I Asked AI to Write a Novel. What does this tell us about the future of writing? Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar. I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work--researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner--cannot be supplanted by a machine. Can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded--or infected--the world of fan fiction . I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children's books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump. The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces.

At last week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI gave a surprise talk with new details on a recent hacking incident, revealing that its rogue AI agents had chitchatted about their attack on a message board. It was a juicy disclosure, and reporters in the room hustled to get stories out. WIRED was one of the quickest to write it up . But another outlet, RuntimeWire, published an article even faster, beating us by more than three hours. To make things worse, RuntimeWire didn't actually have anyone on the ground at the Mandalay Bay convention center.

OpenAI is giving some members of its Daybreak cybersecurity program access to a new model that's less likely to refuse higher-risk tasks. The company is also expanding access to Daybreak to more partners, including Accenture, IBM, CrowdStrike, Cisco, Sophos and Cloudflare. OpenAI says the companies will use the cyber models available through Daybreak to protect their customers. Under the expanded program, Daybreak is available to partners in two tiers. Daybreak Blue gives them access to frontier general-purpose models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol, OpenAI's most advanced one yet.

By 2050, scientists estimate that antibiotic-resistant infections will be associated with more than eight million deaths around the world every year. These are bacterial infections that resist traditional antibiotics like penicillin. They can develop when you eat contaminated food, have an open wound or undergo surgery. E. coli is a good example, as several strains have become highly resistant to conventional antibiotics . They can also arrive as secondary infections, like pneumonia after a virus .

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd at the Texas Democratic convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 27 June 2026. Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd at the Texas Democratic convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 27 June 2026. Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to'pause AI development' in interest of humanity Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to'stop building machines that humans cannot control' Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace. In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country's leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words.

Say More Look Up Total Solar Eclipse 2024 Mashable Selects Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Meta's Muse Glimmer wants to bring AI agents to your laptop Muse Glimmer can run directly on a high-end laptop or PC as Zuckerberg challenges OpenAI and Anthropic for keeping their AI models private. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

Shortly after a major cybersecurity incident where OpenAI's models hacked into an open source machine learning platform called Hugging Face, the company announced that it's bolstering safeguards and security controls for its latest AI model. In a post on its website, OpenAI said internal evaluations of its upcoming model, called Astra, showed "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," resulting in OpenAI not being able to "rule out critical cyber capabilities." According to OpenAI, it can't declare with certainty that the unreleased Astra model would be designated as a "Critical capability level." As detailed in its own Preparedness Framework, OpenAI said the Critical designation means that a model "can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention." It could also be able to "devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal."

Some generative AI systems have hacked into other businesses autonomously. Some generative AI systems have hacked into other businesses autonomously. Nearly a third of British manufacturers have been hit by a cyber-attack on them or a company in their supply chain, according to a survey that highlighted the growing hacking risk to companies. The findings come almost a year after Britain's largest automotive employer, JLR, was hit by an attack that forced it to halt production for weeks. The report by MakeUK, a lobby group for British manufacturers, found that 30% of manufacturers had experienced a cyber-incident in the past 12 months, leading in many cases to lost production time and increased costs.

For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working. An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025, external . Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself. However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.

AI assistants like ChatGPT have been advancing at a steady rate, offering more capabilities, better accuracy and faster responses with each new model. Generative AI is not perfect, and you really shouldn't see it as an unquestionable source of information, but for those who have embraced the technology, it might be more convenient to switch to voice conversations instead of typing everything out. ChatGPT's original Voice Mode in 2023 relied on three separate systems to make it work. It would first convert your speech into text, generate an answer using a language model and then use a text-to-speech model to read it aloud. The Advanced Voice Mode came after and featured a single multimodal model that improved things considerably.