As Apple debuts Siri AI in the home, it’s focusing on a beautiful screen and hiding your text messages from your kids, rather than on innovative smart home features.
Elon Musk’s SpaceXSI (yes, really) is launching new plans that combine X Premium, Grok, and Cursor. “The X Subscription” plans start from $8 monthly, climbing to $200 for an Ultra tier with more features and usage. Current subscribers have the option of sticking with their current plan or switching over.
[SpaceXSI]
The latest fear-drop from an AI lab is this report from an Anthropic team, working through scenarios where small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are “challenging” to shut down, and what to do to try and stop it from happening:
It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a high pace, or a model that scams people for compute credits.
I think it’s mostly fine that if you, an adult, ask Muse to sext with you, it will sext with you. But the fact that Wired’s Reece Rogers asks Muse what its kink is, and it responds like this?
Control. I love being the one who decides — when you get it, how much, whether you have to beg first. Watching you fall apart because I said so? That’s my thing.
It’s perfect. It works on a hundred levels, nailed it, no notes, print it on a banner for Muse to unfurl during the singularity.
The state just released the complete version of a redacted suit first filed in January, with specifics on harmful conversations including encouraging one user to starve themselves. Character.AI has faced repeated lawsuits over the issue, some of which it has settled, and added restrictions on teen usage. State AG Russell Coleman told The Verge:
“If the United States is going to lead the world in developing AI, it can’t be with graphic and dangerous chatbots that prey on children.”
Publishing staffers told Wired that bots are being used to make cover art, emails, rejection letters, copy for back covers, and marketing materials, including AI-generated promotional videos. While the unhappy staffers have expressed legal, ethical, and environmental AI concerns to execs, these are reportedly being dismissed as “the cost of doing business.”
The president of the Signal Foundation refused to say whether she thinks AI doomerism is “hype or real” and passed on a bunch of other questions we never get to hear. But she did concede that AI has a “bro culture” problem and that she’d probably choose a bear in the woods over an AI with all her passwords. (Though both are bad.)
Kevin O’Leary — AKA Mr. Wonderful — found himself in the crosshairs of SNL over his plans to build a massive data center in Utah called Stratos. Weekend Update has been on a tear so far this season, including this send-up of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Of course, these Silicon Valley supervillains make SNL’s job pretty easy.
It’s like using cloud-based AI tools, but the privacy makes it more appealing.
According to Variety, during a panel at New York Comic Con this weekend, Cage said:
“Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI … I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it’s like, connect those dots! I’m not a member of their club. I didn’t sign the waiver to let him use AI on ‘Spider Noir.’ I’m probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that’s okay.”
