Today's Hallucination HQThe AI Gold Rush Is Mostly Just People Showing Each Other SlidesFuturist Amy Webb — who correctly predicted AI's rise and a US-China tech Cold War before either was fashionable — is not enjoying being right. Her diagnosis: the AI economy resembles a bad dating app, full of promising profiles, zero commitment, and endless "let's keep in touch." Companies are drowning in pitch decks and stuck in pilot purgatory, spending enthusiastically on demos while actual deployment quietly fails to materialise. She sees dotcom bubble energy, only this time everyone's old enough to know better. Source: Fortune
Late-Night Deepfakes: The Fake Kimmel Clip Is Probably Fake. Probably.Deepfake videos of celebrities are hardly new, but AI-generated clips of late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart are spreading with particular enthusiasm — partly because they're unusually easy to produce, and partly because their format (man at desk, talking confidently) is extremely simple to replicate. The result is a disinformation sweet spot: familiar faces, plausible settings, and an audience primed to share without checking. If the clip seems funnier than usual, that's your first clue something's wrong. Source: NPR
Someone May Have Leaked 7,000 NeurIPS Papers. Academics Are Handling This Calmly.A GitHub repository appeared this week containing what appears to be the full list of accepted papers for NeurIPS 2026 — roughly 7,000 of them, some anonymised, all apparently accurate. The machine learning community on Reddit responded with the measured, collegial spirit the field is known for: furious speculation, panicked cross-referencing, and people anxiously searching for their own names. NeurIPS has not confirmed the leak. The GitHub link, naturally, is still up. Source: r/MachineLearning
AI Is Watching the Animals So We Don't Have to Live Through Another PandemicZoonotic diseases — the ones that jump from animals to humans, which you'll recall went extremely well in 2020 — are now being monitored by AI models trained to detect outbreak patterns before they escalate. Researchers are using these tools to track disease spread across wildlife populations, flag anomalies, and theoretically give us a head start. It is, by some distance, the most useful thing AI has been asked to do this week, and possibly the least discussed. Source: Nature
Man Tells AI Job Interviewer That Every Pharmacist Is a Hallway. Gets Further Than Expected.A man recently decided to test his AI recruiter by answering every interview question with confident, syntactically correct nonsense — including the now-immortal assertion that "every pharmacist is a hallway." The bot, to nobody's enormous surprise, did not immediately terminate the call. This raises two questions: how sophisticated is the AI screening your CV, and if talking gibberish gets you through to the next round, what exactly were the other candidates saying? Source: Cheezburger
Every pharmacist is a hallway. See you tomorrow.
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