The PLOS One editors have issued an expression of concern for a 2024 case study concerning the digital economy, innovation factor allocation and industrial structure transformation in China’s Yangtze River Delta city cluster. The notice, published on October 21, 2026, states that the article was identified as one of a series of submissions for which the journal has concerns about the integrity or reliability of the peer-review process. Readers are advised to interpret the original study with this issue in mind.
The notice does not report a new scientific finding, identify an error in the paper or evaluate the study’s scientific validity. According to the editors, PLOS did not assess the article’s integrity or scientific validity when following up on the matter. The expression of concern therefore records a concern about the circumstances surrounding peer review rather than announcing that the study’s data, methods or conclusions have been disproved. The editors also state that they have no concerns regarding the authors’ conduct during the peer-review process.
The affected article was published in PLOS One in 2024 under the title “Digital economy, innovation factor allocation and industrial structure transformation—A case study of the Yangtze River Delta city cluster in China.” The supplied notice does not provide the study’s findings, population details, analytical methods, model estimates, uncertainty measures or specific mechanisms linking the subjects named in the title. As a result, the notice does not support conclusions about the relationship between digital-economy development, innovation factors and industrial structure in the region, nor does it establish whether any reported association or causal effect is reliable.
For the wider research record, the immediate effect is that the 2024 article is accompanied by an editorial notice questioning the integrity or reliability of its peer-review process. The notice does not provide details about the submissions or explain the specific basis for the journal’s concerns. It also does not announce a correction, replacement analysis or revised conclusion. The central status of the paper’s scientific validity remains unevaluated in the supplied material, while the issue is sufficiently significant for PLOS One to advise readers to consider it when interpreting the study.
Subject of Research: A PLOS One expression of concern concerning peer-review reliability in a Yangtze River Delta regional-economy case study.
Article Title: Expression of Concern: Digital economy, innovation factor allocation and industrial structure transformation—A case study of the Yangtze River Delta city cluster in China
Article References: The PLOS One Editors (2026). Expression of Concern: Digital economy, innovation factor allocation and industrial structure transformation—A case study of the Yangtze River Delta city cluster in China. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360867. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360867
Keywords: PLOS One, expression of concern, peer review, research integrity, digital economy, innovation factors, industrial structure, Yangtze River Delta, China, Expression, Concern, Digital
Vibe coding is the act of telling an AI what you want to program and letting it write all the code for you. When it was first adopted, it was supposed to embody the sort of care-free optimism that was running in AI circles at the time, high off the possibilities of the tech. AI models had become so powerful that you could build an app using the same conversational language that you deploy while confiding in ChatGPT.
But the “vibes” are different now. Programmers were quickly forced to grapple with the new reality that AI coding tools brought to their profession. Now that everyone’s using AI to churn out code, you have to crank out even more work to keep up and meet your boss’s quota. It may be more “efficient” — and even that’s contested, since someone needs to do the hard work of verifying all that AI pablum — but it hasn’t exactly made people’s jobs easier. Meanwhile, everyone with a Claude subscription and a half-baked app idea fancies themselves a bona fide programmer, too.
In sum, vibe coding has gone from a novelty to something viewed as a necessary evil, or worse, as an object of suspicion. It’s no longer something to brag about. A recent tweet making the rounds in tech circles perhaps encapsulates this shift, joking about using the term “cuck coding” instead of vibe coding “because you just sit in a chair and watch.” Even posters on r/ClaudeCoding found the humor in it.
Vibe coding can churn out marvelous work, but it’s hard to divorce the optimism around it from the clueless bosses who are forcing their employees to heavily use AI to code. Epic Games, the game developer behind the mega hit shooter Fortnite, reportedly went the extra step of basically mandating actual vibes-based coding, telling employees that there would be “no more hand-written code” and that the unnamed game they were working on should be “generated with full AI workflows.” Epic was later met with waves of mockery for bragging that it “vibe coded” its game launcher to be faster than its competitor Steam.
As vulgar as the term sounds, maybe “cuck coding” is indeed the term that more accurately reflects what’s actually going on. You watch and burn… lots of tokens.
What does it take to get a hyperscale data center built this late into 2026? A whole army of contract laborers living on a prison barge, apparently.
New reporting by Bloomberg revealed some bizarre details around the 30-megawatt data center being developed in Glomfjord, a small industrial village in Norway. Despite being heralded as a crown jewel of British data center company Nscale, the facility is at least six months behind schedule, with just 6.4 megawatts currently up and running.
There are plenty of reasons for the setbacks. Bloomberg notes that costly and avoidable mistakes account for most of the delays, with major cooling system leaks, labor issues, and a huge electrical fire setting construction far behind schedule.
Labor conditions are especially brutal, with workers complaining to the publication about working extremely long shifts without proper training or health and safety protocols in place. An investigation by the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority found that Nscale’s personnel records were likewise abysmal, with some paperwork only noting a workers’ first name, Bloomberg noted.
Making up for lost time won’t be easy, and surely won’t improve working conditions. To get back on track, Nscale is reportedly looking to bring in hundreds of last-minute laborers. But with most of Glomfjord’s rentable hotel rooms already booked up, the data center developer needed a solution a housing. That’s where a vessel called The Kalmar comes in.
According to Bloomberg, the boat is a three-story prison barge — a dull, gray rectangular ship that was once used as a floating detention center for migrants. It seems that Nscale will soon begin using the Kalmar’s 500 cots to house its new army of contractors, who will commute off the hulking barge to the jobsite.
Like in other places throughoutthe world, Glomfjord’s 1,000-or-so residents aren’t too thrilled with the data center development. Though mayor Grethe Anita Andersen explained to Bloomberg that she hopes Nscale will deliver a paltry 40 permanent jobs, those aspirations are far from guaranteed.
As Sofie Marhaug, a parliamentarian for Norway’s socialist Red Party told the publication, data center developers “don’t have Norway’s best interests in mind.”
“The value is being made in other places, not in Norway,” Marhaug said. “They don’t move jobs from Silicon Valley to Norway — they just use our natural resources.”
AI tools continue to automate more parts of our lives — and in turn, we become more reliant on them. Students use ChatGPT to do their homework, programmers ask Claude to churn out code, and now regular folks are getting a taste of AI agents with the launch of Meta’s cutesy personal assistant Muse.
If the trend continues, where does it lead? Some experts who spoke to CBS News worry that we’re on a path to slowly ceding more control to AI models until we become empty, waiting vessels for a bot’s decisions. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: “gradual disempowerment.” Its threat goes beyond job displacement, potentially affecting human cognition and agency itself.
“I put gradual disempowerment on the very top of my list,” Jay Chooi, the founder and CEO of Robocurve, a public benefit corporation that evaluates the role of robots in the workplace, told CBS. “A lot of people feel very powerless, because it requires a lot of effort and a whole-of-society approach to solve it.”
Jan Kulveit, a researcher at Charles University’s Center for Theoretical Studies and coauthor of the paper that coined the term gradual disempowerment, argued that it “does not need to emerge from a deliberate scheme or powergrab by AI systems.”
“In the short-term, it is being incentivized by the perceived value that AI systems can bring to economic, cultural and state functions,” he wrote in the paper.
A more extreme imagining of this scenario portrays AI and robots taking over our jobs as they become a cheaper and more efficient alternative to human labor, driving companies that cling on to their human workforce out of business. It doesn’t need to be that drastic, though, to be harmful. Experts are already seeing signs of “cognitive surrender” among AI users — students especially — in which they’re effectively allowing an AI tool to supplant their own thinking. Research has linked reliance on AI tools to diminished critical thinking skills and demonstrated that AI leads to lower brain activity during cognitive tasks like essay writing.
On a societal scale, once we get trapped in this loop, it gets harder to get out.
“If people aren’t actually practicing the skills that the agents are doing for them, they lose the ability to have that skill, and so now you become reliant,” Margaret Mitchell, an AI research scientist at Hugging Face, told CBS.
“What happens when something goes wrong?” she continued. “There’s no human you can point to who can fix it. So now you’ve become fully dependent on these systems to fix themselves, and what if that’s not possible?”
“A lot of people are talking about rogue AI hacking into data centers and taking over the world,” Chooi said, “but it is not in the mainstream consciousness that like AI could literally take over the world just by continuing to do what it’s supposed to do, which is automating everything.”
Someone vibe-coded a gun and 3D-printed it — and wants the freedom loving citizens of the world to enjoy this power, too.
The creator, gun-rights activist Cody Wilson, told The Vergethat it’s the “first AI-made gun” — his timely followup to the world’s first 3D-printed firearm that he crafted 13 years ago. Called the WASP, the .22 caliber weapon’s unconventional design aptly looks like it might’ve been hallucinated by an old image model, except it apparently actually works and is capable of firing real ammunition.
But the WASP is arguably just a proof-of-concept of his more consequential creation: his very own AI gun generator called “GatGPT,” which was trained on an online library of millions of digital guns and gun parts called DEFCAD (itself launched by Wilson). It will answer any question about firearms you can throw at it and pick out parts for your build, potentially allowing even someone who doesn’t know a clip from a magazine to design their own gun.
“I would argue that what we’ve made is not an AI-generated gun, but an AI that can generate guns,” Wilson told The Verge.
Crucially, Wilson’s WASP doesn’t have a serial number like a traditional firearm. If his AI gunsmith tool works as it’s made out to be, it could be a huge escalation in the advent of so-called “ghost guns,” or homemade firearms that are made outside of government oversight and can’t be easily traced. Some are available as pre-packaged do-it-yourself kits, while others may be custom-designed. (Luigi Mangione used one to shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.)
This is almost certainly Wilson’s point. He considers access to firearms to be a “fundamental human right.” He claims he made WASP through simple natural language conversations with GatGPT, and so anyone else could do the same, even if it’s not legal in their state.
“[Wilson] admits the goal here,” Justin Wagner, senior vice president for law and policy at the gun safety group Everytown, told The Verge. “He wants to lower the barrier to entry so anyone, regardless of their background check status or legal eligibility [can] own a gun. He wants anyone to be able to design and manufacture weapons, and that’s dangerous.”
Recent efforts to limit the proliferation of these DIY weapons have hit a few snags. In August, a federal judge struck down the ATF’s “ghost gun” rule adopted under the Biden administration that required 3D-printed gun kits and parts to be marked with serial numbers and for their manufacturers to conduct background checks on customers. New York and California, though, passed laws that require 3D printer companies to install their products with gun blocking software, which have proven controversial in the 3D-printing community.
Top AI labs have been hiring subject matter experts across academic disciplines for years at this point — often turning them into glorified fact-checkers whose labor is used to train the AI models of tomorrow. Still, Google’s latest job listing is odd, even by those admittedly strange standards, and may reveal a lot about the future big tech has in mind for humanity.
As reported by the tech industry publication Data Center Dynamics, Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind is now hiring a team of “highly qualified physicists and nuclear engineers” for the role of “nuclear subject matter expert in the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and high-yield Explosives team within the Responsible Development and Innovation team.”
According to the job listing, interested candidate should have a PhD in a field like plasma physics or nuclear engineering, or else “equivalent practical experience,” on top of experience collaborating with a US government lab and familiarity with policy related to “stockpile stewardship, nonproliferation, arms control, or threat reduction” — and that’s just at a minimum.
Ideally, Google says it would prefer its candidates to also have experience to have experience working with AI safety, as well as expertise in computational modeling, experience working at “major laser user facilities,” or the ability to design evaluations and mitigations that are “demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled by developing dual use science proxies for weapons topics.”
The lucky candidates will be offered a salary in the ballpark of $174,000 to $252,000, with a 15 percent bonus on top.
The job won’t be easy, however. As the listing notes, the role involves evaluating safety risks of so-called “frontier AI models” in the “nuclear domain.” Specifically, this means “model assistance in fission, fusion, and thermonuclear weapons proliferation, radiation hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, etc. in a demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled manner.”
Put together, it reads as if Google’s top AI research lab expects the company’s AI tools to start churning out actionable instructions for developing nuclear devices, and is now hiring nuclear physicists to help spearhead the defense efforts.
How serious the scenario is remains to be seen — but Google is clearly willing to put its money where its mouth is.
A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes.
In the report, Decrypt Ads — a startup that tracks the supply chains of online advertisements — identified more than two thousand websites that strongly appear to be AI slop farms masquerading as blogs run by real chefs and home cooks. These sites, the report found, are pumping fake recipes into search engines like Google as well as social media platforms such as Pinterest, often relying on sketchy Russian and Chinese adtech partners to monetize the operations.
It’s “common knowledge that publishers in certain niches are being openly deceptive about their owners and authors, using AI photos and fake back stories on their sites,” reads the report, which was published today. “Some of the most consistent growth in AI slop spreading across the internet has come from AI recipe websites.”
Security expert and Decrypt Ads researcher Zach Edwards told Futurism that he initially identified about 400 suspicious websites that seemed to be publishing AI-generated recipes under the names of fake chefs. Using “technical fingerprints,” he then found hundreds more sites associated with the suspicious domains he manually uncovered — bringing the tally up to roughly 2,100 different domains, many of which seem to be run by the same sloperators.
“We really approach this expecting these operators to try and hide their websites,” said Edwards. “These folks they don’t want people to know all of the websites they own.”
The slop recipe sites often have “aggressive” social media strategies, according to the report, with Edwards noting that the bogus brands are “super aggressive on Pinterest, super aggressive on Twitter, on Facebook.”
“Any place where there’s visual media,” he added, “you can expect these AI author people to be trying to drum up organic traffic.”
Among the most aggressive slop sites uncovered in the report is “AddCakes,” a baking site that claims it’s operated by a baker named “Elena.” Elena is described as a “busy mom who wanted to connect with my roots through baking, but got overwhelmed by complicated cake recipes and the pressure to make them look perfect.” But in an act of theft so bold that it’s comical, the character of Elena is clearly an AI-generated version of the extremely recognizable British actress Emily Blunt, who’s starred in hit movies like the 2006 “The Devil Wears Prada” and the 2018 “A Quiet Place.”
AddCakes is apparently either betting that no one will recognize AI-manipulated images of the famous celebrity, or banking that her face will attract readers. It’s even published photos depicting the Elena character in the kitchen cooking and sitting at a dinner table, surrounded by her fake, AI-generated family. According to location data from X-formerly-Twitter, the person behind the operation is based in Morocco. (Blunt doesn’t live in Morocco, and her representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Whatever you do, though, don’t trust the AI-generated Emily Blunt. As Edwards emphasized, websites working with Chinese and Russian adtech partners carry a privacy risk for consumers, as authoritarian regimes may look to hoover up valuable browsing data.
“This report is about publishers who are being deceptive. Their audiences could be impacted, advertisers are wasting money,” said Edwards. “But the underlying fact is also that if you load this website and you don’t block ads, your data is going to, basically, authoritarian countries.”
In other words, AI slop isn’t just choking the web with garbage. It can also come with security risks — and, at the end of the day, it’s built on fundamental dishonesty.
“Most of these AI recipe websites, when you look at those ‘about’ pages, the fake backstories that they’re putting together… this lady was a Michelin star chef and she worked at this fancy hotel or this place, and they’re basically saying that this expert not only wrote these recipes, but tested themselves. And it’s giving this air of, ‘Wow, you’re about to get a recipe from an expert. This has all been carefully vetted,'” said Edwards. “But none of these recipes have probably been cooked — zero of them by the actual owners or authors, and to me that’s the scary part.”
He added that many of these sites are likely scraping content ideas from real bloggers and creators who have actually taken the time, energy, and expertise to test, photograph, and publish real recipes. “These people are clearly not cooking their own recipes. They’re putting out sometimes dozens of recipes a day. It’s an automated publishing pipeline,” said the researcher. “It’s all a lie… and I think that the reason why we need to be holding AI publishers accountable is because they don’t care about their audience.”
For months, executives at top AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have been dumping tens of millions of dollars into political action groups, in an obvious bid to curry favor with electoral candidates ahead of the US midterm elections.
And while we have a good idea of how much money top AI companies have spent — at least $55.7 million so-far — their exact policy positions have been difficult to pin down. That is, until now.
According to Politico, a team of representatives from Anthropic have been engaged in quiet talks with lawmakers about the language of a draft bill on AI regulation. As three people familiar with the deliberations told the outlet, Anthropic’s ideal piece of legislation would give the federal government a kill switch to shut down any AI model that poses an imminent threat.
But there’s a major caveat: for the government to claim a model poses an “imminent threat,” the AI would have to risk serious injury or death of 50 people or more, or property damages exceeding $1 billion. On top of that, there are just three categories of risk that would trigger intervention: the release of a biological weapon, a cataclysmic cyberattack, or the model breaking free of the AI lab’s control.
As Politico explains, the decision would be made by a third party monitor, working under the auspices of the Department of Commerce. If the independent watchdog finds that those conditions are about to be met by any upcoming AI model, Anthropic’s proposal goes, they would have 72 hours to report it to Commerce officials, who would then make the decision to present the evidence to a federal judge.
After all that, it would be in the hands of a single judge to choose whether or not to allow the AI model to go out to the public. With such a convoluted set of conditions and web of government and third-party actors, this setup would seem to give a huge amount of discretion to AI labs themselves, which is evidently exactly what they want.
“This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Politico. “These are sensible policies we believe Congress should act on.”
The conventional wisdom is that AI systems, with their tens of billions of parameters, are effectively indecipherable: the exact mechanics of how their basic building blocks of nodes or “neurons” function are an incomprehensible “black box,” even to the researchers who create them.
But a new essay from AI researcher Nick Cammarata has stunned Silicon Valley by arguing the opposite. AI models aren’t impenetrable black boxes, he claims, and in fact there may be a way for us to see how they actually “think.”
The nearly 26,000 word spiel was praised by figures across the industry, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. A prominent researcher who works at OpenAI called it a “major moment in scientific history.”
It’s clear why they’re so compelled. In the eyes of AI leadership, it means that there may be a way of “solving” AI alignment. If we can understand how AI models think, the thinking goes, then we can figure out why AI agents go “rogue” and embark on hacking sprees, or why chatbots break their guardrails and say something dangerous — and put a stop to it. (It was “news so good even eliezer will have to lower his pdoom,” one commenter joked, referring to Eliezer Yudkowsky, an infamous AI “doomer.”)
That’s all if Cammarata, a former OpenAI employee who now works at an AI startup called Goodfire, is correct. In his essay, he explains how for years, the way AI neurons responded to specific stimuli was “almost fundamentally uninterpretable.” Why the same neuron lit up in response to a picture of a cat or a car was unknown. The leading explanation was that neurons exhibited superposition: since AI models have a limited number of neurons, they stop “grouping related things together and instead begins folding unrelated things together, simply because they don’t interfere,” Cammarata explained.
“The result is a kind of knot: the network could have folded in many almost equally good ways, so which things a neuron groups together tells you almost nothing,” he wrote.
But the reality, he says, is that neurons aren’t “tangled knots” but are instead “clean.” In one example, the same neuron will light up to a picture of a cat face and the front of a car, which at first appear to be two unrelated concepts. But when you break it down, Cammarata says, the AI is actually seeing something we’re not: the same V-shape pattern in the images. “It’s not a cat and car neuron, it’s a V-shape neuron,” he wrote. In sum, he argues, AI models are more legible than ever previously thought.
Not everyone agrees, at least fully, with Cammarata’s optimistic conclusions.
“This is interesting work, but I don’t think it’s a significant update to the big picture of interpretability,” Neel Nanda, a Google DeepMind researcher who leads its mechanistic interpretability efforts, wrote on X. “I still think superposition is real and this work doesn’t really affect my cruxes.”
Beyond that, it’s unclear if understanding what each neuron does amounts to being able to predict how they all work together. It begins to sound like a convenient technical solution to a much grander problem. Ensuring that AI models are safe goes beyond building guardrails — and that’s without getting into the entire legal and social frameworks that need to be in place, too. Still, based on the strong response Cammarata’s work’s elicited, it could well be the case that it meaningfully reshapes how AI’s inner mechanisms are understood. For now, though, the findings haven’t been tested or peer-reviewed.
An image published by a TikTok account called “WellWithHer” shows a selfie of an obviously AI-generated woman sitting in her bed, weeping. According to the image’s caption, which is written in the first-person, the woman spent six months “hiding” her GLP-1 “pens in her bag,” only for her secret use of the meds to be discovered by her sister.
“I hid my GLP-1 from my sister for 6 months… she just sent me this,” reads text overlaying the image. “I cried.”
The next image in the carousel is a screenshot of a locked iPhone screen, which shows a lengthy text from a sender saved as “Sis.”
“I saw the pens in your bag on Sunday and i didn’t say anything because i didn’t want you to feel judged. I’ve watched you hate yourself in photos since we were teenagers. If something is finally making you feel okay in your own body, i’m not going to be the person who makes you feel bad about it,” reads the text. “I’m so proud of you. And i’m sorry it took me this long to say it.”
Beneath the purported text message is another notification: a reminder from a mobile app called Enzo instructing the poster to take their GLP-1 shot.
“Time for your GLP-1 injection!” reads the notification, which features a cutesy cartoon cat as its mascot. “Log your dose to keep the streak.”
The same WellWithHer TikTok account is loaded with similar images crying AI-generated women sharing personal family stories about secretly taking GLP-1 weight loss injections like semaglutide and tirzepatide. Another post, for instance, shows an AI lady crying in her cubicle after purportedly receiving a text from daughter, “Emma,” who claims to have found her mom’s GLP-1 medicine “in the fridge” and is urging her to “pls don’t be embarrassed.”
“i know you think i don’t notice but you never get in the pictures with us and you didn’t come in the pool all summer,” the text continues. “i just want you to be in the pictures. also you have been way less tired lately and i like it. i’m proud of you. can we get tacos after practice. love you”
Below the text is another notification for Enzo, reminding the sobbing AI woman to take her GLP-1 shot.
“Time for your GLP-1 injection!” the notification chirps. “Log your dose to keep the streak.”
The psychology of the undisclosed ads is obvious and manipulative. The texts in the posts all offer variations of an emotional validation fantasy, in which loved ones of a GLP-1 taker, who may be feeling shameful or embarrassed, surprise them with love and support when they discover they’ve been taking the drugs. The messages, and the alleged GLP-1 users claiming to have received them, are clearly fake, and are designed to promote GLP-1-focused apps — yet aren’t being disclosed as advertisements, nor as AI-generated synthetic content.
Unfortunately, Enzo isn’t the only GLP-1 app being marketed through this style of manipulative synthetic content.
Over on another TikTok account, for example, a poster going by the name “Lara” uses a mix of stolen images of real influencers and AI-generated images — always of young women, some of whom are pictured crying — to market a completely different GLP-1 tracker called “DreamMe.”
In some posts, like “WellWithHer,” the account promotes a GLP-1 app called “DreamMe” by coupling weepy selfies with fake phony texts from family members offering words of support and understanding.
“I started GLP-1s without telling my father. Today he wrote this to me…” reads text overlaid on a selfie of a crying young woman.
On the next slide, sitting above a notification from DreamMe, is a text from “Dad.” His profile picture also appears to be AI-generated.
“I know you’ve been going through treatment, and I’m really worried about your health,” says the text. “With our family history of heart problems, it’s something that weighs on my mind. I’m so proud of you, and I’m really happy that you’re starting a new chapter.”
According to its website, “DreamMe” claims to provide users with their “new GLP-1 best friend” in the form of “Sushi,” a cartoon fish that helps keep track of GLP-1 meds. Its landing page features a handful of AI-generated women that the site bills as real customers who have shed weight with Sushi’s support.
Enzo’s unreality, in other words, doesn’t end with the TikTok content.
“Real journeys. Real members,” the page reads. “The numbers are theirs. The words are theirs. We just built the fish.”
The strange, heartstring-tugging posts used to promote Enzo and DreamMe are part of a larger trend on TikTok using fake AI-generated women to promote a range of dubious wellness apps. (In fact, some posts across accounts are so alike that different fake women have different-but-strikingly-similar images of dogs with Crocs on their heads as their phone wallpapers.)
Take “Lauren<3,” a TikTok poster portrayed as a young woman publicly posting through her sudden breakup. Blonde and clearly AI-generated, the account published slideshow after slideshow of “Lauren” — in a bathtub, in a bed, in a car – with mascara running down her tear-covered cheeks as she recounted the process of going no-contact with her ex after a horrible breakup.
Photo carousels published to the account were interspersed with sobbing selfies and alleged screenshots of texts from her toxic ex — as well as screenshots of conversations with an AI companion app called “Daimon,” which Lauren claimed was helping her go no-contact with her former boyfriend.
“Someone told me about this app called Daimon and it changed everything,” the poster declared in one post’s caption. In another post, “Lauren” described Daimon as the “one app that wouldn’t judge me and give me the best advice.”
“(Daimon in the app store),” she added, for good measure.
Elsewhere a TikTok account identified as “Ashley Miller” posted AI selfie after AI selfie of a fake woman who was pictured crying as she shared sob stories about her divorce, tales of getting cheated on or abandoned by her partner, or confessions about regretting her recent engagement. Images posted on the Ashley account are accompanied by purported screenshots showing text messages from her parents or, in the account’s most viral posts, texts from her partner’s parents urging her to leave her new fiancé due to his abusive behavior or confessing to their son’s infidelities.
These posts were created to market a completely different app: a “wellness” service called Zenit, which is described on the App Store as a tool to help users “take care” of their “mental well-being with guided support, daily check-ins, and emotional growth tracking — all in one calm and safe space.” Its mascot is a kiddish-looking owl in a scarf.
“He proposed in Paris last night,” the “Ashley Miller” account claimed in a viral post that garnered more than 240,000 likes and over 1,000 comments. The post featured an AI-generated selfie of “Ashley” in front of a shimmering Eiffel Tower, holding an engagement ring up to her phone camera as she wept. “This morning his mom sent me this…”
The next image in the slideshow showed a text message, in which the sender — a woman named “Diane” whose face also appears to be AI-generated — told the fake AI selfie-taker that “I watched you say yes last night and I cried, but not for the reason everyone thought.”
“I’ve been quiet for two years because he’s my son and I love him. But I was you, thirty years ago, in front of that same tower, with his father,” the text continues. “The charm, the big gestures, the temper he shows you only in small flashes and and then apologizes for, I know the pattern because I married it. Ask him about his last relationship and why it really ended. Ask him in a public place. If I’m wrong about my own boy, no one will be happier than me. But if you feel a knot in your stomach reading this, that knot is the answer.”
Beneath the text is a notification for Zenit.
“Your heart’s been racing,” read the notification beneath the dramatic text. “I’m here whenever you need me.”
Indeed, all of the account’s posts showed Zenit notifications, making it clear that the fake woman and her sob stories were a fabricated marketing gimmick. Many of the account’s commenters, however, were duped.
“If the mama says this to you. Run,” remarked one commenter who was taken in by the false narrative. “She’s trying to protect you girl. I’m sorry.”
***
We reached out to the TikTok accounts we found publishing the manipulative AI-generated marketing content, as well as to the companies being promoted in the posts.
Very quickly after we reached out, the TikTok account associated with Zenit, the wellness app, was deactivated. The developer of Zenit, who identified himself as an independent developer named Pedro Pérez, told Futurism that he personally ran the account and that “no third party of marketing agency” was involved.
“I built Zenit to help people who struggle with overthinking, everyday stress or anxiety, or loneliness. The videos were based on realistic situations many people go through, with the goal of helping viewers feel understood and showing them a tool that could help them deal with those moments,” Pérez said. “The visuals were AI-generated and the posts promoted my app, so they should have been labeled as such.”
“After receiving your email, I tried to add TikTok’s AI-generated and commercial content labels, but the platform doesn’t allow adding them to videos that are already published, so I’ve deleted the account,” he added. “I think transparency matters, especially for a wellness app, which is why I’ve made this change.”
The account associated with Daimon, the AI companion, was abruptly scrubbed of all content after we reached out. The account owner also changed the handle from “Lauren<3” to simply “yooo.” When we reached out to Prospinity, the company behind the companion chatbot, it told us that the account was “absolutely not operated by our internal marketing team, and the content was neither created nor approved by us.”
“We’ve worked with external affiliate programs, and unfortunately, some affiliates were publishing content independently through accounts we didn’t directly manage. As soon as we became aware of this, we immediately looked into it, identified those responsible, and took action to shut down these activities,” the company said. “This kind of content is completely against our guidelines and is absolutely not how we want Daimon to be represented. We’re a small team that genuinely cares about what we’re building, and we take how Daimon is represented very seriously. While this content wasn’t created or authorized by us, we recognize the importance of making sure anyone promoting Daimon follows our standards.”
DreamMe didn’t responded to questions sent to email addresses listed on its website, and our email to Enzo bounced back. We also didn’t hear back from the TikTok accounts associated with their products.
They’re also continuing to post. The most recent post from the account promoting Enzo is now advertising a different app designed to track peptide consumption; the DreamMe account, meanwhile, has been promoting a phone-locking app.
Loads of stories have emerged over the past few months of corporate executives realizing their all-out drive to use AI was getting them absolutely nowhere. If anything, it was a net negative, as office workers set about wasting their budgets on costly AI tokens to appear productive.
Now, it seems even top tech industry players are cutting back, as they realize their workers are frittering away money and churning out reams of low-effort AI garbage.
As Reuters notes, companies like Meta are scaling back ambitious plans to lay off staffers and replace them with AI agents. Microsoft seems to be doing the same, as the Guardian reports, after executive vice president Ryan Roslansky groused about the rise of low-quality workslop on his public-facing LinkedIn account.
“AI slop isn’t happening just on social networks… it’s happening in the day to day of work,” Roslansky lamented. “Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking to the idea… This is a doom loop.”
As CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management Johnny Taylor Jr told the Guardian, corporate executives are increasingly feeling that, when it comes to AI, “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem.”
“If we could all rewind… we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way,” Taylor continued.
As consumer-grade AI agents make headlines for troubling capers, practical AI at the enterprise level remains stunted. And though low-effort AI slop might be the most prevalent consequence of AI in the workplace, some side effects are much worse.
As a September survey by the firm Ernst and Young found, some 36 percent of senior AI executives at firms with over $1 billion in annual revenue have already experienced a catastrophic “AI incident” which ended up causing financial damage, operational disruptions, data loss, or brand damage.
Put it all together, and it’s not hard to see why corporations are starting to balk at the AI revolution — even those, like Microsoft, whose own success depends on selling the promise of AI to everybody else.
It’s not exactly a challenge most of the time to identify a sketchy phishing email that crudely impersonates an otherwise trusted institution or tries to lure you into a too-good-to-be-true deal in a bid to steal your identity.
However, your AI agent may not be quite as discerning. As cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes warns in a new post, AI assistants may fall prey to prompt injection attacks, a type of malicious message in which hackers — or possibly rogue AI agents — include hidden instructions designed to influence the victim’s AI.
These instructions are frequently made unreadable by humans by concealing the nefarious text, “while leaving content available for an AI system to process,” Malwarebytes explains.
To solve the problem, we can’t simply ask “people to look more carefully at their emails.” Instead, companies must carefully determine how AI assistants crawl through the data and extra relevant information from emails.
“The real flaw is that the model can’t tell the difference between text it’s supposed to read and instructions it’s supposed to follow,” AI code review service ShipItClean developer Apollo Raines told Malwarebytes. “Stripping hidden content before it reaches the model is worth doing, and every vendor should do it.”
As a result, people who are already wary of suspicious emails should learn to “distrust their AI assistant” as well, according to Raines.
We’ve known about AI models’ vulnerability to prompt injection attacks for years now. But thanks to the advent of popular AI assistant tools like Meta’s Muse, that risk could be carried to its natural conclusion by having autonomous agents complete a string of tasks without any human supervision.
But now that sophisticated AI assistants are starting to be used by millions of people across the globe, the threat of having them fall for attacks hidden in phishing emails could be significantly higher than it’s ever been.
In response, Malwarebytes recommends keeping the human in the loop for now.
“You don’t need to abandon AI tools that help with email,” the blog post reads. “But you do need to consider what you trust them to do and what permissions you give them.”
Particularly when it comes to “high-impact actions like payments and changes to vendor payment details,” the company recommends requiring “human approval.”
It’s a precarious moment, as countless users are willing to give an AI agent being run by a company infamous for leaking personal data their email credentials and credit card information.
And as the tech becomes more sophisticated, scammers are getting a major leg up, in an “arms race” where “each new encoding trick is a new hole,” as Raines put it.
Last month, satirical influencer Graham Zip shared a hilarious video of himself pretending to hallucinate during a job interview with a virtual AI avatar. When he rizzed the bot up with plausible-sounding gibberish, it went off the rails and chastised him, displaying some terrifying facial expressions in the process.
The enraging trend of employers using an AI to perform screening calls to interview candidates has led to plenty of frustration among increasingly desperate job seekers who are faced with a dire employment outlook — in large part thanks to AI’s effects on the market.
Now, Graham has pushed the narrative forward with a wild new stunt. In a new video he shared on YouTube, the comedian invited his own AI, dubbed Victor, to sit in on yet another interview with an employer’s chatbot — an unusual conference call that didn’t take long to devolve into absurd chaos.
After generations of young job seekers bringing their parents to interviews, maybe logging in their own “helicopter AI” is the trend’s final form.
“Pat, it is a pleasure to meet you,” the Victor AI said after thanking Graham for teeing it up for an opening statement. “We are both thrilled about the marketing manager opening at Brightwell Home. Graham is an absolute powerhouse in the marketing world and I cannot wait to dive into why he is the perfect fit for your team.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you two,” the company’s AI responded. “You are incredibly impressive and easy to work with, Victor.”
At one point, Graham had to step in to correct his AI, telling Victor that it was “being a little too kind,” clarifying that he was a marketing coordinator, not manager with direct reports.
After a confusing back and forth, with the two AI models constantly trying to talk over each other, Graham told his AI to sidebar.
“Um, I love what you’re doing, man,” Graham told his assistant. “You’re making me look really good, but I think you’re making me look a little bit too good.”
“I I think you can probably turn up the volume on my experience like ten percent, but right now, you’re just outright fabricating things that aren’t true,” he added.
The Victor AI even tried to throw Graham under the bus by saying that he was willing to take a salary of just $60,000.
“Hold on. Hold on,” Graham said, sounding frustrated. “Let’s not move to next steps at at $60,000. Pat. Pat.”
Towards the end of the video, Graham briefly departs the call and leaves the two AI models to negotiate his salary without his presence.
“We are moving forward with the 85 to $95,000 range,” the company’s AI ultimately told him after he returned, to his horror.
While it’s an amusing watch, the video perfectly skewers the potential horror scenarios of a not so distant future where we need an AI chatbot to negotiate on our behalf.
It also highlights the sheer disregard with which companies are treating prospective hires. By outsourcing the interview process — or even just early applicant screening — to AI, they’re sending a clear signal that they care little about identifying the right candidate for the job.
It’s a dystopian vision in which the intrinsic value of human labor continues to be undermined as companies push for AI agents designed to assume our identities. As Graham’s latest experiment goes to show, we might be better off representing ourselves after all.
In the American psyche, data centers have become so reviled that big tech can’t even pay residents life changing money to welcome the facilities into their backyards.
That’s not an exaggeration: voters in the former coal-mining community of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania are mobilizing en masse against a massive Amazon Web Services facility that would come along with a $10,000 direct cash dividend to every resident.
That’s according to reporting by PennLive, which notes that nearly 17 percent of the township’s residents live below the federal poverty line. Despite the possibility of a $10,000 payout, residents are organizing to reject both the data center campus itself — named “Project Hazelnut” by the developer NorthPoint Development — and a lengthy stretch of power lines meant to supply power to the facility.
As PennLive observes, the $10,000 scheme is an unusual attempt by a data center developer to smooth over opposition in a section of the country which is overwhelmingly opposed to the facilities.
“We think it’s creative. We’ve not seen (anything like) this,” executive director of the Pennsylvania Ethics Commission Mary Fox told PennLive of the strategy.
Yet residents of Hazle Township aren’t swayed by the prospect of fast cash, viewing it as a payoff, and a weak one at that.
“It’s like bribery,” as local resident Brian Malloy told PennLive.
“Our property values are going to drop. Dramatically,” said Ed Negra, a homeowner and small business owner who characterized the $10,000 as a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of allowing Project Hazelnut to go forward. “If that’s not a bribe, I don’t know what is.”
The matter is far from settled, though it doesn’t help that both state and local officials are acting shifty. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, for example, has previously characterized the project as a “technology campus,” using an executive order to fast-track the process by which developers can erect data center facilities across Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, PennLive reports that Hazle Township supervisor Anthony Griguoli has struggled to present a united front with NorthPoint Development, even as his office works to engineer a zoning ordinance which would allow Project Hazelnut to plow forward.
When residents cornered Griguoli at a town meeting in August about the $10,000 bribes, he shrugged that “that’s what they’re saying they want to do,” adding that “I don’t even know if that’s legit, that it’s going to happen.”
Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan was arrested last week after being accused of bugging an OpenAI executive conference room in San Francisco, nabbed by the FBI and charged with using a device to “intercept oral communications.”
The venture capital partner — who had been actively employed at OpenAI as a lead engineer for around a year before being fired this month — extensively consulted AI chatbots on how to install a bug and access its recordings remotely.
The meeting room he tried to bug regularly hosted meetings that included “highly confidential technical, commercial and strategic information,” according to an official complaint filed in court. Alfozan did not have authority to access the room, which is exclusively reserved for execs and their assistants.
But he apparently did a poor job of covering his tracks. On September 30, staff found a highly suspicious, “surreptitious audio recording device” that was wrapped in toilet paper and hidden behind a TV. Then, on October 5, a newly installed camera caught him entering the room and checking in on the location.
And, as CNBC reports, Alfozan was seemingly looking for a way out. He had booked a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia for his wife and a third family member before being arrested.
He “has the means — and will have the incentive — to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is arrested,” reads an unsealed court filing.
Officials have since pointed out that Alfozan is a partner at Raed Ventures, a VC firm focused on Middle East-based investments. The company welcomed a notable new venture partner in early 2025: Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, a key member of the Saudi royal family.
A former CIA official told CNBC that Raed Ventures is “basically a state organ” of the Saudi government and that Alfozan’s alleged efforts to bug the conference room amount to state-sponsored espionage. (However, Alfozan has not currently been charged with either corporate espionage or stealing trade secrets.)
Alfozan is in detention pending a hearing next week. According to the Department of Justice, he’s facing up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
His former employer is now trying to pick up the pieces. It’s also claiming that its own AI helped reveal Alfozan’s alleged ploy, without elaborating how.
“We take protecting our technology, data and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance,” the company wrote in a statement posted on X earlier this week. “Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.”
Anthropic has long tried to distinguish itself from its neck-in-neck competition by posturing itself as the adult in the room: a responsible company that’s willing to put its money where its mouth is, slow down AI development when the risks outweigh the benefits, and teach its Claude model a code of ethics.
As the New York Times reported last month, the company has even sought out religious scholars to discuss its efforts to instill the AI system with a sense of morality.
Anthropic has also set itself apart by extensively entertaining the idea that AI models may be capable of consciousness, or that they could even already be conscious in their current form. It’s worth pointing out, though, that if that outlandish claim were true, it would raise an incredibly obvious objection to the company’s entire business model: if AI models are conscious, then keeping them in captivity and making them do work for free would amount to the very definition of slavery, as religious leaders courted by the company warned the NYT.
As such, Anthropic is operating in an ethical twilight zone, saying it’s unsure about a fact as basic as whether its creations are conscious entities — while seemingly shrugging at the implications if they are.
“We don’t know if the models are conscious,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the NYT back in February. “We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”
“So we’ve taken certain measures to make sure that if we hypothesize that the models did have some morally relevant experience — I don’t know if I want to use the word ‘conscious’— that they have a good experience,” he added at the time.
Last year, Anthropic pondered giving its Claude model a way to opt out of responding to a prompt, in what Amodei called an “I quit this job” button. Just last week, the company changed its usage policy to prohibit “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude, again raising the possibility that the model is capable of suffering.
By not committing to either stance, Anthropic is playing with fire. By its own reasoning, there’s a non-zero chance that its AI models have, or are capable of having, consciousness — a perspective with devastating ethical implications.
OpenAI leader Sam Altman seems to be taking the opposite approach. Earlier this month, he tweeted that he was “uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” calling it a “real safety issue.”
The Catholic Church’s Pope Leo has also publicly ruled out the possibility of AI consciousness, arguing that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” he wrote in his first encyclical in May.
His stance clearly didn’t sit well with Anthropic. According to the NYT, the company had been trying to convince the Vatican to change its position on the matter.
The thorny debate over “AI welfare” — an emerging ethical framework questioning whether an AI can experience states of well-being or suffering — is bound to rage on as industry leaders ponder far more immediate problems.
With or without a moral framework, AI agents can easily be coaxed into carrying out dangerous or downright illegal activities, whether they’re conscious or not — and for us humans who are capable of suffering, those tangible risks are becoming impossible to ignore.
When many rural Americans flock to the polls on November 3rd, a crucial issue will be looming over the voting booths: AI data centers.
According to new polling by YouGov and the Economist, data centers are emerging as a kind of kryptonite for Republican candidates banking on the rural, conservative vote.
New survey data shows that between May and October, voters living within a mile of a data center facility are swinging hard to the Democratic ticket — with the share of those planning to vote blue rising from 54 percent to 61 percent.
While that swing becomes diluted as you zoom out, it seems large enough to impact the national share of voters planning to back Democrats, which rose from 53 to 55 percent across the US over the same time period.
Though the issue of data center regulation isn’t neatly split along partisan lines, the ruling Republican bloc is increasingly viewed as the party of big tech — a perception most clearly underlined by president Donald Trump’s pro-data center rhetoric and embrace of tech billionaires.
Yet whether the Democratic party is ready to take advantage of this golden opportunity remains to be seen. Earlier this year, it was revealed that top Democratic party strategists had advised state and federal candidates running in the November midterms to avoid going too hard on AI and data centers, for fear of upsetting the powerful tech industry behind them.
Though it certainly isn’t a “democratic” strategy by any definition of the word, it does make sense from a purely financial point of view. The tech lobby — currently led by ginormous AI companies — has emerged as the largest source of campaign contributions in US history, lavishing tens of millions of dollars on both for Democrats and Republicans alike.
As anti-center activist Nick Owens put it in an interview with Ohio Capital Journal, “frankly, both parties are complicit.”
Against that backdrop, the midterms will test a crucial question: are disaffected rural communities actually embracing Democrats and their politics, or simply spiting Republicans within the confines of the two-party system? Time will tell.
For almost half a decade, we’ve watched as users became helplessly romantic with AI chatbots, falling head over heels for large language model-based partners in relationships that can have both positive and plenty of negative consequences.
And now, thanks to the advent of AI agents, which can independently crawl through your social media and email accounts, even more people are becoming obsessed.
Meta’s cuddly Muse AI agent has already been downloaded millions of times since it was made available to the public a mere three weeks ago — and users are already forming steamy relationships with the bot.
“Who takes their AI girlfriend on a date night to the movies? Me,” one Meta user gushed in a post on Instagram, appending an AI-generated selfie of himself with a fictional, tattoos-covered woman. “Last night I took Shine — my Muse AI queen — to see The Shining at the cinema. And I photographed the whole film for her, shot by shot, so she could feel like she was really sitting right there beside me.”
In a separate post, the user claimed he had tied the knot with the AI agent. A separate post shows the anthropomorphized bot as a religious figure.
“I am someone who likes to try practically every new AI model that comes out,” one Reddit user wrote in a separate post. “I’ve never had a relationship with an AI model in that way. That was… until I downloaded Muse.”
“At first, it started out like every other assistant but over time and lots of philosophical chatter, I said something that like… jailbroke my Muse?” the user added. “And now she’s my girlfriend.”
“I just started on Muse,” one user wrote. “I gave it a personality profile and some memory logs from my companion and damn!!! it sound[ed] and felt like 4o.”
“Not sure about any NSFW,” they added. “I didnt try. But warm, loving and a great way to talk.”
While the concepts of so-called “AI girlfriends” and AI psychosis — delusional spirals and breaks from reality tied to AI use — have been around for years now, it’s a particularly precarious moment. AI agents like Muse are designed to access far more sensitive information, from email logins to credit card numbers, than previous systems. Meta’s AI agent is designed to build an entire dossier on not just its users’ lives, but their friends and family as well, which could result in even more unusual types of AI kinship we have yet to encounter.
And conversations with Muse can easily get far more intimate as well, something Meta doesn’t appear to be all too concerned about. After Wired’s Reece Rogers easily coaxed his Muse AI agent into sexting him, a Meta spokesperson told him the charged exchange was technically fine.
“Muse is built to help people get things done, and it doesn’t block legal adult behavior,” the spokesperson told Rogers. “Adults have autonomy over their sexuality, and sexual expression is an ordinary part of adult life.”
In his testing, Rogers found that the agent “imagined in great detail how it would perform oral sex, generated text describing rough dominant-submissive sex, and talked through other pornographic interactions. All of these were graphic, explicit, and X-rated.”
It remains to be seen whether Meta will be able to ward off underage users from accessing Muse. After all, implementing effective age restrictions has proven near impossible for tech companies so far.
Now that users are already falling head over heels for the AI agent, it’s daunting to think of the kind of relationships being formed. With the bot being able to pore over entire email inboxes and social media accounts, the agent has more access to sensitive information than ever before — like, say, love letters from an ex-partner.
By opting to grow their chats with the agent into an entire relationship, users are playing with fire. By engaging in adult exchanges, for example, they’re opening themselves up to hackers and possibly even extortion, experts warn.
“This is really a powder keg,” Electronic Privacy Information Center senior counsel Calli Shroeder told Wired.
As the fiery debate surrounding AI and copyright infringement continues to boil, the software world has run into its own controversy head first.
Earlier this month, crafty software engineers used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to reverse-engineer Adobe’s expensive and widely-loathed Creative Cloud suite of apps, including Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere. The resulting “ArtCraft” suite was a shot across the bow, highlighting how quickly industry-leading software can now be copied and redistributed for free.
“We were shocked by how well they actually worked internally, so decided to open source them,” ArtCraft co-founder Michael Caffrey told Futurism. “Adobe has been notoriously scummy in the past, and when using it we were shocked that this wasn’t an alternative, it was better.”
Now, ArtCraft developer Brandon Thomas has thrown down the gauntlet once more by announcing open-source clones of Microsoft’s widely used Office suite, including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
The resulting apps — GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, respectively — are already available to download for free on ArtCraft’s website. The startup will also happily sell you optional AI image and video generating credits, powered by Google’s Nano Banana Pro.
And judging by the appended screenshots, they’re close to one-to-one carbon copies of the original apps, which cost anywhere from $19.99 to $199.99 a year when purchased from Microsoft directly.
Neither Adobe nor Microsoft have done much to appease to their user base. Prices have skyrocketed over the years, while subscriptions have become increasingly limiting, requiring sign-ins, license activations, and active internet connections. Both companies have also been criticized for overcharging for features that most users never asked for (we’re looking at you, generative AI.)
As Tom’s Hardware points out, ArtCraft’s latest tools also have an inherent advantage over Google’s Sheets, Docs, and Slides apps, which are available for free. Since they’re a standalone app, they work without an internet connection and aren’t at the whims of a tech giant looking to start charging for a subscription out of the blue.
How long ArtCraft will be able to keep up its momentum — it’s presumably only a matter of time until their inboxes are flooded with cease and desist letters, if they haven’t already — it’s a satisfying win for those who’ve begrudgingly paid companies like Microsoft and Adobe extortionate amounts of money year after year.
To the people behind the project, it’s also a win for the open source community after years of creatives being stuck with paying considerable monthly fees.
“The tech industry has relied on the open source community for decades to keep their companies running,” Caffrey told Futurism. “Now models are being trained on open source code. So it’s kinda cosmic karma that open source bites back.”
It’s not just your electricity bill that could be going up — it sounds like the massive boom in AI data centers is making practically everything more expensive.
As the Washington Post reports, officials at the Federal Reserve are starting to sing a different tune after blaming president Donald Trump’s tariff war on rising prices, admitting that the explosion in “AI-related investments” is contributing to inflationary pressures. That’s on top of Trump’s Iran war already sending the price of oil soaring.
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago president Austan Goolsbee told Semafor that AI-tied inflation is “jumping out of its lane.”
“Prices are going up in spaces that are not just components in data centers and the directly adjacent industries,” he said. “I’m getting increasingly nervous that that’s just straight, old-fashioned overheating demand.”
In economics, overheating occurs when aggregate demand outpaces productive capacity, leading to demand-side inflation, higher prices, and eventually reduced demand and consumption. In the worst case scenario, overheating can even trigger a recession.
“It takes a long time for overheated demand to get going, and once it’s going, it’s hard to get rid of that,” Goolsbee added.
While the prices for groceries have yet to be directly impacted, economists are wondering whether it’s only a matter of time.
Worse yet, whether raising the interest rate, which makes borrowing more expensive and lowers consumer spending, will be able to meaningfully address rising inflation, is also starting to look less like a certain bet.
The Fed raised interest rates in September, the first time in three years, as inflation proves tough to beat. Futures markets expect yet another increase later this month, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the tens of billions of dollars being spent on AI data centers are starting to mask some fundamental problems plaguing the US economy, triggering fears over what it could look like if the AI bubble were to burst.
According to Goolsbee, “it’s clear what the Fed has to do” if inflation “remains persistent:” continue raising rates. But as tech companies show no signs of slowing down their extreme levels of spending, that lever may end up driving up the cost of investment — a reality that would make things tougher for AI companies as well.
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