Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
On a frigid February evening, I went on four dates with AI companions at a pop-up dating café.
Former employees say the restructuring followed tensions over safety and being “stuck in the catch-up phase.”
What’s causing the issues or how widespread they are is unclear. We’ve been unable to reproduce the issue here, but DownDetector has seen a spike in reports over the past few hours. Users report that Gemini displays error messages or hangs after a prompt. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
During the company’s Q4 earnings call, Gustav Söderström revealed that Spotify had fully embraced vibe coding. AI is coming for a lot of jobs, and software developer is high on the list of those in danger. Still, it’s shocking that the top devs at Spotify haven’t written any code in 2026. Per Business Insider:
“When I speak to my most senior engineers — the best developers we have — they actually say that they haven’t written a single line of code since December… They actually only generate code and supervise it.” - Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström
In a cease and desist letter, Disney includes examples of the new Seedance 2.0 model making videos featuring characters like Spider-Man and Darth Vader, according to Axios. “ByteDance is hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters,” Disney’s attorney said.
While we still lack reliable deepfake detection tech, Jeremy Carrasco (@showtoolsai) has been using his social platforms to help people visually identify red flags for AI in videos. Now, Carrasco is expanding his AI literacy efforts with Riddance — a dedicated text publication for AI media news, investigations, and analysis.
[Riddance]
Gemini-powered Audio Summaries give you a condensed overview of lengthy documents instead of reading the entire thing. The feature is starting to roll out to select business and Google AI users now, and can be found in the Tools menu in Google Docs.
Remember when EssilorLuxottica said it sold 2 million and would hit 10 million a year by 2027? 10M seems well within reach. “In 2025, we sold more than 7 million units of AI glasses, posting exponential growth,” said CEO Francesco Milleri. Prices may stay high in the short term, though, they hinted on the earnings call.
Gore Verbinski’s latest film gets at the heart of everything that makes society feel poisoned about the big push for AI.
Bridget McCormack of the American Arbitration Association on AI-powered courts and the future of law.
After already dunking on OpenAI’s plan to bring ads to ChatGPT, Anthropic is bolstering its own chatbot to attract anyone jumping ship. Free Claude users can now create and edit files (including spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs), access Skills for specialized tasks, connect to third-party services, and more — features previously limited to paying subscribers.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman seems to think AI will be ready to replace most white-collar work within two years — presumably not including his own, of course. He also claimed more of Microsoft’s own AI models are due this year.
“White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
For the past year, the Times has been using LLMs to create what’s internally known as the “Manosphere Report,” according to Nieman Lab. The AI-generated reports include episode transcripts and summaries for around 80 primarily right-wing podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, Red Scare, and The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Zoë Hitzig, a researcher who left OpenAI this week, expresses concerns about the company’s move to put ads in ChatGPT, while posing alternatives to a setup that could potentially harm users down the line:
So the real question is not ads or no ads. It is whether we can design structures that avoid both excluding people from using these tools, and potentially manipulating them as consumers. I think we can.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
Members of the team — which was tasked with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity — have been transferred to other areas of the company, and former team lead Joshua Achiam will take on a new role as OpenAI’s “chief futurist,” Platformer reported.
[Platformer]
Across the industry, workers describe a ‘fear-based culture’ and pressure to ‘fall in line.‘
Ryan Beiermeister, previously vice president of the product policy team, was reportedly fired in early January over alleged sexual discrimination against a male colleague. Beiermeister, who called the allegation “absolutely false,” had opposed adding adult content, and worried safeguards weren’t strong enough. OpenAI said her firing was “not related to any issue she raised.”
The bipartisan “Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act,” introduced by Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT), would require a written notice detailing the use of copyrighted works for training new and currently-available AI models, Deadline reports. The bill follows numerous lawsuits against AI companies for alleged copyright infringement.
The new mandate is one of several changes to India’s 2021 IT rules announced on Tuesday, TechCrunch reports. The updates also include requirements for “synthetic audio and visual content” to be labeled and traceable, and a ban on “deceptive impersonations, non-consensual intimate imagery, and material linked to serious crimes.”
Similar to the Prompted Playlists that Spotify launched in December, YouTube Music premium subscribers on iOS and Android can now use voice or text descriptions to turn ideas, genres, or vibes into personalized playlists.
We’d heard its devices could arrive this year, but in a court filing OpenAI vice president Peter Welinder said they won’t reach customers before March 2027.
The case is a trademark infringement suit from audio startup iyO, which sued after OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s company io — Welinder confirmed OpenAI has no plans to use the io name for its hardware.
Presumably this tweet was timed before Elon Musk’s Grok posted an estimated 3 million sexualized images onto the platform, including 23,000 of children, averaging an estimated 190 images per minute over an 11-day sample period:
X supports #SaferInternetDay and remains committed to protecting children on the platform. We maintain zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation—including AI-generated content—and enforce strict policies to keep minors safe and ensure a positive experience for everyone.
