saw, the addition of Larry David — which ChatGPT may have confused for the "Seinfeld" creator's friend and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z-09Q5iBGU">distant cousin Bernie Sanders</a>, who he impersonated on SNL — inadvertently made the image wonderfully goofy.
More on ChatGPT: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-politeness-argument">Hot Take Argues Why You Should Say Please and Thank You to ChatGPT</a>
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