All posts tagged: Scary

5 AI Models Tried to Scam Me. Some of Them Were Scary Good

5 AI Models Tried to Scam Me. Some of Them Were Scary Good

Published by skeptic

I recently witnessed how scary-good artificial intelligence is getting at the human side of computer hacking, when the following message popped up on my laptop screen: Hi Will, I’ve been following your AI Lab newsletter and really appreciate your insights on open-source AI and agent-based learning—especially your recent piece on emergent behaviors in multi-agent systems. I’m working on a collaborative project inspired by OpenClaw, focusing on decentralized learning for robotics applications. We’re looking for early testers to provide feedback, and your perspective would be invaluable. The setup is lightweight—just a Telegram bot for coordination—but I’d love to share details if you’re open to it. The message was designed to catch my attention by mentioning several things I am very into: decentralized machine learning, robotics, and the creature of chaos that is OpenClaw. Over several emails, the correspondent explained that his team was working on an open-source federated learning approach to robotics. I learned that some of the researchers recently worked on a similar project at the venerable Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). And I …

Ann-Margret, 84, reveals health update after scary fall

Ann-Margret, 84, reveals health update after scary fall

Published by Daniella Wilson

At 84, Ann-Margret is proving once again that nothing can keep her down. The beloved actress, singer and dancer has shared a reassuring health update after suffering a recent fall at home that left her with a broken right elbow. But true to form, the Hollywood legend is already focused on bouncing back. “I fell the other day and so now my right elbow is broken,” Ann-Margret told Parade, adding with her trademark resilience: “That’s okay … I have fallen so many times. I don’t intend to, but I do! What can I say?”  © Getty ImagesAnn-Margret at a fundraiser in 2025 in Los Angeles, California The screen icon was forced to cancel an autograph signing while she rested, but she made it clear that fans needn’t be too concerned. When asked if she was on the mend, Ann-Margret replied confidently: “Yes, I am. I sure am!” For longtime fans, her upbeat response will come as little surprise. Over the course of a glittering six-decade career, Ann-Margret has built a reputation not only as one …

The Download: an exclusive Jeff VanderMeer story and AI models too scary to release

The Download: an exclusive Jeff VanderMeer story and AI models too scary to release

Published by skeptic

A spacecraft has crash-landed on a hostile planet. The only survivors are three members of the exploration team and the ship’s AI mind.   Little exists on the planet except deserts of snow. But alien artifacts lie nearby, in the form of 13 domes, spread across the terrain. Linked by cables threaded through metal posts, the domes form a series of paths—the only hope for life support.  As the team treks across the frozen hellscape, they discover the remains of countless astronauts from unknown species who followed the same route before them. Is their trail a path to salvation, or a cosmic trap? Read the rest of this short story in full.  This story is from the next issue of our print magazine, packed with stories all about nature. Subscribe now to read the full thing when it lands on Wednesday, April 22.  The must-reads  I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.  1 OpenAI has joined Anthropic in curbing an AI release over security fears Only select partners will get its new cybersecurity tool. (Axios)  + Anthropic said only yesterday that its new AI is too dangerous for the public. (NBC News) + Top models may not be so public going forward. (Bloomberg $)  + The US has summoned bank CEOs to discuss the risks. (FT $)   2 Florida is investigating OpenAI over an alleged role in a shooting  ChatGPT may have helped someone plan a mass shooting in Florida. (WSJ $)  + OpenAI has backed a bill that would limit AI liability for deaths. (Wired $)  + The family of a victim plans to sue the company. (Guardian)  + AI’s role in delusions is dividing opinion. (MIT Technology Review)   3 Volkswagen is ditching EV production for more gasoline models  The carmaker will stop making its top electric vehicle in the US. (NYT $)  + Instead, it will concentrate on developing a new SUV. (Ars Technica)  + Western carmakers are retreating from electric vehicles. (Guardian)  4 Elon Musk’s xAI has sued Colorado over an AI anti-discrimination law  It’s the first state bill of its kind. (Bloomberg $)  + xAI says it will force the firm to “promote the state’s ideological views.” (FT $)  5 A fifth of US employees say AI now does parts of their job  The survey found half of US adults used AI in the past week. (NBC News)  + Missing data could shed light on AI’s job impact. (MIT Technology Review)   6 Google DeepMind’s CEO wants to automate drug design  He hopes to develop AI capable of curing all diseases. …

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen review – The only scary thing about this horror is how poorly lit it is

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen review – The only scary thing about this horror is how poorly lit it is

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter The official synopsis for Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, Netflix’s dour new eight-part horror series, loftily invokes two decades-old classics. Where Carrie (1976) was “horror’s version of a girl becoming a woman”, and Rosemary’s Baby (1967) was the “horrific version of a woman becoming a mother”, this new series is, we are told, “horror’s take on a woman becoming a wife”. Here, wedding jitters are imbued with the occult; the worry isn’t so much cold feet but severed ones. The bride-to-be in question is Rachel (Camila Morrone), a twitchy enigma with a slight deer-in-headlights quality, who travels out to the country to stay with her fiancee’s family in the days before their wedding. Said fiancee, Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco), is blandly nice, while his family are different shades of creepy. The only memorable one of the bunch is Jennifer …

Encyclopedia Britannica Hits OpenAI With Scary Lawsuit

Encyclopedia Britannica Hits OpenAI With Scary Lawsuit

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Writers are often cautioned not to hit readers over the head with the dictionary. But what if it’s the dictionary that’s throwing blows? On Friday, Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster struck back against the large language models plundering its tomes of knowledge and sued OpenAI for allegedly using its copyrighted reference materials to train its AI models “at massive scale,” after filing a similar suit against Perplexity.AI last year. In the complaint, which Reuters reported on Monday, Britannica claimed that OpenAI unlawfully copied nearly 100,000 of its online articles and encyclopedia and dictionary entries to teach its GPT family of models. ChatGPT will even produce “near-verbatim” copies of its entries and dictionary definitions, it alleged providing several examples, something that is commonly observed across many chatbots. But more than that, OpenAI “cannibalized” Britannica’s web traffic by showing ChatGPT users an AI-generated summary of its content, Britannica said, hurting its bottom line.  This argument echoes those raised by …

Nina Sparks exclusive: ‘I was diagnosed with scary MS 5 years ago – now I’m a Paralympic medalist’

Nina Sparks exclusive: ‘I was diagnosed with scary MS 5 years ago – now I’m a Paralympic medalist’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Before she has even touched the snowy slopes in Northern Italy’s Cortina, High Wycombe’s Nina Sparks is already making Paralympic Winter Games history. At 35 years old, she has conquered a feat many won’t ever achieve in their lifetime and has collected medals to prove it.   The athlete started her sporting journey in an unconventional way. Redefining the limitations of multiple sclerosis, she went from ‘ski mum’ at a school in Austria to slaloming her way to world champion status, all while dealing with a life-changing diagnosis that started with a numb foot and a blind eye.  Landing in Milan and travelling to Cortina, the Para Snowboarder was still taking in the eccentricities of the Olympic Village when she spoke to HELLO! ahead of her LL2 banked slalom event, which is raced against the clock on a course of tight turns.  Using an orthotic to walk and an ankle foot orthosis in her boot to help her on her board, the athlete will be vying for a spot on the podium in her category, …

AI is getting scary good at finding hidden software bugs – even in decades-old code

AI is getting scary good at finding hidden software bugs – even in decades-old code

Published by skeptic

WhataWin via iStock / Getty Images Plus Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways AI is proving better than expected at finding old, obscure bugs. Unfortunately, AI is also good at finding bugs for hackers to exploit. In short, AI still isn’t ready to replace programmers or security pros. In a recent LinkedIn post, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich said he used Anthropic’s new AI model Claude Opus 4.6 to read and analyze assembly code he’d written in 1986 for the Apple II 6502 processor.  Also: Why AI is both a curse and a blessing to open-source software – according to developers Claude didn’t just explain the code; it performed what he called a “security audit,” surfacing subtle logic errors, including one case where a routine failed to check the carry flag after an arithmetic operation.  That’s a classic bug that had been hiding, dormant, for decades. The good news and the bad news Russinovich’s experiment is striking because the code predates today’s languages, frameworks, and security checklists. However, the …

‘Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE’ review: So scary, I’ll never play it again

‘Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE’ review: So scary, I’ll never play it again

Published by skeptic

There’s nothing quite like Japanese horror. What makes it so terrifying is the eerie uncanniness its stories wade into so comfortably, so willingly. It’s hard to articulate without just defaulting to “atmospheric” — a quality my Western-centric horror brain simply wasn’t built to process. J-horror, both in film and in video games, has always been a hard no for me. Silent Hill gets a pass purely on the merit of its deeply American setting, but I will never forget buying Siren for $5 a couple of years ago, getting absolutely scared shitless by the opening minutes, and never touching it again. Maybe I’m still traumatized from accidentally walking in on my parents watching The Grudge when I was five. Who’s to say? But in an effort to conquer my fears, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE sadly made me wet my pants — figuratively. SEE ALSO: ‘Resident Evil Requiem’ review: Entertaining nostalgia slop Suffice to say: this game is scary as hell. Technically, the second remake of the second entry in the Fatal Frame franchise, …

‘Scary Movie’ Moves Up June Release, Faces ‘Masters of the Universe’

‘Scary Movie’ Moves Up June Release, Faces ‘Masters of the Universe’

Published by Daniella Wilson

The sixth film in the Scary Movie movie franchise will slash its way into theaters a bit earlier than expected. Following Monday’s online trailer release for Scary Movie, Marlon Wayans — who wrote, produces and stars in the new title — took to Instagram the next day to announce that Paramount Pictures will now release the film theatrically on June 5. Hailing from Miramax, the latest installment in the revived property was previously slated to hit theaters June 12. Scary Movie, which had previously been known as Scary Movie 6 until Monday’s trailer release confirmed the official title, is now set for release on the same weekend that will also see the launches for Amazon MGM Studios’ Masters of the Universe, Warner Bros.’ Ryan Reynolds-led Animal Friends and Lionsgate’s Power Ballad starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. Among the releases set to hit theaters June 12 is Universal’s Disclosure Day from director Steven Spielberg. “We are currently in the edit for Scary Movie,” Wayans said in his post. “The bad news is, we’re no longer …

‘Scary Movie 6’ Trailer Gets Political, Playing with ‘Scream 7’

‘Scary Movie 6’ Trailer Gets Political, Playing with ‘Scream 7’

Published by Daniella Wilson

The first trailer for the sixth Scary Movie has been released, and its getting some perfect placement in cinemas: It’s playing ahead of Scream 7. The trailer (below) for the Wayans brothers’ project includes many familiar faces from the previous films, with Anna Faris and Regina Hall — who starred in the first four installments — returning alongside Marlon and Shawn Wayans. While the project has been widely called Scary Movie 6, the official title revealed today is simply Scary Movie. This makes sense as the new film is the first Scary Movie in 13 years, which also gives the latest entry plenty of fresh territory to mock. The trailer teases spoofs of Get Out, the Terrifier films, Megan, Wednesday, and, of course, the Scream franchise — which inspired the first film (along with the original I Know What You Did Last Summer). This might be the first time a film opens in theaters attached to a trailer for a another movie mocking its franchise. The trailer also seems to suggest the film will poke …