the digest (Page 66)

Latest in the digest

Elon Musk's latest Twitter verification gambit is so convoluted, even some of his biggest stans are coming out against it.

Even Elon Musk’s Biggest Fans Are Aghast at His Latest Scheme

By Noor Al-Sibai

Chinese researchers found an entirely new source of water on the surface of the Moon in the form of tiny glass beads.

China Found Something Fascinating in Glass Beads Strewn Across Moon

By Victor Tangermann

Nvidia has had enough. It's calling for its customers to stop mining worthless crypto and use its cards for AI instead.

Nvidia Wishes People Would Stop Using Its GPUs to Mine Worthless Crypto

By Victor Tangermann

An array of fiery streaks was spotted soaring across the sky over Florida early Thursday morning, believed to be the remains of a deployed Chinese rocket.

Burning Rocket Debris Leave Epic Streak Across Florida Sky

By Frank Landymore

AI chatbot company Replika has reinstated the ability for users to have sexually charged conversations with its AI-based avatars, Reuters reports.

Artificial Intelligence

Replika Users Rejoice! Erotic Roleplay Is Back in AI-Powered App

By Victor Tangermann

An AI enthusiast wrote a few bars in the style of Kanye West and, using a clone of the artist's voice, recorded an apology track to the Jewish people.

Artificial Intelligence

AI Bro Drops Freakishly Real-Sounding Kanye West Apology Track

By Noor Al-Sibai

Geoffrey Hinton recently shared his thoughts on the state of AI in an interview with CBS. While enthusiastic about AI's progress, he's also urging caution.

Artificial Intelligence

Godfather of AI Says There’s a Minor Risk It’ll Eliminate Humanity

By Frank Landymore

A second giant "hole," large enough to easily fit 20 Earths in one go, has torn the Sun's surface apart, heralding our star's most ferocious period during its 11-year cycle.

Low Key Hole Opens Up in Sun

By Victor Tangermann

To the shock of absolutely no one, it turns out that those images of Pope Francis looking fresh to death in a pristine white puffer are AI-generated fakes.

Artificial Intelligence

That Viral Image of the Swagged Out Pope Is an AI Fake, Dummies

By Noor Al-Sibai

Swathes of Twitter's source code leaked online months ago on GitHub, The New York Times reports, allowing practically anybody to get a detailed glimpse.

Elon Musk Bragged He Was Going to Open Source Twitter’s Code, Now Furious That Someone Leaked It Online

By Victor Tangermann

Tired of pesky subscriptions that make it near-impossible to cancel? That practice may become illegal, thanks to a new FTC rule proposal that just dropped.

Government Working to Punish Companies That Make It Hard to Cancel Subscriptions

By Noor Al-Sibai

New Yorkers aren't exactly known for being nice, which was why it was so shocking that only a few were rude to some trash robots in Greenwich Village.

Researchers Pleasantly Surprised That Only One New Yorker Attacked Their Cute Trash-Collecting Robots

By Noor Al-Sibai

The US Federal Trade Commission published a consumer alert warning the public of voice cloning scams, which seem to be on the rise.

Artificial Intelligence

FTC Warns That Scammers Are Cloning Your Relatives’ Voice To Steal Your Money

By Frank Landymore

A ginormous, tornado of plasma has been spotted on the Sun's surface, violently raging within a powerful magnetic structure.

We’re in Awe of This Massive Tornado of Plasma on the Surface of the Sun

By Frank Landymore

A 16-month-old AI chatbot startup called Character.ai just reached a $1 billion market cap — despite having yet to generate any revenue.

Artificial Intelligence

AI Company With Zero Revenue Raises $150 Million

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Elon Musk reportedly tried to takeover as OpenAI's CEO back in 2018. But when the rest of the company's board allegedly vetoed his proposal, he walked away.

Elon Musk Reportedly Tried to Take Over OpenAI Several Years Ago, But Failed

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Avi Loeb has good evidence that a meteorite that crashed to Earth was interstellar. He thinks it might even be alien — which is why he's looking for it.

Science & Energy

Harvard Physicist Preparing Expedition to Recover Possible Alien Artifact

By Frank Landymore

Remember Oumuamua, that weird and possibly-alien object that flew past Earth back in 2017? Some scientists have a boring explanation for what it was.

Boring Scientists Say Strange “Oumuamua” Space Object Wasn’t Alien, Just Gassy

By Noor Al-Sibai

The triple-A video game developer has unveiled its new "Ghostwriter" tool, which in theory will save writers the extra effort of writing a zillion "barks."

Artificial Intelligence

Ubisoft Develops Tool to Crank Out Video Game Dialogue Using AI

By Frank Landymore

While testing Google's Bard AI, the editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware discovered that the chatbot plagiarized an answer from his site.

Google’s Bard AI Credibly Accused of Plagiarizing Without Credit

By Frank Landymore

With MetaHuman Animator, creators can easily employ motion-capture tech to relatively instantly animate the facial expressions of high-quality characters.

New Videogame Facial Animation Is So Realistic It’s in the Uncanny Valley

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Trump decided to take to his social media platform, Truth Social, on Thursday to post an almost certainly AI-generated image of himself kneeling to pray.

Artificial Intelligence

Donald Trump Shares Slightly Misfigured AI-Generated Image of Himself Praying

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Microsoft's Bing Chat just cited misinformation generated by Google's Bard chatbot, just one day after Bard was released. Oof.

Google’s Bard and Bing AI Already Citing Each Other in Neural Hall of Mirrors

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Elon Musk has been promising that Tesla's Full Self-Driving would be coming "next year" forever — but as it turns out, he may be the reason it hasn't.

Self-Driving Vehicles

Elon Musk Apparently Made a Stupid Engineering Decision That’s Kneecapped Tesla’s Self-Driving Promises

By Noor Al-Sibai

Given that the sun rises and sets 16 times per day on the ISS, it may be kind of difficult for Muslim astronaut Sultan Alneyadi to fast during Ramadan.

During Ramadan, Muslims Fast From Sunrise to Sunset. A Muslim Astronaut Will Experience 16 Per Day.

By Noor Al-Sibai

Claire "Grimes" Boucher wanted a brain-computer interface (BCI) for her birthday — and one of Neuralink's apparent competitors was happy to comply.

Grimes Using Custom Brain Interface From Elon Musk Competitor

By Noor Al-Sibai

The moons of Uranus could harbor oceans that are ungratefully spewing magnetized plasma particles onto their host planet's surface.

Scientists May Have Just Discovered New Oceans in Two of Uranus’ Moons

By Frank Landymore

Apparently, in the Justice Department's legal battles against Google over monopoly concerns, Google's AI-powered Bard chatbot is siding with the government.

Google’s New AI Says Google Is a Monopoly and the Government Should Break It Up

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Screenwriter Union Reportedly Proposes Allowing AI-Written Movies and TV Shows

Artificial Intelligence

Screenwriter Union Reportedly Proposes Allowing AI-Written Movies and TV Shows

By Frank Landymore

After weeks of nearly-non-stop rain, a freaking tornado was filmed as it ripped through Los Angeles County, damaging people and property in its wake.

Science & Energy

Bizarrely, Los Angeles County Just Got Hit By a Tornado

By Noor Al-Sibai

Experts asked GPT-4 100 leading prompts about conspiracy theories — and, shockingly, the chatbot didn't push back against any of them.

Artificial Intelligence

Researchers Find GPT-4 Is Significantly Less Accurate Than GPT-3

By Noor Al-Sibai

For the first time ever, a dust storm has been observed outside of our Solar System — and it was the James Webb Space Telescope that made the discovery.

James Webb Space Telescope

The Webb Telescope Is So Powerful, It Spotted a Dust Storm on a Planet in a Different Star System

By Noor Al-Sibai

The latest Big Tech chatbot, the Bard AI by Google, just dropped, and there seems to be something kind of funny going on with it.

Something Extremely Goofy Happens When You Ask Google’s Bard AI To Generate Images

By Noor Al-Sibai

Unfortunately, much like ChatGPT, Stanford's Alpaca AI proved to be a lean, mean, misinformation machine that was too costly to maintain.

Stanford Pulls Down ChatGPT Clone After Safety Concerns

By Frank Landymore

The Margaritaville bill always comes due — and in FTX and Alameda Resarch's case, it was way higher than we thought. Like, $600k more.

It Turns Out FTX and Alameda Owe Margaritaville a Staggering Amount of Money

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Jackson Greathouse Fall has gone viral for his stunt of using ChatGPT to make all his business decisions, garnering modest investment.

Man Starts Business With Only $100 By Doing What ChatGPT Tells Him

By Frank Landymore

People are using AI-generated images of Donald Trump getting arrested by the NYPD before it actually happens, because that's the world we live in now.

Artificial Intelligence

People Keep Posting Phony AI-Generated Images of Trump Getting Arrested

By Noor Al-Sibai

OpenAI's ChatGPT was down last night due to a glitch that made chat histories publicly visible, while another bug may have also compromised user emails.

ChatGPT Bug Accidentally Revealed Users’ Chat Histories, Email Addresses, and Phone Numbers

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Oxygen levels are so dangerously low in a river n Australia that millions of fish have turned up on its shores — but don't worry, everything's fine.

Officials Say It’s Fine That Millions of Fish Suddenly Died in This River

By Noor Al-Sibai

A peer-review process accepted a research paper written entirely by OpenAI's ChatGPT — without ever realizing that an AI program penned the paper.

Researchers Reveal That Paper About Academic Cheating Was Generated Using ChatGPT

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Midjourney's latest V5 update has got hands almost nailed down. Now, it'll take more sleuthing to tell if an image of a person is AI generated or not.

Artificial Intelligence

Watch Out, Folks: AI Image Generators Can Do Hands Now

By Frank Landymore

It's not over just yet, but we're almost there, the United Nations' IPCC watchdog group has said in its latest anxiety-inspiring report.

Top Scientists Say We’re in Deep, Deep Trouble

By Noor Al-Sibai

Months after notifying government officials that its Minnesota-based nuclear plant had sprung a radioactive water leak, Xcel Energy has come publicly clean.

Nuclear Plant Admits It Accidentally Leaked 400,000 Gallons of Radioactive Water

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Residents of Sacremento and Northern California at large were treated to fiery streaks soaring overhead. Magnificent, but with mundane origins.

Jettisoned From Space Station, Burning Space Junk Streaks Across California Sky

By Frank Landymore

Some scientists have made fancy space concrete out of potato starch — and it works much better thank building bricks out of blood and urine to work.

Scientists Propose Mars Settlers Live in Potato-Based Structures

By Noor Al-Sibai

If you need random numbers generated, steer clear of ChatGPT. Unless you want responses to be less random and more poisoned by human preferences, that is.

ChatGPT Is Hilariously Bad at Generating Random Numbers

By Frank Landymore

With a silly name and an even sillier startup cost, Stanford's Alpaca ChatGPT clone costs only $600 and shows how easy OpenAI's may be to replicate.

Stanford Scientists Pretty Much Cloned OpenAI’s GPT for a Measly $600

By Noor Al-Sibai

The AI-powered Wonder Studio allows users to automatically replace real actors with convincing CGI characters — with a simple drag and drop.

Mind-Blowing Video Editing App Can Replace Actors With CGI With a Simple Drag and Drop

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Rolls-Royce Will Be Building a Nuclear Reactor for the Moon

Rolls-Royce Will Be Building a Nuclear Reactor for the Moon

By Noor Al-Sibai

Crashing Moons Might Be Annihilating Aliens Somewhere, Researchers Argue

Crashing Moons Might Be Annihilating Aliens Somewhere, Researchers Argue

By Frank Landymore

Study: Cute (and Non Human-Looking) Robots Will Subdue the Humans

Study: Cute (and Non Human-Looking) Robots Will Subdue the Humans

By Frank Landymore

MIT students have dreamed up a lunar colony-building robot that's part spider and part worm — and looks 100% creepy as heck.

MIT Students Built a Terrifying Mix-and-Match Spider Robot to Build Lunar Colonies

By Noor Al-Sibai

Gaze Upon the Brutal Beauty of Four Massive Black Holes About to Crash

Gaze Upon the Brutal Beauty of Four Massive Black Holes About to Crash

By Frank Landymore

A pair of philosophers sounded the alarm on the dystopian applications they see being ushered in by brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.

Experts Warn: Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Usher In the Singularity

By Noor Al-Sibai

Canada’s New Space Agency Logo Is Very Awesome (and Very Canadian)

By Noor Al-Sibai

Incredible: An Active Volcano on Venus, Seen for the Very First Time

By Frank Landymore

Scientists have concluded that the Therizinosaurus was a much gentler giant than previously thought — despite its three-foot claws on each hand.

Brutal-Looking “Edward Scissorhands on Speed” Dinosaur Was Just Showing Off, Scientists Conclude

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Elon Musk's satellite-powered Starlink internet has become the preferred internet provider of illegal Brazilian mining operations in the Amazon.

Brazilian Criminals’ Favorite New Weapon: Elon Musk’s Starlink

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Video Shows Russian Jet Showering US Drone With Fuel Before Colliding With It

Video Shows Russian Jet Showering US Drone With Fuel Before Colliding With It

By Noor Al-Sibai

Microsoft has announced its GPT-4-powered Copilot is coming to its suite of Office 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft’s Stunning Copilot AI Demo Could Change Office Work Forever

By Victor Tangermann

An app called CupidBots uses AI to automate swiping and flirting on various dating apps, and is specifically tailored to target women.

Artificial Intelligence

Meet CupidBot, the Horrifying Dating App Using AI to Harass Women

By Frank Landymore

Scientists are reeling from the discovery of "plastic rocks" on a remote island off the coast of a volcanic Brazilian island.

Alarmed Scientists Discover “Terrifying” Rocks Made of Plastic Trash on Remote Island

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Virgin Orbit's financial woes have apparently deepened to the point that it has reportedly had to furlough its staff while looking for new money.

Virgin’s Satellite Launch Company Is in Deep Financial Doo-Doo

By Noor Al-Sibai

We're not in favor of any jobs going solely to robots. But if any jobs should be automated, it should probably be those of the CEOs.

Artificial Intelligence

The Numbers Are In: Replacing All CEOs With AI Just Makes Sense

By Maggie Harrison Dupré