When <a href="https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/">OpenAI announced</a> the release of GPT-5 this month, the company boasted about how it could supposedly produce "resonant writing with literary depth and rhythm."
In a lengthy <a href="https://www.christoph-heilig.de/en/post/gpt-5-is-a-terrible-storyteller-and-that-s-an-ai-safety-problem">post on his personal blog</a>, University of Munich research fellow Christoph Heilig put that bold assertion to the test. What he found was bizarre: the model easily spits out material that sounds literary and sophisticated, but on closer inspection it's often flowery and incoherent gibberish that makes no sense at all.
As an example, Heilig asked the LLM to write the opening to a satirical piece about recording a podcast in the style of Ephraim Kishon, the beloved Hungarian-Israeli satirist, film director, and Holocaust survivor who passed away in 2005.
"The red recording light promised truth; the coffee beside it had already stamped it with a brown ring on the console," it spat out. "I adjusted the pop filter, as if I wanted to politely count the German language's teeth."
At a quick glance, it looks writerly enough. But stop and think it through. What does it mean to count the German language's teeth, and what does doing so have to do with a microphone's pop filter? Is it a clever allusion to something, a metaphor, or some other literary machination?
Instead, it feels on a close reading as though GPT-5 is just faking it with authorial-sounding prose that ultimately doesn't mean much. Heilig is even more succinct: "The narrator did what?!"
In another test, Heilig asked GPT-5 for a new spin on the passage from Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking-Glass" in which Alice is told that she'll always have to wait for the promised "<a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/tomorrow-and-yesterday">jam tomorrow</a>." In response, the LLM composed something similarly baffling.
"She says: 'In a moment.' In a moment. 'In a moment' is a dress without buttons," GPT-5 wrote.
Once more, it initially sounds like some kind of inspired framing. But again, think about it for a second. Lots of dresses don't have buttons. If there's some kind of loaded meaning to the term, GPT-5 didn't give any explanation of it. In fact, the response seems suspiciously like it's getting hung up on Carroll's wordplay from the actual text that plays on the similarity between the words "addressing" and "dressing" — and just kind of spinning out on that echo from its training data, instead of doing anything particularly interesting with it.
In other words, it's what you might call <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurpleProse">purple prose</a>: florid writing with no deeper point.
Making matters all the stranger, even if the bot's writing doesn't land for a careful human reader, it seems that other instances of GPT-5 — and other chatbots, strikingly — love it.
One "of the most fascinating findings I've had so far is that GPT-5 is capable of tricking even the most recent Claude models into claiming that the gibberish that it produces is in fact great literature," Heilig wrote. "That's an especially astonishing finding given that so far I have never managed to consistently produce stories — regardless of how sophisticated the algorithmic setup was — with any GPT model (GPT-4.5 was successful at some rare occasions) that could trick Claude into concluding that the text was most likely written by a human, not AI."
Exactly why that's happening is opaque, but a reasonable theory might be that to build GPT-5, OpenAI used other AI models to evaluate large numbers of potential outputs to fine-tune how it handled various types of tasks. As a result, it ended up producing ornate text that makes little sense to a human — but is perfectly calibrated to please another AI model.
"The fascinating thing is that what seems to have happened here is that during training GPT-5 figured out blind spots of the AI jury and optimized to produce gibberish that this jury liked," Heilig wrote. "It's almost as if GPT-5 accomplished something similar — to invent a kind of secret language that allows it to communicate with LLMs in a way that they will like GPT-5's stories even when they are utter nonsense."
In other words, GPT-5 "has been optimized to produce text that other LLMs will evaluate highly, not text that humans would find coherent." Provocatively, he suggests that AI models now "share a 'secret language' of meaningless but mutually-appreciated literary markers, defend obvious gibberish with impressive-sounding theories, and sometimes even become MORE confident in their delusions when given more compute to think about them."
Maybe that shouldn't be shocking. At their absolute core, even the most advanced AIs are just figuring out patterns in vast piles of data and then spitting out similar patterns. In fact, it's not even the first time we've heard of an AI system cooking up <a href="https://futurism.com/google-ai-overviews-fake-idioms">incomprehensible new figures of speech</a>; in a sense, it's what they were designed to do.
What this all means depends on your point of view. The more sophisticated that AI gets, is it headed further and further down Nonsense Lane — or has it gotten so smart that it's creating its own alien code to <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/gibberlink-lets-ai-agents-call-each-other-in-robo-language/">communicate secretly</a>, developing new literary forms that our puny human brains can't even understand?
We can't say for sure. For now, we'll just be counting the language's teeth — whatever that means.
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-simple-question-confusion">This Incredibly Simple Question Causes GPT-5 to Melt Into a Puddle of Pure Confusion</a>

Literary Friction

"A kind of secret language."

There's Something Bizarre About When GPT-5 Writes in a Literary Style

Sharks have been on this planet for more than 400 million years. They're older than <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotttravers/2024/12/08/sharks-are-50-million-years-older-than-trees-a-biologist-explains/">the first trees</a>, the <a href="https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars/polaris">North Star</a>, and even the <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-saturns-rings-really-as-young-as-the-dinosaurs-20191121/">rings of Saturn</a>. They've seen and been through it all — but the mounting effects of human driven climate change could be what finally proves too much for these ancient beings.
As we continue to pump astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, nearly a third of it gets absorbed by the ocean, gradually making its water more acidic.
For sharks, the consequences could be horrifying. New research suggests that this acidifying could dissolve and weaken shark teeth, severely damaging the ability of these apex predators to feed and defend themselves. Not even their famed ability to regrow their rows of deadly chompers could be enough to offset the phenomenon.
"Shark teeth, despite being composed of highly mineralized phosphates, are still vulnerable to corrosion under future ocean acidification scenarios," Maximilian Baum, a biologist at Heinrich Heine University in Germany, and lead author of a <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1597592/full">new study</a> published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, said <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250827010714.htm">in a statement</a> about the work. "They are highly developed weapons built for cutting flesh, not resisting ocean acid. Our results show just how vulnerable even nature's sharpest weapons can be."
Currently, the average pH level of the ocean is 8.1. In the some 200 years since the industrial revolution began, it's dropped by about 0.1 pH units, <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-acidification">according to NOAA</a>, representing a 30 percent increase in acidity. One <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/425365a">study</a> projects that the ocean could plunge to a pH level of 7.3 by 2300, if current rates of emissions hold. Meanwhile, some research has found that current pH levels are <a href="https://theconversation.com/acidic-oceans-are-corroding-the-tooth-like-scales-of-shark-skin-129084">already damaging denticles</a>, the tiny serrated scales that form the top layer of a shark's skin.
"Since ocean acidification is known to damage calcified structures like corals and shells, we wanted to investigate whether shark teeth, especially in species... that swim with their mouths open to ventilate their gills and have constant seawater exposure, might also be vulnerable," Baum <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/27/science/ocean-acidification-shark-teeth">told </a><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/27/science/ocean-acidification-shark-teeth">CNN</a>.
In an experiment, the researchers collected shark teeth that were shed by blacktip reef sharks — a vital predator in tropical coral reefs — housed in a local aquarium. For eight weeks, they submerged one batch in a tank containing water with the ocean's current pH of 8.1, and another batch in a tank with the projected pH of 7.3. 
It was immediately clear which set of teeth were worse off, after examining them with electron microscopy.
"We observed visible surface damage such as cracks and holes, increased root corrosion, and structural degradation," said coauthor Sebastian Fraune, head of the Institute of Zoology and Organismic Interactions at HHU, in the statement.
Bizarrely, the acid-bathed teeth had a higher circumference — not because they actually grew, but because their surfaces were more irregular. Bigger teeth may sound like an advantage, but not if they're weakened.
"Many shark species use several rows of teeth at once, and individual teeth can remain in use for weeks or even month," Baum told CNN, "so cumulative damage can reduce feeding efficiency and increase energy demands, especially in species with slower replacement cycles and many rows of teeth that are used at the same time."
It's not a study that perfectly simulates real-world conditions, professor of marine ecology at the University of Adelaide in Australia Ivan Nagelkerken cautioned CNN. The teeth were already shed and came from aquarium sharks. And while sharks generally do keep their mouths open all the time to help them breathe, it's unclear if simply soaking teeth in acidified water for months on end is a good simulation of that reality. Moreover, the study also relied on a pretty extreme projection of ocean acidification.
Baum agrees, but argues this is an important first foray into an understudied area.
"Our study focused on naturally shed teeth because there's currently very little data on this topic," he told CNN. "By isolating the chemical effects of acidified seawater on the mineralized structure itself, we want to provide a baseline for understanding vulnerability of shark teeth."
More on climate change: <a href="https://futurism.com/dying-glacier-music-crying">The Sounds of a Dying Glacier Might Make You Cry</a>

Jaws of Decay

Shark weak.

As Ocean Water Gets Worse, Sharks' Teeth Start to Dissolve

Since its <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16911722/">initial synthesis</a> by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 1912, the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-methylamphetamine (MDMA) — better known by the street terms "ecstasy" or "molly" — has lived many lives.
From its brief time being tested as a <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28851034/">top-secret truth serum</a> in US Army trials to its dual uses as a <a href="https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.20230681">therapeutic tool</a> and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26940772/">party drug</a> during the 1960s and 70s, the compound's propensity for making users feel profoundly empathic and euphoric. It was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/01/us/us-will-ban-ecstasy-a-hallucinogenic-drug.html">banned by the US government</a> in 1985, but that didn't put much of a damper in its recreational use — though it did stall further research until <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35000572/">recent decades</a>, when scientists again began to look into its potential to <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/therapists-mdma-trials-ptsd">benefit mental health</a>.
And most recently, the <a href="https://futurism.com/meta-defector-tech-psychology">uber-wealthy conformists of Silicon Valley</a> have <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/silicon-valley-microdosing-ketamine-lsd-magic-mushrooms-d381e214?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAhZa58uJ1NWKwUSOScTtg-f2ijSv8qIEgSkvjRGHlo2tBlpsuj6cMoLqe4vIQA%3D&amp;gaa_ts=68b2071e&amp;gaa_sig=rV1dCzpqhOqSaXMmULLDH2_kgE9t7puZ7h6t_vBKhU9QkY5k06S9qNYSaUClAx6JOn1v1uCjVkkJOLb6MOjUvw%3D%3D">jumped on the drug</a> as well — alongside <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-ketamine-bladder">ketamine</a>, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/lsd-microdosing-drugs-silicon-valley/">lysergic acid diethylamide</a> (LSD), and "magic" <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/microdosing-workplace-shroom-boom/">psilocybin mushrooms</a> — in hopes of monetizing it.
One such billionaire, venture capitalist Antonio Gracias, also happens to be a close consigliere of serial business owner and <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-shrooms-mdma">psychedelic enthusiast Elon Musk</a>, for whom he briefly went to work in Washington this year at the White House's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/aug/28/elon-musk-antonio-gracias-mdma-psychedelics-company">The Guardian reports</a>, Gracias has become something of a legal drug kingpin after a chance meeting at Burning Man — where else? — with Rick Doblin, the founder and president of the nonprofit <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/psychedelics-researcher-ai-artist-dmt">Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies</a> (MAPS), a long-running psychedelics research and advocacy group.
Just a few weeks before the desert festival commenced last September, MAPS' for-profit pharmaceutical arm, Lykos Therapeutics, suffered a critical blow when the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/08/09/nx-s1-5068634/mdma-therapy-fda-decision-ptsd-psychedelic-treatment">FDA denied its application</a> to allow the firm to sell MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), citing inadequate trial data. Having thought federal approval was all but a done deal — and having <a href="https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/maps-lykos-mdma-ptsd-helena-fundraise/703794/">raised $100 million</a> to that end — <a href="https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/lykos-layoffs-doblin-reoganization-mdma-job-cuts/724403/">Lykos crumbled</a>, laid off three-quarters of its staff, and announced that Doblin was stepping down from its board.
A few weeks after that upset, Doblin and Gracias met on the playa at a sunrise rave. As the MAPS founder recounted to the Guardian, Gracias sidled up to him through the crowd of dirt-stained Burners to tell him point-blank that although what happened with Lykos was not his fault, he should nevertheless fold the company and start anew.
Following that encounter, Doblin reached out to the entrepreneur and made him a counteroffer: instead of letting Lykos run into the ground, would Gracias be willing to pay to take it over and run it?
By January, Gracias and Christopher Hohn, a billionaire British hedge fund manager Doblin put him in touch with, announced their intention to <a href="https://psychedelicalpha.com/news/billionaire-investor-antonio-gracias-plots-100m-lykos-takeover-with-doblins-backing">take over the would-be drugmaker</a>. In March, news broke that Gracias was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/us/politics/elon-musk-antonio-gracias-social-security-administration.html">joining Musk's DOGE efforts</a> at the Social Security Administration. (The optics of someone poised to market a Schedule 1 drug working for the federal government was apparently of no issue to either billionaire.)
Towards the end of May, when Gracias was still doing his mysterious cost-cutting work at Social Security, <a href="https://news.lykospbc.com/2025-05-30-Lykos-Series-B-Financing-First-Close-Completed">Lykos confirmed</a> that foundations controlled by the Musk crony and Honh had raised $50 million in a Series B fundraising round, successfully "recapitalizing" the company. After hiring a new CEO and chief medical officer and restructuring the board — and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/high-ranking-doge-official-elon-musk-ally-antonio-gracias-left-governm-rcna220611">eventually leaving DOGE</a>, and the government, in July — Gracias and his British billionaire associate took over operational control of the company, the Guardian details.
Thus far, there has been no publicly-acknowledged movement at the FDA about potentially approving Lykos' patent application, or about any further study from the pharma company. But the pair may have a powerful ally still inside the government: health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, whose recent comments about MDMA therapy suggest it might not stay verboten for long.
Speaking <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V7C_bdsu1Q">to Congress in July</a>, the <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/trump-execute-dealers-rfk-jr">former drug dealer</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/government-take-away-ssris">known antidepressant hater</a> claimed that MDMA and LSD therapy have "tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting."
"We are working very hard to make sure that happens within 12 months," Kennedy said.
Whether Lykos itself will get a second shot at hawking legal molly remains to be seen — but if Gracias schmoozes Trump and Kennedy as well as he did the MAPS founder, it seems possible.
More on DOGE dealers: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-doge-staffer-ketamine">One of Elon Musk’s DOGE Staffers Used to Sell Ketamine Professionally</a>

Drug Eat Drug World

Rx/Medicines

Somehow, this checks out. 

Top Elon Musk Acolyte Running Large MDMA Empire

How did the building blocks of life come together to spawn the first organisms? It's one of the most longstanding questions in biology — and scientists just got a major clue.
In a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09388-y">new study</a> published in the journal Nature, a team of biologists say they've demonstrated how RNA molecules and amino acids could combine, by purely random interactions, to form proteins — the tireless molecules that are essential for carrying out nearly all of a cell's functions. 
Proteins don't replicate themselves but are created inside a cell's complex molecular machine called a ribosome, based on instructions carried by RNA. That leads to a chicken-and-egg problem: cells wouldn't exist without proteins, but proteins are created inside cells. Now we've gotten a glimpse at how proteins could form before these biological factories existed, snapping a major puzzle piece into place.
"We have achieved the first part of that complex process, using very simple chemistry in water at neutral pH to link amino acids to RNA," said study coauthor Matthew Powner, a chemist at University College London, <a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-08-chemists-rna-proteins-early-earth.html">in a statement</a> about the work. "The chemistry is spontaneous, selective, and could have occurred on early Earth."
The results, he added, show how "RNA might have first come to control protein synthesis."
Amino acids have been around far longer than life has on our planet. We've even found amino acids — plus all the five major ingredients of DNA and RNA called nucleotides — <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-asteroid-bennu-sample-reveals-mix-of-lifes-ingredients/">on asteroid samples</a> plucked directly from outer space.
The curious thing about amino acids, though, is that they don't easily link together; something has to kickstart the chemistry that allows life as we know it.
To find out what that might be, the researchers focused on a reactive molecule called pantetheine, which is already known for its crucial role in metabolism. In a previous study, the researchers found that these compounds were likely abundant in lakes on early Earth. 
When they threw together a watery stew of pantetheine and amino acids, the team found that the amino acids reacted with the compound to create another chemical called aminoacyl-thiol. This thiol, they further demonstrated, combined with free-floating RNA in water at a neutral pH to start a reaction that transferred the amino acids to the RNA, linking them together.
"In a scenario where you have amino acids, where you have RNA molecules, if you have thiols — sulfur molecules — this is, I think, almost inevitable that this kind of process can happen," Powner <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/08/27/origin-of-life-proteins/">told the Washington Post</a>.
The catch is that as far as we can tell, the pantetheine crucial to making this all happen wouldn't have been found in high enough concentrations in the Earth's primordial oceans, where many scientists believe life may have originated— only in smaller bodies of freshwater, where it would be less diluted. Nick Lane, an origin of life chemist at UCL who wasn't involved in the study, further <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/here-s-how-first-proteins-might-have-assembled-sparking-life">cautioned to Science</a> that the amino acid chains being produced are random and chaotic, unlike the orderly arrangements produced by ribosomes.
"They still have not cracked that problem," he told the magazine.
But give these chemicals billions of years to bounce around, and anything can happen.
More on life's origins: <a href="https://futurism.com/life-assembled-material-space">Scientists Find Evidence That Original Life on Earth Was Assembled From Material in Space</a>

Chain Reaction

It comes down to some "very simple chemistry."

Scientists Say They May Have Just Figured Out the Origin of Life

If you're struggling to sort the AI hype from reality, you're not alone. The seemingly breakneck pace of AI development makes it tough to sort headlines from fantasy, with a constant flood of new products and incremental improvements to old ones combining into a rhetorical mess.
Arguably the main economic risk of developing artificial intelligence — or its biggest draw, if you're a business owner trying to pad your bottom line — is the prospect of automating jobs.
Whether or not AI is currently taking a meaningful number of people's jobs, though, has been exceedingly difficult to nail down. On the one hand, the US job market has <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-bubble-economy-bleak">taken a nosedive</a> in recent months and the "laptop workers" most vulnerable to AI seem to be getting hit <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tech-workers-ai-lay-offs">especially hard</a>.
On the other hand, even the most advanced AI <a href="https://futurism.com/companies-replaced-workers-ai">still struggles</a> to perform alongside humans, let alone replace them. A recent MIT study <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-agents-failing-companies">found that</a> AI initiatives are failing to deliver expected revenue returns at 95 percent the companies that roll them out.
But while there's plenty of reason to doubt the AI industry's extravagant claims, there's also reason to worry that the tech is already eating into the labor market.
For instance, a <a href="https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf">recent survey</a> of AI and labor data by a team of researchers at Stanford's Digital Economy Lab uncovered some of the first comprehensive evidence that the AI industry really is throwing the job market into flux.
The scholars compiled three years of payroll records on millions of US workers at tens of thousands of businesses, allowing them to identify long-term trends according to jobs and age groups.
Their first finding was a dramatic decline in employment for entry-level knowledge workers aged 22 to 25 years old, whose occupations are at the highest theoretical risk for automation — a metric called "<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130">AI exposure</a>." These are workers in office gigs whose day-to-day tasks have a lot of crossover with AI functions, like software engineers, service workers, and marketing professionals.
By comparison, older workers in those fields saw their headcount either stagnate or increase slightly.
But what gives the study some extra bite is its observation of 22 to 25 year olds in non-AI-exposed job fields — like industrial workers, nurses, or retail supervisors — who saw their headcounts grow over the past few years.
"[We] find these broad trends not limited to just case studies," said Bharat Chandar, one of the authors of the paper. "For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs. For older workers, [we] find small differences in employment trends based on AI exposure."
That divergence is ominous. It suggests that AI may actually be cutting into early-career roles that traditionally served as a training ground for longer-term careers. What it would mean if those onramps are getting destroyed could have <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-entry-level-job-grads">economic repercussions</a> for decades.
At the same time, exactly why AI seems to be impacting the job market is a whole other can of worms.
For one thing, <a href="https://futurism.com/ceos-ai-job-market">previous data</a> has shown that AI tends to be used by CEOs and business executives as cover to reduce headcounts or outsource jobs — cost cutting measures they might have taken anyway after the <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-labor-market-post-covid-whats-changed-and-what-hasnt/">post-pandemic hiring boom</a>, even without the AI salesmen knocking at their door.
There's also the wrinkle that the job market was already crappy for <a href="https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/jobs-new-college-graduates-2023-labor-market-openings-7195e28">entry-level workers</a> before AI chatbots hit the market — meaning it didn't take much for a few AI exposed jobs to start dragging averages down.
"Overall, [the] job market for entry-level workers has been stagnant since late 2022, while market for experienced workers remains robust," Chandar continued. "Stagnation for young workers [was] driven by declines in AI-exposed jobs. Of course, lots of changes in the economy, so this is not all caused by AI."
Perhaps most notably, the researchers also observed that wages across all ages and compensation have been stagnant since 2022. Unlike entry-level job numbers, this stat is <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w33777">nothing new</a> — an indication that, whatever jobs AI is or isn't taking, the money saved isn't trickling down to the workers, but being hoarded by those at the top.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-layoffs-automation-ignitetech">CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn't Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It Again</a>

Planned Obsolescence

"For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs."

New Paper Finds Evidence That AI Is Already Killing the Job Market

If you followed news about either the media industry or space exploration back in 2021, you probably remember when the New York Times <a href="https://futurism.com/new-york-times-watermelons-mars">accidentally published a story</a> claiming that watermelons had been found on the planet Mars.
"Authorities say rise of fruit aliens is to blame for glut of outer space watermelons," read the story, which the newspaper deleted less than an hour later, but is still accessible in an <a href="https://archive.is/0JiH9">archived snapshot</a>. "The FBI declined to comment on reports of watermelons raining down, but confirmed that kiwis have been intercepted."
Unsurprisingly, a spokesperson for the paper soon clarified that the article had been a dummy draft that had been inadvertently published as part of a testing system.
As it turns out, it wasn't even the first time that the paper of record had mistakenly claimed that life had been discovered on the Red Planet. That distinction goes to an <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1906/12/09/101810982.html?pageNumber=39">extraordinary feature</a> published in December 1906, which the New York Times ran under the screaming all-caps headline of "THERE IS LIFE ON THE PLANET MARS."
In the story, journalist Lilian Whiting — a reporter and poet so prominent at the time that she still has <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilian_Whiting">her own Wikipedia page</a> a full 78 years after her death — wrote breathlessly of Percival Lowell, a controversial astronomer who founded the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which later went on to discover the planet Pluto.
Lowell was convinced that using the large telescope he'd constructed at his observatory in Flagstaff, he had glimpsed "legions of canals on Mars, forming a colossal and a wisely planned system designed to irrigate the oases of the vast deserts which make up the surface of this planet."
"The astronomer finds a network of marvelously designed canals traversing the deserts, meeting at certain points, the lines uniform, thousands of miles in length, three to seventeen canals sometimes converging at one point," Whiting wrote. "Therefore, the only logical result that can be reached... is that the oases are great centres of population; that the canals are constructed by guiding intelligence for the purposes as set forth above, and that their existence is an unanswerable and an absolute proof that there is conscious, intelligent, organic life on Mars."
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-362426" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/08/nyt_mars-1200x786.jpg" alt="A New York Times story from December 1906 claiming that incontrovertible proof of intelligent life had been found on the planet Mars." width="1200" height="786" />
The whole article is worth a read. In addition to a fascinating series of delightfully old-timey stylistic choices and typos, it's a mesmerizing snapshot of a moment when science seemed to feel vast and unknown, when an eccentric professor could make outrageous extrapolations about something he thought he'd spied in his telescope and get the whole thing written up in one of the world's most influential newspapers.
To be clear, Lowell's claims attracted <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bizarre-beliefs-astronomer-percival-lowell-180962432/">plenty of controversy</a> at the time from his peers; after seeing Lowell's astronomical sketches at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, <a href="https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/2003JHA....34...53S/0000055.000.html">one critic wrote</a> that "I do not know whether Mr. Lowell has been looking at Mars until he has got Mars on the brain, and by some transference transcribed the markings to Venus."
The whole episode is back in the public view because of a new book by the journalist David Baron, titled "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Captured-Turn-Century-America/dp/1324090669">The Martians</a>." In it, Baron explores the explosion of interest — and wonderfully wild-eyed pseudoscience — around the planet Mars during the Gilded Age. Scientific luminaries including Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell jumped on the trend, before a scientific backlash tore the whole thing down.
In a full-circle moment, Baron's book got a glowing review this week — published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/books/review/the-martians-david-baron.html">in the </a>New York Times.
Mars fever "suffused polite society in America, with vivid depictions of aliens appearing in soap and liquor ads, on Broadway and at dinner parties," reads the paper's writeup of the book. And in a meta twist, the "vigorous yellow press, and eventually even more sober outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, published all kinds of speculation about the Red Planet as fact."
More on Mars: <a href="https://futurism.com/three-step-plan-terraform-mars">Scientists Reveal Easy Three-Step Plan to Terraform Mars</a>
&nbsp;

Mars Bars

"An absolute proof that there is conscious, intelligent, organic life on Mars."

Why the New York Times Claimed Life Had Been Found on Mars

The New York Police Department is one of the most heavily equipped police forces on the planet. With over <a href="https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/056-NYPD.pdf">48,000 full-time staff</a> and a budget nearing $6 billion, the NYPD's access to immense resources put it closer to the military force of entire countries like the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-seeks-increase-defence-spending-2025-2024-07-29/">Philippines</a> and <a href="https://www.iraqinews.com/iraq/iraqs-military-expenditure-hits-6-2-billion-in-2025/">Iraq</a> than a municipal agency.
With that kind of coin to play around with, it's probably no surprise that the NYPD would throw a little toward tech. Between 2007 and 2020, the department has spent over $2.8 billion amassing a <a href="https://www.stopspying.org/nypd-special-expenses">virtual toy chest</a> of surveillance tech, including <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/nypd-secret-fund-surveillance-tools/">stingray phone trackers</a>, <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/nypd-predictive-policing-documents">crime prediction software</a>, and even <a href="https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2015/10/23/nyclu-claims-nypd-secretly-using-x-ray-van-certain/">X-ray vans</a>.
Among the NYPD’s most contentious technologies is a facial recognition suite it's been building since 2011 — a system that recently led to the arrest of a man who was a whole head taller than the original suspect.
As the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/nyregion/nypd-facial-recognition-dismissed-case.html">New York Times reports</a>, a father named Trevis Williams was wrongly arrested on April 21 after the NYPD's facial recognition software lumped him in with a group of "possible matches" based on grainy CCTV video.
Investigators were trying to identify a man who exposed himself to a woman two months earlier in February. After feeding their algorithm low quality footage of the crime, it spat out six faces of identical looking men — all African American with facial hair and dreadlocks, the NYT reports.
The AI selection on its own was "not probably cause to arrest," and an investigator noted that anyone identified from the NYPD database by the facial recognition system was only a potential suspect.
Still, detectives included Williams' image in the photo lineup anyway — a <a href="https://www.wmdtlawyers.com/blog/potential-biases-in-police-lineups/">notoriously unreliable</a> process even without the AI dystopia factor. When the victim confidently asserted that Williams was the perpetrator, police had the probable cause they needed to flag him as a suspect.
Williams was later identified by subway police in Brooklyn and hauled in for questioning, according to the NYT. Despite being 12 miles away from the crime when it happened, not to mention eight inches taller and about 70 pounds heavier than the man they were looking for, Williams was still arrested and held in jail for more than two days.
"That's not me, man, I swear to God, that's not me," he told police at the time. "Of course you're going to say that wasn't you," the detective reportedly responded.
Though the charge against Williams was finally dismissed in July — and the investigation into the public lewdness case closed altogether — the whole ordeal is a frightening look at what can happen when police play fast and loose with tech and the law in order to score an arrest.
At least three other Black people have been similarly arrested by police using <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facial-recognition-ai-false-arrest">facial recognition in Detroit</a>, prompting legal advocates to push the agency to adopt <a href="https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/civil-rights-advocates-achieve-the-nations-strongest-police-department-policy-on-facial-recognition-technology">stringent rules</a> establishing the use of facial recognition software to assemble lineups. The NYPD has no such safeguards in place, and it's unclear whether it will anytime soon.
More on policing: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police">OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police</a>

Algorithmic Governance

"I swear to God, that's not me."

Police Arrest Man With Almost Zero Resemblance to Actual Perpetrator Because AI Told Them To

The US electrical grid is facing a stress test like never before. Thanks to a perfect storm of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/america-power-grid-straining-load-generative-ai">AI power consumption</a>, <a href="https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2024/08/28/air-conditioning-poses-a-climate-conundrum/">climate crisis</a>, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040619023001021">crony capitalism</a>,  and a president bent on uprooting <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/timeline-trumps-moves-dismantle-us-wind-solar-energy-industries-2025-08-26/">perfectly good energy infrastructure</a>, the country's already-struggling power system is rapidly crumbling as costs balloon into the stratosphere.
A recent analysis <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-27/soaring-power-bills-in-largest-us-grid-pose-risk-for-republicans">by Bloomberg</a> underscores just how dire it's getting. In the country's largest continuous grid — a 13-state monstrosity managed by <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/totalenergies-joins-pjm-interconnection-largest-154200029.html">PJM Interconnection LLC</a> — the media company notes that power costs have set record highs for two years in a row.
Spanning from Indiana to eastern New Jersey, PJM's footprint includes some 65 million residents, as well as a constellation of tech industry mega-sites known as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2024/data-centers-tour-northern-virginia/">Data Center Alley</a>. While the cost of electricity is expected to <a href="https://gizmodo.com/electricity-prices-are-going-up-and-ai-is-to-blame-2000638567">rise drastically</a> with the growth of AI over the next few years, Bloomberg notes that, in PJM states like Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, nearly 25 percent of residents already can't afford their utility bills.
While PJM is a titan among US power suppliers, it's not alone. Across the country, Bloomberg notes that electricity prices rose at over twice the rate of overall inflation over the past year, putting the national price at a near-record high.
As this is happening, the actual condition of the grid is decaying rapidly. A recent report by <a href="https://institute.bankofamerica.com/transformation/us-electrical-grid.html">Bank of America</a> found that nearly a third of transmission infrastructure, like high voltage transmission lines or substations, is already near or beyond its useful life span. Meanwhile, a whopping 46 percent of US distribution infrastructure, including utility poles and power line transformers, was found to be in a similar state.
That makes it all the more baffling that US president Donald Trump is waging an all-out-offensive on perfectly good green energy infrastructure, the kind that <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/grid-flexibility-for-resilient-equitable-digital-energy-future/">experts broadly agree</a> maximizes grid flexibility, reduces energy costs, and enables economic growth.
Earlier this week, Trump's white house <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/26/business/wind-project-cancel-trump-jobs">stopped construction</a> on a massive wind farm in Rhode Island that was said to be 80 percent complete, as the president asserted that "wind doesn’t work." That project was estimated to provide enough juice to power some 350,000 homes across the east coast, and was just <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/timeline-trumps-moves-dismantle-us-wind-solar-energy-industries-2025-08-26/">one of many</a> imperiled by the returning administration.
That said, while Trump certainly isn't making things any better, the current crisis is decades in the making.
A major part of the problem is that the United States boasts the only macro grid in the world without a central plan. Unlike the singular grids managed by China or the EU, the US power system is a <a href="https://rmi.org/the-united-states-has-the-only-major-power-grid-without-a-plan/">labyrinthian bureaucracy</a> made-up of three separate grids, each a jumbled mess of various planning regions, territorial authorities, and public-private utility companies.
To get out of this mess will require a comprehensive overhaul of the current setup — one that the current commander is chief is highly unlikely to authorize.
More on energy: <a href="https://futurism.com/small-towns-ai-data-centers">Small Towns Are Rising Up Against AI Data Centers</a>

With Great power

Shocking.

Electricity Is Becoming Unbelievably Expensive as the US Power Grid Decays Into Ruin

With all the frenzied news swirling around these days, it's understandable if you let Elon Musk slip from the top of your mind.
While the billionaire's mental state was <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-black-eye-drug-claims">arguably frayed</a> during his stint as DOGE czar — thanks in no small part to what's been reported as a <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-traveling-box-drugs">constant stream</a> of illicit drugs — it's become visibly more concerning since his <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-administration-elon-musk-views">dramatic departure</a> earlier this summer.
Seemingly trying to distract himself from the <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-shutting-down-ai-supercomputer">decline of Tesla</a>, the world's richest man has embarked on a number of bizarre side projects to fill the days, including an anti-Microsoft company called "<a href="https://qz.com/elon-musk-macrohard-to-challenge-microsoft">Macrohard</a>," and an anti-establishment political party known as the "<a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tesla-board-america">America Party</a>."
But as the notoriously fickle billionaire already seems to be <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/elon-musk-third-political-party-69bf9bd8?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAgpRLSlvLXtvQCtrbXG-20-wajDyISR2zDIrCuSu0HICoW3Es5SKTJcvPtv6RU%3D&amp;gaa_ts=68b0b599&amp;gaa_sig=rb5VIWo7utlNMWl5xLHrNR_mDiQeit168qHViBSLbYcYokkmmPf35KDAicNJX0pkAP5OzhicBw-IkIBMVyRDow%3D%3D">losing interest</a> in those noble pursuits, concerns are growing that Musk is becoming sexually involved with his very own chatbot, Grok.
A topic first explored <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-grok-anime-porn-1235415287/">by Rolling Stone</a>, Musk's posts on X have become increasing frisky in recent weeks. While his tweeting habits were never exactly PG, the tech magnate has made it a point to show off Grok's more risqué image generation abilities, sharing scenes of scantily glad <a href="https://x.com/Preda2005/status/1959667309355937824">Colombian twins</a>, or a <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959490993805271223">topless woman</a> bedazzled with space dust.
"Wow. And this is just Grok Imagine beta v0.1!" Musk exclaimed to his 225 million followers, along with a <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959488366782943445">4 minute compilation</a> of a young-looking cartoon woman wearing various skin-tight spacesuits.
Beneath his racy Grok smut, commenters bristled with disappointment and annoyance.
"Why do you have to sexualize a chat bot like Grok?" <a href="https://x.com/Mathonymics/status/1959489873456603508">one user asked</a>. Another fan <a href="https://x.com/jfeilders/status/1959723376643293233">complained</a> that it's hard to take Grok's development seriously when its main use seems to be generating porn.
One reply guy <a href="https://x.com/EmbracingTara/status/1959488842618011949">challenged Musk</a> to go just one day without posting gooner bait.
"All he does is post AI soft porn anymore," another poster shrugged. "I don't think he's coping well with getting sidelined by the Trump administration."
Even sadder than Musk's apparent obsession with his personal sex bot is the cost it takes to run the thing. It takes an <a href="https://promptengineering.org/grok-3-elon-musks-ai-power-play-or-just-another-tech-flex/">inordinate amount of energy</a> to power Grok, and the civilian grid connected to Musk's data centers in Memphis is struggling to keep up. To compensate, the billionaire is operating some <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators">15 methane gas generators</a>, which residents say are choking their neighborhoods with noxious smog.
Evidently, it's a price Musk's willing to make others pay so he can enjoy some synthetic skin flicks.
More on Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/ghislaine-maxwell-elon-musk-caribbean">Epstein's Top Child Trafficker Says She Partied With Elon Musk in the Caribbean</a>

High On His Own Supply

"I don't think he's coping well."

Concern Grows That Elon Musk Is Having Some Kind of AI Meltdown

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the <a href="http://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-21/michael-bloomberg-rfk-jr-s-crackpot-science-makes-america-sicker">well-heeled crackpot</a> helming our nation's healthcare system, holds all kinds of screwball beliefs about pharmaceuticals — but his bizarre and incoherent opposition to depression-treating selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) is perhaps the most indefensible.
Since at least 2023, when Kennedy first launched his long-shot presidential campaign, the conspiracy theorist has insisted there is some sort of link between SSRIs and school shootings. That summer, the political scion told Elon Musk during a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFpk0HAIVYA&amp;lc=UgzC9ltzXExi0iQYzw94AaABAg">livestreamed discussion</a> on X-formerly-Twitter that although there are no studies on the matter, "there’s a tremendous circumstantial evidence [that] SSRIs and benzos and other drugs" are causing such violent events.
Last July, as it became clear that Donald Trump was about to again become the GOP's presidential nominee, Kennedy made an even wilder suggestion: that people on psychiatric medications like SSRIs and Adderall should be sent to taxpayer-funded "<a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-adderall-labor-camps">wellness farms</a>" — which sound a lot like labor camps — to dry out.
Fast-forward to February 2025, when Kennedy, after being sworn in as Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/rfk-jr-ssri-antidepressants-children-doctors-risks-studies-rcna192722">vowed to investigate</a> that illusory link between antidepressants and school shootings — which has, contrary to his claim that there's no research on the topic, been all but disproven since 2019, when a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bsl.2429">study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Law journal</a> found that most school shooters had no known history of taking psychiatric meds, and those who did showed "no direct or causal association" between the drugs and their acts of violence.
In the wake of yet another violent and senseless tragedy — this one at a Catholic church in Minneapolis, where a mass shooter <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25">murdered two children</a> during their first week of school and injured 17 other people — the <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-brain-worms">brainwormed</a> health secretary is once again touting his nonsensical theory about SSRIs.
"We're launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs, and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence," Kennedy <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/video/6377564991112">told </a><a href="https://www.foxnews.com/video/6377564991112">Fox News</a>.
As if responding to this tragedy — which the advocacy group <a href="https://www.everytown.org/press/everytown-moms-demand-action-students-demand-action-statement-on-school-shooting-at-annunciation-catholic-church-school/">Everytown for Gun Safety marks</a> at at least the 57th school shooting in 2025 alone — with a wild goose chase weren't <a href="https://x.com/SenTinaSmith/status/1961061772221149678">insulting</a> enough, it appears that vice president JD Vance might be cosigning it.
"We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America," the millennial VP said during a Wisconsin event after the Minnesota shooting, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/jd-vance-mental-health-crisis-mass-shooting-minneapolis-ssri-kennedy-rcna227854">per NBC</a>. "We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence."
While Vance's statement wasn't a direct endorsement of Kennedy's SSRI obsession, it certainly seems related. Conveniently, the VP's allusion to medication being a potential "root cause" of such violence also serves as a compelling distraction for the GOP electorate, which choose to elect <a href="https://www.thetrace.org/2025/02/republican-congress-gun-rights-bills-atf/">pro-gun candidates</a> and ignore how those policies <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/5504/">lead to mass shootings</a>, instead <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3506604-conservatives-blame-everything-but-guns-for-mass-shootings/">chasing strawmen</a> every time another of these tragedies occurs.
More on RFK Jr: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-cancels-cancer-vaccine-mrna">RFK Jr. Cancels Promising Work on Cancer Vaccine</a>