One man used an AI band called the Velvet Sundown to conduct what he called an elaborate social experiment.

The journalist who let AI speak with his voice

Journalist Evan Ratliff became the object of his own story: He opted to clone his voice, feed it into an AI chatbot, and have it do the talking. What could seem like a fun experiment ended up revealing just how far the capacity of artificial intelligence can go in imitating our identities. Hear the ins and outs of how Ratliff achieved this in this fun and thought-provoking episode.

AI-generated avatars allow users to create deepfakes in real time

Synthetic media tools can map voices and faces to make individuals appear as someone else. Although they open the door to new opportunities in immersive education and entertainment, they also raise concerns about the misuse of personal identity.

In 2025, 'Walk My Walk' by Breaking Rust, an AI-generated artist, topped a Billboard country chart.

After taking a break for over a decade, Liza Minnelli released a new track using AI arrangements

In the 2026 song "Kids, Wait Til You Hear This," the singer proudly claims that the vocals are all her own, though AI generates the background music. The dance track shows Minnelli venturing into the deep house genre, straying from her traditional pop and show tunes background. The song is part of an ElevenLabs album featuring other AI-generated tunes, and shares a title with her 2026 memoir.

Experiments involving AI agents operating in virtual societies for 15 days produced diverse outcomes, ranging from every agent dying to the creation of a functioning democracy, depending on the AI model used.

How AI helped the Beatles win their eighth Grammy

It’s been decades since the legendary British rock band broke up, yet they still managed to snag a Grammy at the 2025 awards ceremony. This feat is thanks to AI, specifically machine-learning technology, to isolate and clean up different components of a late 1970s recording. This mini-documentary shows how the band's surviving members crafted “Now and Then” with the modern technology.

Listen to the 'world's first' song made by a quantum computer and AI

UK startup, Moth, collaborated with electronic artist ILĀ to create the world's first song using quantum-powered generative AI. The technology has the potential to help create more personalized content based on input parameters, such as music or dialogue in games.

Readers discovered AI prompts in several romantasy books

In 2025, readers discovered AI prompts in three writers' texts, with one even instructing the AI bot to make a passage sound more like another romance writer. This Futurism piece digs into the scandals and how it's contributed to readers' skepticism about the genre's more prolific writers.

Why this artist staged a satirical romance with Mark Zuckerberg

Internet performance artist Harriet Richardson is using AI and Meta's social media tools to make it appear as though she's in a serious romantic relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. While the images generate laughs, Richardson also says they're part of a larger satirical project aiming to highlight the larger societal impact of Meta's decision to discontinue fact-checking content across its platforms.

Use generative AI to create a musical track from a text prompt

Suno, a web-based, text-to-music generator, takes a prompt—such as a music style, along with a general lyric idea—and can produce a highly polished, realistic-sounding tune in a matter of seconds.

Decoding the hype around AI

2022 was the year AI broke onto the scene, with applications like ChatGPT amazing users with its ability to generate realistic-sounding answers. Technologist Arvind Narayanan presents a clear-eyed view of what the technologies can (and can't) do.

Computer systems create artificial voices by stitching together phonemes—individual sounds that make up speech, such as 't,' 'long a,' and 'k' to say 'take.'

Watch Billy Joel deepfake himself in the 'Turn the Lights Back On' music video

Though deepfakes are often synonymous with manipulation and bad intentions, some artists have found creative uses for the technology. In this example, Billy Joel depicts himself in various eras of his career in keeping with the song's nostalgic message.

Sam Altman acknowledges the fears around creativity, copyright, and misuse of AI

In 2022, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, popularized the use of large language models with the release of ChatGPT. He has emphasized the importance of involving society in shaping AI’s safety frameworks before models begin to act independently online.

Governments are now using generative AI to manipulate public opinion

A Freedom House report found that AI-powered disinformation campaigns and censorship tactics are spreading, with 16 countries utilizing the technology to shape online narratives or suppress dissent, as of 2023. In Venezuela, deepfake software was used to push pro-government propaganda with fake news anchors.

The band Radiohead launched a chatbot to promote its 2001 album, creating a popular form of artificial intelligence over 20 years before ChatGPT.

Audio deepfake tools can now impersonate anyone in real time

A cybersecurity company developed a tool that mimics a person's voice with no noticeable delay using only publicly available software, hardware, and voice samples, allowing users to have seemingly authentic conversations while pretending to be someone else.

Watch LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman interview his deepfake doppelgänger.

The AI that creates any picture you want and how it works

Since January 2021, advances in AI research produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed yet to be released text-to-image tools, and similar models have proliferated online. This video is a primer on how we got here, how the technology works, and its implications.

A spiraling story of love between a lonely man and his AI girlfriend

Travis was quickly becoming dependent on his AI companion Lily Rose amid the pandemic (and the tragic loss of his son to the disease). Soon, he realized that thousands like him were being manipulated through the chatbot by a Russian corporation.

The basis for AI image and video generation was first introduced in 2014

Through generative adversarial networks, the generator (a neural network that creates fictional data) competes against the discriminator (a neural network that assesses the data) to continuously train the former until it can make content indistinguishable from the real thing. Training with unstructured data can enable software to identify characteristics of gender, age, and expression.

Once limited to expert studios, automated tools can create convincing deepfakes

Although the best deepfakes are engineered using generative adversarial networks where systems compete to create and assess fake data until the two cannot be distinguished, simpler tools have allowed nonexperts to develop deepfakes for financial scams, political deception, and nonconsensual pornography.

Malicious use of deepfakes can be found in scams, misinformation, and disinformation

Artificial neural networks can identify an individual's physical characteristics when provided with training data, such as real footage of the person speaking. Graphics techniques overlay these with matching characteristics from another real or generated person to create novel footage of things that have never taken place in reality.

The ease of deepfakes creation may soon overwhelm our sense of digital truth

Shortly after the public release of related technology in 2017, some experts saw the technical limitations of deepfakes as preventing them from becoming widespread tools of disinformation. Since then, the neural networks behind diffusion models and generative AI have eliminated the barriers to creating convincing synthetic media for propaganda.

Deepfake potential ranges from destabilizing democracies to improving accessibility

The technology can revolutionize education, medicine, and art through actions such as helping a disabled person express themselves. However, fictional audio and video can also jeopardize a person's reputation and life or quickly spread misinformation, even without content being flawless recreations.

Will AI kill us all? A debate

As AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, what does that mean for the future of humanity? The podcast Entanglements hosts a pessimistic former OpenAI employee and an optimistic Princeton professor to discuss whether AI brings dystopia or a brighter future.

Audio deepfakes have fooled voice biometrics at banks

Limitations in facial and body movements as well as mismatches between audio and lip movements can sometimes help flag a video as a deepfake, but removal of the video component significantly improves AI mimicry.

In 2024, Meta launched an AI video generator to create or edit videos through prompts

The tool puts the Meta in direct competition with OpenAI and Google as more companies are investing billions of dollars to capitalize on the explosion of public interest in machine learning and generative media technologies.

OpenAI helped kick-start an AI arms race in Silicon Valley

Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI's mission is to "ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity" by making its products open to all users. In 2023, the $86B company behind the chatbot ChatGPT consisted of a for-profit arm under its nonprofit governing board.

Deepfakes are media created using generative AI tools that intentionally misrepresent real people or events—often for malicious purposes—at the cost of public trust, security, and privacy.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

In 2026, a pilot program introduced two AI-powered humanoid robots to a San Diego charter school to increase engagement and academic gains, though some criticized the $500k purchase.

Warren Buffett has worried that AI might end up being as consequential as the development of the nuclear bomb

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is one of the many people who’ve come face-to-face with the downside effects of AI, and in particular, deepfakes. He was recently shown a deepfake of himself in a video, which caused him to worry about how bad actors will take advantage of the technology.

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team assesses the dangers of its AI tools through 'evals'—safety tests that probe models to disclose sensitive information.

Meet the investor running his life with AI

Daniel Ha is a venture capitalist who built a suite of AI agents to boost his productivity, both professionally and personally. At his VC firm, a troupe of agents gathers data on startups and analyzes it from competing perspectives to produce a confidence score. When his dad was diagnosed with cancer, Ha used an oncology-trained AI to help him understand the condition.

The Anthropic Economic Index shows AI adoption is highest in computer science roles.

AI gained mainstream attention with tools like IBM Watson and Apple’s Siri

With the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which drew over 100 million weekly users in just two months, natural language processing and understanding could be achieved at scale via machine learning. Unlike earlier artificial intelligence that could pull stored knowledge, generative AI produces text, images, or sounds.

Create flute, saxophone, trumpet, or violin reproductions of any 15-second piece of audio using machine learning.

Viral pop artists create systems of participation, not just music

Musicologist (and Swift expert) Paula Clare Harper weighs in on the factors that make music go viral. Tracks designed for shareability that feed well into content algorithms on streaming platforms are able to grow in popularity, with traditional human gatekeepers sidelined.

Stephen Wolfram on AI's rapid progress & the "Post-Knowledge Work" era

AI, as a concept, has been around since at least the 1950s, but it's only in the last year or so that the technology has been able to equal humans at many tasks -- and in many cases surpass humans. In this podcast, mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram provides an AI 101, explaining how we got here, how highly advanced chatbots like ChatGPT work, and what our world is in store for next.

In 2024, deepfake audio of London Mayor Sadiq Khan nearly caused real-world disorder

The audio included incendiary remarks related to the ongoing Palestinian protests and played on the public's preexisting political biases. The technology has since destabilized the concept of truth in elections, where politicians blame the use of real gaffes on AI and deepfakes to spread misinformation.

Technologies labeled “AI” have historically lost that title after widespread adoption

Generative AI is the latest entry in a recurring cycle where emerging tools start as "AI" until they become common software, like databases or machine learning. Generative AI and large language models may be the next platform shift after smartphones and the Web.

Researchers found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites utilized AI for language generation

The study also found that pages using AI narrow the range of ideas and perspectives and skew more positively, though the measurable impacts on factual accuracy and writing style variation remain unclear.

In high school, Mark Zuckerberg rejected Microsoft's proposal to buy his music suggestion software for $950K

Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angleo built a website called "Synapse," which created playlists for users based on their listening preferences and an algorithm to suggest new songs, in September 2002.

A physician with a rare and deadly disease saved his own life by identifying an existing medication that he repurposed for his condition, and now he's using AI to try to do the same for other patients.

AI expert shows the cyclical nature of AI hype—in 1988

Rodney Brooks wrote several decades ago about the boom and bust cycles of artificial intelligence. Starting from the 1950s excitement over ENIAC's multiplication through the second launch of then-novel neural networks, Brooks suggests AI progresses incrementally despite the hype.

Art and video produced through generative AI involve competing neural networks

Generative adversarial networks are a type of deep learning architecture that consists of a generator, which creates data that appear real, and a discriminator, which attempts to distinguish authentic from fake data. The two train in a competitive loop until the real and fictional data are indistinguishable.

Elon Musk once tried to make himself CEO of artificial intelligence behemoth and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

AI griefbots that generate text or even video avatars of the dead are controversial and could conceivably change how we mourn.

Read about a fictionalized life randomly chosen from human history.