Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into both Meta AI Studio and Character.AI for “potentially engaging in deceptive trade practices and misleadingly marketing themselves as mental health tools,” according to a press release issued Monday. “In today’s digital age, we must continue to fight to protect Texas kids from deceptive and exploitative…
xAI’s website for its Grok chatbot is exposing the system prompts for several of its AI personas, including a “crazy conspiracist” that seems designed to handhold a user into beliefs that “a secret global cabal” controls the world. TechCrunch has confirmed the system prompt exposure, first reported on by 404 Media. They include instructions for…
AI startup Perplexity is augmenting its Finance dashboard with live transcriptions of Indian public companies’ quarterly earnings calls, as well as a calendar to show schedules for post-results conference calls. Alongside surfacing news about the markets, Perplexity’s Finance dashboard shows market summaries, stock exchange charts, and top performing stocks. The dashboard also lets users create…
Workday, one of the largest providers of human resources technology, has confirmed a data breach that allowed hackers to steal personal information from one of its third-party customer relationship databases. In a blog post published late Friday, the HR technology giant said the hackers stole an unspecified amount of personal information from the database, which…
OpenAI announced late Friday that it’s updating its latest model to be “warmer and friendlier.” The company recently launched the much-anticipated GPT-5 in a process that CEO Sam Altman admitted was “a little more bumpy than we’d hoped for,” with some users complaining that they preferred the previous model, GPT-4o. OpenAI is trying to address…
Netflix could soon lose the creative team behind one of its biggest hits. Earlier this week, Variety and other Hollywood publications reported that Matt and Ross Duffer, the brothers who created “Stranger Things” (and wrote and directed many episodes), were in talks to sign an exclusive deal with Paramount (now under the ownership of David…
While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an “AI-first company,” he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he “did not give enough context.” “Internally, this was not controversial,” von Ahn told The New York Times. “Externally, as a publicly traded company…
A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into left-leaning advocacy group Media Matters. Back in 2023, Media Matters published research showing ads from major companies had appeared alongside antisemitic and other offensive content on Elon Musk-owned X. When major advertisers subsequently pulled back from the platform, X sued…
Do A.I. chatbots packaged inside cute-looking plushies offer a viable alternative to screen time for kids? That’s how the companies selling these A.I.-powered kiddie companions are marketing them, but The New York Times’ Amanda Hess has some reservations. She recounts a demonstration in which Grem, one of the offerings from startup Curio, tried to bond…
Anthropic has announced new capabilities that will allow some of its newest, largest models to end conversations in what the company describes as “rare, extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions.” Strikingly, Anthropic says it’s doing this not to protect the human user, but rather the AI model itself. To be clear, the…
