Category: Wired

Federal employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were greeted this morning by television sets at the agency’s Washington, DC, headquarters playing what appears to be an AI-generated video of President Donald Trump kissing the feet of Elon Musk, accompanied by the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING.” A person at HUD

The basic machine for grinding a steel ball bearing has been the same since around 1900, but manufacturers have been steadily automating everything around it. Today, the process is driven by a conveyor belt, and, for the most part, it’s automatic. The most urgent task for humans is to figure out when things are going

The story of the infamous Humane Ai Pin is coming to an end. This week, the company announced that HP—known for its computers and printers that always seem to need a refill—will acquire several assets from Humane in a $116 million deal expected to close at the end of the month. HP will get more

Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal —a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role—I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. In 1920—well before Alan Turing devised his famous test and decades before the 1956

I know this is unconventional, but I’m going to start by telling you the ending. Or at least, the ending as it stands today. Most of the people involved in this story wind up either dead, maimed, spending months in a mental hospital, languishing in jail, or gone underground. It’s a tragedy from almost any

Sweeping layoffs architected by the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency may be coming as soon as this week at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a nonregulatory agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products to quantum computers are safe and reliable. According to several current

Are there generative AI tools I can use that are perhaps slightly more ethical than others? —Better Choices No, I don’t think any one generative AI tool from the major players is more ethical than any other. Here’s why. For me, the ethics of generative AI use can be broken down to issues with how

Breeze Liu’s online nightmare started with a phone call. In April 2020, a college classmate rang Liu, then 24 years old, to tell her an explicit video of her was on PornHub under the title “Korean teen.” Liu alleges it had been filmed without her permission when she was 17 and uploaded without her consent.

Microsoft is wading deeper into generative artificial intelligence for gaming with Muse, a new AI model announced today. The model, which was trained on Ninja Theory’s multiplayer game Bleeding Edge, can help Xbox game developers build parts of games, Microsoft says. Muse can understand the physics and 3D environment inside a game and generate visuals

One of the first things Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did was push for extreme cuts to the United States’ primary international aid agency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Musk insisted that USAID was too wasteful and corrupt to exist, but by effectively dismantling the agency, DOGE ended projects like