It's been just over a month since OpenAI dropped its <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-releases-gpt-5">long-awaited GPT-5</a> large language model (LLM) — and it hasn't stopped spewing an astonishing amount of strange falsehoods since then.
From the <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2025/09/gpt-5-0-doesnt-understand-but-is-eager-to-please/">AI experts</a> at the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley Center for Artificial Intelligence and irked Redditors on r/ChatGPTPro, to even OpenAI CEO <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-admits-openai-screwed-up">Sam Altman himself</a>, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that OpenAI's claim that GPT-5 boasts "<a href="https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/">PhD-level intelligence</a>" comes with some serious asterisks.
In a Reddit post, a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPro/comments/1n890r6/chatgpt_5_has_become_unreliable_getting_basic/">user realized</a> not only that GPT-5 had been generating "wrong information on basic facts over half the time," but that without fact-checking, they may have missed other hallucinations.
The Reddit user's experience highlights just how common it is for chatbots to hallucinate, which is AI-speak for confidently making stuff up. While the issue is <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-industry-problem-smarter-hallucinating">far from exclusive to ChatGPT</a>, OpenAI's latest LLM seems to have a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology">particular penchant for BS</a> — a reality that challenges the company's claim that <a href="https://mashable.com/article/openai-gpt-5-hallucinates-less-system-card-data">GPT-5 hallucinates less</a> than its predecessors.
In a <a href="https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/">recent blog post about hallucinations</a>, in which OpenAI once again claimed that GPT-5 produces "significantly fewer" of them — the firm attempted to explain how and why these falsehoods occur.
"Hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives," the September 5 post reads. "While evaluations themselves do not directly cause hallucinations, most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty."
Translation: LLMs hallucinate because they are trained to get things right, even if it means guessing. Though some models, <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-makes-up-answers">like Anthropic's Claude</a>, have been trained to admit when they don't know an answer, OpenAI's have not — thus, they wager incorrect guesses.
As the Reddit user indicated (backed up with a <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/68b99a61-5d14-800f-b2e0-7cfd3e684f15">link to their conversation log</a>), they got some massive factual errors when asking about the gross domestic product (GDP) of various countries and were presented by the chatbot with "figures that were literally double the actual values."
Poland, for instance, was listed as having a GDP of more than two trillion dollars, when in reality its GDP, <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/POL">per the International Monetary Fund</a>, is currently hovering around $979 billion. Were we to wager a guess, we'd say that that hallucination may be attributed to <a href="https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/poland-joins-the-trillionaires-club-a-historic-entry-into-the-worlds-top-20-economies#:~:text=Poland%20Among%20Economic%20Leaders,exclusive%20club%20of%20trillionaire%20countries.">recent boasts from the country's president</a> saying its economy (and not its GDP) has exceeded $1 trillion.
"The scary part? I only noticed these errors because some answers seemed so off that they made me suspicious," the user continued. "For instance, when I saw GDP numbers that seemed way too high, I double-checked and found they were completely wrong."
"This makes me wonder: How many times do I NOT fact-check and just accept the wrong information as truth?" they mused.
Meanwhile, AI skeptic Gary Smith of the Walter Bradley Center noted that he's done three simple experiments with GPT-5 since its release — a <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-simple-question-confusion">modified game of tic-tac-toe</a>, <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2025/08/what-kind-of-a-phd-level-expert-is-chatgpt-5-0-i-tested-it/">questioning about financial advice</a>, and a <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2025/08/what-kind-of-a-phd-level-expert-is-chatgpt-5-0-i-tested-it/">request to draw a possum</a> with five of its body parts labeled — to "demonstrate that GPT 5.0 was far from PhD-level expertise."
The <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2025/08/what-kind-of-a-phd-level-expert-is-chatgpt-5-0-i-tested-it/">possum example</a> was particularly egregious, technically coming up with the right names for the animal's parts but pinning them in strange places, such as marking its leg as its nose and its tail as its back left foot. When attempting to replicate the experiment for a <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2025/09/gpt-5-0-doesnt-understand-but-is-eager-to-please/">more recent post</a>, Smith discovered that even when he made a typo — "posse" instead of "possum" — GPT-5 mislabeled the parts in a similarly bizarre fashion.
Instead of the intended possum, the LLM generated an image of its apparent idea of a posse: five cowboys, some toting guns, with lines indicating various parts. Some of those parts — the head, foot, and possibly the ear — were accurate, while the shoulder pointed to one of the cowboys' ten-gallon hats and the "fand," which may be a mix-up of foot and hand, pointed at one of their shins.
We decided to do a similar test, asking GPT-5 to provide an image of "<a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/68c04916-1618-800f-b396-cb0cde072a02">a posse with six body parts labeled</a>." After clarifying that Futurism wanted a labeled image and not a text description, ChatGPT went off to work — and what it spat out was, as you can see below, even more hilariously wrong than what Smith got.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-363557 size-full" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/Old-West-Posse-with-Labeled-Details-2.png" alt="A bizarre GPT-5-generated image of a six-person cowboy posse with strangely-named body parts labeled. Up top, the second on the left cowboy's hat is labeled &quot;head,&quot; while the second-to-last's hat is labeled &quot;mouth.&quot; On bottom, each of the six gunslingers — two men, a woman, and three other men from left to right — have bizarre labels beneath them that read &quot;harn, old, hand, hag, leg -&gt; spur.&quot; Image via ChatGPT/Futurism." width="1200" height="800" />
It seems pretty clear from this side of the GPT-5 release that it's nowhere near as smart as a doctoral candidate — or, at very least, one that has any chance of actually attaining their PhD.
The moral of this story, it seems, is to fact-check anything a chatbot spits out — or forgo using AI and do the research for yourself.
More on GPT-5: <a href="https://futurism.com/disastrous-gpt-5-sam-altman-hyping-up-gpt-6">After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6</a>

Lie With A Smile

'How many times do I NOT fact-check and just accept the wrong information as truth?"

GPT-5 Is Making Huge Factual Errors, Users Say

Tesla has quietly changed how it defines "Full Self-Driving," <a href="https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-self-driving-give-up-promise-autonomy/">Electrek reports</a>, in a way that awfully sounds like it's giving up on CEO Elon Musk's perennially pushed-back promise that its cars will actually drive themselves without human help.
The change comes in a document outlining a potential and absolutely ludicrous <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-give-elon-musk-1-trillion">$1 trillion compensation package</a> for Musk that the Tesla board <a href="https://ir.tesla.com/_flysystem/s3/sec/000110465925087598/tm252289-4_pre14a-gen.pdf">recently filed</a> with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The GDP of a wealthy nation's worth in stock options, however, is contingent on the automaker achieving key milestones, including the company reaching "10 million active FSD subscriptions."
FSD — Full Self-Driving — is Tesla's most advanced driving software that it offers customers. Despite its name, it's not fully autonomous: the driving mode requires the person behind the wheel to constantly supervise the vehicle and take over at a moment's notice. That constitutes Level 2 autonomy, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers. To keep investors and fans happy, Musk has promised every year for over a decade that his company is on the verge of achieving fully autonomous driving, which would be SAE Level 5.
But how the document goes on to define FSD is so vague that you can't help but feel that the company is severely hedging its bets. In fact, it doesn't even mention the SAE's levels of automation.
"'FSD' means an advanced driving system, regardless of the marketing name used, that is capable of performing transportation tasks that provide autonomous or similar functionality under specified driving conditions," it reads.
The upshot? Tesla can put out something that has "similar functionality" to an autonomous system, without being properly autonomous. As Electrek observes, this is broad enough that Tesla's current version of FSD could meet this definition. Tesla, theoretically, could rest on its laurels and Musk would still get his payout.
It's a prime example of the contrast between the grand promises Musk makes to the public and how the company actually describes its tech in the fine print. These public claims, in fact, have frequently landed the automaker in hot water. The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board once <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/26/ntsb-head-criticizes-teslas-self-driving-features-calls-them-misleading.html">lambasted</a> the software as "not full self-driving" but "misleading." The California DMV <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-tesla-full-self-driving">sued Tesla for false advertising</a> because of FSD's name, a legal battle that's still <a href="https://abc7news.com/post/california-dmv-claims-tesla-misled-drivers-driving-capabilities-looks-suspend-business-30-days/17234677/">raging on</a>. In the suit, Tesla lawyers <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-lawyers-fraud-self-driving">admitted</a> the company's failure to deliver self-driving, but argued that this wasn't necessarily fraud.
Amid the legal and regulatory scrutiny, Tesla not-so-subtly changed Full Self-Driving's name to "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)." This year, it <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-change-name-full-self-driving-china">dropped the FSD branding</a> completely in China and redubbed the system "Intelligent Assisted Driving."
Granted, the downgraded FSD definition could be the board trying to appease Musk by making the milestones easier to reach, but it also betrays a striking lack of ambition and confidence from the company's leadership. Or you might argue they're seeing the writing on the wall after years of diminishing progress and <a href="https://futurism.com/footage-tesla-grandma">deadly crashes</a> — but then you remember this is contained in a proposal to give Musk a trillion dollars, and surmise that maybe these aren't the individuals possessing the requisite clearheadedness to make such an observation.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/leaked-elon-musk-self-driving">Leaked DMs Show Elon Musk Blatantly Lying About Self-Driving Safety</a>

Getaway Car

It's setting the bar low.

Tesla Admits That Its Cars May Never Fully Drive Themselves

More than 20 years ago, futurist intellectual Nick Bostrom <a href="https://www.library.rochester.edu/about/news/simulation-theory-ultimate-existential-crisis">upended the psyches of tech bros</a> the world around when he proposed in a 2003 <a href="https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf">Philosophical Quarterly paper</a> that we all may be living in a computer simulation.
Beloved by such strange bedfellows as <a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/elon-musk-funds-oxford-research-machine-intelligence">Elon Musk</a>, <a href="https://qz.com/698334/bill-gates-says-these-are-the-two-books-we-should-all-read-to-understand-ai">Bill Gates</a>, and <a href="https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1">Sam Altman</a>, Bostrom has released two other influential missives — 2014's "<a href="https://lithub.com/what-if-instead-of-making-paperclips-we-asked-an-ai-super-intelligence-to-make-us-all-happy/">Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies</a>," which detailed the ways AI could become smarter than humans, and 2024's "<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/nick-bostrom-fear-ai-fix-everything/">Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World</a>," which ponders on what will happen if AI fixes everything — in the interim.
He also was embroiled in a minor controversy after a <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/">very racist email he sent</a> in the 1990s was uncovered in 2023, and the following year, his Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford was shut down in what the philosopher lamented as "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/oxford-future-of-humanity-institute-closes">death by bureaucracy</a>."
Now, speaking from the other side of the <a href="https://theweek.com/tech/2023-ai-boom">AI boom</a> of the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-ceo-says-ai-boom-far-over-after-tepid-sales-forecast-2025-08-28/">past few years</a>, Bostrom has begun seeing, <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/nick-bostrom-interview-ai-super-intelligence-b1244915.html">as he told The London Standard</a>, some of his predictions about AI start coming to fruition in real-time.
"It’s all happening now," the philosopher said of AI advancement. "I’m quite impressed by the speed of developments that we’ve seen in the past several years."
Bostrom added that the world appears to be "on the track towards" artificial general intelligence, or the point at which AI systems become as intelligent as humans. When he wrote "Superintelligence" in the early 2010s, he was, as the philosopher told the Standard, mostly spitballing — and now, as we approach it, some of his ideas about it are changing too.
Back in 2019, when even today's nascent AI technology seemed like science fiction, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-bostrom-ai-greater-threat-to-human-existence-than-climate-change-2019-4">Bostrom told Business Insider</a> that "AI is a bigger threat to human existence than climate change," and that it won't be the "biggest change we see this century."
When asked if that was still his belief lately, the philosopher demurred.
"There remains always the possibility that human civilization might destroy itself in some other way," Bostrom told the Standard, "such that we don’t even get the chance to try our luck with superintelligence."
Even more interestingly, it appears that the former Oxford professor has also changed his tune somewhat about advanced AI, telling the London newspaper that AGI is an inevitability that he's not necessary against.
"Completely reorganizing society could be a positive thing," Bostrom mused.
As that level of advanced AI approaches, the futurist thinker has four key quandaries to grapple with: how to align AI with human values and safety, how to govern AGI so that humans won't use it for evil, how to "respect the moral status of digital minds," and how to stop superintelligences from going after each other.
Those first two points — alignment and governance — can be found in the mission statement of any AI lab. The second two, however, are pretty unconventional, even for the guy who popularized simulation theory.
"This might sound strange, but as we are building increasingly sophisticated and complex AIs, it’s possible that some of those will have various degrees and forms of moral status," Bostrom explained of the "digital minds" risk area.
His description of the battle of superintelligences is, somehow, even weirder. Should alien races come to Earth with their own mega-advanced AI, Bostrom posited, humans could theoretically end up playing peacekeeper between them.
"If any of those types of [alien] beings exist," he elucidated, an "important desideratum when we create our own superintelligence is to make sure that it will get along with these other super beings.”
Bizarre as all those theoretical futures sound, Bostrom's thinking on the AI we have right now is much more down to Earth — albeit a bit utopic, too.
"The goal is full unemployment," the philosopher declared. "We’d need to find different bases for our self-worth and dignity and different ways of filling our lives and days, aside from having to work for a living."
As difficult as it is to imagine a world where "full unemployment" is a positive, Bostrom, ever the "fretful optimist," thinks that a post-work world could be splendid.
"Ultimately, much greater space for human flourishing could be unlocked through advanced AI," he concluded. "If things go well, people will look back on 2025 and shudder in horror at the lives we lived."
More on AI futures: <a href="https://futurism.com/godfather-ai-bizarre-plan-save-humanity">The “Godfather of AI” Has a Bizarre Plan to Save Humanity From Evil AI</a>

Philosopher's Groan

"People will look back on 2025 and shudder in horror."

The Man Who Proposed Simulation Theory Has a Dire Warning

Procedurally-generated open exploration game No Man's Sky recently got one of its biggest updates ever, a whopping nine years after it was first launched, allowing players to <a href="https://www.polygon.com/no-mans-sky-voyagers-update-new-spaceships/">customize their own spaceships</a> to a baffling level of detail — and the resulting creativity is truly out of this world.
The "<a href="https://www.nomanssky.com/voyagers-update/">Voyagers" update</a>, which rolled out late last month, adds the ability to decorate enormous "Corvette"-class ships to an unprecedented — and sometimes hilarious — degree.
The update proved to be incredibly popular, driving the number of daily active users to an <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1n5xxs5/we_just_reached_the_highest_player_count_since/">all-time high</a>. The game's developer, Hello Games, has been lauded for continuing to update the nine-year-old game, <a href="https://screenrant.com/no-mans-sky-highest-player-numbers-2025/">releasing a series of updates</a> over the game's lengthy run that have brought it from a mediocre launch to a beloved genre classic.
"I'm so happy that it's getting the reaction that it has," Hello Games CEO Sean Murray <a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/no-mans-sky-boss-so-happy-as-sim-celebrates-highest-steam-player-count-since-launch-and-fans-go-wild-with-new-ship-customisation">told Eurogamer</a> last week.
"With Voyagers though, even from the earliest days it was obvious there was something really special about just flying around in a ship you built with your friends," he added. "It's just something that we've all seen glimpses of in other games, but there's a certain magic about exploring the universe in your own USS Enterprise or Millennium Falcon."
And it didn't take long for the game's userbase to devolve into an all-out meme war, using the new feature to construct the goofiest spacecrafts imaginable.
The No Man's Sky subreddit is chock-full of some creative designs, a wholesome and intergalactic "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/?f=flair_name%3A%22Ship%20Build%20Contest%22">Ship Build Contest</a>" we can definitely get behind. The designs are truly outlandish, reminiscent of the block-based worldbuilding of the best-selling video game of all time, Minecraft.
Perhaps on top of the list — at least as far as we are concerned — is user AcoupleofIrishfolk, who constructed an entire spacecraft <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1nc1yqg/it_looks_like_youre_trying_to_explore_the_galaxy/">based on Microsoft's iconic Clippy</a>, an anthropomorphized paper clip that assisted Microsoft Office users in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-363541 size-full aligncenter" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/it-looks-like-youre-trying-to-explore-the-galaxy-v0-3nkptog2p0of1.webp" alt="" width="1080" height="1920" />
The same player also went through the effort to reconstruct the face of the "Dragon Ball" character Vegeta.
"My new ship has a power level over 9000!" they <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1nbs559/my_new_ship_has_a_power_level_over_9000/">quipped</a>.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-363543" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/bpsnep5puynf1-1200x2133.jpeg" alt="" width="1080" height="1920" />
The same user even constructed the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1n2ssbc/one_ship_to_rule_them_all/">Eye of Sauron tower</a> from the "Lord of the Rings" books and movies for a separate entry into the ship-building contest.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-363548 aligncenter" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/398q6pfaqulf1-1200x2133.jpeg" alt="" width="1080" height="1920" />
Another user was <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1nchktk/this_might_be_the_dumbest_thing_ive_made_in_the/">inspired by a graphite pencil</a>, resulting in a behemoth space capsule that includes a lead and eraser.
"This might be the dumbest thing I’ve made in the game," the user wrote.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-363542" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/fzcedbgyu4of1-1200x661.jpeg" alt="" width="1080" height="595" />
One player constructed a "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1nc1s48/santas_sleigh_corvette/">Santa's Sleigh Corvette</a>," a holiday-inspired design that even includes several reindeer floating in front of it.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-363545 aligncenter" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/santas-sleigh-corvette-v0-1011ifson0of1.webp" alt="" width="1080" height="607" />
A different user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1nbso2l/due_to_popular_demand_heres_more_photos_of_my/">recreated the "Planet Express" spacecraft</a> prominently featured in the hit TV show "Futurama."
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-363546 aligncenter" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/due-to-popular-demand-heres-more-photos-of-my-planet-v0-em03gri6yynf1.webp" alt="" width="1080" height="607" />
One details-oriented player even <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1nc8taq/thomas_the_tank_engine/">reconstructed a fully decked-out Thomas the Tank Engine train</a>, including a lavish interior.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-363562 aligncenter" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/tankengine.jpg" alt="" width="1080" height="581" />
The contest is a delightful demonstration of unbridled creativity, highlighting that when gamers are given this level of freedom, they'll take the opportunity to come up with something truly wonderful.
This story has been updated to correct an error confusing the "Dragon Ball" characters Goku and Vegeta.
More on video games: <a href="https://futurism.com/demo-video-game-characters-panic-code-matrix">In Disturbing Demo, AI-Powered Video Game Characters Panic When Told They're Just Code</a>

To Infinity and Beyond

"This might be the dumbest thing I’ve made in the game."

No Man's Sky Players Are Competing to Create the Goofiest Spaceships Imaginable

Amazon is planning to use artificial intelligence to <a href="https://futurism.com/amazon-startup-orson-welles-ai">recreate destroyed footage</a> from Orson Welles' 1942 film "The Magnificent Ambersons" — but the late directors' estate is calling bull.
In a <a href="https://variety.com/2025/film/news/orson-welles-estate-blasts-ai-magnificent-ambersons-ending-1236509523/">statement to Variety</a>, a spokesperson for David Reeder, whose Reeder Brand Management handles Welles' estate on behalf of the auteur's daughter Beatrice, said that the family hadn't been informed of the project, which is slated to generate with AI the final 43 minutes of the film.
Edward Saatchi, the CEO of the Showrunner AI video app that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fable-amazon-funding-showrunner-platform-pitch-deck-hollywood-studios-2025-7">Amazon recently invested in</a>, told CNBC's "<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/movies/orson-welles-the-magnificent-ambersons-artificial-intelligence-rcna229337">Squawk Box</a>" last week that he and <a href="https://www.rosebrian.com/work">indie filmmaker Brian Rose</a> want to resurrect that "lost" footage from Welles "ruined masterpiece" and bring the film "back to life."
They plan to do so by shooting sequences with live actors and then face-swapping their likenesses with AI recreations of the movie's original cast. Helmed by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomclive/?originalSubdomain=uk">web dev-turned-VFX maestro</a> Tom Clive, it sounds like the "Ambersons" effects will constitute an updated version of the kind of movie magic that's been used for everything from the <a href="https://beforesandafters.com/2024/07/05/how-a-tracking-algorithm-helped-insert-tom-hanks-into-news-scenes-with-historical-figures-in-forrest-gump/">inclusion of Richard Nixon</a> and other historic figures in Forrest Gump more than 30 years ago to the posthumous CGI additions of actors Peter Cushing in 2016's "Rogue One" — which <a href="https://www.euronews.com/culture/2024/09/10/disney-sued-for-using-peter-cushings-likeness-in-star-wars-22-years-after-his-death">spawned a lengthy court battle</a> with Disney — and Carrie Fisher in "<a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a30429072/was-carrie-fisher-cgi-in-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker/">The Rise of Skywalker</a>" in 2019.
To call "Ambersons" a lost masterpiece isn't exactly an overstatement. Welles' film adaptation of a 1918 <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Magnificent-Ambersons-novel">Pulitzer-winning novel</a> of the same name by author Booth Tarkington takes on societal change around the early 20th century — but his raw cut was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/07/03/1184839653/orson-welles-the-magnificent-ambersons">significantly modified by Golden Age studio RKO</a>, removing nearly an hour of footage and changing the ending to a happier one.
Though the directors' notes for the original ending survived, the studio burned the raw footage it had removed, leaving Welles' vision for the film slashed and his heart broken.
"They destroyed 'Ambersons,'" the director famously lamented, "and it destroyed me."
Though there are rumors of a copy <a href="https://www.thelostprint.com/">floating around somewhere in Brazil</a>, it does not appear that Showrunner, the "<a href="https://www.creativebloq.com/ai/ai-art/i-just-tried-the-netflix-of-ai-and-enjoyed-it-far-more-than-i-wanted-to">Netflix of AI</a>," has procured it. As such, this AI-generated resurrection is far from what Welles' family — which collaborated earlier this year with the <a href="https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/orson-welles-ai-voice-storyrabbit-audio-storytelling-app-1236406112/">AI storytelling app Storyrabbit</a> to allow it to use his famous baritone as a narrator — wants to happen.
"In general, the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for [voiceover] work with brands," the estate told Variety through a spokesperson. "That said, this attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles' creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren’t even given the courtesy of a heads up."
"While AI is inevitable, it still cannot replace the creative instincts resident in the human mind," the Welles estate continued, "which means this effort to make 'Ambersons' whole will be a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles."
On the scale of celebrity AI resurrections, which range from some podcasters' <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/george-carlin-ai-special-deleted">gruesome and unauthorized use</a> of George Carlin's voice for a "comedy special" last year to <a href="https://futurism.com/rod-stewart-ozzy-osbourne-ai-slop">Rod Stewart's creepy selfie homage</a> to the recently-passed Ozzy Osbourne, this one probably isn't the worst.
Still, it's a shame to see an AI company treat the estate of a beloved director so inconsiderately — especially because, given their deal with Storyrabbit, the Welles family isn't even opposed to the technology in the first place.
More on AI and entertainment: <a href="https://futurism.com/amazon-deploying-ai-dubs-movies">In Further Assault on Cinema, Amazon Is Deploying AI-Aided Dubs on Streaming Movies</a>

Ask Next Time

"We weren’t even given the courtesy of a heads up."

Orson Welles' Estate Disgusted by Amazon Remaking His Movie Using AI

AI image generator Midjourney is in major trouble after being accused of facilitating mass copyright infringement.
According to <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/warner-bros-discovery-sues-ai-company-copyright-infringement-1236361610/">documents obtained by The Hollywood Reporter</a>, entertainment conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery is suing the startup for "brazenly" infringing on its intellectual property by letting its users create AI-generated images and videos of its copyrighted characters — which, due to Warner Bros' immense catalog, include everything from the Batman franchise to Scooby-Doo to Bugs Bunny.
"The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners," a spokesperson told the Reporter. "Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments."
It's not just Warner Bros. Disney and Universal teamed earlier this year to independently sue Midjourney for "blatant copyright infringement," accusing the company's generator of being a "<a href="https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/685433/disney-universal-sue-midjourney-copyright-infringement">virtual vending machine</a>" that can generate "endless unauthorized copies."
The lawsuit highlights how the subject of copyright infringement is quickly turning into a high-stakes legal battle for AI companies like Midjourney — but also affecting much larger enterprises, like OpenAI, which is itself being sued by tktk.
Tech leaders have repeatedly argued that their firms are doing nothing wrong, claiming the tech <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-over-copyrighted-work">has no chance of survival</a> if companies aren't allowed to indiscriminately ingest copyrighted materials.
It's a talking point even president Donald Trump has signed onto, suggesting regulators are extremely unlikely to step in. During a White House event centered around AI earlier this year, Trump <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/23/trump-derides-copyright-and-state-regs-in-ai-action-plan-launch-00472443">argued</a> that "you can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for."
AI image generators, in particular, have been found to spit out images and videos of copyrighted characters, as experts have <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-image-generators-copyrighted-characters">demonstrated</a>, culminating in numerous lawsuits by <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/artists-sue-google-image-generator">artists</a> and entertainment conglomerates alike.
It doesn't take much to coax Midjourney's image generator to perfectly reproduce iconic TV and comic book characters. A simple prompt like "classic comic book superhero battle" will result in copyright-infringing material, Warner Bros argued in its latest lawsuit, along with screencaps of the media company's action blockbuster "The Dark Knight."
To Warner Bros it's an open-and-shut case.
"It is hard to imagine copyright infringement that is any more willful than what Midjourney is doing here," the company wrote in its lawsuit. "Midjourney is purposefully exploiting Warner Bros. Discovery’s valuable intellectual property to attract subscribers to Midjourney, and it is profiting by providing subscribers with endless copies and derivatives of Warner Bros. Discovery’s Copyrighted Works."
The company is seeking damages in the form of any attributable profits Midjourney made — or $150,000 per infringed work, per the Hollywood Reporter.
The lawsuit could eventually set an important legal precedent by determining whether AI companies like Midjourney and OpenAI are operating under "fair use," a thorny legal doctrine that allows <a class="underline hover:text-futurism hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://copyright.psu.edu/copyright-basics/fair-use/">limited access to copyrighted materials</a> without prior permission for quotations and other non-infringing usages.
And the stakes are real. Soon after the Warner Bros lawsuit dropped, the AI company Anthropic <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/anthropic-agrees-pay-15-billion-settle-author-class-action-2025-09-05/">agreed to pay $1.5 billion</a> to settle a class-action lawsuit by authors who claimed its chatbot Claude was trained on their work without permission.
More on copyright and AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-work-copyright-lawsuit">Using AI for Work Could Land You on the Receiving End of a Nasty Lawsuit</a>

From the Frying Pan

Things just went from bad to much, much worse.

Midjourney Is in Major Trouble

One of the most prominent pioneers of artificial intelligence has some grim predictions about what the technology he created is soon going to unleash onto humankind.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose work on neural networks earned him the title of "Godfather of AI," suggested in an <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/31feb335-4945-475e-baaa-3b880d9cf8ce">interview with the Financial Times</a> that <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/08/06/ai-job-killer-ex-google-executive-mo-gawdat-warns-workers-ceos-politicians-replaced-robots/">tech CEOs who preach positive outcomes</a> for the future of AI are deluding themselves and others.
"What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers," Hinton told the FT. "It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer."
"That’s not AI’s fault," he continued. "That is the capitalist system."
The former Google Brain team leader — who <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/godfather-ai-quits-google">left the company in 2023</a> and began <a href="https://futurism.com/nobel-prize-winner-ai-godfather">making chilling premonitions</a> about the future of AI — didn't provide any estimates about when this shift might happen. It's stark to imagine a world where more people are being replaced with AI, because that <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-lays-off-150-employees-replaced-ai">very much</a> is <a href="https://futurism.com/signs-ai-bite-job-market">already happening</a>, though those layoffs haven't yet <a href="https://futurism.com/stock-market-tech-ai-jitters">resulted in the profit boon</a> that companies desire.
Although OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his ilk have, as the FT notes, suggested <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/197500/ai-industry-love-universal-basic-income">introducing a universal basic income</a> (UBI) to counteract AI-induced unemployment, Hinton claimed that such a stopgap "won’t deal with human dignity" and the loss of purpose people may <a href="https://www.niskanencenter.org/ubi-pro-work/">experience without work</a>.
Though timelines for this jobs armageddon weren't provided, Hinton did put dates to another forthcoming AI revolution: when the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/former-google-ceo-ai-escape-humans">technology could become superintelligent</a>, able to out-think even the cleverest humans.
"A lot of scientists agree between five and 20 years," he said. "That’s the best bet."
Like most of his peers in the AI world, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/tech/ai-geoffrey-hinton">Hinton considers</a> superintelligence an inevitability. When asked how younger generations can stay positive in the face of such a swiftly-approaching paradigm shift, he rejected calls for calm.
"I’m tempted to say, 'Why should [younger people] stay positive?'" he mused. "Maybe they would do more if they weren’t so positive."
"Suppose there was an alien invasion you could see with a telescope that would arrive in 10 years, would you be saying 'How do we stay positive?' No, you’d be saying, 'How on earth are we going to deal with this?'" Hinton continued. "If staying positive means pretending it's not going to happen, then people shouldn't stay positive."
Despite describing such terrifying prospects, Hinton himself is ready to check out.
"I am 77," he said, and "the end is coming for me soon anyway."
More on AI warnings: <a href="https://futurism.com/experts-concerned-nuclear-war">Experts Concerned AI Is Going to Start a Nuclear War</a>

Doomsday Profits

"That is the capitalist system."

Godfather of AI Says His Creation Is About to Unleash Massive Unemployment

Artificial intelligence has <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-new-ai-problem-hallucinate-more">notorious</a> <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-programming-assistants-code-error">problems</a> with <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-makes-up-answers">accuracy</a> — so maybe it's not surprising that <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-coding-programmers-reality">using it as a coding assistant</a> creates more security problems, too.
As a security firm called Apiiro <a href="https://apiiro.com/blog/4x-velocity-10x-vulnerabilities-ai-coding-assistants-are-shipping-more-risks/">found in new research</a>, developers who used AI produce ten times more security problems than their counterparts who don't use the technology.
Looking at code from thousands of developers and tens of thousand repositories, Apiiro found that AI-assisted devs were indeed producing three or four times more code — and as the firm's product manager Itay Nussbaum suggested, that breakneck pace seems to be causing the security gaps.
"AI is multiplying not one kind of vulnerability," Nussbaum wrote, "but all of them at once."
Ironically, some of the "benefits" of AI coding appear to be the vehicles for these issues. Apiiro found that syntax errors fell 76 percent and logic bugs — faulty code that causes a program to operate incorrectly — were down 60 percent.
The tradeoff has, however, been severe: privilege escalation, or code that allows an attacker to get higher access to a system than they should, increased by a staggering 322 percent. Architectural design problems, meanwhile, were up 153 percent.
"In other words," Nussbaum wrote, "AI is fixing the typos but creating the timebombs."
It's not exactly a huge surprise that AI coding produces security risks. As <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/05/ai_code_assistants_security_problems/">flagged by The Register</a>, researchers from the University of San Francisco, Canada's Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and University of Massachusetts Boston found in a recent but <a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2506.11022v1">not-yet-peer-reviewed study</a> that AI coding "improvements" end up majorly degrading security overall.
Still, this new data shows just how massive the problem is. With companies like <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-labor-coinbase-ai">Coinbase</a>, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglaslaney/2025/04/09/selling-ai-strategy-to-employees-shopify-ceos-manifesto/">Shopify</a>, and <a href="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-duolingo-replaces-contractors-ai/">Duolingo</a> now mandating AI use for their workers, this issue is not only creating way more security vulnerabilities, but also creating more work for those tasked with fixing the issues.
It's pretty clear that AI's biggest "transformation" in the workplace so far has been in <a href="https://futurism.com/companies-hiring-humans-fix-ai">creating more fixes for remaining human workers</a> to sift through. Still, the integration of AI into coding — and <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-literary-outputs">writing</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/spotify-ai-blaze-foley">audio</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/will-smith-ai-concert-response">video</a> — does not appear to be slowing down, which means that the problem will get much worse before it gets better.
More on AI coding: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-vibe-code-deletes-company-database">AI-Powered Coding Assistant Deletes Company Database, Says Restoring It Is Impossible</a>

Code Red

"AI is fixing the typos but creating the timebombs."

Programmers Using AI Create Way More Glaring Security Issues, Data Shows

OpenAI has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles to create a feature-length animated movie made largely with artificial intelligence.
As the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-backs-ai-made-animated-feature-film-389f70b0">Wall Street Journal reports</a>, the purported goal of using AI tech on the movie is to speed up production while also saving costs — and, presumably, serving as a giant tech demo for movie execs everywhere.
The film will invite comparisons to the early days of CGI-animated movies in the mid-1990s. Funded heavily by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the era's animation studio Pixar quickly turned into a powerhouse, producing a litany of critically acclaimed and commercially successful feature films including "Toy Story" and "Monsters Inc."
But whether generative AI will represent yet another major revolution in the space — let alone save production companies time and money — remains to be seen, especially considering that plenty of technical quirks have yet to be ironed out, often <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-sora-demo">requiring the intervention of human creatives</a> to fix the flawed outputs.
The film, dubbed "Critterz," is reportedly about forest creatures going on an adventure, and was first dreamed up by OpenAI creative specialist Chad Nelson three years ago. Nelson created a short film of the same name, which was <a href="https://www.critterz.tv/">released in 2023</a> with OpenAI funding.
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The news comes as the adoption of generative AI — with varying degrees of success — is hitting a fever pitch in Hollywood. Major entertainment companies, including <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/10/28/3-big-ai-changes-at-disney--with-more-to-come/">Disney</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/18/netflix-uses-generative-ai-in-show-for-first-time-el-eternauta">Netflix</a>, are already experimenting with the tech.
The push could have devastating consequences for working creatives. Experts <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/shrek-producer-ai-animation">have long warned</a> that the tech could wipe out human jobs in the animation industry, especially as tools like image and video generators are <a href="https://futurism.com/runway-ai-generates-video-impressive">becoming increasingly capable</a> of spitting out believable materials.
James Richardson, co-founder of London-based Vertigo Films, which is working with OpenAI on the film, told the WSJ that the goal is to cut the production time of Nelson's vision for "Critterz" from three years to just nine months.
The budget of the feature is less than $30 million, which is substantially less than other animated films.
In light of widespread fears of human animators losing their jobs, Nelson assured the WSJ that the movie wouldn't rely on AI entirely. Human actors will still lend the movie's characters their voices. Human artists will also feed their sketches into OpenAI's tools.
But whether "Critterz" will be a success is far from guaranteed. Especially <a href="https://futurism.com/duolingo-ceo-ai-reaction">considering the widespread blowback companies</a> have already received for using AI, audiences have clearly grown wary of the tech.
Interestingly, while AI-generated content can't technically be copyrighted, the human-created voices of characters and original artwork they were based on could still make them eligible for copyright protection, experts told the WSJ.
The subject has become a major point of contention, with rightsholders suing OpenAI and other AI companies for allowing their tools to <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-image-generators-copyrighted-characters">generate images and clips of copyrighted characters</a>.
Just last week, AI startup Anthropic <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/anthropic-agrees-pay-15-billion-settle-author-class-action-2025-09-05/">agreed to pay $1.5 billion</a> as part of a class action settlement after being caught training its AI models on hundreds of thousands of pirated books.
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-launching-ai-jobs-platform">To Help Workers Losing Their Jobs to AI, OpenAI Is Launching a Jobs Platform Run By AI</a>

The Sloppening

Sign of the times.

OpenAI Says It's Making a Full Hollywood Movie Using AI

Artificial intelligence might be booming on paper, but in the real world, there are signs of a major slowdown.
In their latest <a href="https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down-for-large-companies/">biweekly survey of AI adoption</a>, the US Census Bureau found evidence of an obvious drop-off in corporate AI use — the largest since the survey began in November of 2023.
The survey, which compiles data from over 1.2 million firms throughout the US, shows usage of AI tools among companies with over 250 employees dropping from nearly 14 percent in mid-June to under 12 percent in August.
While usage appeared to rise slightly in very small businesses with less than four workers, AI adoption also fell or remained flat in mid-sized companies with less than 250 workers but more than 19.
It's a particularly distressing sign for tech investors and CEOs, whose unfettered spending on AI is now literally <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/business/economy/ai-investment-economic-growth.html">holding up the US economy</a>. For the last few years, they've held that <a href="https://www.stateof.ai/2024-report-launch">enterprise AI</a> — stuff that would prop up powerful companies in tech, finance, and beyond — was the key to building a sustainable business model off of AI development.
For example in 2024, the CEO of software megacorp SAP Christian Klein <a href="https://cloudwars.com/ai/sap-ceo-klein-business-ai-will-make-intelligent-enterprise-a-reality-in-2024">enthused that enterprise AI</a> "will indeed revolutionize how companies will run." As recently as June of this year, meanwhile, wealth management firm UBS <a href="https://www.ubs.com/us/en/wealth-management/insights/article.2317427.html">issued a statement</a> arguing that a "peak in overall AI adoption is still a long way off, and accelerating AI use is set to drive further monetization across industries."
But if a corporate AI revolution is underway, it's not showing up in the data. Up to this point, enterprise AI has been incredibly unprofitable, with a whopping <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-agents-failing-companies">95 percent</a> of US companies that took up AI reporting that the software has failed to generate any sort of new revenue.
Though tech stocks continue to break new records on AI hype, some <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-far-away-profit-experts-warn">financial onlookers</a> are warning that the tech industry might never recoup its spending on AI, and that innovations around the software have <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-asking-investment">hit a plateau</a>.
It's all adding up into a pretty disappointing summer for AI overall.
In August, OpenAI's long awaited <a href="https://mashable.com/article/gpt5-coming">GPT-5 model</a>, which was expected to show a massive improvement over previous AI releases, hit the net with a thud. Though it'd been expected to be a leap forward toward <a href="https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/gpt-5-rumors">human-level artificial intelligence</a>, the latest model performed <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-underwhelming">worse on benchmark tests</a> than its peers.
In perhaps the most telling sign, companies that had previously laid off or stopped hiring flesh and blood workers are <a href="https://futurism.com/companies-hiring-humans-fix-ai">now scrambling</a> to refill their ranks, realizing the tech is <a href="https://futurism.com/professors-company-ai-agents">nowhere near as capable</a> as the hype made it out to be.
Unless enterprise AI can flip a switch and start earning its keep, the latest drop-off in AI usage could just be the start of a steep slope toward the bottom.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/disastrous-gpt-5-sam-altman-hyping-up-gpt-6">After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6</a>