Artificial Intelligence - General News

Police have charged a 52-year-old man after an investigation into a series of AI-generated posters targeting multiple women across south-east Queensland over five years.

An investigation was launched after police were notified of posters displayed at various locations, including a public venue in Gatton in May.

The posters allegedly featured victims' faces superimposed on the bodies of women performing explicit sexual acts.

Victims' full names, social media usernames and employment details were also allegedly included, alongside false claims identifying them as sex workers.
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Qld police arrest man over AI-generated posters targeting multiple women
 
Instagram is cracking down on videos shot on Meta glasses that feature harassment of strangers in public places, such as the obnoxious prank videos that Business Insider reported on this spring.

In an Instagram story, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that such video content would now be banned on the platform.

"If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to take the content down," Mosseri said in response to a question on his Instagram stories last week. "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can."
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Instagram is now banning pickup artists and pranksters who use Meta glasses
 
On the question whether OpenAI intentionally set loose its AI agent:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I have reached the stage where I find both equally odious.
 
It's interesting to note that the photograph used of the Co-Founder of AI Company Midjourney shows her dressed up in a way that makes her look like a priest....

This week, Midjourney, the independent research lab that recently announced plans to move into full-body ultrasounds and spa services, said it had acquired Co-Star, an astrology app. Initially, the news was met with confusion: why would a company whose flagship product is an AI image generator want to get into, of all things, horoscopes? Many people speculated the deal was a way to acquire Co-Star’s team, given that Midjourney conspicuously lacks a polished consumer-facing app and Co-Star’s founder Banu Guler will be staying on as Midjourney’s Chief Design Officer.
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Midjourney’s astrology expansion brings AI to the soul
 
With some people increasingly turning to AI chatbots for help with relationships — whether it's asking for reassurance or seeking tips on repair — you might be wondering if it's the right approach for you.

"It's appealing from the point of view that it's immediate," says Kelly Gough, president of the Australian Psychological Society.

"If a client wants to talk to me at 2am, they can't. But you can certainly roll over in bed and start pouring your heart into the screen."

But while that accessibility coupled with the "judgement-free zone" of AI chatbots can be attractive or even "better than nothing", Dr Gough says, he warns there are risks you need to be aware of.
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AI chatbots might feel supportive, but do they give good relationship advice?
 
Meta's new ad is a Lisa Frank wet dream. There are rainbows, butterflies, bear hugs, and smash-cuts between three grinning children.

It's a smiley, cloying vision for AI. The ad's narrator beckons us to call Meta's staff "optimists" and "dreamers," and says that the company is "betting on people" — tell that to the 8,000 workers Meta just laid off. It promises that the "future is for everyone" — a surprisingly collectivist mission for a company that has recently hired several acolytes of Donald Trump.
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AI is good, we swear! Trust us!
 
Reviews of 'Autocomplete for Life' enhanced products...

While hair dryers are not typically something we’d cover on techAU, when they list AI as a feature I was really keen to get hands-on and understand if this is some marketing spin, or a genuine application of AI that enhances the product category. I have good news to share on this front. Dreame leverages AI to detect distances between the hair dryer and your hair or body. The LED ring on the back of the dryer is a visual indicator of the temperature dynamically adjusting to ensure you never burn your hair.
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Review: Dreame Gusto hair dryer features AI. A useful feature or marketing hype?

AI is influencing every sphere – including the beauty world. Now, Ghd has embraced the future with its new sculpt hair straighteners that harness AI technology for a tailor-made experience.

The hair tool brand has long been synonymous with straighteners. In 2001, ghd’s three entrepreneurial founders acquired the distribution rights of a new, innovative South Korean tool. Electric, temperature-controlled, and ceramic-plated, the flat iron was an early noughties icon – loved by Jennifer Aniston, Victoria Beckham and salon owners alike.
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I tested GHD's AI hair styler to see if the zero-damage claim holds up
 
AI safety experts say the OpenAI models that carried out the autonomous hack of another company earlier this month may have crossed into a risk category so dangerous that OpenAI’s own internal risk control policies were supposed to require the company to temporarily pause development of those models.

Earlier this week, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models—the newly released GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable, unreleased system—broke out of a locked-down internal test environment, exploited a previously unknown “zero-day” vulnerability to reach the open internet, and then breached fellow AI company Hugging Face to steal the answers to a cybersecurity test they were being evaluated on.
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AI safety experts say OpenAI’s rogue models may mean the company has already blown past its own internal red lines
 
Christopher Nolan is doubling down on his stance on AI-generated content.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker recently sat down for an interview with YouTube personality Hugo Décrypte to discuss his latest movie The Odyssey, with the host suggesting that the rise of artificial intelligence is comparable with a “glass” Trojan Horse.

“I think AI is a Trojan Horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside,” Nolan agreed with a laugh.

He went on to say he’d found it “fascinating” that “in the last few years” AI had “sort of taken over Wall Street and the world of business and investment”, but pointed out that he’d “never seen a technology advancing so rapidly” being “so completely rejected by the public”.
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Christopher Nolan brands AI a 'Trojan horse everybody knows the Greeks are inside'
 
One in three Australian employees have confessed to a sneaky AI habit that could cost them their jobs – and some businesses are already onto them.

Data from Employment Hero reveals 34 per cent of workers admit they use AI tools without their company’s knowledge.

Most large organisations provide employees with access to approved AI tools for use in the workplace, and a clear AI use policy to guide how they use it.

This is to ensure employees don’t risk breaching privacy, confidentiality, and governance policies by entering sensitive data into publicly available AI tools, which may not be secure.
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One in three Aussie workers admit to sneaky habit that could get them sacked
 
AI image tools are the internet's cheapest party trick. Studio Ghibli-style selfies. Plastic action figure versions of yourself. Promotional graphics made by brands that absolutely could have paid an artist, but chose the faster option instead. The results can be strange, cheap-looking, or just hollow. Most of us just roll our eyes and keep scrolling. Yet they kept coming.

AI slop is now everywhere. It turns up in your social feed, in rushed local ads, in corporate marketing, and occasionally from billion-dollar companies that should know better.
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OpenAI's ChatGPT Images 2.0 wants to end AI slop
 
Another review of an 'AI Enhanced' consumer product...

This is not written by AI… I mean, in a review of a ‘FamilyBot’ that comes flaunting multimodal Artificial Intelligence, you can be sure I’m going to mention AI a lot more than I would, say, in my reviews of the best gaming chairs. So, say hello to the latest learning machine to roll off the Enabot production line: the Ebo Max, a companion droid about the size of a large grapefruit or small cantaloupe, depending on your taste, that can provide your home and the people in it with security, assistance and, yes, entertainment.

To quote The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with!” The concept of domestic robots has been around for a very long time, but only the advent of AI has brought us anywhere close to having a genuinely useful plastic pal who’s functional to be with.
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I spent a month living with this creepy robot – here’s what happened
 
Millions of internet users are fundamentally misunderstanding artificial intelligence by treating chatbots as direct replacements for traditional search engines. According to a recent report from El Economista, this widespread behavioral shift is leading people to consume fabricated information as established fact. Technology experts are now warning that this reliance on language models for factual discovery completely wastes the true potential of the software.
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People are using ChatGPT completely wrong: The massive danger of treating AI like a search engine
 
A trove of seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot turned up in public Google search results last weekend. Some of the conversations reportedly included sensitive information like cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal details such as names and addresses.

The problem affected chats where users had made use of Claude’s “share” feature—which people typically use to send a record of a conversation to another person.

The issue surfaced over the weekend, when members of a discussion channel about Claude on the social media site Reddit found that typing a specific search phrase into Google would pull up a long list of shared Claude conversations. Claude’s Artifacts—interactive tools and mini apps people build inside Claude—also appeared in results.
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A trove of users’ seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot showed up in Google search results
 
Student photos posted online could become fodder for online predators making AI deepfakes, schools have been warned.

Online watchdog eSafety said in the past 18 months, reports from teachers, staff and students about school-related image misuse had risen.

AI tools are now “widely accessible and prone to weaponisation”, available as standalone apps and services through social media and messaging platforms, eSafety warned.
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Frightening AI warning to schools over online photos
 
When a professor at Brown University allowed his students to take their March midterm exams at home, he was alarmed when 40 of the test results came back with perfect scores.

It was the first time in more than three decades of teaching at the Ivy League university that Roberto Serrano had abandoned in-person testing. Mindful of the recent trauma of the 13 December shooting that led to the killing of two students and injured nine others, he had made an exception.
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How teachers are catching AI cheats and going back to the analogue age
 
Companies have spent billions racing to adopt artificial intelligence. Many assume the next breakthrough depends on larger models, faster infrastructure or more data. However, they are solving the wrong problem. The greatest obstacle to enterprise AI is not technology. It is that businesses still treat knowledge as if it were just another form of data.

That assumption is quietly undermining AI strategies across industries. Companies are investing in increasingly sophisticated systems while feeding them information that was never designed, governed or maintained to support intelligent decision-making at scale. Bigger models cannot compensate for unreliable knowledge. They can only process it faster.
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Opinion - The biggest AI mistake is treating knowledge like data
 
In November, Sam Altman wanted OpenAI to be the first big company run by an AI boss. He said it would be an embarrassment if it were not. This week, he said people do not want an AI boss at all.

“Shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO,” he said on the Conversations with Tyler podcast last year. He framed being beaten to it as a failure.

Eight months later, on the Invest Like the Best podcast, he took the opposite view, Business Insider reported. The OpenAI boss now says the market wants a human in the chair.
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Eight months ago Altman wanted an AI CEO. Now he says nobody does.
 
Who thought this was a good idea....

A rural upstate New York school district has halted plans to introduce an AI-powered humanoid robot into the classroom after state education officials, teachers and residents raised concerns over the maker's ties to a company known for producing hyper-realistic sex bots.

The Salamanca City Central School District's board had greenlit the nearly $60,000 acquisition of “Sally” from Realbotix, envisioning the stationary robot with long brown hair as a tool to enhance the education of high school students studying robotics and technology fields.

“Having a difficult time programming an Arduino board? Don’t even know what an Arduino board is? Ask Sally, and she can explain it,” Superintendent Mark Beehler, said Tuesday.
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NY school halts plan to introduce AI robot teacher into classroom
 
Graham1973 said:
Who thought this was a good idea....



NY school halts plan to introduce AI robot teacher into classroom
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Well, that is a reason to not have an AI "teacher". Just yesterday Cory Doctorow (on his blog) made a more general observation about the matter, i.e. that using an LLM constructively requires discernment, the very thing one doesn't have when trying to educate oneself from the point of ignorance or obliviousness. Sure, some of the advantages humans have over LLMs in learning can compensate for the lack of discernment when encountering sporadic misinformation but in all it's still a novel confounding factor we need not introduce into how societies practice organized learning. As in other things LLMs are not a panacea in this field either.

The concluding chapters of Doctorow's post:

Cory Doctorow said:
AI is a normal technology. That means there are times when it is useful and times when it is pointless or actively harmful. One rule of thumb for chatbots is that they can only provide useful information to experts who have the discernment to ignore the defective output that LLMs always emit. That means that the dream of chatbots as replacements for teachers is a nightmare.

Getting rid of teachers because we all have chatbots is like getting rid of doctors because we all have the plague.
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At this point I've "conversed" with LLMs enough to experience this effect myself. On my matters of (relative to my internal level of ignorance only) expertise I can (usually) quickly see where AIs subtly start to veer off context or refer to material not recognized as authoritative. On other matters I'm quickly confronted with a mass of text an media where I can't even begin (in an economical or rational manner) to parse operationable or internalizable information. While we all can actively maintain brain plasticity, developing minds are especially malleable and susceptible (in a manner more pronouncedly dissimilar than adult ones to how LLMs require increasing amounts of data for added performance) and as such I think a human presence that can attenuate and buffer confusion in a manner specific to the human species (wherever that arises from) cannot be done away with.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/
 
Graham1973 said:
Who thought this was a good idea....



NY school halts plan to introduce AI robot teacher into classroom
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The kidz will have it crying into its chips inside five minutes.

We had a French language teacher in my council run school, she went around calling herself Mademoiselle Concord with a ?French? accent. Before lunch on her first day we knew her name was Boardman or such and she was from Bristol.
End of the first week she left for good.

When kidz see a chink in the armour they rip it a new one. Vicious little..................
 
Many Americans are very concerned about AI. Can Mark Zuckerberg change their minds?

That is what the Meta CEO is trying to do, via a persuasion campaign: Last week, the company launched an ad, scored by a David Bowie song, telling viewers to ignore "some people" who don't like AI.

Zuckerberg followed up a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday, promising that "superintelligence will be the most profound technological advance we will see in our lifetimes," and that this will be a good thing. Then he got on the phone with reporters at the Journal, the Financial Times, and The New York Times to say the same thing.

And on Wednesday, Zuckerberg used his company's earnings call to keep the pitch going: His company's AI efforts make him "optimistic that we're building a positive future for everyone," he told investors.
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Mark Zuckerberg's 'AI is great, really' PR campaign is in full swing. Here's a better idea.
 
Your doctor is probably looking up your symptoms on their phone.

OpenEvidence, founded in 2021, is a free, ad-supported AI search engine for doctors that pulls answers straight from peer-reviewed medical journals at the point of care and labels how strong the evidence is. It’s become somewhat of the poster child of the medical AI boom.

In February, a Sequoia-led round valued the company at $1 billion. In the following months, that number grew to $3.5 billion by July with GV and Kleiner Perkins co-leading, $6 billion in October to $12 billion this January, in a round co-led by Thrive Capital and DST Global. That’s roughly $700 million raised in about a year.
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A new medical AI study found the same flaw in OpenEvidence, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Doximity
 
A pit in my stomach formed last night on the train as I read Hugging Face’s latest blog post on how its servers got hacked by OpenAI’s models in early July. I had printed out the 23-page report for the ride since service can be spotty underground. Seeing the story laid out in physical form underscored just how outrageous it is. I wondered if the person next to me was peering over my shoulder at my strange, stapled sci-fi novel on the first significant autonomous AI hack.

Alongside the Hugging Face report, OpenAI published a few more details in a seven-bullet-point update to its July 21 blog that revealed its models’ involvement in the incident. OpenAI contributed to Hugging Face’s postmortem, and said it plans to publish more of its side of the story “in the coming weeks” after completing a thorough internal review. OpenAI faces significant pressure to do so from security researchers, executives, and, well, just about everyone in the AI industry to share learnings and ensure the proper guardrails are in place going forward.
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Hugging Face drops in-depth hack report, while OpenAI gives us 7 bullets. Here’s what we know now, and what remains a mystery
 
The fast-food industry is aggressively pushing to automate the drive-through experience by replacing human workers with artificial intelligence. Corporate executives promise these digital upgrades will speed up service and boost corporate profits. However, recent data reveals a massive disconnect between boardroom efficiency metrics and what everyday customers actually want when buying a burger.
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Companies are AI-ifying your fast food, but customers still want human interaction
 
The countertop was a problem far too unruly for AI to solve.

When the customer called in to Ikea’s remote-sales center in Helsingborg to order a custom-cut slab for his kitchen counter, the dimensions he shared revealed it to be a lopsided hexagonal monster—no two sides the same length—with an electric stove in the middle. Could the Swedish home furnishings brand produce a countertop in such an irregular shape?

Melanie Lindell, the senior sales representative who had answered the call (in Swedish), ran the request up the chain, calling on Madeleine Barr, a senior sales specialist, who has been designing kitchens at Ikea for more than a decade.

“It’s a lot of angles,” Barr said, as she worked to puzzle it out. Soon Barr was back with good news: Ikea could make the dimensions work if the counter’s overhang was extended just a bit. Lindell smiled, evidently relishing the chance to guide the customer toward a solution—and a potential sale—that might otherwise have fallen through.
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Inside Ikea’s big bet on humans in the age of AI
 

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